Marcia Julio Vilanculos brought her baby to the digital literacy training at Ideario innovation hub, Maputo, Mozambique. Women’s caregiving responsibilities must be factored in by training programmes. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Sep 14 2018 (IPS)

‘Think Bigger’, urge the colourful posters on the walls of Ideario, an innovation hub in Chamanculo, a modest neighbourhood in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. The message is right on target for the new female trainees, eager eyes glued to laptop screens as they learn internet and computer skills.

Three times a year Ideario runs a free, three-month-long course on digital literacy for 60 poor young women, selected among 500 candidates from Chamanculo.“Our survey highlights the gendered barriers to internet access and use in particular contexts - urban, peri-urban and rural women, with low income levels.” -- Chenai Chair, evaluations adviser at ICT Research Africa.

Ideario’s operations manager, Jessica Manhiça, tells IPS many girls initially fear using computers. Nine in 10 do not have one at home.

“I was afraid of erasing other people’s documents,” Marcia Julio Vilanculos, 25, tells IPS. In high school she paid a classmate to type her handwritten assignments.

“Overcoming fear opens the door to thinking bigger,” says Manhiça. “Girls are raised to be afraid of technology, of making mistakes, of being ill-judged as different, unconventional or masculine.”

The course starts by reinforcing self-esteem and unpacking the myth that tech is for men.

“Many parents discourage the girls from the course, worrying they will become independent, delay marriage, or exchange sex for jobs,” says Manhiça. “The young women internalise their families’ negativity.”

Not surprisingly, less than three percent of jobs in Mozambique’s booming tech sector are filled by women, reports a market survey by Ideario’s partner, MUVA Tech. MUVA Tech is a programme that works for the economic empowerment of young urban girls.

Among Mozambique’s 28 million people, less than 10 percent are internet users and only less than one in 10 users are women, according to a recent After Access survey by Research ICT Africa.

According to Research ICT Africa:

• 30 percent of all women own cellphones,
• 15 percent of these women own a smartphone (but not all use it for internet for a number of factors),
• and 6.8  percent of all Mozambican women, with or without owning a cellphone, use the internet. 

Of the seven African countries surveyed, only Rwanda has lower internet penetration and greater gender disparity.

“Our survey highlights the gendered barriers to internet access and use in particular contexts – urban, peri-urban and rural women, with low income levels,” says Chenai Chair, researcher at Research ICT Africa. “The findings reflect the gendered power dynamics that people live with daily.”

The digital gender gap is widening in Africa, warns the International Telecommunications Union.

Even Kenya, celebrated for its digital innovation and a relatively low overall digital gender gap of 10 percent, shows vast disparity among the urban poor. A digital gender audit in the slums of Nairobi by the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) in 2015 found that 57 percent of men are connected to the internet but only 20 percent of women are.

In poor areas of Kampala, Uganda, 61 percent of men and 21 percent of women use the internet, and 44 percent of men and 18 percent of women use a computer.

When women go online, they may find harassment. In Uganda, 45 percent of female internet users reported online threats, as did one in five in Kenya. The gender stereotypes and abusive behaviour found in daily life continue online.

“It is still believed in many cultures in Uganda that women should not speak at the same table as men and that includes discussions on social media,” Susan Atim, of Women of Uganda Network, tells IPS.

The WWWF research identifies the root causes of the digital gender divide: high costs, lack of know-how, scarcity of content that is relevant and empowering for women, and barriers to women speaking freely and privately online.

Systemic inequalities based on gender, race, income and geography are mirrored in the digital realm and leave many women, especially the poor and the rural, trailing behind Africa’s tech transformation. Without digital literacy, women cannot get the digital dividends – the access to jobs, information and services essential to secure a good livelihood.

Simple steps like reducing the cost to connect, teaching digital literacy in schools, and expanding public access facilities can bring quick progress, says WWWF.

Tarisai Nyamweda, media manager with Gender Links, a regional advocacy group, points out the scarcity of women role models in tech for schoolgirls. The percentage of female high school teachers ranges from fewer than two in 10 in Mozambique and Malawi to just over half in South Africa.

“We need to change the narrative so girls can identify new ways to do things,” says Nyamweda.

Digital literacy training must consider women’s domestic responsibilities.

To be at Ideario at 8 am, Vilanculos would wake up at 5 am, to make a fire and heat water. She prepared breakfast for her husband (a car painter) and their two children. She then dropped her eldest at school at 7am and brought her baby with her to the training. During lunch she picked up her oldest and took both her children to stay with an aunt, and returned to Ideario.

“I was tired, my feet hurt,” she recalls. But the effort paid off: today she is a microworker with Tekla, an online job platform.

The use of information and communication technologies is now required in all but two occupations, dishwashing and food preparation, in the American workplace, notes a policy brief on the future of work by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Considering that 90 percent of jobs in the Fourth Industrial Revolution will require digital skills, according to a World Economic Forum study,  there is no time to lose in closing Africa’s digital gender gap.

By Lyndal Rowlands and Mercedes Sayagues
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 29 2014 (IPS)

In rural Zambia and Malawi, new mums face long delays finding out if they have passed HIV on to their babies.

Without treatment, a third of babies born with HIV will die before their first birthday and half before their second. Starting treatment within the first 12 weeks of life vastly improves their chances of survival.

But testing babies is not easy in poor countries.

Because mothers pass antibodies to their babies in the womb, the usual adult antibody tests during the first months of life can be inaccurate.

A virological test is needed. But only a handful of central labs can do these in Zambia and Malawi. On the long journey to and from the lab on the back of a motorbike or truck, the blood sample or the result often gets lost.

Some studies suggest that nearly half of tests never reach the clinics or the mothers.

Meanwhile, the new mum returns to her village and she and the baby likely drop out from the clinic’s radar.

Malawi and Zambia each has an estimated one million people living with HIV. In 2012, new HIV infections among children numbered 9,400 in Zambia and 11,000 in Malawi. Just over one third of babies were tested.

The old system couldn’t cope. New ideas and technologies were needed.

Enter UNICEF Innovation with an open source, code-based RapidSMS software: as soon as the lab result is in, the rural clinic’s nurse receives it by SMS on a cell phone or looks it up on the website. In remote villages, a community health worker receives the SMS and alerts the parents.

All information is encoded to ensure privacy and the software includes a web dashboard for reporting and administration.

In Zambia, the turnaround was cut from two or three months down to one month, said Shadrack Omol, deputy representative of UNICEF in Lusaka.

The SMS relaying is part of an antenatal system, Project Mwana (KiSwahili for child), that brings other benefits for all new mums as well.

At the first antenatal visit, the mother’s details are entered in Mwana’s SMS reminder system for alerts on checkups, immunizations, baby weighing and drug refills.

Bundling the HIV component with regular mother and baby care helps avoid stigma and fear of being identified as HIV positive.

In 2011, a Mozambican charity with 22,000 people on ARV treatment tried to build a cellphone database to remind patients of appointments: fearing loss of privacy and stigma, only half gave their cellphone numbers.

In Zambia, Mwana covers 484 clinics in 10 provinces. In Malawi, it has delivered more than 20,000 tests.

The next step, says Emanuel Saka, HIV specialist with UNICEF in Malawi, will be “expanding the geographical coverage and scope of the technology” and targeting adolescents with HIV.

New solutions to old problems

The best solution would be to test babies at the point of care in the rural clinic without any delays. In Mozambique, health workers are trying out a new viral load testing machine that can diagnose young babies in less than one hour.

“This is a great breakthrough,” said Bindiya Meggi, a pharmacist working on this project with the National Institute of Health.

Made by the German company ALERE, the machine is being tried in four sites with the help of the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

“It’s very simple to use,” said Ocean Tobaiwa, a Zimbabwean technician at the trial clinic in Maputo

As the machine is tested, it is adapted to local conditions, such as irregular electricity, black outs, power surges, heat and humidity. German technicians visit regularly to tweak the machines.

At present, babies are tested at one-month of age. A dry blood sample is collected through a heel or finger prick and sent to a central lab for viral load analysis.

Mozambique has only four such labs for a population of 24 million, with some 900,000 HIV positive women, and thousands of kilometers of roads impassable in the rainy season.

Although in theory results should be returned in two weeks, the reality is one month or more. Meanwhile, as in Zambia and Malawi, mother and baby are lost to follow-up.

In Zambia, RapidSMS is the backbone of U-Report, a booming HIV hotline service for young people, which garnered 71,000 users in two years. (see sidebar)

UNICEF Innovation Labs work with universities and the public and private sector to find new solutions to old problems in health, education, and water and sanitation.

“There is so much to do in the area of technology and real time information that hasn’t yet been explored,” Kochi said.

SILENT SUFFERING: MEN, MANHOOD AND HIV

By Mercedes Sayagues
Cape Town, Dec 18 2014 (IPS)

Across Africa, men have lower rates than women for HIV testing, antiretroviral treatment enrollment and adherence, viral load suppression and survival.

Generally, of all people on antiretroviral treatment (ART) in Africa, just over one-third are men.

The disparity can be even more dramatic: in South Africa, in 2012, half the number of men were taking the life-saving drugs compared to women: 1.3 million women and 651,000 men.

At the core of this inequality are socially constructed ideas of masculinity. To be a man means being strong, to ignore pain and symptoms. Hospitals are for women and children.

As a result, men test for HIV and start ART late, sometimes too late to beat the virus.

Manhood brings a mix of personal costs and benefits. Among the costs are men’s poor mental and physical health, and their difficulty to talk about their feelings.

It’s not considered macho to share personal problems. This is one reason why men hesitate to join support groups to help them cope with treatment.

Experts recommend setting up men-friendly clinics with opening hours suitable for working men, recruiting male champions to encourage men to join HIV support groups, and routine co-testing of couples at antenatal clinics.

Every day, eleven Mozambican women die of cervical cancer. That is 4,000 every year. It is the most frequent cancer among women aged 15-44 and the biggest killer of women among all cancers. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Oct 31 2014 (IPS)

Mozambique is reeling under the twin burden of HIV and cervical cancer. Eleven women die of cervical cancer every day, or 4,000 a year. Yet this cancer is preventable and treatable, if caught early.

Among African countries, Mozambique vies neck and neck with Malawi for the saddest statistics.

Mozambique has the highest cervical cancer cumulative risk and mortality – seven out of 100 newborn girls will develop this cancer and five will die from it.

Malawi is first in incidence (new cases per year), with Mozambique tailing second.

Cervical cancer is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a common virus with 40 types. Many people carry it dormant and often it goes away by itself. But two types of HPV cause cervical cancer.

HIV and HPV are deadly allies. HPV infection doubles the risk of acquiring HIV while HIV hastens progression of cervical cancer.

Some numbers will give an idea of Mozambique’s burden:

• 7.3 million women over age 15, who can potentially acquire HPV through sex.
• 820,000 women over age 15 living with HIV. Cervical cancer advances quickly with a weak immune system.
• 4,000 deaths of cervical cancer a year, not counting those who die at home, undiagnosed, untreated and unreported

Step by step, health authorities are tackling the problem with a three-pronged strategy: information for prevention, routine screening for detection, and better treatment.

There is even talk of bringing radio therapy equipment and training technicians. In terminal stages, radio therapy shrinks cancer and reducing excruciating pain.

Routine screening for this cancer is now offered with family planning services. Diagnosis and treatment via cryotherapy (freezing) can be done in one visit. The Ministry of Health hopes to cover all districts by 2017.

The mass media campaign had a tireless advocate in the former First Lady, Maria da Luz Guebuza. The Association for the Fight against Cancer, a volunteer group, has multiplied its outreach and helps patients at the oncology wards of main hospitals.

Information is dispelling the perception of cervical cancer as “the neighbour’s disease”, brought upon women by a neighbour’s curse or by witchcraft.

The situation is still dire; needs outpace resources, both human and financial. But it is a great improvement over just three years ago, when only a handful of clinics offered screening, and millions of women had never heard about HPV and cervical cancer at all.

The budgets of many African countries reflect greater interest in arms deals than in managing the deadly HIV epidemic. Credit: Thomas Martinez/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida and Mercedes Sayagues
JOHANNESBURG/NEW YORK, Aug 13 2014 (IPS)

They say there is a war on and its target is the deadly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).   

This war runs worldwide but its main battleground is sub-Saharan Africa, where seven out of 10 HIV positive persons in the world live – 24.7 million in 2013. The region suffered up to 1.3 million AIDS-related deaths in the same year, according to the United Nations.

A ragtag army is fighting the war on AIDS. Sometimes it is comprised of well-dressed aid officials sitting in conference rooms allocating funds. At other times, it deploys shabby foot soldiers – community healthcare workers and AIDS activists – into desolate rural areas with no running water, let alone antiretroviral therapy.

With many competing health problems, funding for AIDS is a growing concern. Yet a look at the defence of budgets of several countries plagued by HIV portrays a startling picture of governments’ priorities, with huge military expenditures belying the argument that the key obstacle to winning the war against AIDS is money.

And, as the 2015 deadline for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals looms large – with donor countries tightening their purse strings – health experts worry about financing for HIV prevention and AIDS treatment after 2015.

New funding for AIDS in low- and middle-incoming countries fell three percent from 2012 to 8.1 billion dollars in 2013, says a joint report by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) released in June.

Five of the 14 major donor governments – the U.S., Canada, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands – decreased AIDS spending last year.

And yet, while governments claim to be too cash-strapped to fight the AIDS war, funding for other wars seems much more forthcoming.

Spending on arms and on AIDS

Africa will need to do more with less to manage AIDS, concludes a 2013 UNAIDS report entitled Smart Investments.

In Kenya, a funding shortfall is expected soon, since the World Bank’s 115 million-dollar ‘Total War on HIV/AIDS’ project expired last month.

Meanwhile, the country’s defence budget is expected to grow from 4.3 billion dollars in 2012-2014 to 5.5 billion dollars by 2018, as the country stocks up on helicopters, drones and border surveillance equipment, according to the news portal DefenceWeb.

True, Kenya is under attack from Al-Shabaab terrorists. Still, five out of 10 pregnant Kenyan women living with HIV do not get ARVs to protect their babies.

Mozambique’s fighter jets

In Mozambique, a dearth of funding puts the country’s recent military expenditures into a harsh light.

Daniel Kertesz, the World Health Organization representative in Mozambique, told IPS the country’s six-year health program has a 200 million dollar finance gap per year.

Mozambique being very poor, it is difficult to see how the country – with 1.6 million infected people, the world’s eighth burden – will meet its domestic commitments.

“Today, Mozambique spends between 30 and 35 dollars per person per year on health. WHO recommends a minimum of 55-60 per person per year,” Kertesz said.

The same week, the government announced it had fixed eight military fighter jets, which it had discarded 15 years ago, in Romania, and is receiving three Embraer Tucano military aircraft from Brazil for free, with the understanding that purchase of three  fighter jets will follow.

According to a 2014 report by the Economic Intelligence Unit, Mozambique’s spending on state security is expected to rise sharply, partly owing to the acquisition, by the ministry of defence, of 24 fishing trawlers and six patrol and interceptor ships at the cost of 300 million dollars – equal to half the 2014 national health budget of 635.8 million dollars.

 The same week the refurbished fighter jets landed at Maputo airport, the press reported that the main hospital in Mozambique’s north-western and coal-rich Tete province went for five days without water.

Indeed, the country’s public health system is in such dire straits that the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) meets 90 percent of the health ministry’s annual AIDS budget.

“The state budget for social programmes is not increasing at the same level as military, defence and security spending,” Jorge Matine, a researcher at Mozambique’s Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), told IPS.

“We have been pushing for accountability around the acquisition of commercial and military ships for millions of dollars,” he said.

A coalition of NGOs has requested the government to explain “its decision to spend that money without authorisation from Parliament when the country is experiencing severe shortages of personnel and supplies in the health sector,” Matine explained.

The coalition argues that, if defence spending remained as it was in 2011, the country would save 70 million dollars, which could buy 1,400 ambulances (11 per district, when many districts have only one or two) or import 21 percent more medicines.

A similar pattern unfolds across the continent where, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), military spending reached an estimated 44.4 billion dollars in 2013, an 8.3 percent increase from the previous year. In Angola and Algeria, high oil revenues fuel the buying spree.

The South Africa-based Ceasefire Campaign reported recently that arms deals with private companies are also on the rise in Africa, with governments expected to sign deals with global defence companies totalling roughly 20 billion dollars over the next decade.

Credit: Marshall Patstanza and Nqabomzi Bikitsha/IPS

Failing Abuja 

At the same time, the 2001 Abuja Declaration, whose signatories committed to allocating at least 15 percent of gross domestic product to health, has “barely become a reality”, Vuyiseka Dubula, general-secretary of the South Africa-based Treatment Action Campaign, told IPS.

 “Regardless of our calls, very few countries have even come close to 12 percent, including some of the richer African countries such as South Africa and Nigeria,” Dubula said.

Between 2000-2005, she added, “almost 400,000 people died from AIDS in South Africa; during that same period we spent so much money on arms we don’t need, and one wonders whether that was a responsible [use] of public resources.”

Mozambique is a sad example of Abuja failure. Back in 2001, Mozambique’s health budget represented 14 percent of the total state budget, tailing the Abuja target. It declined to a low of seven percent in 2011 and clawed to eight percent since.

“Financing mirrors the priorities of the government,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Ethiopia’s minister of foreign affairs and former minister of health, told IPS. “We have seen that in countries that had the political will to turn around their health sectors, they upscale finance and really invest in the health sector.”

If this is true, the budgets of many African countries reflect greater interest in arms deals than in managing the deadly HIV epidemic.

Edited by: Mercedes Sayagues

COUNTDOWN SNAPSHOT: HOW MOZAMBIQUE IS COPING WITH AIDS

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Aug 12 2014 (IPS)

Mozambique struggles to contain the HIV epidemic with one in ten among its 24 million people infected. Helping them is not easy when only 60 percent of people have access to health services.

There are five doctors and 25 nurses per 100,000 people. In neighbouring South Africa, the ratio is 55 doctors and 383 nurses.

Recently, the United Nations ranked Mozambique 178 among 187 countries in human development. Quick stats:

• 50 years: life expectancy
• 3: mean years of schooling
• 70 percent: number of people living in poverty
• 40 percent: number of women who give birth at home
• 56 000: number of women infected with HIV annually

Excessive dependence on donors is another problem, with 90 percent of the health ministry’s HIV/AIDS budget paid by theUnited States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The overall health budget is just eight percent of the total state budget, far from reaching the 2001 Abuja commitment to allocate 15 percent to health.

Nonetheless, Mozambique is doing quite well in preventing mother to child HIV transmission. Infection rates among children have plummeted, but remain too high at 12,000 in 2013. The good news is that this number is half of what it was five years ago.

Sources: UNAIDS, UNICEF

By Mercedes Sayagues
SAO TOME, Aug 24 2009 (IPS)

If you live in São Tomé, a good investment in your health is to plant a po-sabom tree (Dracaena aroborea) in your backyard. Leave space: it can grow up to 20 metres high, with sword-shaped leaves.

Sum Gino at his market stall: 'We don

The local stiljon, or traditional healer, has many uses for po-sabom. For toothache, drink tea of its bark and roots. For skin itches, whip bark in water until foamy, then bathe. For a wound, apply a poultice of leaves and bark. If you are horny, its bark and roots, mixed with alcohol will boost your powers.

The forest is the pharmacy on the two tiny Gulf of Guinea islands of São Tomé and Principe; and traditional healers are the experts on its plants.   Over 14 years, Maria do Ceu Madureira, a Portuguese ethnobotanist, had led a research team from the University of Coimbra and the Ministry of Health of São Tomé, with funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Her ethno-pharmacological study, published in 2008, pulls together traditional knowledge and modern science.

Madureira was fascinated with the richness of the local flora and worried that elderly healers are dying without disciples.

“Their knowledge is disappearing faster than the forests,” says Madureira.

Massive study

The study collected information on 325 medicinal plants and more than 1,000 medicinal recipes from some 40 respected healers, midwives and grandmothers.

The plants were identified, classified and compared to similar plants studied elsewhere. When pharmacological and phytochemical analyses were performed on fifteen plants, they showed potential to develop new medicines for old diseases.

Po-sabom looked promising against malaria and leishmaniasis, and effective against 14 fungi and four bacteria, including candida albicans, a frequent cause of oral and vaginal infections among HIV-positive people. Thirteen plants are effective against the plasmodium falciparum malarial mosquito.

Other plants have anti-bacterial, anti-histamine, anti-diarrhoeic, anti-tumour, pain-killing and sedative properties.

“Empirical knowledge was checked with scientific methods in the laboratory and we found the therapeutical value of plants,” says Marcelina Quaresma Jose da Costa, from the pharmacy department at São Tomé’s ministry of health.

Sum Gino and Sum Pontes

At his stall at the central market in São Tomé, 78-year-old Francisco Sousa Carvalho sells leaves, roots and barks; the most popular are those against fever, high blood pressure and diabetes. His teeth are gone and his bones hurt: “This I can’t cure, it is old age,” he laughs.

Too feeble to go into the forest, he sends others to find the plants, but says it is getting harder to find them.

Sousa Carvalho, know as Sum (or, healer) Gino, is one of three healers credited as co-authors in the study.

Book profits – and Madureira’s compilation has practically sold out in Portugal and São Tomé – have gone to fix and equip the homes of healers and pay them a monthly stipend.

Another co-author is Lourenco de Sousa Pontes Junior, still sprightly and strong at 82. His wooden home stands amidst a palm grove in Bobo Forro, São Tomé. He sees his clients in a small room.

“This project is saving our knowledge for future generations,” said Lourenco de Sousa Pontes Junior. His specialty is massage and is reputed as an expert on barks.

Pontes regrets that the young are not interested in learning his craft, and fewer clients come to him. The Portuguese banned traditional medicine and the  post-colonial Marxist government despised it. “Traditional healing is losing ground,” he says.

Perhaps this trend could be reversed. Da Costa, who studied in Cuba, is one of São Tomé’s three pharmacists. The other two are retired. Da Costa, 54, would like to go on pension too, if a replacement could be found.

Young saotomenses have gone abroad to study pharmacy in Brazil and Portugal, but none has returned, she says.

Da Costa has come to invite Pontes to do a display and speak about his craft at an exhibit she is organizing for the Week of African Traditional Medicine, Aug. 24-31.

“The book fuelled interest among young people,” says da Costa. “If we had a centre for botanical studies, we could train, create jobs and reduce the brain drain.”

The old can teach the young the secrets of the rainforest and help find new medicines for old diseases.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
SAO TOME, Aug 11 2009 (IPS)

Zinaldina dos Reus, Zizi for her friends, is washing clothes by a stream near the airport in São Tomé. Her toddler plays nearby. Zizi, 21, can't remember the last time she or her husband had malaria, years ago. She credits the free bed nets and anti-mosquito home spraying regularly supplied countrywide since 2004.

2008 saw a rise in cerebral malaria cases in Sao Tome Credit: M. Sayagues/IPS

Bureaucratic delays plagued the indoor residual spraying programme (IRS) throughout 2008 when the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB took it over from the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund. IRS is now contracted to the local NGO Zatona-Adil, which started spraying in July, nine months later than planned.

Malaria is endemic in the Gulf of Guinea, where the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe lie. Yet the impoverished country has led since 2004 an anti-malarial campaign that has won praise from the World Health Organisation. From first cause of death, malaria dropped to third.

Besides spraying, the anti-malarial strategy offers free bed nets, effective for four years or 21 washes, distributed at school and health posts; preventive drugs for pregnant women; artemisinin-based therapy as the first-line drug for treatment, and awareness campaigns.

On the tiny islands (pop. 180,000), malaria declined from 65,000 cases and 169 deaths in 2004 to 2,700 cases and three deaths in 2007.

"A vertiginous decline," says Dr. Herodes Sacramento Rompão, director of the National Centre for Endemic Diseases or Centro Nacional de Endemias (CNE).

In 2007, malaria mortality was down 99 percent from 2002. Most impressive is the gain among the under-fives: from 28,990 cases in 2003 to 1,080 cases in 2007. For lack of patients, the main hospital in the capital closed two paediatric wards.

But 2008 saw a rise in cerebral malaria cases, with 12 deaths, half of them among children.

Several factors are at play. After three or four years without malaria bouts, local people's acquired semi-immunity diminishes and they become more susceptible to infection.

Many think that malaria is no longer a problem. Although seven out of 10 malaria consultations at health posts are women, mothers delay taking their children for a malaria test early enough.

"People get complacent and roll-up the nets," says Rompão. Another problem is people's growing resistance to indoor spraying. This worries Men-Fang Shaio, head of the malaria control project at the Taiwanese Medical Mission.

"IRS must be over 80 percent or it is a waste of money," he says.

In July 2009, two-thirds of homes targeted for IRS were not sprayed, either because they were closed or the owner refused it. Some homeowners leave on the day announced for spraying.

"People have ways of avoiding us," says Dionisio da G. Amado, director of Zatona-Adil.

A variety of beliefs are at play here. Some complain of allergies and itching from the insecticide used, alphacypermethrin. Others resent taking out all furniture and utensils for two hours, especially in the rainy season.

Some argue that spraying is useless because mosquitoes still buzz around. (Spraying kills the malaria-carrying anopheles, not the plentiful culex mosquito.) Neighbours with illegal electrical connections are wary of allowing the teams inside.

Excuses on the urban myth side: Teams sell the insecticide and spray with water only or in highly diluted doses. The malaria blood tests administered during searches for patients detect HIV, which carries high stigma.

Acceptance of home spraying has been declining from a high of 87 percent in 2005, to 83 percent in 2006 and 78 percent in 2007 and 66 percent in July 2009.

The fishing area of Lobato, in the North, had the highest refusal rate, also the highest number of malaria deaths last year.

"Lobato has a history of refusing health services," says Rompão. "Is it superstition? Shame? Do women refuse because husbands are at sea?"

CNE has commissioned an anthropological study to understand why.

Many middle class households also reject spraying, arguing they have mosquito netting and air conditioning. In Pantufo, a fishing village close to the capital, giving mosquito nets improved the acceptance of spraying, says Amado. His NGO plans to involve churches, do door-to-door campaigns, and hand out nets, but not in a sealed plastic bag, to prevent their sale.

In addition, Sao Tome's Council of Ministers is considering a fine of 10 million dobras (655 dollars) for non-compliers, explains Rompão.

Completing the malaria treatment – 8 pills a day during three days – is another hurdle.

Men are more difficult patients than women, says Lance Santos, a statistician with the Taiwan Medical Mission: "In rural areas, in the evening, alcohol makes men forget treatment."

Environmental sanitation to stop mosquito breeding is equally important, since 70 percent of mosquito bites now occur outdoors thanks to home spraying.

Once the chores are done, Zizi, her husband and their child will sit outdoors, around a neighbour's TV to watch the popular Brazilian "novelas", or soaps. The many bars with outside TVs attract crowds.

"Mosquitoes schedule meetings with the population on 'novela' evenings," says Rompão.

He should ask Brazilian scriptwriters to feature characters who accept indoor spraying and complete treatment.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, May 12 2009 (IPS)

Their mud huts perch precariously on the eroded, high embankment of the Zambezi river, in the provincial capital of Tete, in central Mozambique. But watching their homes be washed away by erosion or floods is just another risk for the residents of Matundo and Matheus Sansao Muthemba bairros. Their lives are as precarious as their homes.

Even one dollar a week makes a big difference in the ability of the poor to invest productively, say researchers. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

A 2008 study of 500 households conducted by independent researchers Leonor Teressa Matine and Ambrosio de Fonseca found that two thirds of homes shelter between six to ten people, but few families manage to pull in the equivalent of a farm worker’s monthly minimum salary of $55.

They work hard to diversify their sources of income: they sell at the market and the bus station, cultivate small plots, build and rent out shacks, gather and sell firewood and re-plaster houses. Some sell sex. Some beg on the streets. A few have jobs as domestic help or night watchmen.

Fourteen percent, mostly elderly and mothers, receive the state poverty subsidy of $4 a month per adult and $2 per child, according to Matine and de Fonseca’s study "Vulnerability and Survival Strategies among Families in the Periphery of the City of Tete: Studies of the bairros Matundo and Matheus Sansao Muthemba". Few families can eat three times a day.

"They can never overcome their vulnerability," said Matine at a seminar on poverty dynamics and patterns of wealth accumulation, organised by the Institute for Social and Economic Studies in April in Maputo.

Mozambique is touted as a success for keeping peace after a civil war that ended 17 years ago and welcoming foreign investment. Yet, deep poverty remains relentless. Mozambique ranks 127 out of 135 countries in the human poverty index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

For many peasants, the average monthly cash income is one dollar, according to Joseph Hanlon, social scientist and senior lecturer in development policy and practice at the Open University in Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom. Child malnutrition is rising, says United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Several speakers argued that the best way to help the poor escape the poverty trap is to give them a bit of cash every month. Social protection through cash transfers has shown success in Latin America, especially in Mexico and Brazil, says the World Bank in its February 2009 report "Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty."

Relentless poverty

But can one of the world’s poorest countries tackle such a scheme?

"For the elderly in remote areas, cash works better than food," reckoned Janet Duffield, director of Beira-based NGO HelpAge. "It gets people to hospital. It buys goods they need."

HelpAge is researching poverty among the elderly, at a time when traditional social security systems based on inter-generational support and migrant workers’ remittances are as eroded as the Zambezi shore in Tete.

"We see very rational thinking in spending among the poor," said HelpAge researcher Sydney Machafa. Even one dollar a week makes a big difference in the ability of the poor to invest productively, he says.

Currently, only 0.6 percent of Mozambique’s state budget goes to direct social assistance through a fragmented array of schemes managed by several agencies focusing on orphans, women, the elderly and flood or cyclone victims. The food subsidy of the National Institute of Social Action reaches 140,000 elderly. But these schemes are partial, short-term and miss many needy people.

What is needed, say researchers, are regular cash transfers as opposed to short-term, ad hoc emergency aid.

Many studies, such as the 2006 report by World Bank "Mozambique Agricultural Development strategy – Stimulating Smallholder Agricultural Growth," show a lack of demand for goods in rural areas because people simply don’t have money. A small cash transfer would boost local demand.

"A universal social benefit would both protect the poor and stimulate rural economic growth," said social scientist and independent consultant Bridget O’Laughlin.

The logistics of doling out cash in this vast country of 880 square kilometres and 20 million people appear daunting. Yet, it is possible, as shown when war-torn Mozambique managed to give demobilisation pay during two years to 100,000 soldiers after peace in 1992.

In another example, 3,000 teams crisscrossed the country last year, equipped with briefcase computers, to fingerprint, photograph and issue voter’s cards to nine million people. Technology can help through cell phones and smart cards, researchers argue. Old fashioned rural post offices and armoured vans can deliver cash.

Donor dependency

To give the subsidy across the board to all Mozambicans would reduce administrative costs and opportunities for corruption in the selection, divisiveness, jealousy and accusations of witchcraft, researchers said at the conference. Besides, the Latin American experience shows that only the really poor will spend time to claim a small amount of money.

Still, in Mozambique, where donors pay for more than half of current government expenditure of about $3.6 billion, some question the sustainability of social protection schemes.

Donors fear creating dependence because countries that have adopted the practice of cash transfers, such as Brazil and South Africa, treat the grants as a permanent social expenditure, part of state welfare. This means that outside donors would be roped into an unlimited amount of social aid or have to – against the aim of the cash transfer programme – limit implementation to a certain time period.

"The aid industry wants an exit strategy, a short-life scheme," explained Hanlon, who is currently working on a book about cash transfer systems all over the world. There is local resistance as well.

"A common view of senior politicians and civil servants is that the poor should help themselves out of poverty. There is enormous reluctance to institutionalise social protection as a right," said independent researchers Rachel Waterhouse and Gil Lauriciano in their 2009 study "Social protection in Mozambique: A new imperative".

If the cash transfer scheme does not get support from the Mozambican government, there is little possibility that it will be implemented in the country, as international donors will be unlikely to fund a programme that does not have a time and expenditure limit. Waterhouse and Lauriciano point out that a growing number of government people and donors support "a new and broader approach to social protection."

"I am wary of donor fashions that come and go," concluded O’Laughlin. "But the issue of cash transfers needs to be debated. Accumulation of wealth and inequality keep reproducing poverty in Mozambique."

Discussions around the possibility of cash transfers have just begun in Mozambique, and it will take a few more months, or even years, before a decision pro or against cash transfers will be made.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, May 4 2009 (IPS)

Cash transfers are the new darlings of proponents of welfare programmes. Mexico, Brazil, Bangladesh, lately New York City, and about two dozen developing countries presently dole out money to poor families, usually with conditions attached, such as taking their children to school and health checkups.

Reduce the burden on women, not increase it, Hanlon suggests - 'Income-generating projects usually mean more work for women.' Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

Hanlon is editor of Mozambican Political Process Bulletin, and in 2008 with Teresa Smart authored a critique of Mozambique's aid and development model titled "Do More Bicycles Equal Development in Mozambique?"

He spoke to IPS at a seminar on poverty dynamics organised by the Institute for Social and Economic Studies in Maputo at the end of April.

IPS: What are you proposing?

Joseph Hanlon: Just give money to the poor. People cannot pull themselves up by the bootstraps if they have no boots.

IPS: Cash with no conditions?

JH: If there are schools and clinics nearby, the poor send their children. Conditionalities for the poor only placate the tax-paying middle classes.

IPS: How would the cash be targeted?

JH: Choosing a small group is socially divisive. Imposing conditions and excluding people is both time-consuming and expensive and, in the case of Mozambique, quite ineffective and unfair. Seventy per cent of Mozambicans are poor.

IPS: Then who should get it?

JH: Eventually, all poor families. To begin with, since most Mozambicans live in extended families with children and older people, the most efficient and non-divisive system of cash transfers would be a universal child benefit and non-contributory pension.

IPS: Your paper does not mention the feminisation of poverty. Why?

JH: In Mozambique, women-headed households are not significantly poorer than others. Poverty is a general problem. It makes more sense to improve the whole family’s economic standards and productivity.

IPS: Why not target women specifically?

JH: The NGO and the aid industry’s stress on gender is not always helpful. Income-generating projects usually mean more work for women. This is not to say that women are not discriminated, in inheritance rights, for example, but the aid industry approaches the problem as if it were one more fault of the poor that women are not treated fairly.

IPS: Yet you suggest giving the cash transfer to the senior woman in the family.

JH: It is easier to give the cash transfer to families, not individuals, but we must a bit careful with family dynamics. There is some indication that women spend money on food for the family but, at the same time, money may be invested in consumption rather than production. It is a horrible trade off that the poor face.

IPS: What would the cost of the programme be?

JH: The current monthly subsidy for the elderly is 100 meticais (about US $4), and 50 for a child. A scheme of pensions for over-65s and school-age children aged 7 to 14 would equal 0.8 percent of GDP, or $80 million. It is practical and affordable.

IPS: Where would the money come from?

JH: A five percent increase in donor aid could fund the program, from the additional aid promised at the Gleaneagles Summit. In the future, when Mozambique becomes a mineral and energy exporter, it should set aside a portion of mineral revenues to fund social protection, like Bolivia and Alaska.

IPS: How will this cash transfer help the economy?

JH: Research shows that increased rural income is largely spent on local services and locally produced farm and non-farm goods, especially for goods produced by the poor.

IPS: How do cash transfers relate to the Millennium Development Goals?

JH: The focus on MDGs has led to disproportionate spending on health and education by donors and governments, forgetting MDG 1 – halving poverty. More aid to create jobs and economic development is needed. So, let’s put the money in the hands of the people. The poor invest wisely.

IPS: Any examples to follow?

JH: I would opt for either the Brazilian or South African models. In Brazil, recipients are self-declaring families below the poverty line. In South Africa, children and old people. What is important is that both programs are rights based, largely unconditional, and universal.

IPS: Social protection in the form of old age pensions and child grants is not new. What is new about cash transfers?

JH: The neo-liberal and aid agency models blame both poor people and poor countries for their poverty; they must be educated and controlled. The poverty trap model says the poor know what to do but lack the money to feed their children and invest, so give them money.

The key issue of underdevelopment is lack of demand (due to the poverty trap), not supply (as in the neo-liberal model). Demand looks at the poor, while supply looks at the rich as the engine of development.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
PRETORIA, Feb 6 2009 (IPS)

Laws against female genital mutilation are driving the practice underground and across borders, says UNIFEM.

FGM -- no longer announced in the market, but still thriving. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

Outlawing the practice has "deeply biased the discourse on female excision", says the study. In surveys, interviews and informal conversations, people deny that the practice continues. Group excisions are no longer announced in the market. But it still happens, and it travels wherever people think it will not be punished or noted.

"We think it is getting worse," said Francis Bogie Boogere, a specialist in sexual violence with UNIFEM in Burkina Faso.

The study notes that in addition to anti-FGM legislation, ethnic ties across frontiers underpin social and cultural networks that help cross-border excision. The Peul move between the borders of Burkina Faso and Niger, the Gourmantche between Burkina and Niger, the Dagara and Lobi between Burkina and Ghana, while Burkinabe workers in Cote d’ Ivoire go home to excise the girls and return. When northern Cote d’ Ivoire turned lawless during the civil war, female cutting flourished there.

Mossi and Yagse communities from Burkina Faso find in Mali "the ideal situation to excise their daughters in plain view" says the study. Between July and November, when thousands of young Burkinabe cross on foot, by ox cart, bicycle or minibus to pick cotton in Mali, and during school holidays, girls melt into the flux.

Boogere has picked up anecdotal evidence of trafficking in cut clitorides for witchcraft in Cote d’ Ivoire. "Excisers in Benin and Togo know traditional doctors who know rich men in Cote d’ Ivoire who believe these fetishes will make them richer," he told IPS. This trade could sap efforts to end the harmful practice inflicted on thousands of girls in West Africa every year, he worries.

Since West African nationals don’t need passports and visas to travel in the region, the families can easily take the girls across the border. Some excisers run rudimentary guesthouses for their visitors. Or the exciser travels to do a mass circumcision, or families and exciser meet across the border.

Excisers of the Mossi ethnic group are reputed to be the best. The study describes how Mossi migrant communities secretly organize the travel of famous excisers into Ghana and, through a complex system of coded information and alerts, hide them and get them out if they risk arrest.

Boomerang effect

Anti-FGM laws help make people aware of the harm of excision but also cause "a negative mutation into a clandestine phenomenon", says the study. Secrecy makes estimates harder, but it seems girls are getting cut at a younger age, according to Boogere.

In Burkina Faso, which banned genital cutting in 1996, "clandestinity is an unpredicted consequence of the law," said Alice Tiendrebeogo, a Burkinabe historian, teacher, and a former minister of education.

This is one reason why Mali, where some 80 per cent of girls are excised, is taking "la voie douce" (the soft way) of convincing people to abandon the practice through community campaigns, explained Diarra Affusatou Thiero, a Supreme Court judge and former minister for the promotion of women, children and the family between 1997-2002.

"We don’t want to pass a law just to say we have one if it will not be respected and applied," she told IPS.

"Our mothers-in-law, our grandmothers and mothers take our children to be excised while we are at work or traveling. How can I take my mother-in-law to court? I’d lose my husband, my family. I’d be disgraced. It’s complicated. It is better to sensitize to bring change", she added.

Yet precisely because Mali "does not have repressive mechanisms around excision it remains an El Dorado for Burkinabe practitioners," says the study.

The region has no mechanisms to deal with cross-border FGM. Only Ghana’s law allows prosecution if the cutting is performed outside the country. Elsewhere, lawmakers did not foresee the cross-border strategy of people resisting change.

In November, at a meeting with First Ladies of seven West African countries, Unifem and governments launched a regional action plan in the border regions involving governors, police and NGOs.

"The key issue is that both sides of the border must be vigilant", said Tiendrebeogo. Nevertheless, says the study, the solution does not lie in repression, but in convincing people to abandon the practice. Community radio stations are key to this approach, as they reach people in their own language and broadcast across borders.

Also essential is greater public commitment from political, religious and traditional leaders, WHICH the study deems "feeble". So far, campaigns remain sporadic, non-participatory and poorly adapted to their target. "Cross border excision is an unexpected and perverse consequence… and proof of the inefficacy of approaches and strategies used," concludes the study.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
PRETORIA, Dec 22 2008 (IPS)

Public health and individual human rights are poor friends. What may be good for society may be bad for the individual, or the other way round. And nothing sharpens this tension as starkly as AIDS.

Does a mother's right to refuse HIV testing prevail over the baby's right to a healthy life? Should infectious patients with drug-resistant TB be locked up? Can a father reduce maintenance payments because he must buy nutritious food to help his antiretroviral (ARV) treatment and stay alive?

Such tensions are explored in "Balancing Act", the annual review launched in December by the Centre for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria. It looks at public health practices and legislation around AIDS and rape, drug-resistant TB, male circumcision, routine and mandatory testing, and ARV treatment for prisoners, refugees and migrants in South Africa.

"Writing this book showed me the incredible amount of work to be done with magistrates, lawyers, judges and the media on these issues," said author Carmel Rickard, a journalist specialized on human rights.

Lock them up

For Rickard, the "most shocking" finding was regarding media coverage of drug-resistant TB. Struggling to contain its alarming TB epidemic, South Africa has a policy of forced hospitalisation of patients until they are no longer infectious. Echoing public anxiety, the media describes patients "as convicts, dangerous to society, and intensifies stigma," said Rickard.

Absent in the press is the experience of Tugela Ferry, in KwaZulu Natal province, site of a killer outburst of extra-drug resistant TB that killed over 200 patients and nurses a couple years ago, and now a pioneer in treating patients at home.

"Journalists need to know about this option and generally be more critical about drug-resistant TB policies," said Rickard.

Complexity

Another thorny issue for medical staff is disclosure of a patient's HIV status to their sexual partners, who risk infection, while non-disclosure to doctors can result in inappropriate health care, as HIV masks other diseases. Thus, strict patient confidentiality could result in infection and death of others. Whose rights should a doctor uphold?

"Health workers are also responsible for the health of patients' spouses and babies. We should expand the discourse to include third parties," said Dr. Theresa Rossouw, an AIDS clinician in Pretoria. "Nothing is the same after HIV."

On rape – another alarming epidemic in South Africa – a new law of 2007 has made it harder for rape survivors to get post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), the 28-day course of ARVs to reduce the risk of HIV infection.

With the new law, only designated clinics will provide PEP, after charges are laid and paperwork completed in two different facilities – not easy for traumatised victims. Previously, access to PEP was simple, informal, and treated as an emergency health matter.

The HIV tests offered to rape survivors are the cheapest and slowest, taking several weeks. Activists argue that a faster but more expensive test will deliver peace of mind to a rape survivor within 11 days of the assault and eliminate the need for compulsory testing of the rapist, which could prompt revenge on the survivor.

When laws dealing with AIDS "do not properly factor human rights into the equation, then the decisions can become self-defeating and even worsen the situation," wrote Rickard.

New legal problems

At the book launch, Joe Ngelanga, a law lecturer at the Justice College in Pretoria, rattled off new AIDS-related legal issues popping up in courts: the right of adoptive and foster parents to know if the child is HIV-positive; child custody by an HIV-positive parent; wilful infection through unprotected sex; and jail sentences for terminally ill criminals.

"AIDS has implications for the running of the courts," said Ngelanga.

The review argues for wide and systematic training of the judiciary and legal community around AIDS, and production of a policy document or chart on AIDS and the law to be displayed in every court room.

Summing up the review, Centre director Mary Crewe explained that while human rights operate globally, public health is implemented locally. And while public health interventions propose a rational use of resources, people often manage their health and their lives irrationally. Often, personal autonomy and social control drive on opposite directions.

"Traffic lights restrict movement so that everybody can move," said Crewe. "How do we strike the balance between the imperatives of public health and the imperatives of human rights?"

A useful concept to guide this complex debate is "fair limitation" of individual rights to support public health, suggested Jody Kollapen, chair of South Africa's Human Rights Commission. "In our young democracy, we are learning to grapple with human rights and AIDS."

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
PRETORIA, Aug 14 2008 (IPS)

What do they have in common – the landless widow with a deaf son in Bangladesh, the 12-year-old miner in Kyrgyzstan, the Ugandan farming couple with 12 children and the South African domestic worker who loses her home when her husband dies and her job when she breaks a leg? They, and their children, are trapped in chronic poverty, even as their countries show economic growth.

A new report suggests guaranteeing a basic income is a route out of poverty. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

The report was produced by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), a global partnership of universities, research institutions and NGOs from countries including Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Uganda and the UK, and is funded by the UK government’s department for international development. The centre is led by the University of Manchester, UK and the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

It intersperses these personal stories with analysis, and identifies five factors which underlie poverty: insecurity, limited citizenship, spatial distribution, social discrimination and poor work opportunities.

The solutions to these ‘poverty traps’ include nets of social protection, particularly through cash transfers to households; public services for the hard to reach poor; anti-discrimination and gender empowerment measures; building individual and collective assets, and strategic urbanization and migration policies.

Perhaps the report’s most interesting proposal is to expand welfare systems to guarantee the chronically poor a basic income, both as their right and as a way out of poverty. The experiences of Brazil, Chile, India and South Africa show that social transfers in cash or in kind reduce vulnerability, allow the poor to engage in more productive economic activities, and are generally judiciously spent.

According to the researchers, social protection is affordable and can be scaled up even in relatively poor countries, as Bangladesh and Uganda have shown.

However, governments often have questions about creating dependency and the long-term financial commitments required. Gaining a constituency for social protection is key, says the report, and it calls on world leaders to commit to the drawing up of a Global Social Protection Strategy by 2010 to target the eradication of extreme poverty by 2025. This strategy would build on the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty by 2015.

Controversially, the report notes that some governments that have effectively responded to poverty – Ethiopia, Uganda and Vietnam – are not wholly democratic. Democracy alone does not guarantee pro-poor policies, says the report. Some ‘elite projects’ (a polite term for mildly authoritarian regimes) have forged a social compact between citizens and the state that placed chronic poverty seriously on the policy agenda. Policy-makers must get “thinking beyond the contemporary mantra of democracy, elections and decentralization”.

What this means, CPRC director Andrew Shepherd told IPS, is that there is sometimes “a tension at the international level between promoting poverty reduction … and promoting competitive multi-party democracy.”

“In many cases democracies produce governments which are very effective in reducing poverty – witness recent experience in Brazil, for example,” he added.

“There are less democratic regimes which have been and are very effective in reducing poverty, and the international community needs to recognise that part of this effectiveness may be due to the nature of the regime, where a strong connection between regime and citizens has been forged through a popular movement, which generates a ‘social compact’ between elite and the poor as part of a national development ‘project’.

“China and Vietnam would also be examples, and there are others during the last 60 years. The implication for the international community would be to exercise caution in attaching political conditionalities to aid or other international negotiations. Of course this does not mean that in extreme cases (eg Zimbabwe) the international community should not take a strong political position.”

Duncan Green, head of research at the British charity Oxfam, finds this analysis “courageous”. He adds: “We need to talk about this. Especially after traumatic events, autocracies may do nation-building more effectively than elected governments. There is more to politics than ballot-counting.”

Only a few ‘elite projects’ are so considerate. In mineral-rich countries, like Sudan, Myanmar, Angola, and Congo (Brazzaville), predatory elites siphon off, through non-transparent fiscal systems, revenue that could ease poverty. Worse, some violently predatory governments so scare their citizens that they would rather avoid any dealings with the state, says the study.

In one of the most interesting chapters, the report analyses several states. Of the 32 countries identified as chronically deprived, 22 are considered fragile states, racked by conflict, war and greedy elites. A fragile state is one that does not reduce risk to its citizens through providing law and order, services and infrastructure.

“Shoring up fragile states should be as important to donors as tackling climate change”, Shepherd said at the launch of the report.

In mineral-rich but ‘poor-unfriendly’ states, donors should support advocacy efforts to empower citizens and provide technical assistance for social protection, mainly on health and education, nudging such states to become institutions that interact meaningfully with poor people.

In resource-poor countries with ‘poor-friendly’ governments, donors should step up budget support, reduce aid volatility, and shoulder much of the cost of providing basic services and social protection.

This, until economic growth raises the revenue base. Eventually, functional states should set up effective systems of public finances. People who should pay taxes will do so, instead of evading them, and the poor will benefit.

Economic growth eases poverty, but a rising tide does not lift all boats, warns the report. Growth alone does not automatically benefit the chronically poor. Living in remote areas, suffering from food shortages and poor health, exploited in work, not fully participant in social and economic life, they are locked out of the national growth process.

The much vaunted tool, the Poverty Reduction Strategies, have failed, says the report. Perceived as donor-owned products, they neglect the chronically poor, lack serious analysis of poverty, and ignore issues of justice, discrimination, gender empowerment, and migration. They remain, says the report, a missed opportunity to build a fairer social compact.

Two trends stand out: the dramatic reduction in the numbers of the poor in China, and that in Latin America and the Caribbean poverty is becoming urban rather than rural. In other parts of the developing world, 70 percent of the poor are rural but, given the world’s rapid urbanization, a shift towards urban chronic poverty can be predicted.

This demands bold policies towards migration and urban planning. Instead of seeing migrants as a problem, as policy-makers and urban residents tend to, they should be assisted in gaining a share of urban benefits, productivity and growth. In remote areas, establishing urban growth poles can boost local economies.

At the root of poverty lies powerlessness. The chronically poor have limited citizenship and little or no voice in the capitals. Society is mostly indifferent to them. But social movements – from cooperatives to ethnic minorities, from the landless rural to urban squatters – can influence the public policies needed to eliminate the chronic poverty traps.

“The chronically poor in developing countries do not need to wait forever,” Shepherd told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
VICTORIA, Jul 3 2008 (IPS)

Annette* is a small, lively woman in her early sixties. Married to an abusive husband – who once threw boiling water on her, landing her in hospital – she was not repeating the story with her alcoholic and drug-addicted son. Just as her husband was growing older and calmer, her son was getting increasingly violent.

Increasing numbers of men are reporting domestic violence in the Seychelles, though women are still more severely affected Credit: Carlos Goulao

“It is not right for a son to abuse his mother and I had had enough with the father” she told IPS.

Annette lives on Mahé, the biggest island in the Seychelles archipelago (pop 85,000) in the Indian Ocean. Considered a tourist paradise for its pristine nature and luxurious resorts, the Seychelles is seeing a troubling increase in domestic violence.

In 2006, the Family Tribunal registered 172 cases of spousal violence, rising to 226 in 2007. Greater awareness of the problem through media campaigns and easier reporting procedures at the Police Family Squad only partly explain the 31 percent increase.

“The number of reported cases is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Tessa Siu, research officer with the Gender Secretariat at the Ministry of Health and Social Development.

Experts add that domestic violence is fuelled by the skyrocketing cost of living and high alcohol consumption.

“Domestic violence happens when men drink baka (a cheap local brew) as well as whisky,” says Jean Claude Matombe, communications officer with the National Council for Children, which has run media campaigns against child abuse.

A national survey carried out by the Gender Secretariat last year found that 42 percent of women and 36 percent of men had been emotionally abused by an intimate partner; 27 percent of women and 23 percent of men had experienced moderate physical violence; and 28 percent of women and 26 percent of men had suffered severe physical violence.

While both men and women suffer abuse, physical violence hurts women more: 33 percent of women experienced lasting aches and pain as a consequence, compared to 16 percent of men, and 17 percent of women reported bruises to the face, compared to six percent of men.

Worryingly, the survey found that 11 percent of women have been raped by an intimate partner. Among 555 women surveyed, eight reported contracting HIV due to the abuse and 21 women became pregnant after a partner raped them.

The research findings about abused men underline what police records show. More men are lodging complaints of abuse –- up from 8 cases in 2006 to 18 in 2007, suggesting both an increase in violence against men as well as greater willingness of men to seek help, according to Siu.

Henri*, a calm man in his late fifties employed as a security guard in the market in Victoria, the capital, endured years of verbal, emotional and physical abuse from his wife. She ran the family business, was unfaithful, and insulted and punched him. Once she threatened him with a knife. He endured as much as he could, then sought help from the Family Tribunal and finally divorced her two years ago.

“I have little education but my parents taught me values and respect for others,” he told IPS.

He and other survivors of domestic violence were speaking at a workshop on the issue organised in June in the capital by the Secretariat and GenderLinks, a regional advocacy group.

The workshop followed Cabinet’s approval of a national strategy on domestic violence early this year.

The strategy includes media awareness campaigns, better provision of services to survivors and rehabilitation of abusers, and a change in the law so that domestic violence, now classified as assault, will be recognized as a specific crime with a special magistrate, and fast-tracked through the courts.

The problem is getting people to report the abuse and seek help. The survey found that most victims hide abuse from agencies, family and friends. The reasons given were low expectations of the outcome and love for the abusive partner.

Services for survivors exist, but they are slow and fragmented. Police routinely refer rape victims to hospital for post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) treatment to prevent HIV infection.

But it can take months to get an appointment with the Family Tribunal, Probation Services or the Family Squad Unit that deals with abused children.

If the local policeman is friends with or related to the abuser, the complaint does not go far – that was the experience of the four survivors who spoke to IPS.

Last year, Sharon Telemaque, of the gender activist group GEM PLUS, trained some 40 new police recruits on domestic violence and will train another batch this year.

“Their first attitude was, if I am a man, I can slap my partner, but at the end of the day we started seeing changes,” she told IPS.

The survey also found that although six out of ten adults have witnessed domestic violence incidents, they did not intervene because they see it as a private matter.

“As a child, I learned on the street that a woman should be beaten and I had to un-learn it,” says Matombe.

The Secretariat and a group of non-government organizations and churches plan a massive information campaign against domestic violence for the 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women from 25 November to 10 December. This will help people un-learn the harmful patterns of domestic violence.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
KAMPALA, Oct 4 2004 (IPS)

The fragrance of ginger and paw paws from market stalls floats into the tiny room where Musisi Josephus Gavah shows visitors a thick ledger – the register of members of the Mukono District Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS.

The 650 members of the network (which is also referred to as ‘Mudinet’) are organised into support groups in 16 of the 28 sub-counties of the district – which is located in south-eastern Uganda, close to the capital, Kampala. Gavah is the coordinator of Mudinet.

Much has been said about Uganda’s success in the fight against AIDS – and the extent to which this can be ascribed to the open and unembarrassed stance on HIV adopted by its government.

However, the involvement of people who have already contracted the HI-virus has also been crucial to the anti-AIDS effort. HIV prevalence among Uganda’s population of almost 25 million has dropped from over 20 percent in 1992, to about 6 percent – this according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

In the case of the ten-year-old Mudinet, for example, members attend workshops on AIDS prevention, human rights – and ways in which they can continue to lead fulfilling lives. Thanks to the network, thirty groups have obtained funds for income-generating projects.

Mudinet activists hand out condoms – and distribute school uniforms, other clothes and bedding to orphans. In addition, they assist with malaria control in villages, handing out mosquito nets.

Uganda is also home to the first non-governmental organisation (NGO) formed by Africans to address the needs of those infected and affected by AIDS.

The AIDS Support Organisation (TASO), set up in 1987, has now established branches in various parts of Uganda to provide a variety of services. These include the dispensing of anti-retroviral treatment (ART).

The importance of the contribution made by HIV-positive persons has been acknowledged by the Uganda AIDS Commission (UAC), established by government in 1992 to coordinate the national response to the HIV pandemic.

Between 2001 and 2002, the commission reviewed Uganda’s AIDS strategy, placing HIV-positive people in positions where they could influence AIDS policies. Inge Tack, UNAIDS technical adviser in Kampala, calls this approach "revolutionary".

UNAIDS country programme adviser Ruben del Prado agrees: "It’s very exciting to see people with AIDS maximizing their presence at the top."

Last year, Mudinet joined forces with about 800 similar networks and associations to form the National Forum of People Living with HIV/AIDS Networks.

Previous attempts to set up an umbrella organisation had failed due to rivalries between AIDS associations and their leaders – particularly the National Guidance and Empowerment Network (NGEN+) and the National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda (NACWOLA).

"The scramble for resources led to fragmentation and competition," says Rubamira Ruranga, head of NGEN+.

Ruranga, who tested positive in 1989, was one of the first Ugandans to declare publicly that he had contracted the virus – along with a popular musician and an Anglican priest.

Adds Richard Serunkuuma, of the Positive Men’s Union: "We were disorganised and contradicted ourselves. Our messages were not getting across clearly. But if we act together, we carry more weight."

The process of reconciling differences was given a helping hand by the UAC during its 2001/2002 review, which resulted in a strategy dubbed the ‘AIDS Partnership’.

Under this plan, each of a dozen sectors that play a key role in fighting AIDS – ministries, donors, NGOs, churches and the like – had to find common positions on their approach to the pandemic. The sectors were also required to elect representatives to interact with the AIDS Partnership.

As a result, Uganda’s many associations of HIV-positive people were obliged to develop a joint plan on combating HIV and dealing with its consequences – a process that took a year of meetings, retreats and discussions. UNAIDS provided 17,000 dollars to finance the discussions, and in May 2003 the National Forum of People Living with HIV/AIDS Networks was born.

"The forum will help us avoid duplication and coordinate services and lobbying," says NACWOLA’s Annete Biyetega.

Forum representatives advise the UAC on policy, implementation and funding proposals submitted to international donors. They are also trained in leadership skills and resource management.

"We want a strategic move into policy. No more staying in the background," says Flavia Kyomukama, from the AIDS telephone hotline – SALT.

The next step is for the forum to become a formal partner of the Ministry of Health in the provision of ART.

At present, about 25,000 Ugandans are receiving this medication. Officials plan to have 60,000 people – or about half of those in need – on ART by the end of 2005.

People living with AIDS, some of whom have years of ART experience, can help patients and their families understand what treatment entails – and the importance of sticking to it. This is especially valuable in districts where health facilities and personnel are scarce.

"When we deal with people with AIDS, we handle with care," says Gavah. "Others handle with fear."

His eyes fill with tears as he recalls the treatment his late wife received at a local hospital. She had acute herpes zoster, a condition more commonly known as shingles. This causes someone to development a painful rash, followed by blisters.

"The staff ignored her, talking about her in English without realising she was a teacher, giving her jabs without explaining why," says Gavah, adding "No patient should be treated like this."

A burly man with an easy smile and a chronic dry cough, Gavah discovered he was HIV-positive in 1992 when he applied for teacher training in Libya. "AIDS is like a pregnancy; you can’t hide it for long," he notes. "I went public because I wanted to do something for my district. So did my wife."

The couple had one child and fostered 10 orphans. When AIDS-related illnesses set in, Gavah left his job and opened a private nursery school. Among the 160 pupils, 40 are orphans who attend for free.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
PRETORIA, Sep 19 2004 (IPS)

In the Nguni languages, which include Zulu and Xhosa, an “indlavini” is a violent and reckless man who disrespects elders and tradition. The indlavini emerged in the early twentieth century, when millions of South African men migrated to towns – looking for jobs in the gold and diamond mines.

The tough cities also produced the “utsotsi”, a street-wise petty criminal who asserts his masculinity through violence. “These are all manifestations of an alienated identity,” says Nhlanhla Mkhize, a lecturer in psychology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Mkhize traces the origin of this alienation to factors that defined the era of apartheid (the system of racial segregation that ended in 1994), namely marginalisation, poverty, violence – and the forced migration that uprooted men from families and communities. These social ills transformed male identify into something typified by aggressiveness, risk-taking, sexual prowess and dominance over women.

Amplified by the media, such notions of masculinity have now become entrenched. With the introduction of HIV into the social equation, their consequences are also deadlier than ever before.

Experts agree that the twin epidemics of AIDS and violence against women and children in South Africa are linked to these concepts of male identity. Frequent casual sex, unprotected sex and forced sex put men and women at risk of HIV infection.

According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), HIV prevalence among South Africans aged 15 to 49 was 21.5 percent in 2003. This means that 4.3 to 5.9 million people here are now living with HIV – the largest number in any country. South Africa also has the world’s highest number of rapes: 52,107 cases were reported in 2002, according to police statistics.

Moreover, rapid political and social changes in post-apartheid South Africa are further eroding the privileged position that men have traditionally occupied in society.

A survey of 30 schools in the south-eastern KwaZulu-Natal province found that, across all races, male students and teachers felt uncertain about their role and status. For white males, this stemmed in part from the advancement of blacks and women. Black males felt marginalized by poverty, unemployment and women’s empowerment.

“Men and boys carry a burden of anxiety about manhood,” says Graham Lindegger, author of the study – and a professor at the School of Psychology at Natal University.

His research also indicated that many elements of masculinity – promiscuity, risk-taking, the desire for superiority over women, the need to take the lead and to succeed – transcend race, culture and class.

Similar findings have emerged from a country-wide survey of chiefs, traditional healers and priests from the Zionist denomination, done by the Promotion of Traditional Medicine Association of South Africa. It found that loss of leadership in various areas had made men “socially disoriented, indifferent and irresponsible spectators of family life.”

However, government and civil society have put a variety of programmes in place to address this problem.

Since 1998, Men as Partners (MAP), a project of the Planned Parenthood Association of South Africa, has run workshops for trade unions, ministries, hospitals, schools, churches and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in all provinces to discuss gender roles, stereotypes and power relations between men and women.

A survey of 2,000 men found that, before participating in a MAP workshop, 22 percent approved of hitting a partner – and half believed rapes were caused by women dressing or walking provocatively. After the workshops, 71 percent believed that women had equal rights to men – and 82 percent that it was unacceptable for a husband to beat his wife.

MAP Manager Lesetedi Boitshetole notes that men have become more receptive to having their perceptions of women changed in the past three years. This is likely due to public condemnation of rape and political leaders taking up the case of women’s rights and advancement.

The Youth Development Skills (YDS) programme of the Centre for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria works with unemployed youth in the poor townships of Mamelodi and Atteridgeville, and in the centre of the capital. Its 20 peer educators have overseen AIDS and gender relations workshops since 2000, educating some 6,000 youths in that period.

“Young men are scared of the virus but they still think it is cool and right to have two or three girlfriends and get them pregnant,” says peer educator Charles Kekama, 21.

On a sunny morning earlier this month, YDS peer educators were handing out free condoms at the Vista University campus in Mamelodi. “Not for me, man. I like to do it skin to skin with my women,” an accounting student named Jacob said, walking away. But many others collected handfuls of condoms.

Over the past few generations, economic migration has resulted in men absenting themselves from family life. Women head more than a third of households in South Africa.

Now, a traveling exhibition of photos of men with children – the Fatherhood Project – is seeking to stimulate discussion of how to help men assume an active family role, particularly as caregivers to children – even those not their own. At a time when increasing numbers of households are being required to absorb AIDS orphans, this is no small thing.

The project has been organized by the Human Science Research Council, and implemented by the South African Men’s Forum and the Department of Social Development.

As the exhibition travels, local governments, the private sector, NGOs, churches and communities organise music events, dramas, poetry readings, essay competitions and debates around it.

Law enforcement agencies are also addressing skewed notions of masculinity in their bid to combat gender-based violence. In the northern Gauteng province, the Department of Community Safety (DCS) has teamed up with police and justice officials to speak on gender equality in schools and communities.

Lulu Mxekezo, deputy director of communication at DCS, says while the department used to dealt with violence against women after the fact, it now seeks to address the underlying causes of the problem.

In Thembiza township, in Johannesburg, the Men for Change organisation also teaches anger management and gender equality to abusers of women.

At present, South Africa and Mauritius are the only countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to have passed comprehensive legislation against gender-based violence in line with the 1997 SADC Declaration on Gender and Development.

“Equality cannot be realized solely through legislation. (There is) a paradigm shift, a mental gear required for the values of equality and dignity to take hold in the collective psyche,” says Cheryl Gillwald, Deputy Minister of Correctional Services.

Her department is the lead agency for a campaign entitled 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women Campaign, which takes place in November.

And, change is happening, especially among the under-25s, with “increasing interest and mobilization” of men around issues of masculinity and HIV/AIDS, says Liz Floyd – director of the Gauteng Province AIDS Programme. This initiative reaches taxi drivers, mine workers, traditional leaders, prisoners and 30,000 men in single-sex hostels.

“Our challenge is to promote a male identity based on the traditional humanistic African values, without the excess of power of men over women,” she adds.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
DAKAR, Jul 8 2004 (IPS)

Traffic stops around the Old Mosque in the Senegalese capital. Thousands fill the streets, and when the muezzin calls, they kneel, bow and pray in perfect unison.
     The sermon is about the earthly problem of how to avoid contracting HIV, and helping people who have the virus. On Sunday, Catholics will hear a similar message.

It’s 13:30 in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, on Friday. Traffic stops around the Old Mosque. The sound of babouches shuffling on the pavement replaces hooting. Thousands fill the streets.

When the muezzin calls, they kneel, bow and pray in perfect unison. It is a moment of intense collective spirituality – and a chance to ponder the more earthly problem of AIDS. The sermon dwells on how to avoid contracting HIV, and the fact that people who are infected with the virus must be helped, not shunned.

On Sunday, Catholics will hear a similar message during Mass.

This partnership between religion and public health has been one of the pillars of Senegal’s anti-AIDS strategy. And, its success is beyond dispute – a point worth noting as delegates from around the world prepare for the Fifteenth International AIDS Conference, to be held in Bangkok from Jul. 11 to 16.

HIV prevalence in Senegal remains low, at 1.4 percent of the 10-million-strong population. This amounts to some 80,000 HIV-positive people.

Although Senegal shares some of the problems common to West Africa such as poverty, it has managed to pull off what other nations in sub-Saharan Africa have not: implement rapid response and prevention programmes for AIDS.

While many of the continent’s leaders under-stated the significance of the pandemic for years, or responded to it apathetically, Senegal’s government swung into action as soon as the first six cases of AIDS were diagnosed in 1986. A team of respected scientists and doctors persuaded the then president, Abdou Diouf, that this might be the country’s only opportunity to contain the spread of HIV.

By the end of 1986, a national AIDS body was working to guarantee a safe blood supply, measure the spread of the epidemic, expand existing programmes for control and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases – and reach out to sex workers. These persons must be registered and have regular medical check-ups, where they are provided with information about AIDS, and free condoms.

But AIDS officials soon realized that the health sector could not win this battle alone. Religious leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs)and community groups had to do their part.

With its network of thousands of mosques which enjoy high attendance for Friday prayers, Islam’s potential to encourage prevention and solidarity was huge.

A rich variety of religious organizations, sports and cultural clubs, women’s groups, village and neighborhood associations was thus tasked with AIDS prevention nationwide.

“The AIDS response was built on the lively and complex local human architecture,” says Gary Engelberg, Director of Africa Consultants International – a Dakar-based NGO that focuses on cultural and health-related activities.

This contrasted sharply with the way in which religious leaders reacted to AIDS in other countries.

The first instinct of many was to associate the spread of HIV with loose morals, condemn those infected – and oppose AIDS awareness initiatives like condom distribution in schools. This was done because of fears that it might encourage promiscuity amongst pupils.

In Senegal, government and religious leaders reached a tacit agreement. Clerics would preach abstinence and fidelity but would not oppose condom campaigns. In turn, condom promotion would be “soft” and stress responsible sexuality.

“Each actor has an area of responsibility and we complement each other,” says Bamar Gueye, National Coordinator of the Islamic NGO, Jamra.

Senegal is a deeply religious country. Ninety-four percent of citizens are Muslim, and four percent Catholic. Muslims networks or “confreries” are very strong, while the Catholic Church’s influence derives from the many schools and clinics it runs, as well as its dynamic youth movement.

“We needed to work with religious leaders to succeed,” says Ibra Ndoye, Executive Secretary of the National Council for the Fight against AIDS (CNLS), and a key architect of the response since 1986.

In briefings with Islamic leaders, health officials explained the disease and why preaching that AIDS was a divine punishment for sin would increase stigma and discrimination.

“After training, we realized we should not stigmatize sex workers or people with AIDS,” recalls Gueye.

In 1988, Jamra signed an agreement with government concerning the Muslim response to AIDS. Staff from the NGO and health officials started to visit imams, khalifs and traditional authorities to discuss the epidemic. Slowly, the perception these leaders had of HIV/AIDS changed.

In 1991, top Islamic leaders heard their first account from an HIV-positive person of what it meant to have contracted the virus.

In 1992, a “community train” staffed by volunteers conducted AIDS prevention nationwide.

In 1995, Jamra published a guide on AIDS in French and Arabic, which gives factual information about HIV/AIDS and explains how living according to Islamic principles can prevent its spread.

The guide advises against female circumcision, wife inheritance, premarital sex, anal sex and sex during menstruation. Use of condoms within marriage is allowed. By the late 1990s, many imams were supporting a grassroots campaign to stop female genital mutilation.

Today, the Society of Women against AIDS in Africa (an NGO headquartered in Dakar) reports that rural imams support their promotion of the female condom among married couples. The imams ruled that a wife has the right to protect herself from infection.

The involvement of the Catholic Church was slower, partly because Cardinal Hyacinthe Thiandoum (who died in May) was deeply opposed to condom promotion.

But in 1991, a group of young Catholics began promoting AIDS awareness in schools. These efforts resulted in SIDA Service, an NGO that specializes in AIDS prevention, voluntary testing and counseling (VCT) – and in care and treatment of HIV-positive persons.

Its founders set out to change the Catholic hierarchy’s attitude, visiting each bishop and archbishop in the country from 1992 to 1993. “It wasn’t easy, but we were known for our religious commitment so the bishops listened,” says Paul Sagna, Executive Director of SIDA Service.

Their efforts crystallized in a conference, ‘AIDS and Religion: the Responses of Christian churches’, held in Jan. 1996.

Today, each of the seven dioceses has a SIDA Service committee with several “antennes’ (outreach points) in the community. The activities of these committees include prevention, testing, counseling and care of people who have contracted HIV.

SIDA Service started the first free VCT facility in Dakar in 2000 and now runs eight of the dozen VCT facilities in all regions.

To avoid stigmatisation of its clients, SIDA Service in Dakar renamed itself the Cardinal Hyacinthe Thiandoum Centre for Health Promotion (Centre de Promotion de la Sante Cardinale Hyacinthe Thiandoum).

Fittingly, in November 1997, Dakar also hosted the First International Conference on AIDS and Religion, sponsored by the Jointed United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the European Union.

The partnership advanced further in May 1999 with the launch of the Alliance of Religious Leaders and Medical Experts Against AIDS (Alliance des Religieux et Experts Medicaux Contre le SIDA) comprising Jamra, the Association of Imams of Senegal, SIDA Service and CNLS. The Alliance conducts AIDS prevention and training and organizes national and international conferences.

As various researchers have noted, certain aspects of Senegalese culture have assisted the country to contain the spread of HIV. These include conservative attitudes towards sex, low levels of alcohol consumption and universal male circumcision (which affords men a degree of protection from HIV).

However, there’s no denying that roping religious leaders into this battle was of great importance.

Today, the virtues of a partnership between religious and public health institutions have become part of conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, however, this was a groundbreaking approach to fighting AIDS – and sadly, still a rarity in other African states.

(* Mercedes Sayagues is currently doing a best practice study on AIDS policies in Senegal for the South African Institute of International Affairs, at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.)

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
DAKAR, Jul 8 2004 (IPS)

It’s 13:30 in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, on Friday. Traffic stops around the Old Mosque. The sound of babouches shuffling on the pavement replaces hooting. Thousands fill the streets.

When the muezzin calls, they kneel, bow and pray in perfect unison. It is a moment of intense collective spirituality – and a chance to ponder the more earthly problem of AIDS. The sermon dwells on how to avoid contracting HIV, and the fact that people who are infected with the virus must be helped, not shunned.

On Sunday, Catholics will hear a similar message during Mass.

This partnership between religion and public health has been one of the pillars of Senegal’s anti-AIDS strategy. And, its success is beyond dispute – a point worth noting as delegates from around the world prepare for the Fifteenth International AIDS Conference, to be held in Bangkok from Jul. 11 to 16.

HIV prevalence in Senegal remains low, at 1.4 percent of the 10-million-strong population. This amounts to some 80,000 HIV- positive people.

Although Senegal shares some of the problems common to West Africa such as poverty, it has managed to pull off what other nations in sub-Saharan Africa have not: implement rapid response and prevention programmes for AIDS.

While many of the continent’s leaders under-stated the significance of the pandemic for years, or responded to it apathetically, Senegal’s government swung into action as soon as the first six cases of AIDS were diagnosed in 1986. A team of respected scientists and doctors persuaded the then president, Abdou Diouf, that this might be the country’s only opportunity to contain the spread of HIV.

By the end of 1986, a national AIDS body was working to guarantee a safe blood supply, measure the spread of the epidemic, expand existing programmes for control and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases – and reach out to sex workers. These persons must be registered and have regular medical check-ups, where they are provided with information about AIDS, and free condoms.

But AIDS officials soon realized that the health sector could not win this battle alone. Religious leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs)and community groups had to do their part.

With its network of thousands of mosques which enjoy high attendance for Friday prayers, Islam’s potential to encourage prevention and solidarity was huge.

A rich variety of religious organizations, sports and cultural clubs, women’s groups, village and neighborhood associations was thus tasked with AIDS prevention nationwide.

“The AIDS response was built on the lively and complex local human architecture,” says Gary Engelberg, Director of Africa Consultants International – a Dakar-based NGO that focuses on cultural and health-related activities.

This contrasted sharply with the way in which religious leaders reacted to AIDS in other countries.

The first instinct of many was to associate the spread of HIV with loose morals, condemn those infected – and oppose AIDS awareness initiatives like condom distribution in schools. This was done because of fears that it might encourage promiscuity amongst pupils.

In Senegal, government and religious leaders reached a tacit agreement. Clerics would preach abstinence and fidelity but would not oppose condom campaigns. In turn, condom promotion would be “soft” and stress responsible sexuality.

“Each actor has an area of responsibility and we complement each other,” says Bamar Gueye, National Coordinator of the Islamic NGO, Jamra.

Senegal is a deeply religious country. Ninety-four percent of citizens are Muslim, and four percent Catholic. Muslims networks or “confreries” are very strong, while the Catholic Church’s influence derives from the many schools and clinics it runs, as well as its dynamic youth movement.

“We needed to work with religious leaders to succeed,” says Ibra Ndoye, Executive Secretary of the National Council for the Fight against AIDS (CNLS), and a key architect of the response since 1986.

In briefings with Islamic leaders, health officials explained the disease and why preaching that AIDS was a divine punishment for sin would increase stigma and discrimination.

“After training, we realized we should not stigmatize sex workers or people with AIDS,” recalls Gueye.

In 1988, Jamra signed an agreement with government concerning the Muslim response to AIDS. Staff from the NGO and health officials started to visit imams, khalifs and traditional authorities to discuss the epidemic. Slowly, the perception these leaders had of HIV/AIDS changed.

In 1991, top Islamic leaders heard their first account from an HIV-positive person of what it meant to have contracted the virus.

In 1992, a “community train” staffed by volunteers conducted AIDS prevention nationwide.

In 1995, Jamra published a guide on AIDS in French and Arabic, which gives factual information about HIV/AIDS and explains how living according to Islamic principles can prevent its spread.

The guide advises against female circumcision, wife inheritance, premarital sex, anal sex and sex during menstruation. Use of condoms within marriage is allowed. By the late 1990s, many imams were supporting a grassroots campaign to stop female genital mutilation.

Today, the Society of Women against AIDS in Africa (an NGO headquartered in Dakar) reports that rural imams support their promotion of the female condom among married couples. The imams ruled that a wife has the right to protect herself from infection.

The involvement of the Catholic Church was slower, partly because Cardinal Hyacinthe Thiandoum (who died in May) was deeply opposed to condom promotion.

But in 1991, a group of young Catholics began promoting AIDS awareness in schools. These efforts resulted in SIDA Service, an NGO that specializes in AIDS prevention, voluntary testing and counseling (VCT) – and in care and treatment of HIV-positive persons.

Its founders set out to change the Catholic hierarchy’s attitude, visiting each bishop and archbishop in the country from 1992 to 1993. “It wasn’t easy, but we were known for our religious commitment so the bishops listened,” says Paul Sagna, Executive Director of SIDA Service.

Their efforts crystallized in a conference, ‘AIDS and Religion: the Responses of Christian churches’, held in Jan. 1996.

Today, each of the seven dioceses has a SIDA Service committee with several “antennes’ (outreach points) in the community. The activities of these committees include prevention, testing, counseling and care of people who have contracted HIV.

SIDA Service started the first free VCT facility in Dakar in 2000 and now runs eight of the dozen VCT facilities in all regions.

To avoid stigmatisation of its clients, SIDA Service in Dakar renamed itself the Cardinal Hyacinthe Thiandoum Centre for Health Promotion (Centre de Promotion de la Sante Cardinale Hyacinthe Thiandoum).

Fittingly, in November 1997, Dakar also hosted the First International Conference on AIDS and Religion, sponsored by the Jointed United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the European Union.

The partnership advanced further in May 1999 with the launch of the Alliance of Religious Leaders and Medical Experts Against AIDS (Alliance des Religieux et Experts Medicaux Contre le SIDA) comprising Jamra, the Association of Imams of Senegal, SIDA Service and CNLS. The Alliance conducts AIDS prevention and training and organizes national and international conferences.

As various researchers have noted, certain aspects of Senegalese culture have assisted the country to contain the spread of HIV. These include conservative attitudes towards sex, low levels of alcohol consumption and universal male circumcision (which affords men a degree of protection from HIV).

However, there’s no denying that roping religious leaders into this battle was of great importance.

Today, the virtues of a partnership between religious and public health institutions have become part of conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, however, this was a groundbreaking approach to fighting AIDS – and sadly, still a rarity in other African states.

* Mercedes Sayagues is currently doing a best practice study on AIDS policies in Senegal for the South African Institute of International Affairs, at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 3 2003 (IPS)

During the day, she hid in farms. At night, she slept in the bush or with goats in kraals.

Plaxedes, a polling agent for the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was hiding from the Green Bombers, Zimbabwe’s feared militia. When they found her, they beat her up. They made her crawl until her knee bones showed through torn flesh.

Then, three men frog-marched her to a well-known torture base on the foothills. There, they raped her several times. Her voice breaks as she tells what happened next: "They built a big fire and burnt me with red hot metal wires in my private parts."

Plaxedes and other Zimbabwean women raped by militia tell their stories in a powerful movie documentary premiered this week at Wits University in Johannesburg with a panel discussion afterwards.

The event kick-started a drive by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) to break the silence in South Africa about massive gender-based human rights abuses – gang rape and sexual torture, in simple words – taking place in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

"We must push our human rights institutions and academics to make a stand about what is happening in Zimbabwe," said Sheila Meintes, a member of South Africa’s Commission on Gender Equality and a lecturer in political studies at Wits University.

Zimbabwe has been in violent political turmoil since parliamentary elections in 2000 threatened the 20-year-old monopoly on power of ruling party ZANU-PF. The government retaliated with increasing repression and militarisation.

Rights groups have documented gross human rights abuses, systematic torture and the emergence of a state-sponsored youth militia who terrorise the population with impunity.

In the violent run-up to last week’s by-elections in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, tales of brutal sexual abuse emerged after the army, police and militia swooped into townships. Two women were raped with rifle barrels. Middle-aged women were raped along their elderly mothers. Patrons in nightclubs were forced to have unprotected sex with each other at gunpoint. Their stories recall Plaxedes’ but in an urban setting.

Such reports point to a new pattern of sexual violence.

During 2000 and early 2001, rights watchdogs like Amnesty International, Danish Physicians for Human Rights and others reported widespread torture of opposition supporters. About 40 percent of these were women. They were beaten up, stripped naked, taunted and humiliated, but few cases of rape and sexual abuse were reported.

After May-June 2001, the rape and sexual torture of women become more prevalent and brutal. Usually it happens in front of family and neighbours. As a result, the whole community experiences psychological torture.

"Militia tear the social fabric," said Tony Reeler, regional human rights defender with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa

Elders are humiliated, adults beaten up and tortured, and women raped in front of husbands, parents, children and neighbours.

One woman in the movie was raped in front of her gagged, blind husband. A few days later, the militia set their hut on fire, tying a wire around it to prevent escape. She cut it with pliers and the family fled amidst flames and smoke but the husband fell into the well and drowned.

"The humiliation, pain and terror inflicted by the rapist is meant to degrade not just the individual woman but also strip the humanity from the larger group of which she is part," said a Human Rights Watch Report on sexual violence during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The reports from Zimbabwe point to the use of sexual violence against women as part of a planned programme as in Bosnia or Rwanda, said Reeler.

Broadly, civil war breeds four kinds of rape. One is genocidal, as in the Balkans, where the intention is to destroy an ethnic or political group.

Political rape punishes individuals, families or communities who hold different political views and creates fear among them. Opportunistic rape happens when militia runs out of control, assured of impunity.

Forced concubinage involves young girls conscripted to wash, cook, and act as porter and have sex. This was frequent among Renamo rebels during Mozambique’s 17-year-old civil war and is on the rise in Zimbabwe since June 2000, when the Green Bombers became embedded in communities.

The last three forms of rape are found in Zimbabwe

"This abuse of women is reproduced in every conflict," said Meintes.

Human Rights Watch confirms this. "Throughout the world, sexual violence is routinely directed at females during situations of armed conflict."

What is new in the last decade is the move to criminalise the use of rape as a war weapon. Zimbabwe could become the next historic case. Already the International Bar Association has called for the prosecution of President Robert Mugabe for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.

In a landmark decision not to ignore rape as a war crime, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia will prosecute rapists. The Rwanda Tribunal is explicitly empowered to prosecute rape as a crime against humanity and a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

International law condemns rape and other forms of sexual violence as war crimes. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 do so and were later strengthened by Protocol II, which extends protection to victims of rape, enforced prostitution or indecent assault during conflict.

One problem is that many women tend to keep rape and sexual violence secret out of economic and social vulnerability, stigma, shame and fear.

In Zimbabwe, raped women are like Plaxedes, the most vulnerable, the poorest, uneducated and unemployed. "Their chance of demanding their rights is zero," said Reeler.

Plaxedes had to flee the area. Her mother looks after her small children. "When this changes, you will recover your children," said the mother.

Tina Sideris, a South African researcher and activist on gender-based violence, and founder of Masiskumeni, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Mpulanga province, worries about the consequences of widespread women abuse in post-conflict reconstruction.

"Post-conflict programmes don’t deal with gender issues," she says,

These range from providing support to thousands of rape survivors to helping demobilised soldiers and guerrillas who take home their wartime violent attitudes as baggage.

In war, many men lose, through attacks, destitution and displacement, their sense of being family providers. Others, as soldiers, guerrillas or militia, lose their sense of responsibility to family and community.

Sideris wonders if these factors result in an increase in domestic violence once the conflict is over and points to the inability of institutions to deal with gender changes during and after conflict.

Sideris is equally concerned by South Africa’s silence about its neighbour. "I hear more discussions about Iraq than Zimbabwe, about the rape of women in Bosnia than the rape of women in Mozambique and Zimbabwe," she says.

Rounding up the discussion, said Sheila Meintes: "The pen is mighty than the sword. Academics can write papers, letters to newspapers and to politicians. Let’s start right now."

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
ANDRIESVALE, South Africa, Mar 28 2003 (IPS)

It might look like an ordinary cactus but the Hoodia Gordonii has become a symbol of efforts to reverse the worldwide history of exploitation of indigenous peoples.

At a ceremony in a remote corner of the Kalahari, the South African San peoples were recognised as official holders of traditional knowledge.

It looks like an ordinary cactus – thin, thorny fingers growing less than a metre tall in the reddish sands of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert – but on Mar 24 the Hoodia Gordonii reversed a worldwide history of exploitation of indigenous peoples.

At a simple but moving ceremony in Andriesvale, a remote corner of the Kalahari, the South African San Council and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) of South Africa signed an agreement that recognises and rewards the San as holders of traditional knowledge.

The San will get up to eight percent of profits from a diet drug derived from the Hoodia, a plant they know well. For thousands of years, the San – the oldest people in southern Africa – have chewed the bitter Hoodia twice a day to suppress hunger and thirst during long hunting trips.

"Our ancestors taught us to survive by being attentive to the land, rain, game and plants," says Kxao Moses, a Namibian San and chair of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa. Even today the San treat hunger, fever, eye allergies and stomach pain with the Hoodia.

In 1996, scientists from the parastatal CSIR isolated the Hoodia’s hunger-suppressing chemical component, or P57, and patented it.

In 1997, CSIR licensed the UK-based firm Phytopharm to further develop and commercialise P57. The following year, Phytopharm licensed drug giant Pfizer – of Viagra fame – to develop and market P57.

Throughout, CSIR retained the patent. It may be worth billions of dollars. The market for a natural appetite-suppressant drug is huge. In the United States alone there are between 35-65 million clinically obese people. Worldwide, obesity is rising fast.

The San, who had shared their knowledge with CSIR scientists, were out of the picture. To the extent that, in mid-2001, when a Pfizer spokesperson in Britain described P57, the San were said to be extinct.

The San peoples of southern Africa angrily complained. An international scandal ensued.

The timing was right. Back in 1996, indigenous knowledge was an abstruse issue and the CSIR is an institution still shaped by the apartheid regime it had served well for 40 years.

Five years later, protection of indigenous knowledge is debated at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and promoted by the post- apartheid CSIR.

It was a thorny issue at the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg because indigenous knowledge systems clash with Western intellectual property rules (IPR). The latter view knowledge as the property of an individual or a company, while traditional knowledge is collectively owned and handed down through generations.

Under pressure from the developing world – WTO is reviewing the IPR system. Buoyed by international agreements like the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biological Safety, an addenda to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, countries in the South are passing laws to prevent biopiracy.

In 1999, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) approved an African Model Law that comprehensively covers IPR issues for biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. African countries must now pass domestic laws that comply with it. Few have done so.

The South African government is considering a draft bill that requires proof of prior informed consent of communities before granting patents for products or elements derived from their traditional knowledge.

The agreement between the San and the CSIR reinforces bioprospection as opposed to biopiracy.

"Big pharma can’t do business as they did before. It’s payback time," says Tom Suchanandan, an academic with the Council for Human Sciences Research of South Africa.

He points that "this is no hastily construed document but took lots of time and effort", one reason being the public scandal, another South Africa’s legal vacuum on this matter.

"The CSIR and the San had to produce an agreement able to withstand international scrutiny and it does," says Minister of arts, culture, science and technology, Ben Ngubane.

For three years, the South Africa San Council negotiated with the CSIR on behalf of the San in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In a unique novel arrangement, the San will share profits across borders.

The CSIR will pay the San eight percent of milestone payments made by its licensee Phytopharm during the drug’s clinical development over the next 3-4 years. If and when the drug is marketed, possibly in 2008, the San will get six percent of royalties.

"The CSIR, being owned by government, was rather embarrassed and we played that embarrassment hard," recalls human rights lawyer Roger Chennels, the San’s legal counsel.

Already R259,066 has been paid. Milestone payments for the San could reach R8-12 million while royalties could top R60 million annually during the 15-20 years before a patent expires, says Petro Terblanche, CSIR Biochemtek Director.

The San badly needs such windfall. Present in the region for 40,000 years, in the last 2000 they have been dispossessed by several waves of newcomers. Today, commercial ranching, large- scale agriculture, even national parks threaten their hunter- gatherer lifestyle.

"The San’s soft culture does not do well in a Western capitalist world," says Chennels.

For centuries their culture has been devalued as "uncivilised". Even their language is on the verge of extinction, squeezed out by Afrikaans and English. Less than two dozen elderly San speakers survive in South Africa. A handful was at Andriesvale to witness their leaders sign the agreement.

Ravaged by low self-esteem, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment, the San remain marginalised. Only recently a wave of interest is re-valuing San rock paintings and crafts, their harmony with nature, practices of heightened consciousness states and cultural beliefs.

"This (agreement) is about more than money, it’s about our culture," says Tina, a trainee tracker at Molopo lodge in Andriesvale.

Asked about their needs, a group of young women quickly say "jobs and education in our language".

If the diet drug is produced, it is not yet clear whether the Hoodia will be grown commercially or the molecule laboratory-produced. "For South Africa’s economy, it is preferable to farm it. For risk management, to use a reactive in a lab," says Terblanche.

Dreadlocked, decked in an opossum tail headdress, beads and a handmade leather medicine pouch, community leader Jan van der Westhuysen, 47, crouches and gingerly touches the prickly plant. "This is life to us, it gave us energy and sustenance," he says.

He looks around the dry savannah. Hoodia was plentiful here when he grew up but no longer, he says. "Humans are not taking good care of the world."

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
ANDRIESVALE, South Africa, Mar 28 2003 (IPS)

It looks like an ordinary cactus – thin, thorny fingers growing less than a metre tall in the reddish sands of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert – but on Mar 24 the Hoodia Gordonii reversed a worldwide history of exploitation of indigenous peoples.

At a simple but moving ceremony in Andriesvale, a remote corner of the Kalahari, the South African San Council and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) of South Africa signed an agreement that recognises and rewards the San as holders of traditional knowledge.

The San will get up to eight percent of profits from a diet drug derived from the Hoodia, a plant they know well. For thousands of years, the San – the oldest people in southern Africa – have chewed the bitter Hoodia twice a day to suppress hunger and thirst during long hunting trips.

"Our ancestors taught us to survive by being attentive to the land, rain, game and plants," says Kxao Moses, a Namibian San and chair of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa. Even today the San treat hunger, fever, eye allergies and stomach pain with the Hoodia.

In 1996, scientists from the parastatal CSIR isolated the Hoodia’s hunger-suppressing chemical component, or P57, and patented it.

In 1997, CSIR licensed the UK-based firm Phytopharm to further develop and commercialise P57. The following year, Phytopharm licensed drug giant Pfizer – of Viagra fame – to develop and market P57.

Throughout, CSIR retained the patent. It may be worth billions of dollars. The market for a natural appetite-suppressant drug is huge. In the United States alone there are between 35-65 million clinically obese people. Worldwide, obesity is rising fast.

The San, who had shared their knowledge with CSIR scientists, were out of the picture. To the extent that, in mid-2001, when a Pfizer spokesperson in Britain described P57, the San were said to be extinct.

The San peoples of southern Africa angrily complained. An international scandal ensued.

The timing was right. Back in 1996, indigenous knowledge was an abstruse issue and the CSIR is an institution still shaped by the apartheid regime it had served well for 40 years.

Five years later, protection of indigenous knowledge is debated at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and promoted by the post-apartheid CSIR.

It was a thorny issue at the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg because indigenous knowledge systems clash with Western intellectual property rules (IPR). The latter view knowledge as the property of an individual or a company, while traditional knowledge is collectively owned and handed down through generations.

Under pressure from the developing world – WTO is reviewing the IPR system. Buoyed by international agreements like the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biological Safety, an addenda to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, countries in the South are passing laws to prevent biopiracy.

In 1999, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) approved an African Model Law that comprehensively covers IPR issues for biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. African countries must now pass domestic laws that comply with it. Few have done so.

The South African government is considering a draft bill that requires proof of prior informed consent of communities before granting patents for products or elements derived from their traditional knowledge.

The agreement between the San and the CSIR reinforces bioprospection as opposed to biopiracy.

"Big pharma can’t do business as they did before. It’s payback time," says Tom Suchanandan, an academic with the Council for Human Sciences Research of South Africa.

He points that "this is no hastily construed document but took lots of time and effort", one reason being the public scandal, another South Africa’s legal vacuum on this matter.

"The CSIR and the San had to produce an agreement able to withstand international scrutiny and it does," says Minister of arts, culture, science and technology, Ben Ngubane.

For three years, the South Africa San Council negotiated with the CSIR on behalf of the San in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In a unique novel arrangement, the San will share profits across borders.

The CSIR will pay the San eight percent of milestone payments made by its licensee Phytopharm during the drug’s clinical development over the next 3-4 years. If and when the drug is marketed, possibly in 2008, the San will get six percent of royalties.

"The CSIR, being owned by government, was rather embarrassed and we played that embarrassment hard," recalls human rights lawyer Roger Chennels, the San’s legal counsel.

Already R259,066 has been paid. Milestone payments for the San could reach R8-12 million while royalties could top R60 million annually during the 15-20 years before a patent expires, says Petro Terblanche, CSIR Biochemtek Director.

The San badly needs such windfall. Present in the region for 40,000 years, in the last 2000 they have been dispossessed by several waves of newcomers. Today, commercial ranching, large-scale agriculture, even national parks threaten their hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

"The San’s soft culture does not do well in a Western capitalist world," says Chennels.

For centuries their culture has been devalued as "uncivilised". Even their language is on the verge of extinction, squeezed out by Afrikaans and English. Less than two dozen elderly San speakers survive in South Africa. A handful was at Andriesvale to witness their leaders sign the agreement.

Ravaged by low self-esteem, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment, the San remain marginalised. Only recently a wave of interest is re-valuing San rock paintings and crafts, their harmony with nature, practices of heightened consciousness states and cultural beliefs.

"This (agreement) is about more than money, it’s about our culture," says Tina, a trainee tracker at Molopo lodge in Andriesvale.

Asked about their needs, a group of young women quickly say "jobs and education in our language".

If the diet drug is produced, it is not yet clear whether the Hoodia will be grown commercially or the molecule laboratory-produced. "For South Africa’s economy, it is preferable to farm it. For risk management, to use a reactive in a lab," says Terblanche.

Dreadlocked, decked in an opossum tail headdress, beads and a handmade leather medicine pouch, community leader Jan van der Westhuysen, 47, crouches and gingerly touches the prickly plant. "This is life to us, it gave us energy and sustenance," he says.

He looks around the dry savannah. Hoodia was plentiful here when he grew up but no longer, he says. "Humans are not taking good care of the world."

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
PRETORIA, South Africa, Sep 30 2002 (IPS)

What does an anti-pimple cream have to do with the African Renaissance? How can a yellow fruit relished by elephants challenge world rules on intellectual property?

In South Africa, traditional healers treat acne with a wood-based cream. Jumbos get tipsy on wild marula, key ingredient of a popular sweet liqueur and a cure for colds and dysentery.

Both cream and fruit — a cosmetic technology and a natural resource — are part of South Africa’s traditional knowledge.

“This is an unexploited, undeveloped, and misunderstood wealth that we need to tap into,” says Noma Xabiso, chief executive of the African Renaissance South African chapter.

A key tenet of the Renaissance vision, popularised by South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki, is to develop Africa’s own resources such as biodiversity and traditional knowledge.

South Africa, however, is not doing enough to promote and protect indigenous knowledge, say activists.

“At the level of rhetoric, there is recognition of its value. At the level of action, little is happening,” says Rachel Wynberg, a South African researcher on biodiversity now with the University of Strathclyde in Britain.

Government’s policies on biodiversity and traditional knowledge are good. Turning them into practice through laws and monitoring mechanisms remains slow.

A Bill to protect indigenous knowledge, to be tabled in parliament before December, has been postponed to 2003, says Mogege Mosimege, director for indigenous knowledge systems at the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology.

An earlier version was returned to drafters by Parliament two years ago for lack of clear regulatory mechanisms.

‘”We follow a path of caution,” says Gwen Mahlangu, chair of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee for Environmental Affairs and Tourism.

This is uncharted territory. Only recently has the concept of traditional knowledge acquired legitimacy.

Indigenous people have few legal ways of asserting ownership of knowledge – from local foods, seeds, herbal medicines and cosmetics to pottery, beading and folk tales.

Increasingly, seed, agrochemical and pharmaceutical companies claim and receive intellectual property rights over genetic resources and related knowledge without consent from or compensation to the people who have used these — whether a cream or a fruit — for centuries.

Now developing countries are fighting this theft of knowledge, or biopiracy, in an improbable arena — the world system of intellectual property rights (IPR).

The IPR system is rooted in European industrial and scientific tradition. It sees knowledge as a commodity owned by an individual or company and grants patents for trade and profit.

In contrast, traditional knowledge is developed, handed down and owned by communities. Its cultural and collective nature is hard to grasp by IPR.

“The present system serves the interests of industrialised countries by excluding the richest assets of developing countries — biodiversity and indigenous knowledge,” says Tom Suchanandan, of South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council.

“National legislation must remove the unfair commercial advantages that western intellectual property rights hold over indigenous knowledge,” he adds.

The quandary for South Africa and developing countries is that patent laws mandated by the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) do not accommodate traditional knowledge. (Under pressure from developing countries, the WTO meeting in Doha last November agreed to review the patent system.)

“Does the Bill grapple with the schizophrenic dilemma between our strong patent legislation and the protection of indigenous knowledge?” asks Wynberg. “Is TRIPS delaying the Bill?”

Nolwazi Gcaba, a South African patent and copyright attorney, says the Bill is urgently needed ‘’to defend the rights and property of indigenous communities, to avoid their exploitation.”

Bioprospecting of plants used by traditional healers goes on in South Africa, legally and illegally.

“Researchers from all over the world seek the plants we use but give us nothing,” says T.J. Matiba, a traditional healer, founder and president of South Africa’s Council of Traditional Healers since 1985.

Benefit sharing is an especially thorny issue because of South Africa’s history.

The apartheid regime forced blacks off their land and marked vast areas for nature conservation with no benefit for locals. It banned traditional healing and branded indigenous knowledge as backward. Apartheid ideology systematically eroded and devalued the rich and diverse knowledge systems of Africans.

Today, holders of traditional knowledge like T.J. Matiba are recognised, albeit, in Mosimege’s words, they are “still cast in the background”.

Mosimege notes their minimal representation in workshops and an untenable relationship with researchers that “seems to be perpetuating ills of the past à without proper benefit-sharing.”

Apartheid-era research and conservation institutions neglected social problems. This history underpins the need to develop a code of ethics for today’s research.

“A code to prevent the unlawful extraction of cultural knowledge will impact on research policies that inadvertently encourage exploitation,” says Suchanandan. “Benefit-sharing is not charity but a responsibility for researchers.”

Unwitting accomplices, some South African academics take foreign colleagues around the country collecting plants and videotaping healers.

“There’s naivete among some academics, delighted to work with foreign partners after years of apartheid isolation,” says Dr. Martinus Horak, manager of the bioprospecting programme at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. “Others are funded by foreign corporations.”

This explains how rare local desert plants turn up in laboratories at American universities, says Horak.

He lobbies for legislation ‘to control, not prevent, access to our rich biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. We’ve lost so much, we can’t lose more.”

At a workshop on biopiracy held during the Earth Summit in Johannesburg in September, Horak pleaded Malhangu to speed legislation in Parliament.

The issues are tricky: how to reward knowledge and apportion ownership; how to patent biological and cultural resources, sometimes across borders; how to disburse royalties equitably.

Competencies are unclear between the Ministry of Environmental Affairs (for biodiversity), the DACST (for indigenous knowledge) and Trade and Industry for TRIPS.

AIDS, crime, poverty and unemployment relegate this issue to the backburner.

“Our government is more focused on trade regimes and attracting foreign investment than strengthening our indigenous resources,” says Haydee Swanby, of the Cape Town-based Biowatch, a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
GABORONE, Sep 9 2002 (IPS)

It is midnight on Saturday. Thick crowds pack the three bars in Kilimanjaro, a shabby shopping centre in the Gaborone township of Broadhurst. Beer and whisky bottles litter the grounds. It is brisk business for liquor, dagga and sex.

A few blocks away, business is also booming in the more upmarket George’s bar. The crowds at Kilimanjaro are solid black. At George’s the sex workers are black but a lot of clients are white.

Sex happens in cars, on the street or in the bush, in the dark, where women cannot check their clients for signs of sexually transmitted diseases, where it is harder to negotiate safe sex.

Prostitution is illegal and criminalised in Botswana. The women operate alone or in pairs, vulnerable to abuse from clients and police alike.

“We are tired of being thrown in the bush re sena go jewa ke batho (after sex). Even the police rape us or threaten us with prison if we refuse sex. They do this knowing we have no place to run to,” claims a sex worker.

On average, the women have three clients a night and up to six around payday. The price ranges between P50 to P200.

One U.S. dollar is equal to 6 Pula.

The demands range from oral sex and group sex to dry sex, where women put herbal powders in the vagina to make it dry and tight. Dry sex lacerates the delicate vaginal walls, facilitating HIV infection.

Clients pay less for sex with a condom. Most prefer sex without a condom. They believe that if the woman is fat, she is AIDS-free; that if the man is STD-free, a condom is not needed; and they “don’t want to eat a sweet with its wrapper”.

The data comes from a first-ever survey among sex workers in Broadhurst, Bontleng and Old Naledi townships in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.

Botswana, with a population of 1.5 million, has the world’s highest rates of HIV infection, with 40 percent of adults infected, reaching 45 percent in Francistown and 56 percent in Selebi-Phikwe.

Sex workers are at great risk, yet misplaced notions of “morality” keep them invisible and marginalised. Their rates of HIV infection are unknown.

Countrywide, only two AIDS programmes target them. A successful project started in 1994 by the NGO Emang Basadi stopped for lack of funds.

Help is on the way. The United Nations Foundation (UNF) is sponsoring a 1.8-million-U.S.-dollar, three-year-long AIDS awareness project in poor townships of Gaborone.

It will reach young people at risk, such as sex workers, street children, orphans and unemployed youth.

“We are targeting those who are usually ignored, 15 to 20- year-olds in poor areas,” says Irene Maina, of UNAIDS.

The Urban Youth Project (UYP) is part of Telling the Story, a UNF-sponsored scheme to improve AIDS awareness among youth in seven Southern African countries.

Of the sex workers interviewed, half were aged 15-24 and a quarter was aged 12-14. Most were recruited into this work by friends or family, some as young as nine years old.

The idea is to train young people as peer educators among their own age group. Provision of youth-friendly services for reproductive and sexual health is also important.

“Young people don’t go to the local clinic because they fear finding the auntie or the neighbour there,” says Matsae Balosang, head of the Family Health Division at the Ministry of Health in Gaborone.

Informal sex work is another problem. Half of Botswana’s people are poor. Jobs are scarce. For many girls, sex is the only way to acquire goods.

“Rape and sex for gifts are a significant problem among teenage girls,” says Baatweng Motladiile, training coordinator at the Scripture Union, which runs sex education workshops for young people and their parents.

At Kilimanjaro and at George’s, the young sport the latest fads.

“We live in a material world, as seen in MTV,” says Ndanji Lesetedi, 19. “You need Reeboks and a cellphone to look hip, so guys and girls will do anything to get one.”

Brain Rich Morem, 22, a poet in Old Naledi township, estimates that one out of three girls he knows exchanges sex for gifts.

“Youth of Botswana, you are amazing, in heroic deeds and in reckless sex,” he boomed at an event in Old Naledi recently.

Botswana has one of the world’s highest rates of teenage pregnancy, although slightly decreasing. Half of all teenage girls get pregnant. The number of illegal and unsafe abortions is unknown.

“Most of my friends have babies,” says Banyabotlhe Methle, 19, a student in Old Naledi.

Why? To show parents they are grown-up, to prove their fertility, to catch a husband, to have a baby to love. Boys impregnate girls to show their manhood.

In Botswana, fertility confers social status. Young women come under parental and peer pressure to bear children even out of wedlock, says Botswana Human Development Report of the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

Studies report that some teenagers believe sex during adolescence will enhance their fertility. Others believe that standing up and shaking your hips after sex prevents pregnancy.

Half of the households in Botswana are female-headed. Rooted in history — migration of men to work in South African mines — this has become a pattern.

In 2001, nearly 80 percent of pregnant women were single, according to a national survey in antenatal clinics.

Rapid urbanisation — urban population rose from 18 percent in 1981 to 46 percent in 1991 and 50 percent today — also impacts on lifestyle.

“Marriage is devalued,” says Lydia Matebesi, a health officer with the UNDP. She adds that, on the one hand, women are free to leave unhappy marriages or not to enter one. On the other, female-headed households tend to be poorer and do not promote the family as role model.

“Teachers drink with their students in bars, parents have sex outside marriage, what do you expect from youth?” asks Clifford Segwagwe, 23.

An activist with UYP, he works to boost young people’s self-esteem and convince them to live healthier lives and say no to unsafe sex.

Reaching for the young is Botswana’s best hope to beat the pandemic.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
LUNDA, Sep 6 2002 (IPS)

Luisa Cruz* felt like she had won the lottery. She got her life back. But her windfall turned into a nightmare.

Earlier this year, Cruz, 22, was seriously sick in Luanda, the capital of Angola, with AIDS-related infections. Her weight was down to 39kgs. Bingo, she got a free trip to get free anti-retroviral treatment in South Africa, courtesy of the Angolan government.

Cruz says that Angolan embassy staff dumped her at a private hospital in Pretoria, South Africa. She lay semi-conscious for 45 days. When Cruz, who does not speak English, was discharged, her 30-day visa had expired. She had become an illegal alien.

Cruz had to return to South Africa in three months for a key check-up. But, having overstayed in her previous trip, she was denied a new visa.

An anguished Cruz pleaded with the South African High Commissioner and with South African Airways in Luanda. Weeks passed. Her supply of anti-retrovirals finished. She got sick again.

Eventually she was granted a visa, guaranteed by an 800-U.S.-dollar deposit. That is a lot of money in war-torn Angola. Cruz borrowed and besieged family and friends for help.

This time, Cruz brought back from Pretoria a six-month supply of anti-retrovirals. She looks and feels healthy, weighs 64 kgs, and works as an activist with Luta pela Vida (Fight for Life), a non-governmental organisation (NGO). She worries about her next visa.

Her story reflects the Angolan government’s way of dealing with AIDS in particular and health in general.

The health system has all but crumbled. The rich fly to Johannesburg, Lisbon or Sao Paulo to get quality care. The masses rely on foreign NGOs. And a few lucky ones win a ticket to health through the Junta Nacional de Saude (National Health Board).

Out of thousands of applicants, the Junta chooses a handful to go abroad for anti-retrovirals, bypass surgery or cancer chemotherapy at government expense. The well-connected get chosen first. But a handful of unconnected, poor people, also win this lottery. Among them was Cruz.

The system is unfair and unsustainable. The Junta receives “a shockingly high proportion of the limited budgetary resources available for education and health, despite the fact that the national health and education systems are severely under-funded and in a state of crisis,” says economist Tony Hodges in his book “Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-diamond Capitalism.”

“This is not the best option for a public health strategy in terms of efficiency, equality or human rights,” says Dr. Alberto Stella, of UNAIDS in Luanda.

For an AIDS patient, each trip costs at least 5,000 U.S. dollars and must be repeated three times a year for control and adjustment of medication. When trips are delayed, and this often happens, as Cruz found out, treatment is compromised. New resistant viral strains can appear if the regime is not followed carefully.

With that money, Angola could set up a pilot project to treat 1,500 people — far more than the Junta flies to South Africa. If successful, the scheme could be expanded and replicated.

“This is a good time to start a strong project, based on international experience, with the help of aid partners and with a number of local professionals who are being trained,” says Stella.

Instead, the Angolan government mooted the idea last December of building a factory to produce generic anti-retrovirals, like Brazil.

This is a grand plan with no follow-up. A factory alone may help the rich who can afford the therapy but not the poor. Success in treatment requires a network of trained professionals, laboratories and support system, from voluntary testing and counselling to home-based care.

“It is easier to run a generics factory than to work with communities to prevent AIDS and care for those affected, and to train doctors and nurses on how to treat people with AIDS,” says Dr. Melanie Luick, of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Luanda.

Seroprevalence rates are a modest eight percent, compared to an average of 25-30 percent in neighbouring countries. It is estimated that half a million people (out of a population of 13 million) live with HIV/AIDS in Angola.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” says Stella.

The data comes from an UNICEF study conducted in only three out of 18 provinces. However limited, it shows an alarming 250 percent increase in HIV infections among women at antenatal clinics.

Another study shows that one-third of sex workers in Luanda has HIV, one third has syphilis and two out of 10 have hepatitis B.

A nationwide survey by UNICEF and the Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas found that only eight percent of women know about AIDS adequately. Less than one percent of people use condoms during sex.

Few testing and counselling centres exist. Nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child transmission is not administered routinely.

Stigma runs high and drives the epidemic underground. Few people disclose their positive status.

Until now, war contained AIDS by limiting travel and trade. As the country opens up with peace, all the ingredients for an explosion are here. Four million people displaced, high poverty, low education, overcrowded shantytowns, no jobs.

At this week’s Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said that widening access to treatment through the state sector makes economic sense, even in countries with faulty health systems.

“We should measure the real impact of medical evacuations against a local treatment scheme,” says Stella.

Cruz agrees. She is lobbying parliamentarians and media with the idea. “I am alive because I got treated in time,” she says. “I want other Angolans to be as lucky.”

*Cruz is not her real name.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, May 9 2000 (IPS)

The stadium is packed. The crowd cheers wildly. This is a key match for Mozambique’s first league soccer cup.

The players emerge from the tunnels. But they are not wearing their team colors. Instead, they wear white T-shirts and white caps emblazoned with a logo: a soccer ball bouncing on top of the AIDS red ribbon.

Both teams run across the field, unfurling a long red banner to form the AIDS symbol.

Meanwhile, smiling young men and women in similar outfits hand out condoms and leaflets about HIV/AIDS to the public. They will do the same during the half time, when security is relaxed and lots of people sneak in.

This is Joga Seguro (Play Safe), a creative HIV/AIDS prevention campaign launched in Mozambique in October last year.

Soccer is by far Mozambique’s most popular sport. Banking on its popularity, Joga Seguro informs people about the disease and promotes safe sex as the first barrier for HIV prevention.

Promoting condoms in radio spots, television advertisements and billboards are eight famous Mozambican soccer stars.

Travellers arriving at Maputo airport are greeted by a Joga Seguro billboard close to the luggage carousel.

Its condom dispensary empties quickly and needs frequent refills.

Household names such as Victor dos Santos, voted sports star of 1999, Rui Evora and Joao Chissano, players with Costa do Sol; Antonio Muchanga and Salvador Macamo, of Maxaquene, and Jose Elvino, Daniel Nhampossa and Arnaldo Salvado, of Ferroviario, have lent their considerable prestige to the campaign.

The campaign also seeks to protect players from HIV infection.

“Because players have fans and money, train away from their families and travel often, their sexual life can be risky,” says coordinator Rui Tadeu.

Through national and provincial soccer leagues, Joga Seguro conducts HIV/AIDS sessions with players and their trainers, masseurs, managers, and arbiters.

“Trainers are important because they know the players’ sexual life intimately,” adds Tadeu. While top management needs to be seen as supporting the campaign.

Joga Seguro has a regular column in the sports pages of main newspapers and magazines, about HIV/AIDS in the world of sports.

A recent edition told the story of Magic Johnson, the basketball star who shocked the world when he disclosed his seropositive status. Radio broadcasts of soccer matches include safe sex messages.

Catastrophic floods in March hampered activities in the central region but work continues in the northern provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado.

Joga Seguro’s one-year budget is U

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, May 2 2000 (IPS)

Some traditional beliefs and practices run counter to HIV/AIDS campaigns hampering progress, say Mozambican researchers.

Take the belief in “kaka”, for example. In Zambezia, people believe a sexually transmitted disease can be cured by having sex. The “bad spirit” moves on to another body and you are healed.

Sociologist Nelia Taimo, who recently surveyed attitudes and knowledge about sex and reproductive health among youth in Zambezia, was shocked by her findings.

In one village, women think HIV is transmitted by eating a certain fish from the lake.

Both girls and boys believe that a girl cannot get pregnant if she only has sex once with her partner. So boys and girls have many partners but only have sex with them sporadically.

Girls think they will not get pregnant if they have sex 10 days after their menstrual period. Menstruation is considered unclean; intercourse should be far from it. In actual fact this goes against the scientific belief that this is approximately when the peak fertile period begins.

In a display of fatalism, many people say that, if it is your destiny to get sick, you will, regardless of your behaviour.

“Even our local colleagues were surprised with our findings,” says Taimo.

Practices like “kaka” and multiple partners spread sexually transmitted diseases, STDs. High rates of STDs are associated with high HIV infection.

At the same time, people hear messages from AIDS campaigns, namely, the “abc” approach: abstinence, be faithful and use condoms. But they do not practice these.

AIDS campaigns will continue to fail unless they take into account local practices, warns Taimo. Moreover, beliefs differ among Mozambique’s nine provinces and various ethnic groups. “We can’t use the same messages from the Rovuma to the Maputo rivers,” she says.

Mozambique, with 14.5 percent of its people infected with HIV, ranks among the world’s top 10 most affected countries.

The problem intensified since the 16-year-old civil war ended in 1992. During the war, large portions of the country (pop. 17.3 million) were effectively cut off from the world. Road travel was reduced to small areas around cities.

HIV/AIDS is a mobile disease. When people move, the virus moves. After the peace agreement, Mozambique experienced one of the largest mass movements in modern Africa.

Two million refugees returned after many years in Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Swaziland — countries severely affected by the pandemic. Nearly three million internally displaced people went home.

Nine thousand foreign peacekeepers and 50,000 demobilized soldiers from the two warring sides compounded the problem. Soldiers with money in their pockets and families far away are likely to have casual sex.

With peace, commercial traffic with neigbouring countries multiplied, bringing needed goods — and HIV. So did labour migration to South Africa and Zimbabwe. The recipe for an HIV/AIDS explosion was there.

Unaids estimates that Mozambique has 300.000 AIDS cases, but less than 10.000 have been reported. Under-reporting stems from poor health coverage in rural areas. Seven out of 10 rural Mozambicans go to traditional healers, not to health posts.

Most worrisome is that 65 percent of new infections are among people less than 30 years old. Unaids estimates that, by the year 2030, 37 percent of the youth aged 15 today in Maputo will be dead from AIDS.

Mozambique’s first HIV/AIDS plans were woefully inadequate.

Last year, the government designed a new national strategic plan. All ministries are involved. It looks good on paper. Then came catastrophic floods in March. Government efforts were re- directed to this disaster.

“Our work, specially in the central region, has been put on hold,” says Dr. Joel Samo Gudo, the plan’s technical advisor.

The floods brought new, massive displacement of people — and new chances for wide HIV transmission. People uprooted from their communities, crowded in makeshift transit camps, their social normatives (peer pressure, social sanctions, etc,) temporarily suspended, are prone to risky sexual behaviour.

On a warm afternoon in mid-April, drums beat and a crowd claps and cheers at the Marracuene accomodation camp for flood-displaced people.

They are watching a play about risky sex, performed by the Mavalane Youth Group against AIDS and Drugs. Its 12-member drama group is contracted by the British charity, Action Aid, to perform in the camps.

The Group also does peer education. Three days a week, in Maputo, three trained counsellors advise youth on drugs, sex and HIV/AIDS. Those who may have a sexually transmitted infection are referred to a local health clinic.

The Group operates from two small rooms in a large secondary and evening high school in a working-class neighbourhood.

Its coordinator, Luis Macave, 25, appears comfortable handling wooden penises sheathed with condoms to teach boys how to wear one. “Some kids believe HIV is transmitted by sharing clothes or cups, not by sex,” he says.

Ignorance about HIV transmission is compounded by myths regarding the disease, and not only in rural areas.

At a reporting workshop recently held in Maputo, none of the dozen odd Mozambican journalists had been tested for HIV.

Eventually, the course monitor realised why. They believed that, if a person learns he or she is seropositive, they die faster. If they don’t know, they live longer and healthier.

HIV/AIDS remains a taboo subject. Graca Machel, widow of President Samora Machel, now married to Nelson Mandela, created a furore late last year when she placed a death notice for Boaventura Machel, Samora’s brother, giving AIDs as the cause of death.

Since then, Mozambique’s main daily newspaper, the government- owned Noticias, has published just two notices with AIDS as cause of death. The third appeared in mid-April. The notice was first rejected, and accepted only after the person who brought it complained to the director of classified ads.

Against this background, it is not surprising that few HIV- positive people declare their status. This is changing, however slowly, as Associations of people living with HIV/AIDS are formed, in Maputo as well as in the provinces.

The oldest and largest is Kindlimuka (Awake, in the Shangaan language spoken in southern Mozambique). Among many other services, Kindlimuka provides counselling.

Counsellor Arlindo Fernandes sees his clients wherever they request — on the street, at the beach, in a park — because many are afraid to walk into Kidlimkuka’s offices, lest someone sees them.

In two years of activism and counseling experience, Fernandes has learned about people’s different cultural values. “Some communities talk easily about sex, some don’t. You have to take this into account,” he says.

Taimo agrees. “The more I research, the more I realise how many things we don’t know,” says Taimo. She explains that the long civil war preserved some traditions but destroyed others. Modern and traditional information coexist and interact among rural communities.

“What I do know, is that AIDS messages are not catching on because they do not match people’s cultural reality,” says Taimo.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
HARARE, Mar 17 2000 (IPS)

For wearing a T-shirt urging “Women vote No to the referendum”, Betty Makura was assaulted and stripped down to her bra — a serious humiliation for a Shona woman-by a group of ‘Yes’ supporters in Mabvuku township near Harare.

Makura (44) was among thousands of Zimbabwean women who braved violence to campaign against a draft constitution.

At a referendum on 12-13 Feb, voters rejected it 55 percent to 45 percent.

Zimbabwe wants to replace the 1980 Lancaster House Constitution, which ended white minority rule in the former Rhodesia.

Zimbabweans, however, never felt it was homegrown, born as it was, of a compromise with colonialism following a bitter liberation war.

After 1980, Zimbabwe effectively became a one-party state ruled by the neo-marxist Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front.

Zanu-PF amended the constitution 15 times, eroding human rights and reinforcing the executive. But the wave of multi-party democracy that swept southern Africa in the 1990s brought calls for reform in this country bedeviled by corruption and economic mismanagement.

Since 1997, the National Constitutional Assembly, NCA, a loose coalition of trade unions, churches and women’s groups, seeks to write a more democratic charter.

To co-opt the move, President Robert Mugabe last Sep set up his own 400-member Constitutional Commission, staffed with party loyalists and a few independents.

Both sets of public hearings were a novel and healthy national exercise on citizenship. More than one million people attended (pop.12 million). On record, people want less presidential powers and more democracy.

But the draft constitution disregards their views. Adopted without discussion by the Commission, the charter enshrines Zanu PF ‘s grip on power. It allows the 75-year-old Mugabe to run for two more terms, with sweeping emergency powers.

“This constitution was no good. They wrote things we did not say. The advertisements said whoever voted ‘No’ were sell-outs and they had no right to do that,” says Makura in halting English.

The Women’s Coalition, made up of 35 organisations, campaigned against the draft. Their activism made a difference.

“There is strong anecdotal evidence that women were key in the ‘No’ result,” says Julio de Sousa, regional director of Oxfam, a charity that funds several women’s groups.

The coalition criticised the draft charter’s weak stance on women’s rights. Equality between men and women is not clearly recognised. Rights can be suspended on vague grounds of public morality and national security.

The tricky issue of customary law vis a vis women’s rights is not addressed.

Customary law considers women as minors. They cannot inherit property equally as men. Because polygamy is legal, senior wives can be cast aside in favour of junior wives and their children.

Widow dispossession is frequent, since the husband’s relatives are entitled to his estate. Once a man pays lobola, or bride price, the wife belongs to him.

Last year, a 13-year-old girl committed suicide by setting herself aflame with petrol. She had fled five times from a forced marriage with an evangelical pastor already married to her eldest sister. Each time the girl was retrieved by her brothers, beaten up and returned to the pastor.

In 1999, in a ruling that shocked the world, the Supreme Court found that, under customary law, women have no right to inherit property.

A 1997 law ensures equal rights to all heirs but not in cases brought to court before the law was enacted. The Magaya ruling, as it is known, showed how women’s gains can be reversed if unprotected in the Bill of Rights or when the vague concept of culture is invoked to justify discriminatory practices.

At coalition meetings, rural women complained that “culture is used to oppress us”. They understood the need for a strong Bill of Rights to uphold equality and women’s rights over custom and tradition.

Confident on the power of the state machinery and 20 years of uninterrupted rule, the government called Zimbabwe’s first ever referendum.

In Dec 1999, a United Nations electoral team found the voter’s roll to be chaotic and the electoral system a shambles. Still the government went ahead. A nasty and racist propaganda barrage flowed in the state-controlled media. In the townships, Zanu-PF youth tore down ‘No’ posters and harassed campaigners like Makura.

Police arrested NCA activists. This correspondent was assaulted and threatened by Zanu-PF thugs inside a police precinct while constables watched impassively.

Six months before the referendum, the Women’s Coalition began a countrywide campaign to inform women about constitutional issues.

“This is the first time that women managed to overcome class, race and political differences,” says Margaret Samuriwo, a programme officer within Oxfam.

The Coalition organised provincial workshops for community leaders, a national conference, TV and radio programmes, and 500,000 flyers in eight languages.

Lydia Zigomo, director of Zimbabwe Women’s Lawyers Association and chairperson of the Coalition, was amazed at the quality leap in women’s demands:”Grassroots women are saying: We are full citizens of Zimbabwe and we want our full share. We are not begging favours from government.”

A key Coalition member is the 60,000-strong Association of Women’s Clubs, a rural savings scheme founded in 1938. To the surprise of urban-based, more educated groups, the AWC took constitutional reform to its heart.

Its members brought the debate into the grassroots, then turned out in numbers to vote and monitor the polls. Zigomo says that, where the AWC was weak, the Yes won.

Today, AWC women are training to be monitors, polling and presiding officers in future elections. “Our members saw how officials trick illiterate voters and how rigging happens during counting, and requested this training,” says AWC director Sekai Holland.

The referendum was a watershed in Zimbabwe. Turnout was, as usual, low, at 31 percent of eligible voters. But people in the queues spoke of civic duty, as if the constitutional process had infused them with a sense of citizenship and ownership of the vote. This is a new feeling in the former one-party state.

Democracy is less than 10 years old in Zimbabwe.

“A real constitutional literacy has developed. You can not stop that,” says Zigomo.

During two hot days, poll monitor Georgina Muziti (53) sat inside a tent at daytime, slept on the floor next to the ballot box at night, and went without a bath, a hot meal or a change of clothes.

By Sunday evening, her legs were swollen, she had flu and a headache but still held proudly:”That ballot box is not getting out of my view, no ways.”

At midnight on Monday, when the counting for Harare Central yielded 6,682 ‘No’ to 4,821 ‘Yes’, Muziti smiled. It was too late to find a bus to her home in Seke, 30 kms from Harare. Another night sleeping on the floor. “My bones hurt but I am happy. I would do it again,” she said. “For Zimbabwe.”

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
PORTO DOBELA, MOZAMBIQUE, Nov 23 1999 (IPS)

“Do not destroy our existing wealth to create new wealth,” wrote in 1973 Mozambican environmentalists to the Portuguese colonial government.

They were complaining against a railway that would cut thought the Maputo Elephant Reserve towards a deep sea port to be built in Ponta Dobela. The veterinary services, wildlife lovers and ecologists argued it would affect the flora, fauna and water resources, and detract from the pristine wilderness.

Twenty-five years later, a new generation of greens is battling the resurrected Port Dobela project.

It has been moved a bit south but is still in the middle of the coast that stretches south of Maputo to Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa. The area is considered among the world’s 240 areas of great biodiversity. Africa has roughly 25 of these.

It is likely to be declared a World Heritage Site for its unique bio-diversity wealth.

In July the government signed a memorandum of understanding between the state railway company, Caminhos de Ferro, and two South African businessmen.

The 515-million-US-Dollar port will channel the coal and magnetite exports from the Transvaal, South Africa. It would offer more competitive rates than Richard’s bay in South Africa, they say. How, it is not explained.

“One more time that Mozambique builds things to serve South African interests,” says Antonio Reina, regional director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

The principals of Porto Dobela Development Limited are Barry Swart and Colyn Braun. Documents show that their company was incorporated in the Isle of Mann with a capital of 2,000 pounds (3,242.20 US Dollars).

Both are tight-lipped about funding and co-investors. It would not be the World Bank. It has just approved a 100 million US Dollars to Mozambique to upgrade the port-railway systems in Maputo, Beira and Nacala.

Critics point out that Richard’s Bay is expanding. The Transvaal coal deposits of export quality are estimated to end in 20 years. Experts say 515 million US Dollars cannot build a deep sea port from zero.

Environmentalists are gearing for battle. They request that the environmental impact assessment be conducted by an independent body, such as the World Conservation Union, and to help draw its terms of reference. An inter institutional committee should monitor the process.

The port’s impact should be huge, say experts. The world’s highest vegetated dunes would suffer. So would the sand forest, home to unique butterflies, birds and plants. Pollution could kill the 7 kilometre-long coral reef, one of the southernmost in the world. Two species of turtles nest on the beaches. Wildlife habitat would be drastically reduced.

“To build a port there is madness. It is criminal,” says Reserve manager Richard Fair.

Another argument against the port are the recent findings of a study on elephants and people along the Futi river. Fred de Boer, an ecologist at the Biology Department at Eduardo Mondlane University, says 205 elephants were counted; only two were out of the Reserve. The area along the Futi is scarcely populated.

“From the perspective of both people and elephants, it is feasible to open the Futi corridor between Tembe park in KwaZulu Natal and the Reserve,” says de Boer.

The World Bank supports this idea. But the proposed railway and port cut across the Futi.

“The port would be bad for the elephants, the sand forest and the ecosystem in general. We would lose biodiversity,” says de Boer.

Porto Dobela would also affect the eco-tourism focus of the Spatial Development Initiative recently signed by South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland.

The port would be located just south of the Maputo Elephant Reserve, in the middle of Matutuine district. A national master plan designates Matutuine for conservation and eco-tourism; yet an industrial project from colonial times is resurrected.

“The port is in contradiction with the master plan,” says Helena Motta, coastal adviser at the Ministry of the Environment.

The vast area was granted in concession for eco-tourism in 1996 to American billionaire James Ulysses Blanchard III. His promised investment of 800 million US Dollars for five-star lodges and golf courses never materialised.

Last week, the Council of Ministers revoked the concession. It is not known what the government plans to do with the area.

If, in agreeing to the port, the government was sending a signal to the company to invest or divest, it also sent wrong signals for potential investors — procedural irregularities, lack of transparency and contradictions in policy. Not the best way to attract investors.

Blanchard, with his Disneyworld dreams of steam trains and floating casinos, delayed any serious tourist development in the concession. But this may turn out to be his greatest achievement. By blocking the land, Blanchard stopped both its development and its destruction.

He may go into the annals of conservation not for what he built in the Reserve, but for all that was not built, from South African time-share condominiums to an industrial port.

At stake is what kind of development does Mozambique want. It has opted to go for mega-projects, like the Mozal aluminum smelter factory. Other grandiose schemes failed for lack of funding and poor infrastructure: the settlement of Boer farmers in 220,000 hectares in Niassa province; Blanchard’s 800 million US Dollars investment.

In 1996, the government stopped a deal with the South African firm SAPPI to grow eucalyptus in Matutuine district because the area was declared for eco-tourism. Now an industrial port rears its head. But the government hastens to sign an agreement before an environmental impact assessment is made.

It appears that a group of international conservationists could step in to protect the wilderness. Maurice Strong, UN under- secretary-general and convener of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is said to be brokering the deal.

Also interested are Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation; Vance G. Martin, president of the 25-year-old Wild Foundation, and Teresa Heinz, of the Heinz Family Philantrophies associated to the multinational food giant. South African magnate Anton Rupert is believed to be keen as well.

Two weeks ago, Strong, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, with Graca Machel, wife of former South Africa President Nelson Mandela, as their guide, they toured Inhaca island.

A take over of the area by environmentalists might save it. The environmental impact assessment will throw light on the amount of damage a port would do.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE, Nov 22 1999 (IPS)

The future of southern Africa’s most pristine wilderness is uncertain. Last week, the Mozambican Council of Ministers revoked the concession of 236,000 hectares (ha) for eco-tourism granted in 1996 to American billionaire James Ulysses Blanchard III.

In March, the paraplegic Blanchard (54) died of a stroke. His estate was not keen to pursue his dream of floating casinos, five- star lodges and marinas. The heirs, however, expected to sell the concession, not to have it revoked.

It is not known what the government plans for the vast area, stretching south of Maputo to the border with Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa.

The area — an unspoiled, complex eco-system of sand dunes and sand forests, freshwater coastal lakes, savannas and wetlands, along gorgeous beaches and waters teeming with fish — is a likely candidate to be declared a World Heritage Site for its bio-diversity.

The concession was controversial from start. Blanchard, a rightwing gold magnate with ties to the conservative Heritage Foundation, supported rebel group Renamo during Mozambique’s civil war that ended in 1992.

Probably in exchange for ceasing his support to Renamo, Blanchard was awarded a 50-year renewable concession over an area the size of Mauritius, including Inhaca island and the Maputo Elephant Reserve.

Blanchard promised an 800-million-US-Dollar investment. The sum was duly incorporated in the national yearly estimates for national growth. But little materialised.

Mozambican law stipulates deadlines for investors to follow their approved plans or concessions can be revoked.

Blanchard was not prepared to fork out his own money but looked for co-investors. At one stage, his company advertised 200 plots of 0,4 ha each at 50,000 US Dollars each and 500 plots of 2ha each at 100,000 US Dollars. However, all land belongs to the state in Mozambique.

A South African consultancy prepared a fancy, expensive brochure, known as Blanchard’s Black Book. It describes a Disneyworld paradise of golf courses, luxury hotels, and even a steam train along the dunes.

Against Mozambique reality of rutted roads and non-existent infrastructure, the plan seemed out of touch. Investors were not forthcoming.

When a couple of tourist operators proposed to start with simple tented camps and thatched lodges, Blanchard declined. He wanted luxury facilities. Being wheelchair-bound, he wanted smooth, comfortable travel. Helicopters and boats would bring tourists from the capital Maputo.

Another factor that must have shaped his vision of tourism is that he always saw his domain from a helicopter or airplane. From the air, Blanchard saw a postcard. Easy to fill in a lodge here and a golf course there.

Only in late 1998 Blanchard once had ground vision, from the back of a four-wheel drive. Reserve manager Richard Fair, who organised the drive, recalls Blanchard’s elation.

The project was marred by the choice of people at Blanchard Mozambique Enterprises (BME). Its first manager, John Perrot, an oil engineer, spoke of importing lions, elephants and San people for the viewing pleasure of tourists.

The firm claims some 5 million US Dollars were invested. There is little to show for it, besides the black book.

Paradoxically, work at the Elephant Reserve picked up after Blanchard’s death. The turning point was the contract to manage the Reserve signed last December between BME and the National Directorate for Forests and Wildlife.

With this assurance, bits of money began trickling in. Never big quantities, though: for example, one week before his death, Blanchard transferred 60,000 US Dollars to the Reserve.

BME introduced 24 kudu and 14 waterbuck, supplied uniforms and radios for 43 scouts, refurbished their derelict lodgings, and set up regular anti-poaching patrols to control spotlight hunters who drive at night in their four-wheel drive vehicles from Maputo and Ponta de Ouro to shoot roebuck and wild pigs.

To protect peasants and crops from the Reserve’s 200 elephants, roughly 30 kilometres of electrified fence were erected since 1997. The fence was always a sore point with local communities, unhappy about its path. It differs from the old Reserve boundary, since Blanchard’s concession is larger.

Even before the billionaire’s death, the troubled BME was wooing a group of conservationists to become partners.

One was South African magnate Anton Rupert (82). A tobacco magnate who headed the luxury goods Rembrandt Group, Rupert’s contributions to conservation are less well known. He is president of the World Wide Fund for Nature-South Africa, and founder and chair of the Peace Parks Foundation, which wants to set up cross- border conservation areas in Southern Africa.

It appears that a group of impeccable environmental credential wants to take over.

On Nov 5, Maurice Strong, UN under-secretary-general and convener of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was in Maputo. Together with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, with Graca Machel, wife of former South Africa President Nelson Mandela, as their guide, they toured Inhaca island. Turner’s UN Foundation could step in to protect the wilderness.

Strong is said to be brokering the deal. Also interested are Vance G. Martin, president of the 25-year-old Wild Foundation, and Teresa Heinz, of the Heinz Family Philantrophies associated to the multinational food giant. Rupert is believed to be keen as well.

“We have wasted three years without developing the area,” laments Antonio Reina, regional director for the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

Blanchard did not make any use of his domain, but this had a positive effect. If he had not held the concession, the lovely wilderness might have been partitioned irresponsibly.

In July, environmentalists were shocked when the government signed an agreement to build a deep-sea port at Ponta Dobela, the jewel of the Reserve’s coast. This resurrects a project from the 1960s to channel exports of coal from the Transvaal, South Africa.

By doing nothing, Blanchard preserved the spectacular wilderness. If the conservation lobby can come up with a team, a management plan, and the government’s commitment, it will benefit local people and preserve for future generations, one of Africa’s most spectacular wilderness.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
LUANDA, Oct 5 1999 (IPS)

While the Angolan government clamps down on the independent media and the unexplained murders last month of two journalists and a Unita legislator send shivers through Luanda, the roots of Angola’s appalling disregard for human rights are uncovered in a recent report by Human Rights Watch.

In “Angola Unravels: The Rise and Fall of the Lusaka Peace Process,” researcher Alex Vines paints a horror picture of gross rights abuses committed by both warring sides, the MPLA (the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) government and rebel Unita, since the Lusaka peace protocol was signed on Nov 20, 1994.

Most appalling is that these abuses were committed while 7,000 United peacekeepers were deployed in the country to ensure compliance with Lusaka.

According to the New York-based rights watchdog, since the protocol was signed, the government has engaged in torture, disappearance, and summary execution, particularly of UNITA supporters; indiscriminate killing of civilians and pillaging during military operations; arbitrary recruitment into the military; forced displacement of civilians; harassment and censorship of the media and of political opposition.

The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) is to blame for a host of similar abuses including indiscriminate shelling of besieged cities; summary execution and torture; mutilation of the dead and living.

Since war broke out again last December, both sides are laying new landmines indiscriminately, on military targets as well as to deny food, water and safe passage to civilians.

Laying new landmines appears to be a worse offense for the government, because it signed the 1997 Ottawa convention that bans antipersonnel landmines, although the Angolan Parliament has not yet ratified it.

These human rights abuses occurred under the watchful eye of two UN peacekeeping missions, UNAVEM III, and its successor, MONUA, at a cost to the international community of 1.5 billion US Dollars.

Vines traces the origins of the problem to flaws in the peace agreement. “Human rights issues were kept as a subtext in the Lusaka Protocol, mentioned only as a commitment to general principles of human rights in the protocol’s annexes,” he writes.

At the time, Angolan non-governmental organisations (NGOs) complained bitterly that civil society had been excluded of the protocol. By privileging the warring sides and excluding civil society, an opportunity to strengthen a culture of respect for human rights and tolerance of dissent was lost.

A joint commission, comprised of UN, government and UNITA representatives, with the USA, Portugal and Russia as observers, oversaw the implementation of the Lusaka Protocol. Accord violations verified by the UN or by one of the parties were reported to the commission.

Besides flaws in the Protocol, the policies of the UN special representative, the Malian diplomat and judge Alioune Blondin Beye, come under scrutiny.

The policy can be summarised in “see no evil, speak no evil.” Beye ordered the UN to turn a blind eye and effectively sanctioned impunity toward breaches of the accords.

Human Rights Watch was told by a UN official in 1995 that “the situation is too sensitive for serious human rights monitoring. Making public what we know could undermine the peace process and put us back to war.”

On the contrary, says Human Rights Watch, better rights monitoring and reporting would have made it harder for both the government and Unita to abuse Angolans, while the UN could have pressed for accountability.

“The impunity with which rights were abused eroded confidence in the peace process and created a vicious cycle of rights abuse that steadily worsened,” says the report.

The UN human rights division in Angola carried out little serious investigative work on rights abuses, produced no publication, and discouraged journalists from talking to it.

In early 1998, with the peace process unravelling, Beye ordered a change of strategy shortly before his death in an unresolved plane crash near Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, in May. A UN report on the crash was due six months later but has not been mentioned since.

Beye’s depleted UN mission became for the first time more robust at investigating human rights violations – but it was too late to save the peace.

“The UN’s practice of ignoring the two parties’ deceptions and depredations and its own lack of transparency encouraged both parties to regard the peace process with contempt,” concludes the report.

By mid-1998, both the Angolan government and Unita had determined that war was their preferred option. Full-scale war resumed in December and is going on now. So are human rights abuses.

Angolan peasants in Unita-controlled areas are treated like medieval serfs. In the MPLA-controlled cities, peace activists, journalists and opposition politicians are harassed and intimidated. Donors and the UN keep quiet.

Human Rights Watch plans to soon launch in Luanda a Portuguese edition of the report, with updates on sanctions-busting: how Unita ilegally sells its diamonds and how both warring sides buy weapons.

Although an oil and weapons embargo was slapped on Unita in 1993, Human Rights Watch says the rebels bought weaponry from, among others, private sources in Albania and Bulgaria.

UNITA was effective in “sanctions-busting” through South Africa, Congo, Zambia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Togo and Burkina Faso.

Zaire was the major sanctions-busting gateway until the fall of President Mobutu in mid-1997. The locus then shifted to Congo- Brazzaville until late 1997, when the Angolan government helped overthrow the elected government of Pascal Lissouba.

By 1998, there were fewer sanctions-busting flights to UNITA, but not because the UN had become more effective in policing. Human Rights Watch says that, until it was too late, the UN largely turned a blind eye to violations of the 1993 embargo.

These violations could have been avoided if the UN had deployed its peacekeepers promptly and empowered them to undertake proper monitoring and reporting of ceasefire, embargo and rights violations.

“There is also an urgent need for a clean break with the past, by making Angola’s leaders accountable for their actions and cognisant of the potential penalties they face if they knowingly endorse abuses of human rights,” concludes the report.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
MALANGE, Oct 4 1999 (IPS)

Isaias Soares does not walk alone on the streets of Malange. He doesn’t go out at night at all. He is afraid of the security forces.

Soares is a radio reporter in a besieged provincial capital in war-ravaged Angola. His crime was to interview the local representative of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), who said police and soldiers were stealing food aid from starving peasants after distributions. The interview was broadcast in August by the Voice of America (VoA) in Angola.

Other aid workers in Malange testify that such theft occurs. To minimize risks, nuns advise people to go home in groups after food distribution.

Soon after the broadcast, Soares was briefly detained. He now faces criminal charges. His sources won’t talk to him. His job with Radio Nacional de Angola is on the line.

His fate is worse for being a provincial reporter. Governors run provincial capitals ruthlessly as their private fiefs. Independent views are not tolerated. “Provincial journalists are the most vulnerable,” says the director of radio Ecclesia in Luanda, Antonio Jaka.

With most provincial capitals cut off from road transport, accessible only by air, and with permanent tight police controls at the airport and access roads, journalists are virtual prisoners. A governor can easily impede a provincial reporter from leaving town.

Soares first got into trouble with the governor of Malange, Flavio Fernandes in 1997. The governor’s office banned him from free-lancing for VoA after he filed several reports criticizing the governor.

Soares, a thin, intense man, 30, with a flowing beard and a zeal for journalism since he was a cub reporter at 12, spoke to IPS at his brother’s apartment in Malange. He does not stay alone any longer for fear of being arrested without a witness.

“Angolan journalists are not free to report on what they hear, see, read or know,” says Soares.

His story is just one among many recent episodes of intimidation of the press.

His colleague, William Toneto, was detained early on Saturday by Angola’s secret police, according to fellow journalists at the bi-weekly Folha Oito newspaper in Luanda. The state has so far laid no charges against Toneto, the editor of Folha Oito.

The editor of Agora, Aguiar dos Santos, has also appeared four times, since August, at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, to answer questions about an article by French sociologist Christine Messiant about President Eduardo Dos Santos which his newspaper reprinted.

In the last six months, two Angolan journalists had their passports confiscated and 16 reported police harassment for their stories. Since 1993, seven have been killed in unexplained circumstances.

In early August, journalists from the Catholic radio Ecclesia in Luanda were detained for nine hours, the station searched and its diskettes confiscated, after the radio re-broadcast a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) interview with rebel Unita leader Jonas Savimbi.

The staff shut down the radio until their colleagues were released. Police said they should have requested permission before re-broadcasting the interview of a “war criminal”. The legal basis is a resurrected law of crimes against state security from 1978, the ruling party’s most repressive era.

“The message is not to talk too much about certain issues but we will not be intimidated,” says Jaka.

In May, BBC correspondent Lara Pawson was manhandled by three men as she got into her car in downtown Luanda. They told her it was because of reports on forced conscription of youth for the army. There are many more such examples.

In mid-August, Joao Faria, political editor of Angora, was involved in a rear collision with a car driven by plainclothes policemen. Three other cops in a patrol car pulled up and threatened Faria with arrest.

Faria believes the collision and threats were meant for him in his capacity of editor, peace activist with the Angola reflection group on peace (Garp) and author of a book-in-progress on the failures of the peace agreements signed in 1991 and 1994.

At the end of August, two journalists were mysteriously murdered in Luanda; their bodies found shot in a car. A few weeks later, a Unita Member of Parliament (MP) was found shot and killed far from his home. He had earlier attended a party for African legislators.

Whether motivated by politics or by theft, these murders show how little life is worth in Luanda, one of Africa’s most violent capitals.

Journalists work in an environment where murders remain uninvestigated and human rights abuses unpunished.

Angola has never enjoyed full press freedom. After independence, the Marxist one-party state did not tolerate dissidence. A thaw came before the elections in 1992. But, as war renewed soon after, its resumption dealt a blow for press freedom.

The next thaw came with the Lusaka peace agreement in 1994. A handful of independent and private media, mostly newsweeklies and a couple of radio stations limited to Luanda, appeared.

“With the return to war, these meaningful gains are once again threatened by censorship and intimidation,” says author Alex Vines in “Angola Unravels”, a recent report by Human Rights Watch.

In a recent letter, the Angolan union of journalists complained to the Attorney General that the National Directorate of Criminal Investigations applies undue and illegal pressure on journalists.

By law and by intimidation, the Angolan press has always been highly controlled. The law does not allow private TV station or short-wave radio stations. It also prohibits direct re- broadcasting.

In spite of the dearth of choices, Angolans are avid radio listeners. Surveys show that 80 percent of its 11 million people listen to radio, both national and international.

The national radio and TV stations are propaganda vehicles. It can be crude, like the clips flighted early this year after the evening newscasts, showing Savimbi as a war criminal, in a Wanted poster. It can be subtle, like this month’s clip: soft-focus images of unity and team work, under romantic music, like in a soft drink ad.

Naturally the government won’t relinquish its control of the airwaves. Nor will it tolerate dissent. Intimidations multiplied in 1999.

“There is generalized pressure on the independent media and generalized fear among us,” describes Antonio Jaka.

Says Human Rights Watch: “Attacks against the rights of freedom of expression and association have undermined the defense of other rights. They also delay peace and reconciliation by obstructing access to accurate information and the airing of different points of view.”

“There are some lines we can’t cross because we could be killed, jailed, harassed or fined,” says Mario Paiva, a senior journalist. “We don’t enjoy full freedom of expression.”

In the past, Paiva has received death threats by phone. He does not have a phone any longer. Beside threats, co-option and graft work. Newsweeklies, their editors and reporters can be enticed with grants, loans and trip abroad. The ruling party, led by the presidential clique, is an octopus of many tentacles. What it cannot intimidate or repress, it tries to buy.

Paiva notes that both warring sides dislike press freedom. “We are squashed between the two; threatened by the government for reporting on Unita while Unita complains we are unfair to it.”

The handful of journalists and media that resist, run risks, as Soares and Jaka well know. “Why are we arrested for informing people? We have done nothing wrong,” says Jaka. “We will continue our work.”

Press freedom is one of the first casualties in any war, and Angola is no exception.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
MALANGE, Oct 4 1999 (IPS)

Isaias Soares does not walk alone on the streets of Malange. He doesn’t go out at night at all. He is afraid of the security forces.

Soares is a radio reporter in a besieged provincial capital in war-ravaged Angola. His crime was to interview the local representative of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), who said police and soldiers were stealing food aid from starving peasants after distributions. The interview was broadcast in August by the Voice of America (VoA) in Angola.

Other aid workers in Malange testify that such theft occurs. To minimize risks, nuns advise people to go home in groups after food distribution.

Soon after the broadcast, Soares was briefly der. Governors run provincial capitals ruthlessly as their private fiefs. Independent views are not tolerated. “Provincial journalists are the most vulnerable,” says the director of radio Ecclesia in Luanda, Antonio Jaka.

With most provincial capitals cut off from road transport, accessible only by air, and with permanent tight police controls at the airport and access roads, journalists are virtual prisoners. A governor can easily impede a provincial reporter from leaving town.

Soares first got into trouble with the governor of Malange, Flavio Fernandes in 1997. The governor’s office baee-lancing for VoA after he filed several reports criticizing the governor.

Soares, a thin, intense man, 30, with a flowinhout a witness.

“Angolan journalists are not free to report on among many recent episodes of intimidation of the press.

His colleague, William Toneto, was detained early on Saturday by Angola’s secret police, according to fellow jouEduardo Dos Santos which his newspaper reprinted.

In the last six months, two Angolan journalists had their passports confiscated and 16 reported police harassment for their stories. Since 1993, seven have been killed in unexplained circumstances.

In early August, journalists from the Catholic radio Ecclesia in Luanda were detained for nine hours, the station searched and its diskettes confiscated, after the radio re-broadcast a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) interview with ssive era.

“The message is not to talk too much about certain issues but we will not be intimidated,” says Jaka.

In May, BBC correspondent Lara Pawson was manhandled by three men as she got into her car in downtown Luanda. They told her it was because of reports on forced conscription of youth for the army. There are many more such examples.

In mid-August, Joao Faria, political editor of Angora, was involved in a rear collision with a car driven by ttended a party for African legislators.

Whether motivated by politics or by theft, these murders show how little life is worth in Luanda, one of Africa’s most violent capitals.

Journalists work in an environment where murders remain uninvestigated and human rights abuses unpunished.

Angola has never enjoyed full press freedom. Ae return to war, these meaningful gains are once again threatened by censorship and intimidation,” says author Alex Vines in “Angola Unravels”, a recent report by Human Rights Watch.

In a recent letter, the Angolan union of journalists complained to the Attorney General that the National Directorate of Criminal Investigations applies undue and illegal pressure on journalists.

By law and by intimidation, the Angolan press .

The national radio and TV stations are propaganda vehicles. It can be crude, like the clips flighted early this year after the evening newscasts, showing Savimbi as a war criminal, in a Wanted poster. It can be subtle, like this month’s clip: soft-focus images of unity and team work, under romantic music, like in a soft drink ad.

Naturally the government won’t relinquish its control of the airwaves. Nor will it tolerate dissent. Intimidati “Attacks against the rights of freedom of expression and association have undermined the defense of other rights. They also delay peace and reconciliation by obstructing access to accurate information and the airing of different points of view.”

“There are some lines we can’t cross because we could be killed, jailed, harassed or fined,” says Mario Paiva, a senior journalist. “We don’t enjoy full freedom of expression.”

In the past, Paiva has received death threats iced with grants, loans and trip abroad. The ruling party, led by the presidential clique, is an octopus of many tentacles. What it cannot intimidate or repress, it tries to buy.

Paiva notes that both warring sides dislike press freedom. “We are squashed between the two; threatened by the government for reporting on Unita while Unita complains we are unfair to it.”

The handful of journalists and media that resist, run risks, as Soares and Jaka well know. “Why are we arrested for informing people? We have done nothing wrong,” says Jaka. ‘ no exception.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
LUANDA, Oct 1 1999 (IPS)

Seldom one day passes without a mention of the Eduardo dos Santos Foundation (FESA) in the evening newscast at the government-owned and sole TV station, Televisao Popular de Angola.

The foundation set up by the Angolan president hands out food, clothes and toys to poor people; restores a colonial church, a sports stadium, markets and health clinics; gives vehicles to police, wheelchairs to amputees and generators to hospitals.

It sponsors landmine, environmental and AIDS awareness programmes. It has nominated president dos Santos for the Nobel Peace prize.

For Luanda’s youth, Fesa promotes traditional dancing, step aerobics, and karate. At Christmas, a Santa Claus landed by helicopter at Fesa’s soccer school near the presidential palace of Futungo and gave toys to 300 children. A partnership with a foreign soccer club is sought, “to build our prestige and dimension overseas”.

Many Angolans wonder if there is anything Fesa will not do. And how is it possible, that, while public services in health, education, sports and culture collapse, while hospitals and schools crumble for lack of funds, Fesa steps in where the state withdraws?

A French sociologist and expert on Angola, Christine Messiant, has recently published an analysis of Fesa. She describes the foundation as “the culmination of the privatization process of the Angolan state”; a mechanism to exalt the personality cult of dos Santos and reinforce his presidential powers; to boost his clientele approach to government; and to coopt civil society and marginalise non-governmental organisations who refuse to be sucked in by the Fesa whirlwind.

The foundation has a two-pronged approach to lure the rich and powerful and to content the poor and powerless.

Luanda’s squalid suburbs, teeming with poor, unemployed, war- displaced people, are a cauldron of discontent with the economic crisis, runaway inflation, piles of rubbish, open sewage, police abuse and forced recruitment for the army.

Fesa’s programme of “recreation and distraction” in the suburbs is a way to stem popular discontent and channel energy elsewhere.

Two years ago, when the President sacked prime minister Marcolino Moco, crowds from Fesa’s favorite suburbs, Cazenga and Sambizanga, took to the streets in support of the president. Wearing Fesa T-shirts, they shouted anti-Ovimbundu slogans.

The Ovimbundu are the power base of rebel group Unita, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Moco is Ovimbundu.

This “panem et circenses” approach to keep the masses occupied was successfully used by the Brazilian military regime in the 1970s.

Angolan social scientists point to Brazil as Fesa’s ideological cradle. Fesa has opened a regional bureau in Rio. Brazilian corporate giant Odebrecht, which mines diamonds and builds infrastructure in Angola, is a member of Fesa.

A Brazilian ad agency designs Dos Santos’ media campaigns. He has reportedly bought a house in Salvador de Bahia. And unconfirmed reports say his wife has had a tummy tuck, facelift and liposuction with a famous Brazilian plastic surgeon.

Additional bureaux will be opened wherever “there are friends and potential collaborators,” says the Fesa magazine.

“Does that mean where Angola buys weapons?” asks wryly an Angolan social scientist who requested anonymity.

Some academics, young professionals, high society ladies, industry captains and their wives are seduced with cocktails, seminars, study trips and funding for their pet projects. At least one foreign NGO, Danish Aid People to People (DAPP), works with Fesa.

The first lady, Ana Paula dos Santos, often appears on TV in DAPP projects. Set up quietly in 1996, Fesa began its triumphal build up in 1997. No better symbol than its headquarters in the posh Miramar neighborhood, a colonial mansion assigned to rebel Unita leader Jonas Savimbi during the elections in 1992. Riddled with bullets during the battle of Luanda after Savimbi rejected elections results, it was lavishly restored.

At its inauguration in August, the Who is Who of Luanda’s business elite sipped champagne and shook the president’s hand against a background of donated cars and computers.

Fesa’s general assembly reads like a roll call of big business: South African diamond giant De Beers, Portuguese construction companies, banks, oil companies, and parastatals like oil company Sonangol, diamond concern Endiama, Angola telecoms and the national airline.

Messiant sees Fesa as an offshoot of the growing concentration of power and wealth since 1992. Such concentration is boosted by the alliance of foreign economic groups, anxious to guarantee their investments, with a new nomenclature of Angolan rulers, namely, the presidential clique, top police officials, army supremos, legislators and ministers, and far lower, the party hierarchy.

According to the magazine, in 1998 the general assembly contributed 1.5 million US Dollars, yet Fesa carried out projects worth 6 million US Dollars.

How was this accomplished? Partnerships, says Fesa. Messiant points to a special partner — the Angolan state. Many Fesa projects featured on prime TV are done through ministries (rehabilitation of infrastructure, vaccination campaigns, etc). It is never said how much the state invests and how much Fesa does, but Fesa takes credit.

Hushed-up critics in Luanda argue that Fesa is usurping roles and functions of the state.

As Fesa grows and its omnivorous programme takes over more areas of public life, from soccer to science, its generous funding weaves a web of vested interests and dependency.

Sectors of civil society that presented a challenge, a “dissident” view to dos Santos (NGOs, churches, human rights and free press monitors) are effectively marginalised – if not coopted.

Even some MPLA members suspect Fesa is a scheme to marginalise the ruling party, which is embedded in the state machinery. By presiding over the demise of the state while promoting Fesa, dos Santos neutralises the POpular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) sphere of influence and any challenges to his powers that could emerge within.

In the days of one-party state, there was no life outside the MPLA. Today, can there be anything outside Fesa? Where are the limits between Fesa and the state, between the private and public status of dos Santos? Except for the independent press, critics are muted. Many find Fesa a scandal but its events are generously endowed and well attended.

Says Mario Paiva, a journalist with the independent weekly newspaper Agora: “It is an absolute scandal that Fesa grows and rises using public money.”

There are few job opportunities in Angola’s ruined economy: who is going to turn one down?

So Fesa balloons, in a disorganised, unplanned way, doing everything from charity to technical seminars. A recent one focused on social communication and marketing as tools to promote tourism. Given that Angola has zero tourism – war zones, filthy cities and collapsed infrastructure seldom pull in visitors – its usefulness is at best doubtful.

Worse, while one million Angolan starve and shelling kills many, Fesa indulged in its peak annual extravaganza, the FESA week, built around the President’s 57th birthday on Aug 28.

A Brazilian TV star, Tais Duarte, was flown in for the week. She plays Xica da Silva in a soap Angolans love to watch. Dos Santos danced with Xica, toasted with champagne and blew the candles on a lovely cake, 2 metres long by 1 metre wide, decorated as three soccer fields with tiny sugar players.

At the Karl Marx theater, a symposium attended by 1,700 people discussed “How to overcome hunger and misery in Angola.”

On Aug 28, while dos Santos danced and toasted, Unita shelled the Angolan city of Huambo. Arriving at the party, dos Santos was asked how he felt, having one more year of age, one more year of war.

“I feel good; I feel strong, and I feel confident we will find the road to peace,” he replied.

Along that bumpy road, dos Santos, in office since 1979, has become a master manipulator in the attempt to control the party, the army, the state and civil society. Fesa is his tool.

Excerpt:

By Mercedes Sayagues
LUANDA, Sep 25 1999 (IPS)

On the outskirts of Angola’s besieged provincial capitals, squalid camps are springing up to house hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants.

In one camp in Huambo, 15,000 people live in crowded tents, covered in the dry season’s reddish dust, among the ruins of an abandoned soap factory.

From the hills around Kuito, straw and mud settlements overlook the ruins of a once prosperous colonial city. In Malanje, 10,000 families are building basic grass and straw shelters sprawled along the road to Luanda, 20 kms out of town.

One million people are displaced by fighting in Angola’s war- ravaged hinterland. Many fled when rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) attacked their villages.

Others were told by the government to clear out disputed areas, whether for their own protection, or to deprive UNITA of food, information, recruits, wives and porters.

Much of the hinterland is a no-go area, where the state can neither rule nor protect its citizens from marauders. The safe perimeter around provincial capitals hovers between 20-40 kms.

Provincial towns, emptied of their residents who fled to the coast, have filled up with starving peasants. They are thin, ragged and shell-shocked. And they have never been as destitute, never before in Angola’s 25-year-old civil war, Africa’s second longest after Sudan’s.

“They have nothing left, only what they are wearing,” says Jenny McMahon, a nutritionist with the Red Cross in Huambo, located in Angola’s central highlands. “Everything has been looted.”

When people flee their villages, their homes are stripped bare. Doors, window frames, mats and cooking pots, and the crops in the fields are looted by armed men from both warring sides and by the waves of hungry, displaced people.

During the 1993-94 war, some cassava could be found in the fields around the towns. Not now. The displaced are wholly dependent on food aid flown in by relief agencies. Having missed the short planting season in February, they will need food aid until the next harvest in March next year.

The needs of the estimated three million people in UNITA- controlled areas, where no NGOs work and there is no access, are not known.

This month, the World Food Programme (WFP) plans to distribute 13,000 tonnes of food to 900,00 people across the country. In Huambo, the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) is giving food, seeds and tools to 85,000 families, both displaced and residents.

For locals are not better off than the displaced. They are selling the roofs of their houses to buy food at high prices in the market. “The roof is the last asset they have,” says McMahon.

“For the first time, the coping mechanisms are lost,” says Marjorie Martin, head of the ICRC.

In Malange, 350 kms east of Luanda, the Angolan NGO Adra had successfully resettled communities of people who fled the war in 1992 and 1994. They planted large areas, the rains were good, and the cassava, beans and maize were growing beautifully.

But the war restarted last December. Malange was shelled almost daily since January. Waves of people from the countryside arrived. The last food distribution took place in mid-May.

No more food aid got into the city until the end of July. Like a swarm of locusts, the hungry took everything they found in the fields. Now the resettled are as hungry as the displaced.

Domingos Lourenco looks desolately at 130 hectares he and his fellow villagers planted, which is now empty.

“It is so frustrating to see our work undone again and again,” says Adra’s representative in Malange, Roque Goncalves. “When we do our end of year balance, it feels like we have achieved nothing.”

Francesco Strippoli, director of the WFP and of the UN humanitarian effort, speaks of “the sense of despair in continuing operating without seeing light at the end of the tunnel.”

Briefing the UN Security Council on Aug. 23 , four heads of UN agencies pleaded for countrywide access for humanitarian aid. But this entails talking to UNITA, and the government is adamant it will not.

“There is no way the Angolan government will start new negotiations with somebody who did not abide by previous agreements,” said Deputy Minister for External Affairs, Georges Rebelo Chicoty, in Luanda last week.

Savimbi, on the other hand, in a recent radio interview with the BBC, downplayed the humanitarian catastrophe looming in Angola. “Humanitarian priorities are not high on anybody’s agenda,” says a senior aid official.

The Red Cross has kept nutritional records in Huambo since 1984. At 30 percent, malnutrition has never been so bad, not even in drought years, not even in the lean season, not even under UNITA’s bloody occupation of Huambo in 1993-94, not in any previous phase of Angola’s civil war.

The ICRC has supplied seeds and tools to the displaced. One km down from the dusty, crowded camp, people are growing vegetables by a stream. That will help a bit, but it is no long-term solution for Huambo’s 200,000 displaced peasants.

In Malange, swollen by 150,000 displaced people, Medecins Sans Frontieres estimate that 50,000 children are malnourished, and a quarter of these suffer severe malnutrition.

At a food distribution camp in Malange, six ‘sobas’ or traditional chiefs, oversee the distribution of food aid to their people. They stand with dignity in front of the crowd. In the khaki coloured jackets and caps with a shiny badge provided by the government, they look a bit like railway conductors.

According to the eldest among them, soba Banda Ngunza, 63, late last year, after an attack by UNITA that left many dead, among them four sobas, they were told by the government to leave their villages in the municipio of Kiwabo Nzoya, 100 kms east of Malange towardas the diamond-rich Lundas.

“We lived well in our village. We had everything. We didn’t need food aid. Now we are poor,” says Ngunza.

Why does the war continue? “Too many diamonds. Everybody wants them,” he answers.

And what does the soba and the 66 families under his rule want? “We are tired. We want the war to stop and to go back to our village.”

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