By Brian Moonga
Nov 3 2011 (IPS)

Zambian farmers say a lack of rain is putting a strain on their crops and they are starting to point their fingers at climate change. Brian Moonga reports from Lusaka.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20111003_cimatechange_moonga.mp3[/podcast]

By Brian Moonga
Oct 8 2011 (IPS)

A lack of access to medicines due to prohibitive costs is driving some Zambians to use the cheapest remedies they can find and, as Brian Moonga reports, this has some serious health implications:

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By Brian Moonga
Oct 3 2011 (IPS)

Zambia has signed numerous international treaties to help promote gender equality, among them the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention on equal pay for work of equal value. But, as Brian Moonga reports, some gender activists feel much more needs to be done to reach gender parity.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20111003_gender_moonga.mp3[/podcast]

By Brian Moonga
LUSAKA, Nov 30 2010 (IPS)

A thousand babies are infected with HIV every day – in pregnancy, during birth and through breastfeeding. Close to 400,000 African children are infected with HIV every year.

The situation points back to the high HIV prevalence amongst women of reproductive age, especially in Southern Africa. Zambia is one of the countries recognised for making progress in addressing the problem.

Seventy thousand Zambian women between the ages of 15 and 40 have HIV; the health ministry says 85 thousand children are living with the virus.


Zambia faces several obstacles to preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV, including testing; obtaining and delivering treatment to women, particularly in rural areas where there is an acute shortage of medical personnel.



The country is addressing this in several ways, including vastly increasing the number of HIV testing facilities.

Zambia has also introduced a new HIV infection prevention tool: a new drugs kit called Mother-Baby Pack is a pre-packaged set of medicines including maternal and baby prophylactic anti-retroviral medicines in line with the World Health Organization’s Guidelines. The medicine comes in a box with clear directions for when a mother should take the drugs as well as when and how to administer them during the child’s first month of life.

Despite limited resources, Zambia has been praised for progress in getting the right care to pregnant and breastfeeding mothers living with HIV. The project is being implemented in eight of the country’s 76 districts.

“The proactive stance taken by Zambia’s [health] ministry of and its adherence and application of the WHO 2010 guidelines to infection prevention of children has greatly helped Zambia achieve a lot towards trying to reduce this mode of HIV transmission,” says Susan Stressor, country director for Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation.   According to Stressor, the mother-baby pack has a 95 percent chance of preventing mother to child transmission of HIV, which she says is much more effective than the previous regimen.

“By distributing the pack, we will be helping mothers enjoy the opportunity to be able to breastfeed their infants without any fear at all. This pack enables the mother to take full control of her health and that of the infant,” says Stressor.

Ruth Chisonga (not her real name) is a single mother of two who earns her living buying and selling second hand clothes in Lusaka. She has been HIV-positive for five years, and is on antiretrovirals.

Chisonga is happy at the news of the new mother-baby Pack which she feels enable her to giver birth to an HIV free child next when she decides to get pregnant, but free her from the hassle of walking long distances to collect medication.   “It’s very hard for me to walk all the way. Now this kit, once it’s made available, I think it will be easier to use and will greatly lessen the chances of missing treatment schedules because I will be empowered to administer the drugs myself,” she says.

“The mother-baby packs provide mothers who are living with HIV with the drugs they need before, during and after giving birth.  This will help build an HIV-free generation in Zambia,” says Stressor.

Chisonga would like to see the mother-baby pack programme scaled up country-wide to empower mothers like her.

According to the health ministry, 63 percent of pregnant women living with HIV are receiving antiretroviral medicines to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child.

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By Brian Moonga
LUSAKA, Nov 29 2010 (IPS)

Less than one in four Zambian children who should be on life-saving anti-retroviral drugs is receiving them. The country planned to increase the number of children on ARVs from the present 20,000 to 120,000, but inadequate facilities pose a major stumbling block.

There are an estimated 85,000 HIV-positive children in Zambia who need these drugs to stay healthy; AIDS campaigners say the current treatment scheme through public health institutions is a fraction of what’s needed.

Simon Mwewa, coordinator of paediatric treatment programmes at the Network of Zambian People Living with HIV, says much more needs be done to provide treatment to children under the age of 16.   “I think we still have a long way to go in terms of access to treatment for paediatric ARVs. There are about 2,000 children on ARV treatment [in Lusaka]; more than 5,000 children are infected. There is little information being given to the parents and the guardians of children living with HIV/AIDS on issues of treatment in relation to adults.”

One of the lucky few on anti-retroviral therapy is four-year-old Michael Mulenga. Diagnosed as HIV-positive within a few months of being born, his mother Karen Mwale, is grateful that he started treatment so early.

“The child takes a combination of three drugs, lamivudine, zidovudine and stavdine,” she says. “He has been taking the drugs for the past three years. He is doing fine. Very active so far. He is growing like the other children.”

Mwale, a single mother, is fortunate to live just a stone’s throw away from Lusaka’s Kabwata Health Centre, which hosts a a specialist HIV treatment unit for children. But even at Kabwata, the drugs provided are adult tablets, which must be broken into pieces to get the appropriate dose for her son.

“It is not easy because when it’s time for the child to take the medicine, there are all those drugs they are supposed to be given. And for a child it’s not something easy to swallow. If am not there to give the child the medicine, it’s not an easy thing for me to [be certain] that the people who are looking after the child will definitely give him the medicine.”

The lack of child-specific medicine is just one indicator of the unfulfilled need in the area of paediatric AIDS in Zambia.

“Most of the centres don’t have that facility to detect CD4 count measure the level of white blood cells] for children,” says Mwewa. “There are a lot of challenges looking at pediatric HIV treatment. Now imagine someone has got HIV and is not on treatment; obviously that person will eventually die, so there will be high mortality amongst children who are not on treatment. There is no proper adherence to treatment. Instead of a child getting a three month dosage, he is given one month – there is a danger of developing drug resistance.”   Despite international commitments to achieve universal access to prevention of mother-to-child transmission by 2010, Felix Mwanza, the National Coordinator of the Lusaka-based Treatment Advocacy and Literacy Campaign, says progress towards this goal has been slow.

“The country now has reached a mark of 50 percent [coverage] yet the global rate agreed upon is 80 percent. The question is are we in that particular position to reach the target of 80 percent by the end of the campaign. That’s a very big question mark, as far as we are concerned, because of a lot of bottlenecks: the lack of human resources, the lack of infrastructure and also the limited investment in the health sector.”

The National AIDS Council is hopeful that new programmes to reduce child AIDS cases will be successful.

“As a way of improving paediatric response in the area of HIV, government has strengthened the capacity of early infant diagnosis,” says the Council Chairperson, Bishop Joshua Banda.

Providing anti-retroviral therapy means that HIV-positive status is no longer a death sentence.

“The future of my child, it’s bright, because I see my child growing like any other normal child,” she says. “He doesn’t have to miss school like the children I used to see. He is just like any other child who is suffering from asthma.”

But Mwale and her son will wrestle with a new set of challenges as Michael grows up.

“How am I going to tell the child that he is HIV positive? Because somehow I feel the child may start blaming me as a parent, that I gave him the virus… Why didn’t I give it to the other ones, only him?

“So that’s my main worry as the child is growing up: how is he going to accept his status and fuse it in with his daily activities, with the friends plus the peer pressure that is there? Because there are special precautions that he has to take as he grows up as an adolescent. All those are things that worry me as a parent.”

Of the estimated two million children under the age of 15 living with HIV and AIDS globally, 1.8 million of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. The Zambian Government intends to place all children in need of antiretroviral therapy on treatment by the end of 2010 in line with its National HIV/AIDS Strategic Framework on the road to meeting its millennium development goal number of halving child mortality by 2015.

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By Brian Moonga
LUSAKA, Nov 1 2010 (IPS)

Zambia’s efforts to strengthen its education system will come to little if no way is found to retain skilled teachers like Caroline Chisenga.

Many Zambian teachers are voting with their feet on pay and working conditions. Credit: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

On average, a teacher with a diploma qualification receives a salary equivalent to $400 a month, with housing and other allowances adding another 100 dollars to monthly pay. This amount, teachers say, is too low to sustain even a small family in the face of high inflation and the generally high cost of living, especially in places like Lusaka and the Copperbelt Provinces.

That’s what led Chisenga to first leave the country after seven years teaching in Zambia’s second largest city, Ndola.

“My salary was not to my satisfaction, so I went into Botswana and got myself a job. I served there for a year, and while i couldn’t sign a second contract, I think I got away with some good money and decided to come back home.”

Chisenga says she made as much as $1,500 a month in Botswana. Mathematics and science teachers like Chisenga top the numbers of those who leave in search of better conditions of service, leaving a huge dent in staff numbers at public schools.

The government faces a massive challenge in finding people to take charge of the more than a quarter million students enrolled in high schools across the country. The average ratio is roughly one teacher to 60 pupils in high schools.

“Teachers that the government trained have since decided to leave the country and serve in other countries,” says Chisenga. “That’s how serious the situation is and this has actually led to a negative impact in schools, especially high schools. If anything, I still look forward to taking another chance out there because there is good money.”

Patrick Nyambe is Head Teacher at Lusaka’s South End School, which has close to 600 pupils. Nyambe says his school needs at least five science teachers, and another five to teach mathematics, but the school has only been able to find two for each subject.

“[Teachers] are few. We are a little behind, you find that [Zambia] still has colleges offering two-year training. That’s for primary school, but those are the teachers that are falling in to teach science in schools because the demand is so high because of the exodus [of teachers from the country]. They should have a fast-track type of training so they could train more teachers to fill the gaps.”

A recent media report told the story of a teacher in a rural district where a teacher who had only completed grade seven was teaching primary school, so desperate is the need for staff. Low pass rates in science and mathematics are evidence of how the shortage is affecting the quality of education.

Zambia currently has about fifteen government-run teacher education colleges. Additional training is available from the University of Zambia.

It costs $10,000 dollars over three years to train a Fine Arts or English language teacher at Lusaka’s Evelyn Hone College – training a science teacher at the University of Zambia costs even more. A large number of the trainee teachers are beneficiaries of the government bursary system but they have no obligation to take a public school teaching post after completion of their studies.

And most of those trained have ambitions of leaving the country.

All of this is aggravated by the decimation of a generation by the AIDS pandemic: a report by the National AIDS Council indicates that fully 40 percent of Zambian teachers are HIV positive. A thousand teachers die from AIDS each year.

Zambia’s education ministry has in the past two years deployed over 20,000 teachers across the country to replace those who have left for greener pastures or died. Chinyama is one of those who believes that even training more teachers is not enough.

The Zambia Education Coalition is one of the leading education non-governmental organizations set up to support policy framework on education for all and the millennium development goals.

Its director, Miriam Chinyama, has called on the government to quickly improve working conditions for Zambia’s teachers.

“We are currently looking at the teacher-pupil ratios, and the statistics are not favourable. We need to do everything possible to try and retain the few teachers that we have,” she said, underlining that pay is not the only issue for teachers, who are also de-motivated by a lack of materials and equipment in classes.

“Government needs to ensure that they put in place competitive conditions of service to keep our teacher in the system. There are lots of ways to motivate teachers,” she said.

“For instance, government started a programme giving solar panels to teachers in rural areas so that they have things like electricity. Those are small but important things that need to be enhanced, apart from just looking at take-home pay.”

From his vantage point at the South End School, Nyambe agrees.

“The education system in Zambia, they put up schools where they have not provided the necessary equipment to make a teacher of science enjoy his work. So you find that this is part of the frustration which is there. As they upgrade these basic schools, they should upgrade the equipment, the science labs and all that.”

As Zambia strives towards achieving quality education it is important that the government seriously implements measures that will address teacher motivation in order to prevent more personnel from seeking economic refuge in the region given the economic cost the loss of teachers has on the future of the education system.

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Eighty percent of Zambians live on less than two U.S. dollars a day, a situation that has contributed to high levels of hunger and malnutrition for a majority whose staple diet consists largely of white maize.

Vitamin deficiencies leave children and people living with HIV particularly vulnerable to disease. Credit: Brian Moonga/IPS

Researchers have developed a new, vitamin-rich maize variety that they hope will provide an affordable improvement to the diets in Zambia and across Africa.

Malnutrition compromises the health of close to 10 million Zambians. A lack of essential nutrients weakens the immune system, leaving children and people living with HIV in particular more vulnerable to disease.

Catherine Moono is a Lusaka housewife and mother of four. Like most Zambians, her family’s diet consists largely of white maize, ground into maize meal which is cooked into a thick porridge locally known as nshima.

U.S.-based HarvestPlus is a nongovernmental organisation developing improved crop varieties suitable for the climate and economies of developing countries. The organisation has announced the development of a new maize variety rich in vitamin A.

According to Dr Torbert Rochford, a researcher at Purdue University, this conventionally-bred maize variety could be an ideal solution to one of the nutritional challenges developing countries like Zambia face.

“We have material that has been derived from this orange corn that are in the infant stages of testing in Zambia,” Rochford told IPS.

“The material that was used comes from four inbred lines from Thailand that were orange in colour then I crossed these inbreeds with each other and selected for dark orange visually. It was a very simple standard conventional breeding practice, all natural, no GMO involved. Selection for dark orange also increased the amount of carotene.”

(Crossing inbred lines is a common technique of crossing nearly identical plant varieties to strengthen desired characteristics in the hybrid offspring.)

Samuel Tembo, the manager for Plan International Zambia’s Economic Empowerment Country Program, says the new maize variety could contribute significantly to improving the diet of children and adults alike.

“Plan sees this development as an opportunity to contribute to reduction in malnutrition among children as vitamin A will now be in the main staple food which is widely grown in the country. Plan International has been working with rural communities where Malnutrition is high by promoting crop diversification in order to ensure that food stuffs grown contribute to the dietary needs of children.”

In a country where poor sanitation regularly exposes children in particular to waterborne diseases like cholera, improved diets that strengthen resistance to disease are crucial. For the many people living with HIV – and there are 80,000 children alone currently on antiretroviral drugs – proper nutrition is vital to the success of anti-retroviral therapy.

Vitamin A-rich maize could offer an effective means of supporting better diets for Zambia’s most vulnerable.

By Brian Moonga
LUSAKA, Aug 22 2010 (IPS)

Residents of Lusaka’s George Compound remember the bad old days in the early 1990s, when the area suffered ugly outbreaks of waterborne diseases.

Communal water point, George Compound, Lusaka Credit: Koni Benson/IPS

A Japanese grant supported the establishment of the George Water Supply Project in 1995, with management of the neighbourhood’s water supply supervised by a team of 60 locals elected by the community, working together with the Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company.

Fifteen years down the line, George Water Site Manager Lengwe Mwape says basic water needs are now being met for the township’s estimated 200,000 residents: eight boreholes and water reservoirs supplying water to 385 communal access points, allowing each family to draw up to 250 litres per day.

“We have about 16,500 households on the prepaid scheme. Then we have an extra 2,000 individually-connected properties. We pump 240,000 litres in the morning and the same quantity in the evening for those who go to the communal taps,” he says. “For the ones with individual connections, they have longer hours of supply, on average 16 hours each day.”

The George Water Supply Project meets its own costs for treating water, spending up to 6,000 U.S. dollars a month. Residents buy a card each month from the Lusaka Water Company office, 10,000 Zambian kwacha (roughly $2) entitling the holder to 7,500 litres of water. When a member of the household goes to the tap, they present the card to the controller, who permits them to draw up to a maximum daily amount.

There are those who can’t afford the monthly contribution. These pay 200 kwacha for every 20 litres: a rate seven times more costly per litre than water in a monthly subscription.

Area resident Rose Malama feels the project is beneficial to the community, but she has reservations, beginning with the pricing structure.

“I have only a small family, so if I need water for washing clothes, then I will draw more. But if I’m not using it for that, maybe it’s three or four containers only, which is 100 litres.”

She would like to be charged only for the amount she uses. Many residents find themselves caught between using less than the maximum 250 litres/day their monthly card entitles them to and buying water on a pay-as-you-go basis, but at a much higher rate.

“There’s nothing we can do as citizens,” Malama adds, “since they said it’s 10,000 kwacha this water, you either take it or leave it.”

The George Water Committee is elected for a five-year term by the community. Its mandate is to ensure that the water project is operating efficiently and to attend to maintenance. A tap monitor is assigned to each zone to oversee the functioning of the system and ensure availability of water at the designated times. The monitors also report illegal connections and ensure no one draws water they are not entitled to.

According to Mwape, the team employs mainly locals to run the day-to-day operations of the facility. The Committee and the LWSC have also hired accountants, water technicians and others.

“We have meetings every fortnight to give them an overview of how this unit is performing in terms of revenue collection. We give them specific tasks or areas to follow-up, or go to properties that have been disconnected and check if those guys are still disconnected,” he says.

“We still have 8,000 [households] who do not have cards and who do not have individual connections.”

George is perhaps typical of informal settlements throughout southern Africa: the technical challenge of supplying water to a dense, unplanned neighborhood is complicated by a host of pirate practices.

“We would have illegal connections, people from here [the project] conniving with people from the community. They give them an individual connection. There has also been the issue of water vending.”

According to Mwape, some unscrupulous people with individual connections are reaping huge profits from water vending, taking advantage of the much-cheaper rate they pay for water and the longer hours it is available to them.

“They sell at an average of 300 kwacha per 20 litre container. We are giving it to them at 20 kwacha for twenty litres. What we charge per month per individual, they make in a day.”

To curb the challenges of illegal connections and water vending, a security committee has been established to work with police to end this.

A few hand-dug wells remain in George, and as a result, Mwape says, cases of cholera are still recorded here in the rainy season. But the water project has drastically reduced the problem as few residents have still use unclean water sources.

Several residents – speaking anonymously to avoid retribution – told IPS there needs to be greater transparency in accounting for the 20 percent commission that comes back to the Water Committee each month. They want full accounting reports of its expenditures on maintenance for example to be produced for everyone to see.

“We want accountability; we want to know where that money is going.”

But Mwape says they’ll be disappointed if they think there are millions of kwacha unaccounted for.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep this project sustainable. Expenses have gone up. Everything: electricity, telephone bills, the chemicals for treatment. But the tariffs don’t go up at the rate all the other expenses do,” he told IPS.

The George Water Supply Project has succeeded in restoring a safe water supply to an area where it’s badly needed. To address residents’ concerns and remain sustainable in the face of growing costs, its elected management will have to maintain open and transparent accounts, and perhaps an open mind to users’ complaints.

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