By Erna Curry
CAPE TOWN, May 3 2011 (IPS)

Every minute, somewhere in the world, a child goes blind according to the World Health Organization. Three in five poor children who go blind are likely to die within two years of losing their sight – yet half of cases of childhood blindness are avoidable.

Blessjah Adegoke had cataracts removed at an ORBIS clinic in Ilorin, southwest Nigeria. Credit: Clare Louise Thomas/Image Incubator

“In the East African countries of Kenya and Uganda, as well as Zambia for example, the commonest cause of childhood blindness is cataracts,” says Dr Daniel Etya’ale, executive director for Africa for the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness’s (IAPB) and a member of the Africa Initiative Steering Committee of ORBIS, a non-profit organisation committed to saving sight worldwide.

It has worked in 88 countries since its inception in 1982, including establishing 28 paediatric eye care clinics in India since 2007.

Blind children in sub-Saharan Africa face three major challenges: “Firstly, many are not being reached early enough for successful intervention; secondly these children are extremely vulnerable – about half are likely to die within two to three years of becoming blind; thirdly there is very little infrastructure and specialised medical help available to them.”

Etya’ale says the high mortality rate of blind children may be linked to the medical conditions that cause their blindness. Xerophtalmia, for example, is caused by a vitamin A deficiency which is also associated with diminished ability to fight infections.

WHO recommends one paediatric ophthalmic centre per ten million people. But sub-Saharan Africa has far fewer. South Africa only has one such centre – at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town; only 11 other countries can boast any facilities for children’s eye care.

Professor Colin Cook, Head of Opthamology at the University of Cape Town and the Red Cross Hospital, says prevention measures for childhood blindness vary in different regions, sometimes requiring surgery, sometimes children need glasses, or even community and primary health interventions such as immunisation and improved nutrition.

Congenital cataracts have been linked to the childhood disease rubella in a significant percentage of cases of cataracts in children in South Africa, Zambia and Kenya; in response, immunisation programmes have been stepped up to ensure girls are vaccinated against the disease before reaching childbearing age. Vaccinations serve both to avoid loss of eyesight and to minimise other risks rubella poses to developing fetuses, like deafness and cardiac malformation.

Early detection and correction of problems with children’s vision calls for a more inclusive and holistic system to check eye health at community, district, provincial levels; for example training community health groups to do simple eye tests.

“Whenever they see evidence of a cataract, they can immediately send the child for a proper assessment which can be the difference between a life of misery, or even premature death, and a full life,” says Etya’ale.

ORBIS uses flagship tools such as its Flying Eye Hospital, a mobile ophthalmic training hospital aboard a DC-10 airplane, and Cyber-Sight, an online telemedicine mentoring and teaching resource. It relies on 450 expert medical volunteers to bring eye care and training to partners in developing countries – more than 12 million people have received care and 260,000 health care professionals have benefited from training.

Dr Hunter Cherwek is the Medical Director of the Flying Eye Hospital and agrees that early screening is essential, with children examined annually as part of a routine paediatric checkup. “School screenings are important, but a lot of places we go to, there is no mechanism to screen vision, even for glasses. Nothing is in place.”

Orbis is hosting 58 delegates from 15 countries at a two-day conference in Cape Town on May 4 and 5. Lene Øverland, Director of Programmes for ORBIS in Europe, the Middle East and Africa said, “All these people have an interest to provide eyecare services on a very high level to children on a primary and tertiary level. We want to define a plan of how to work together in the next five years on a comprehensive model to address childhood avoidable blindness in line with Global Vision Goals by 2020.”

“Blindness and poverty create a very vicious cycle,” said Cherwek. “It’s like a double hit, and it’s almost impossible for someone to overcome both as a child. Vision restoration and visual rehabilitation help break that cycle for quality of life, and for financial repercussions.”

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By Erna Curry
CAPE TOWN, Mar 16 2011 (IPS)

Despite formal recognition of domestic workers’ rights in South Africa, they still face a struggle for fair treatment.

Fifty-nine-year old Gladys Mnyengeza knows all too well about being treated like a third-class citizen. She’s been doing domestic work since she was nine years old. She said domestic workers are often hidden and isolated.

“When (the employer) has visitors you have to cook the food, do everything. They will dish for themselves. You are washing the dishes and they will close the kitchen door so the visitors don’t see you.”

Mnyengeza is a proud member of the South African Domestic, Service and Allied Workers’ Union (SADSAWU), a trade union looking after the rights of domestic workers in South Africa.

“Our people are scared to come. They are scared their madams will see them here. If we can go with each other and fight all this, we are all in a struggle as domestic workers,” said Mnyengeza.

In June this year, the second and final reading of an International Labour Organization Convention on the rights of domestic workers will take place. If it is adopted, it would strengthen legal protection for millions of the most vulnerable workers worldwide.

Invisible workers

A domestic worker is defined as an individual in a private home doing services such as cleaning, childcare, driving, gardening, cooking, elderly and frailcare.

According to the 2010 Labour Force Survey, there are about 880,000 domestic workers in South Africa. The majority of domestic workers in South Africa are women with low levels of education that render them vulnerable to exploitation and sexual harassment. Many are also migrants.

South African domestic workers met in Cape Town as part of efforts to ensure that the South African government along with 93 other countries, votes in favour of the Convention come June.

Myrtle Witbooi, General Secretary of SADSAWU, was an active participant in Geneva in 2009 when a first round of discussions on the Convention was held. “If we can win, if we can get a Convention on Domestic Work as Decent Work, it means we will be able to have one voice in the world. And all governments must listen to that voice.”

Countries, including South Africa, would be bound by this Convention if it is adopted at the ILO’s 100th session in June this year.

Minimum working rights

The convention would affect billions of vulnerable domestic workers all over the world by affording them minimum working rights and protection. As a Convention is binding, member countries are called on to interpret the new labour standard within their national labour legislation.

The situation is particularly unique because domestic workers are so isolated in private homes. It also makes it difficult to organise, as illustrated by the voices from the different domestic workers at the event.

One SADSAWU member said, “I am here on behalf of the workers in Plattekloof, Cape Town because they cannot speak up. They are alone there and they are suffering. That’s why I came, because at least I can go back and report to them… that you know they exist and their problems.”

She added, “I had a hard time. To be a domestic worker is not easy. It’s not nice… you work so hard. Sometimes you don’t even get something to eat. It’s worse when you do a sleep-in job. You will cook that food there but you won’t even eat a piece. After supper the madam will tell you, ‘You can just take that bread there and put some jam on.'”

Africa lagging behind

International trade unionist Cecelia Mather congratulated South Africa’s government on its commitment to the Convention. “The South African government is good – they need to get the rest of Africa to follow.”

Domestic workers in South Africa enjoy better labour protection than their counterparts in other countries, but there are important gaps. They are excluded from compensation for workplace injuries, for example. A SADSAWU member working in the Cape Town suburb of Bellville was washing windows when she fell off a ladder and broke her right arm; she was fired by her employer and had to pay her own medical bills.

Research from the Global Network in Africa shows that across Africa, domestic workers endure poor working conditions and a significantly lower level of access to social security in terms of health, education, housing, electricity and transport.

Making rights an election issue

The hundreds of women and their supporters who attended the meeting are proud to be a members of a union and seemed uninterested in discussions about the upcoming South African local government elections in May.

The ruling ANC has set itself a target of achieving 50/50 representation of women on local councils.

But the workers were unimpressed by this “The parties? They don’t recognise the domestic workers and it’s a long struggle we have to fight.”

Myrtle Witbooi, who is also the chairperson of the International Domestic Workers Network, said, “If they want to implement rights for domestic workers then we are working for all of them. We need someone that will fight for workers’ rights.”

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Noncedo Pulana lacks many things, but she is certainly not short of confidence as she prepares to stand for election as Khayelitsha ward councillor. She feels her long years as an activist in the sprawling township have prepared her to do a better job.

Noncedo Pulana and her children in Khayelitsha Credit: Erna Curry/IPS

Khayelitsha is reputed to be the largest township in South Africa. Created in 1985 to accommodate an influx of black labour to Cape Town, in 20 years its population grew beyond 400,000. Seventy percent of residents still live in shacks of wood and corrugated metal; one in three must walk 200 metres or more to the nearest public water point.

Pulana can often be found at a communal house in the township that she calls “the 5-Star”, a joking reference to the way the small structure seems to accommodate all who need it. She spends hours here meeting with, educating and politicising young people she refers to as her spiritual children.

Councillors missing on key issues

Three-quarters of Khayelitsha’s population is under the age of 35. A quarter of these youth are HIV positive. Yozi, from the Site C section of the township, is one of them.

Yet ward councillors are not visible on health committees in the community.

“If the ward councillors could take the lead in one of these challenges, being open, taking part, taking a lead by saying I am going to test [for HIV] publicly…” Yozi says.

“I want all of us to know our HIV status, but not just that: I’m also saying that due to the lack of employment that leads to this brutality that we have seen. You don’t see (the ward councillors) leading such campaigns and attending such meetings and raising these issues publicly, opening up for community members to engage and to discuss.”

Since 2003, Pulana has served as a member of the Khayelitsha Development Forum and as a community representative on the ward council. Community representatives can give input on the plans and budget for the ward, but it is the ward councillor who has the power to make decisions.

“What made me eager to become a councillor is that I saw myself that this work that I am doing it was supposed to be done by a councillor,” she says.

Coming to the party

She is standing for election as a candidate for the DA, the Democratic Alliance party. It’s a complicated choice for a community activist from this black African township where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has dominated every election since 1994. The DA has so far drawn its support mostly from white and coloured voters, though it gained some seats in predominantly black areas in the most recent vote.

Pulana says she grew disillusioned with the ANC several years ago, when she could not gain recognition as a leader, as a person with something to say in her local branch. Part of the reason for her frustration, she says, was resistance to her leadership potential based on her gender.

“The environment we are in, it needs a person like me. Because when you go to the meetings, who is in the forefront? It’s the man. If you go to church, who is in the forefront?… Although the women are many, who is voicing the things? It’s men. Who is organising? It’s men. Why is it like that?”

In Khayelitsha, and similar townships across the country, the belief that councillors serve their constituents adequately has been badly eroded. The evidence lies in the thousands of protests across the country every year, demanding faster progress in providing decent housing, healthcare and jobs.

Pulana believes her history of community organising has already established a level of trust between her and her community. “The reason I can say so is that they know Noncedo. Noncedo is always there for the people.”

Is elected office the answer?

Eleanor Hoedemaker is a community activist from Zille-Raine Heights, an informal settlement in another part of the city. She knows Pulana well, but she rejects the idea of running for ward councillor as an effective means to work for change.

“You can’t trust any of them (politicians)… male or female! We’ve been approached already to join political parties but we said we do not want to lose our identity, like other people who were activists and went into parliament. So rather not. Rather stay an activist, and lets not get involved in politics.”

Will Pulana retain her commitment to securing the basic needs of her community should she be elected?

There is little support from South Africa’s political parties specifically to help women strengthen their influence as elected officials or within party structures.

Pulana has developed leadership skills in the course of her community work and with training by organisations such as the child health and rights group Children’s Resource Centre and as part of a project called Building Women’s Activism, run by a Cape Town NGO, the International Labour Research and Information Group.

She herself has no fears on this score.

“If the men were doing it right, we would not have to waste our time and do it. We saw there is this gap, and we had to jump it, uyabo (you see?)”

But first she has to win an election.

By Erna Curry
CAPE TOWN, Oct 27 2010 (IPS)

A coalition of civil society groups marched to South Africa’s Parliament on Oct. 27 to protest against the draft version of a new Protection of Information Bill. “This bill is a betrayal of all the democratic principles we fought for,” anti-apartheid stalwart Kader Asmal told the crowd.

A week of action against what activists describe as a Secrecy Bill concluded with a march on parliament. Credit: Davison Makanga/IPS

Critics, under the banner of the Right 2 Know Campaign, say the bill could restrict the right to access information which is essential to holding government accountable.

“This bill is a charter for rogues. Because everyone from the president down to the local authority can designate bills, ideas, as confidential,” Asmal said.

“Nowhere in the world have you got town councillors being able to [do this]… You can’t have hundreds of people with the right to do that, you want a small number of people.”

The bill would criminalise those who pass on or possess classified information without authorisation, be they whistleblowers, journalists or ordinary citizens – even if the release of the information is judged to be in the public interest.

This could have a serious impact on freedom of the media, as journalists would risk prison terms of up to 25 years for possessing or publishing classified information: stiffer sentences than those prescribed for government officials who wrongfully conceals information.

Information about government contracts could potentially be deemed secret, blocking transparency in deals involving huge parastatal companies.

Excessively broad powers

Ayesha Kajee, the director of the Freedom of Expression Institute and a member of the campaign, is one of those who says that the bill in its current form is extremely problematic.

“It has a very broad, very vague definition of national interest that would ostensibly allow any head of any organ of government, anywhere in the country, at any level – national, local, provincial – to classify information on the basis that it’s in the national interest to make that information secret.”

These broad powers, activists say, could cripple popular struggles for social and economic rights. The campaign for expanded treatment and care for HIV/AIDS, for example, could be hindered by lack of information on a provincial health budget.

The Right 2 Know Coalition – which organised protest events and community meetings in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town in the week leading up to the Oct. 27 march – includes diverse community-based organisations, the HIV advocacy group the Treatment Action Campaign, and religious leaders, as well as the South African National Editors’ Forum, and the FXI.

Cape Town community activist Yusra Adams fears the bill will starve struggles for housing and better service delivery of vital information.

“The media is giving me information on the ground, they are the people that are making me alert of what is going on. If I am not reading I am not well informed.”

Activist Nkwame Cedile, who was involved in organising events, agrees. “This Bill will affect everything, from your councillor to your president, from the hospital to your library. It’s going to cast a blanket of darkness over information throughout government,” he said.

“And the danger, for me, is that it’s going to make it difficult for transparency and accountability and under any democracy transparency and accountability are the pilllars of that particular democracy.”

Government response

Appearing before the parliamentary committee reviewing the bill on Oct. 22, the Minister of State Security, Siyabonga Cwele, stressed that citizens will still have recourse to access information through the Promotion of Information Act, PAIA.

“We are not against it… accessing information,” Cwele said, “we have said that again and again. That’s why there is a section in the bill that deals with override in terms of access, and we also made proposals to further the alignment with PAIA.”

A statement issued by the ministry proposed that the concept of “national interest” be removed from the bill, and that a definition for “commercial information” be adopted from the existing Promotion of Information Act. FXI’s Kajee is unimpressed by the minister’s defence.

“Currently government has to prove why something should be made secret. If this bill comes into law, the onus shifts to the citizen to show why something should not be secret,” she told IPS.

“That’s an unfair equation as government has huge resources, it has huge power in relation to the ordinary citizen.”

For Nic Dawes, editor of the weekly Mail & Guardian newspaper, the bill recalls the apartheid era.

“We remember what it was like to live in a society of secrets. We remember that you can’t have true freedom and live your freedom without the right to know,” he said.

“There are those of them who say to us, well trust us, you have the freedom to trust us. We say that is not the freedom we fought for, in fact it’s not freedom at all.”

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