By Terna Gyuse
NAIROBI, Nov 29 2018 (IPS)

Sabine Jessen is the National Director of the Oceans Program for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. Speaking to IPS at the Sustainable Blue Economy Conference in Nairobi, she argues that we first need to figure out what we need to conserve, before we think about what resources we can still use without threatening the ecosystems we need to preserve.

Farm owner Kindness Paradza (r) with farm manager Brian Ngwenya (l). Experts say that although support for smallholder African farmers has increased, they still need better access to markets. Credit: Stanley Kwenda/IPS

By Terna Gyuse
ARUSHA, Tanzania, Sep 28 2012 (IPS)

Investment in rural infrastructure and support for Africa’s millions of small-scale farmers have increased in the past decade. But as these farmers begin to see increased yields, the question of better access to markets comes to the fore.

Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, says rural Africa is ripe for investment, presenting unprecedented opportunities.

“Africa has the world’s fastest-growing population and the highest rate of urbanisation in the world. The middle class is growing across the continent, driving up demand for food,” Nwanze told delegates at the 2012 African Green Revolution Forum taking place in Arusha, Tanzania Sep. 26-28.

African governments, their development partners and agribusiness people agree that the keys to increased production include better seed and fertiliser, as well as improved infrastructure like roads and irrigation.

But many small-scale producers lack storage, processing or transport facilities to get what they harvest off their farms. One of the ways that private sector investment can connect these smallholders to markets is through outgrower schemes, in which a company contracts with small farmers to supply agricultural produce.

In Mozambique, Olam International, an India-based multinational agribusiness company that does business with two million farmers across two dozen African countries and beyond, is busy developing an outgrower scheme on a giant 20-year, 850,000 hectare concession it has secured not far from the port of Beira.

“There was nothing there four years ago,” M. D. Ramesh, the company’s manager for East Africa operations, told IPS. “Now we have 60,000 farmers working on 60,000 hectares.”

Olam provides farmers with credit, seed and fertiliser, and then buys their harvest when it comes in.

The initial problem was that many smallholders had no clue how to grow cotton. Olam organised mobile demonstrations to train locals to grow the crop. The results, said Ramesh, are not yet optimal, but harvests are up from 300 kilogrammes per hectare at the start, six years ago, to 600 kg/ha now. To put this in perspective, Olam’s more experienced outgrowers in Zimbabwe routinely harvest 1,200 kgs of seed cotton per hectare.

“Realise that we’re working with no infrastructure, no telephones, no banking – so everything is a cash transaction: it’s a challenge,” said Ramesh.

But he is confident that by 2015, 100,000 hectares will have been brought into production, with 120,000 farmers producing 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes of seed cotton a year, which will be worth some 40 million dollars after processing.

“The largest risk with small-scale farmers is that when you give credit, there’s no recourse if something goes wrong… and it often does go wrong, but over time a mutual dependence develops between both sides,” Ramesh said.

Carter Coleman, CEO of Agrica, operates a very different company – on a very different scale – in Tanzania, but he agrees on the subject of risk. “Agriculture is capital-intensive, high-risk, and provides returns over the long term. Many investors hear that and head for the door.”

Not Coleman. Agrica was founded in 2005, with a vision of setting a standard for sustainable, commercial agriculture in East Africa. Its only project so far is the 5,800-hectare Kilombero rice plantation in Tanzania, established on the long-abandoned site of a joint Tanzania-North Korea farm project.

Kilombero Plantations Limited or KPL is a state-of-the art facility practicing zero tillage, airborne fertilisation, water-efficient central pivot irrigation and a mill, powered by a mini-hydro plant – all in line with the philosophy of its owners, Agrica.

But it is also working to help 5,000 of its smallholder neighbours shift from subsistence to surplus production by 2016.

Two years ago, KPL brought in an expert from India to train a handful of their neighbours, small-scale farmers in the Kilombero Valley, in the Smallholder System for Rice Intensification.

The techniques, developed years ago by a Jesuit priest in Madagascar, involve systematically planting carefully-chosen seeds on a 25 x 25 centimetre grid; this allows farmers to triple their yields, while reducing the amount of seed used, as well as the time needed to plant and weed the fields.

Fifteen farmers were trained, each testing the new methods out for themselves for a season on just 30 x 30 metres. It worked brilliantly, and the next year 365 more families were trained – with members of the initial group each expanding their SRI-planted area to about half a hectare.

The increased volumes of rice caused a bottleneck at harvest time – there were simply not enough neighbours to hire to bring in the harvest.

“We brought in two mini combine harvesters from Vietnam to help. Each one can harvest an acre in three hours, which would take three days by hand,” Coleman said. “And it’s 20 percent cheaper for the farmer. Now we want a bunch more.”

The outgrowers are happy, but KPL is for the moment a victim of its outgrowers’ success. The company buys the unprocessed rice at market prices, but while the price for paddy rice has doubled since last year to 466 dollars per tonne, the going rate for milled rice that KPL sells has risen by only about 40 percent, leaving the company with no margin on what it eventually delivers to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital.

Coleman also explained several ways that poor infrastructure hurts the company. Hauling fuel in over the unpaved road that links the Kilombero Valley to the outside world during the rains is a nightmare.

“We can’t bring a tanker in. We have to transfer it to barrels, and load them onto a cart hitched to a tractor. And we need to send another tractor along to pull the first one out of the mud when it gets stuck. It’s like a scene out of World War I.”

At one point during the rainy season last year, the road was completely impassable, cutting the valley’s thousands of inhabitants off from the outside for two months.

KPL and its outgrowers alike could use better support for agricultural research – to guard against pests, for example.

Outgrowers can also be subjected to a punitive five percent levy on their turnover by the district authority, though farmers get nothing tangible in return. The levy can wipe out an entire year’s profit.

“Everyone talks about government commitment, but the top-level commitment doesn’t translate down through the inert bureaucracy to deliver what’s been promised,” Coleman said.

Addressing a plenary session earlier on Sep. 27, Nwanze said that despite increasing attention and investment, he saw the situation with Africa’s agriculture sector as a case of the glass being half empty.

“Where are Africa’s roads, water supply, electrification, storage facilities to reduce post-harvest losses? Where is the good governance to manage increased levels of funding?” he asked.

“The idea that the glass is half full leads to complacency and sometimes to mental paralysis. So I’m not going to tell you how well we have done or are doing. I’m going to challenge you to do more.”

By Terna Gyuse and Isaiah Esipisu
ARUSHA, Tanzania, Sep 27 2012 (IPS)

African leaders should take note of the lessons learned from the Arab Spring and realise that ensuring good governance and food security will avoid crises on the continent, says Kofi Annan, chairman of the Africa Green Revolution Alliance.

The former United Nations Secretary General said that food shortage was one of the triggers of the protests in North African and Middle-Eastern countries that lead to the ousting of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011 and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in February that same year.

Annan was speaking at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) being held in Arusha, Tanzania from Sep. 26 to 28. One of the forum outcomes is to develop concrete action plans for growing Africa’s agricultural sector and to promote food security on the continent.

“These are people who wanted to have a real say, on how they are governed, and by whom. They also wanted to play a role in their own political system,

“I think that if African leaders were to pay attention and understand that democratic systems have to work in Africa, we have to accept democratic rotation periodically and listen to the people and the civil society. With this we may avoid crises that we have witnessed in Africa. Remember, it is not just food, it is about food and political systems,” said Annan.

Several hundred delegates – representing African governments, U.N. and donor agencies, and transnational agribusiness companies like Yara and Cargill – have gathered in Arusha, Tanzania, to discuss the transformation of Africa’s agriculture. Even some of Africa’s farmers are present.

Agricultural and economic analysts at the forum told IPS that food security in Africa can be assured only if countries work and trade together without restrictions.

“The East African region has a huge potential for agricultural development. The only enabling environment to ensure that there is food security, is to harmonise policy issues in order to avoid bans on exportation of agricultural goods, and to avoid imposition of unaffordable levies,” Anne Mbaabu, the director for the Market Access Programme at AGRA, told IPS.

“We also need to harmonise grades and standards so that they are the same in all the five countries that form the East African Community (EAC). Yet, this will only succeed after putting in place proper infrastructure in terms of ports, roads and railway lines,” she said.

Tanzanian Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives Christopher Chiza, echoed her sentiments.

Kofi Annan (r), chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Melinda Gates (l), co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, from their visit to rural cassava farmers and a commercial village dedicated to cassava processing near Arusha, Tanzania.Courtesy: AGRF

“It is important to note that with security concerns, it is not easy for neighbouring countries to trade easily even if your neighbour is in a deep food crisis,” he said referring to the situation in Somalia, which made it difficult for humanitarian organisations to deliver food aid during the recent famine that hit the Horn of Africa region.

However, Chiza noted that there are still bottlenecks that the EAC must deal with before opening borders for uncontrolled import and export markets in the region.

“Political environments in our countries are an existing trade barrier. We need a fair amount of trust. One of the things many people are talking of is nationalisation of land and other agricultural resources in Tanzania. We should make it easy for people to invest in our countries without problems. There is also need for a common currency within the region, and many other complicated issues that must be sorted out within member countries before we finally unite,” he said.

The focus of the forum, said Annan, is to push on past a tipping point in scaling up the transformation of African agriculture.

“In the past, African governments did not focus on agriculture, but today it presents an opportunity to feed, employ and create global food security,” he said, adding that the goal is to support African smallholders’ transition from subsistence farming to running their farms as businesses, producing a surplus for sale.

Africa has the majority of the world’s viable but uncultivated land. And the land that is being farmed is under-utilised. The key to securing the rural livelihoods, strengthening food security, and Africa taking up its proper place in the global food system includes investments in rural infrastructure, expanding the adoption of better seed, fertiliser and techniques by Africa’s farmers, large and small.

“This is what we need,” Annan said. “To make sure farmers are well-organised and given the knowledge and support to play their full part in transformation.”

Annan addressed journalists alongside Melinda Gates, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of AGRA’s major supporters.

Gates said her foundation’s agriculture strategy always starts with thinking of farmers’ goals, and how to make investments to support these.

“Smallholder farmers are incredible engineers,” said Gates. “They have the difficult task of running smallholder farms.”

She spoke about the way in which farmers she has met across Africa prioritise things like education and nutrition for their children, carefully assessing their options to try to create a surplus despite the challenges.

“Farmers need to be connected to larger market and not put their produce on market when price is low so that they can earn better incomes,” she said.

In order to ensure farmers are able to take advantage of changes in the countryside, AGRA and others are encouraging small-scale farmers to form collectives and associations to amplify their voices and efforts.

“Agriculture offers us the real opportunity not only to feed ourselves, but also to create employment opportunities for young people and make living in rural areas comfortable,” said Annan.

Critics call it “the Secrecy Bill”. And it comes at a time when several African countries are adopting promising new legislation on access to information. But campaigners say South Africa’s draft Protection of Information Bill represents a step backwards.

The Right2Know Campaign will march on Sep. 17 to parliament in protest against the Secrecy Bill. Credit: Davison Makanga

Intended to replace an apartheid-era law on official secrets, the Protection of Information Bill has faced severe criticism from opposition parties, journalists and ordinary citizens. They have challenged the broad powers initially granted government to classify information as secret and a vague definition of “national interest” that justifies classification.

Under sustained public pressure, the government heavily revised the bill, but campaigners remain opposed to the lack of a public interest defence for disclosing secret information and the retention of draconian penalties for even possessing information deemed sensitive.

The bill stipulates that jail sentences of up to 15 years will be handed to anyone who possesses information relating in any way to any aspect of the security services. It also proposes jail sentences of as long as 25 years for anyone accessing classified information.

“Even though the committee added limited whistleblower protections, many other clauses remain under which they could be prosecuted,” says Sithembile Mbete, a member of Right2Know Campaign, a civil society coalition created to oppose the bill.

On Saturday, the campaign will march to parliament in Cape Town in protest; a candlelight vigil is planned for Sep. 20, the night before the bill is expected to be tabled in the legislature.

Elsewhere on the continent, there are positive signals that governments are embracing principles of freer access to information. Nigeria adopted a progressive freedom of information law in 2010; Uganda passed an Access to Information Act in 2005 and in 2010 the country debated the Whistle Blowers Protection Bill 2010, which aimed to create an enabling environment for citizens to freely disclose information on corrupt or improper conduct in public and private sectors.

In Kenya, activists and lawyers are pushing government departments to bring in changes to comply with its new constitution, which grants citizens access to information held by the state.

Paul Waihenya, a journalist based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, says the new constitution’s provisions on access to information represent a giant leap forward by the government in terms of transparency and accountability. But he points to a recent instruction from the Ministry of Internal Security warning local authorities against speaking to the media, after a local official in the north told the press about the severe famine gripping parts of the country.

“The interdiction move against the chief who gave (the press) information about his community is a reminder that this right to access information is not (yet) absolute,” he told IPS.

Other observers say it is still impossible to get vital details of public finances or the release of official reports into corruption investigations. Court action has been launched to challenge delayed responses to access to information requests as well as to fees that are an obstacle to ordinary citizens’ access to information such as land ownership records and vehicle registrations.

But Laura Neuman, project manager for the Carter Center’s Access to Information Project, sees signs of progress on the continent. She points to the central role played by Liberian civil society – actively supported by her centre – in the drafting of that country’s new Freedom of Information Act.

She told IPS by phone from Washington that this engagement will help to ensure that the legislation will have positive impacts in ordinary people’s lives.

“It’s a myth to think these are laws for the media or the elite, because frankly those groups already have access to information,” she says.

“We have seen (access to information laws) used in transformative ways all over the world.

“We’ve seen people use it to promote their educational rights in various countries. We’ve seen it used around health care. We’ve seen it used to protect children in orphanages. There’ve been hosts of great uses of the right to information to protect the environment,” Neuman said.

She says an essential component of expanding rights is to establish processes by which governments provide information – and where they fail, to give citizens a clear and accessible way to demand it.

It is ironic that South Africa is moving in precisely the opposite direction.

“The pending enactment of the Protection of Information Bill means South Africa has lost its leadership on matters of advancing the right to information on the African continent,” says Mukelani Dimba of the Open Democracy Advice Centre in Cape Town.

“In the decade since the adoption of South Africa’s freedom of information (FOI) law, the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA), South Africa had been an important reference point for other countries on the continent to draw lessons from regarding the operationalisation of the right of access to information in the context of a developing African country,” he says.

Dimba says good legislation has not been matched by implementation. The Right2Know Campaign’s Mbete agrees.

“The problem is that in many ways PAIA hasn’t been quite functional and the implementation of the act has been problematic,” Mbete says.

“The majority of requests for information actually go unanswered, which is effectively to refuse them. And there’s been no independent appeal mechanism created in terms of PAIA, so the only way to dispute a denial of access or refusal to give information is to go to the court which is a mechanism that is not available to most South Africans.”

On the 20th anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration – issued by African print journalists in 1991 to assert that a free press is a fundamental human right, and essential to democracy – journalists, bloggers, information campaigners and government officials will be meeting in Cape Town from Sep. 17 to 19 to launch the African Platform on Access to Information.

The conference will advance the idea that governments hold information as custodians of the public good, and everyone has a right to access this information via clearly defined rules.

Dimba has advice for campaigners seeking to go beyond setting out principles and passing legislation. “African access to information (ATI) activists and advocates need to move away from their fixation with adoption of Freedom of Information laws in Africa,” she told IPS.

“African governments will not be open and transparent simply because of adoption of such laws: this is a lesson that we should learn from South Africa.”

She argues that African countries will transform themselves into open societies by adopting effective information practices.

“This means the FOI movement and the open data movement have to start working closely together. Kenya provides an important opportunity on how to use information and communications technology to promote better access to information. Through the M-PESA, Ushahidi platforms and the recently launched Transparency Portal, Kenya is showing the rest of the continent how to exploit ICTs to create opportunities for the exchange, sharing and transferring of information for socio-economic development and all of this has been done without an access to information law in place.”

*Miriam Gathigah in Nairobi contributed to this report.

Members of the emerging economy grouping known as IBSA – India, Brazil and South Africa – have joined China and Russia in opposing measures against Syria.

“The South African government is of the view that the Syrian issue is best resolved by the Syrians themselves and they must be given space to do so,” South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation spokesperson Saul Kgomotso Molobi told IPS. “The Syrian government has indicated that it has been and continues to take reforms to open up the political space.”

Molobi said the international community’s positions are informed by the interests of the leading countries rather than a desire for change in the Middle East. “The examples are Bahrain and Yemen, where despite repression there were no attempts to seriously sanction and weaken the regime. In the case of the former, all was done to bolster it through military support from the Gulf Cooperation Council.”

IBSA appears keen to play an independent role. On Aug. 10, a delegation with representatives from all three countries met with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian foreign minister, Walid Al- Moualem.

At the meeting, the Syrian government again outlined its assertion that the protests stem from three disparate sources – academics and intellectuals pushing for democratic reforms, sections of the population responding to economic hardship and repression in particular regions of the country, and militants fighting to overthrow the government.

Assad acknowledged that “mistakes” had been made in the government’s response to the protests and repeated his claim to be committed to reform, offering as evidence proposed new laws he says will steer the country towards multi-party democracy in consultation with the citizenry.

“The Syrian government has indicated that it has been and continues to take reforms to open up the political space,” said Molobi. “It also wants to open up the economic space. This will be achieved through various laws that are being passed, such as the multi-party law, the media law and others. A national dialogue forum has been started although it has not attracted the attention of the country as a whole. The government would like to see an elected parliament that would continue the reform process.”

Molobi said South Africa and IBSA condemned violence – “by all parties” – but conceded there has been little sign of restraint by the Syrian government since the meeting – which shelled Latakia with tanks and gunboats on Aug. 14.

“We regret the escalation of violence and call on all parties to exercise restraint since an all-out conflict will be a disaster for all,” said Molobi.

University of Cape Town political scientist Zwelethu Jolobe said IBSA’s position should be seen to some degree as a reaction to the slowly growing international response to the Syrian crisis: “Everyone is giving their two cents and they probably felt they should too.”

He said that South Africa’s previous engagement with Syria was limited to a pair of bilateral agreements on trade and education, signed over the past two years as part of South African President Jacob Zuma’s administration’s broader activity in the Middle East.

South Africa’s calculations on Syria’s present crisis, he argued, are primarily informed by the significant roles each country plays with respect to the Palestinian Authority. South Africa’s ruling African National Congress Party has strong ties with the ruling West Bank party Fatah, dating back to the days of the anti-apartheid struggle and extending to financial and political support at present.

Syria has been a strong backer of Fatah’s sometime-rival Hamas, offering financial, military and political backing as well as hosting the party’s political bureau in Damascus.

“South Africa cannot afford to have Assad’s government completely implode – it upsets a delicate regional balance with extremely high stakes, within which South Africa has invested an enormous amount of historical, emotional, political and financial resources,” Jolobe said.

The relationship between Syria and Hamas is under strain, in part due to Syria’s internal crisis. The Palestinian party has refused to make a public show of support for the Assad government and a Palestinian neighbourhood in Latakia was among those which came under attack by state security this week.

Hamas is actively exploring relocating its offices to Cairo – a country with which Jolobe says South Africa has invested far more time cultivating close ties recently.

Asked whether, given the history of international support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the ANC government’s affirmation of Syria’s “sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity” was somewhat implausible, Molobi responded, “The situation in Syria has different aspects to it and violence is the sad part of it. This has been perpetrated by government and non-government groups with serious results. There are no short cuts and a proper Syrian process is the only hope to bring peace in Syria and no outsiders can do this.”

While highlighting the uneven responses by the U.S. and European countries to uprisings and violent state repression across the Middle East this year is important, the people who have not retreated from the streets even after months of repression surely require more from South Africa and its IBSA partners.

Friday saw the close of another deadly week in the five-month-old uprising in Syria. Activists documenting protests from within the country said demonstrations took place in several parts of the country; security forces are again accused of firing on protesters, killing at least 10.

The protests, which activists inside the country say involved thousands of people in the capital Damascus, the eastern city of Deir ez-Zour, the southern province of Daraa, and the port city of Latakia, came a day after the European Union and the United States called for Assad to step aside.

Speaking on Syrian state television on Sunday, Assad rejected calls to step aside, while announcing multi-party elections for parliament would be held in February. A U.N. humanitarian mission finally on the ground in Syria was greeted by protesters calling for Assad to step down in the city of Homs; according to the Local Co-ordination Committees, security forces opened fire once the team had left.

Only six sub-Saharan African countries have failed to reduce the number of women dying in childbirth over the last two decades. High-spending South Africa is among them, with maternal mortality rates more than quadrupling since 1990. Human Rights Watch researcher Agnes Odhiambo says this is largely due to a lack of accountability.

Maternal mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole have been reduced by a quarter compared to 1990 levels. But the continent’s most developed economy is moving in the opposite direction: South Africa’s maternal mortality rate in 1990 was 150 per 100,000 live births; in its 2010 MDG progress report, the country reported this had risen to 625 per 100,000.

“HIV is a big factor in maternal mortality in South Africa,” says Odhiambo, adding that improved reporting means deaths that might have gone unrecorded in the past have also been added to the total.

“But even with all that, the kind of negligence that is happening in our facilities… from what women were saying, substandard care is a big problem and that is an issue that we truly have to think about.”

Health workers failing patients

The survey, ‘Stop Making Excuses: Accountability for Maternal Health Care in South Africa’, reveals a picture of serious neglect, including women in labour being sent home from hospitals without being examined, women ignored or made to wait for hours – even days – by nurses when they asked for help, women being physically and verbally abused by staff, and others forced to change their own sheets or carry their newborns around the hospital while still weak from giving birth. Women with HIV and those from other parts of Africa also reported experiencing discrimination.

“For me, that is failing women,” says Odhiambo. “You fail women when a woman loses her baby and you don’t even bother to explain to her what caused the death of that baby… Or when women are made to clean up their own blood, or when women are forced to sleep (in the same bed) with their baby barely three hours after a c-section, when they’re not yet strong enough.”

The provincial secretary for the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) in the Eastern Cape, Xolani Malamlela, acknowledged that health workers’ performance sometimes falls short, but said the union’s assessment is that the problem begins with poor management of health institutions.

Malamlela says that health workers are frequently overworked and are not always paid on time, leading to a demoralisation of staff. He also says procurement policies that have centralised control of stocks of medicine and equipment in the provincial capital have deprived individual hospitals of the capacity to manage vital supplies.

“But we cannot deny that you might here and there find those reckless staff… and we must also play our part in encouraging our members not to deal with patients in a very reckless manner,” he says.

Managers failing patients and health workers

Odhiambo’s report is critical of a failure to act on complaints – not only in sanctioning individual health workers but in recognising system-wide problems that contribute to abuse and neglect. She points out that South Africa’s health authorities are negligent on another level, in failing to collect appropriately detailed information about maternal mortality that would guide policy.

The country has not conducted a Demographic and Health Survey since 2003, for example. Cost is cited as the reason for the delay, but countries with lesser resources have more up-to-date statistics.

“Our health systems are challenged,” says Marion Stevens, a midwife and member of Women in Sexual and Reproductive Rights and Health. She says the main factor in maternal deaths is HIV/AIDS, but argues that the national health department’s focus on the pandemic is poorly executed.

“Accountability is an important issue, because it asks the question why. With all the resources that are being spent on AIDS, why are we not looking also at women’s health, and in particular at maternal mortality as a related issue?”

The focus on AIDS, she says, has come at the cost of considering a continuum of health care. For example, women are told not to go for antenatal care until they are 20 weeks’ pregnant because clinics are overwhelmed by other demands.

“So for women who are ill when they’re pregnant, if they want to get well, or if they are HIV-positive, or if they want to choose to have an abortion, then they essentially come in very very late, and that’s problematic.”

Stevens says the health department has designed a powerful new strategy for sexual and reproductive health rights which provides for greater accountability and integrating issues of HIV and AIDS into a holistic view of women’s health, but since it was completed in May, the document has been sitting on someone’s desk.

Restoring accountability

Odhiambo says that South Africa’s health system lacks adequate monitoring by patients. “A lot of monitoring of what is going on has been done from a provider point of view, but I think there’s a need to bring in patients to say what is not working for them.”

She envisions that this could help to break down the barrier between health workers and users of the system. “Health workers are feeling targeted by this notion of patient complaints, but they’re feeling targeted because the mechanism is not being used in the way it should.

“If patient complaints are implemented properly, then health users and health workers should be friends, because health users are complaining about the problems they’re facing in different facilities, as are health workers and nurses, so the two can really join forces and push the government to make the changes needed so that you’ve got happy users and happy providers.”

By Joshua Kyalimpa and Terna Gyuse
KAMPALA, Jun 14 2011 (IPS)

GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccinations and Immunisation, secured pledges of 4.3 billion dollars from donors in London on Jun. 13 with the aim of securing funding to ensure life-saving vaccinations for every child on the planet.

As many as two million children – overwhelmingly in low-income countries – die each year from diseases which could be prevented by vaccinations such as pneumonia and diarrhoea. GAVI’s programmes have already immunised well over a quarter million children in the past 10 years, and if the pledges from the London conference are honoured, the money will allow the alliance to reach a further 243 million by 2015.

Entering an age of immunisation

Thanks in large part to GAVI, the past decade has seen renewed attention to developing vaccines against diseases affecting the world’s poorest, including meningitis, pneumococcal disease and malaria.

Among the organisations whose investments have supported a breakthrough in prevention of one of the world’s most dangerous diseases is the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI), a global programme of the independent non-governmental organisation PATH.

Malaria vaccines are a long-overdue means to prevent infection and work towards eradication of the disease. The eradication of malaria in the developed world has been cited as one reason developing a vaccine previously received little attention from pharmaceutical companies or government research facilities.

The debut of a first vaccine against malaria, for example, could now be less than five years away – final testing is under way in seven countries.

Yet developing an effective vaccine is only part of the challenge – effectively integrating it into public health will require careful planning and execution.

The recent history of Africa’s immunisation programmes – from the re-emergence of polio in West and Central Africa, to the persistence of meningitis and infant pneumonia – is littered with promising solutions that have failed to have the expected impact. Against a background of poverty and conflict, vaccination campaigns have been hampered by weak infrastructure, insufficient staff or funding, and even popular resistance to vaccinations.

Across the continent, there is new attention to the practical requirements of effective immunisation campaigns. Dr Seraphine Adibaku, head of Uganda’s malaria control programme, says his country has already started raising popular awareness of the coming availability of a malaria vaccine, with the most recent meeting of officials from the ministry of health and developers of the vaccine and other stake holders held in May.

“We are conscious not to cause excitement because it can lead to undesirable consequences but we have to tell the people that a vaccine could be here sooner than later,” says Adibaku.

Uganda is banking on using infrastructure like ware houses and refrigerators from the Uganda National Expanded Program on Immunisation, which is already in place and has been used on previous immunisation programmes, to roll out the malaria vaccine. Adibaku says training will be given to vaccinators on handling the new vaccine with funding from GAVI, all of which shall be in line with the national vaccination policy.

Adibaku has questions about the vaccine: “We do not know yet for how long the vaccine will offer protection. Do you get protection for six months, one year, or for the rest of your life? These are some on the questions not answered yet.”

He says for a vaccine to be effective, it should offer a high level of protection – between 80 and 90 percent – provide long-lasting resistance, and be affordable.

New resolve to get it right

The London conference on funding for vaccines is an important signal that the value of immunisation programmes is understood by both donors and governments seeking assistance.

“When GAVI got started, it was something that had never been tried before,” says Dr Helen Saxenian, from the Results for Development Institute.

“The idea was that prices would fall (once large-scale demand for vaccines was created) and so some countries would be able to afford them without assistance. GAVI quickly realised prices were not – and are not – falling fast enough, and realised the alliance would need to be involved with subsidising vaccines for a longer period of time.”

The reasons vaccine prices have not fallen include the cost and complexity of producing newer vaccines, as well as limited competition between a very small number of producers; but Saxenian points out that there have been some successes, notably for the rotavirus and pentavalent vaccines.

In 2008, GAVI introduced a requirement for recipients of assistance to co-finance the procurement of vaccines. The Results for Development Institute recently evaluated GAVI’s policy on co-payment, to assess the ability of countries receiving assistance to cover their share of the costs.

“The finding,” says Saxenian, “is that low-income countries will not be able to pay the full cost of vaccines any time soon. However co-payments (from national budgets) at 20 cents per dose would be affordable for almost all countries.”

Shared responsibility maximising impact

She argues that the co-financing requirement has been a valuable learning process for all involved. It has strengthened forward planning by national health ministries, communication between health ministries and finance ministers who must make appropriate and timely allocations from national budgets, and between various countries and the UNICEF Supply Division, through which all of Africa’s GAVI aid recipients purchase vaccines to meet their obligations.

Aid recipients have said that they prefer to contribute part of the cost of paying for vaccines, says Saxenian. “Immunisation managers would like to see national budgets for vaccinations grow. It’s a key priority for healthcare, and since one can’t assume that donor assistance will last forever, they would like to see national budgets for it grow,” she told IPS over the phone from the United States.

“A basic way of thinking about this is that if something is completely free, there’s not as much of a sense of ownership as when you’re paying for even part of it. When it’s free, then countries may think, I’ll take it, whether they’re ready or not to adopt it.”

Adibaku says that when one considers the cost of Malaria to the national economy, Uganda should be able to contribute to the vaccination programme but if it is within the range of what they have been spending on the disease

Alongside the pledges from public and private donors to support immunisation, developing countries also renewed their commitments to co-financing in London, with GAVI estimating their contribution will reach 100 million dollars a year by 2015.

Developing countries could be required to make substantial contributions towards a malaria vaccine but this could be a worthwhile investment considering the amount of money the economy looses because of their illness.

Excerpt:

By Terna Gyuse
LAGOS, Jan 10 2011 (IPS)

The past year has seen mixed fortunes for activists working towards abolishing the death penalty in Africa. Togo and Burundi joined the ranks of African states that have removed capital punishment from their statutes, while Gambia extended its application to new offences.

In April, Nigerian state governors announced they wished to see executions resumed “as a measure to decongest prisons” and directed prison authorities to initiate execution papers.

Olawale Fapohunda, secretary to the National Study Group on the death penalty which called for an official moratorium on executions in Nigeria, spoke to IPS about developments in Africa’s most populous country since then. Excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: What is the status of that order to prison wardens – have executions resumed since then?

A: There has been no development since that directive was given. This is perhaps due largely to the local and international condemnation that greeted that decision.

I had expressed concern at what is a simplistic if not crude solution to a serious problem.

Given the limited number of months left before the end of their tenure, it would seem logical that the task of deciding who should die should be the last thing on the mind of our governors, especially when one considers the enormous governance challenges faced in most states of the federation including poor infrastructure, rural and urban poverty, failing health care system, failing education to mention a few.

Secondly, given the bad publicity that Nigeria continues to receive over tragic deaths in the aftermath of at least two ethnic and religious conflicts, one would have thought our governors will be sensitive to any further killings under whatever guise.

The decision to sign death warrants as a matter of urgency was reportedly based on the inexplicable conclusion that the state of our prisons – including congestion – is the result of an increasing population of death row inmates and a backlog of death warrants requiring their signature.

Happily reason has prevailed and nothing further has been done or said on this issue.

Q: At the time of the governors’ announcement, you pointed out that the bulk of the prison population in Nigeria are people awaiting trial. What proportion of prisoners in Nigeria are death row inmates? How do conditions for death row inmates differ from those of other prisoners?

A: The total prison population in Nigeria is no more than 48,000. Of this number, there are about 26,000 inmates awaiting trial. Less than 1,000 inmates are on death row. Every single study on the state of Nigeria’s prisons including those commissioned by Federal Government has pointed out that the number one challenge faced by the Nigerian prisons today is the situation of awaiting trial inmates.

All the studies have shown that these inmates suffer some of the worst conditions of prison life. Long lock up hours, limited or no access to rehabilitation opportunities, limited access to justice have all combined to making the awaiting trial population frustrated and vulnerable.

One issue that both the prisons and all of us who campaign for justice sector reform agree on is that keeping thousands of persons in our prisons without trial is exacting a heavy financial and human toll on the prisons system.

I served as secretary to the National Study Group on death penalty – the study group was inaugurated to advise government on the desirability or otherwise of abolishing death penalty in Nigeria.

We found that one of the most intractable problems in death penalty administration in Nigeria is the severe lack of competent and adequately compensated counsel for indigent defendants and death row inmates seeking appeals. The limited funding and mandate of the legal aid scheme has seriously undermined the support system for lawyers taking these complex and demanding cases.

Q: Gambia extended application of the death penalty to drug offences in October 2010 – how does the abolition or moratorium of the death penalty in one country influence government and popular attitudes in others?

A: I do not believe that what happens in the Gambia could or should influence what happens in the West African subregion, given the governance challenges in that country. It is good to note that countries like Senegal, with its large Muslim population, are setting the agenda for the abolition of death penalty in West Africa.

Q: Is popular support for the death penalty growing despite local and international campaigning against it? How can alternative responses to serious or violent crime be promoted?

We are concerned that not much progress is being made with respect to the abolition of death penalty in Nigeria. Religion and perception of the crime situation in Nigeria are key issues in this regard. It is often difficult to engage in any argument with those of religious persuasion.

With respect to the perception of crime, we have pointed that that with a population of 140 million, Nigeria still has the one of the lowest inmate populations in the world. It is either we are a low crime country or the law enforcement institutions are simply not catching the offenders.

We have also advocated for a new legal framework that recognises victims of crime as important personalities in our criminal justice system. In my view, the attitude of Nigerians to offenders is due to the fact that there is an over-concentration on [punishment of] the offender.

The victim of crime is virtually ignored once the offender is convicted. We need to reverse this. The organisation I work with, the Legal Resources Consortium, has proposed a victims of crime charter as well as a victim of crime bill. In our view if we are able to reform policy and legislation for victims of crime we can create an appropriate atmosphere for a healthy debate on death penalty.

Excerpt:

By Brahima Ouédraogo and Terna Gyuse
OUAGADOUGOU and CAPE TOWN, Dec 8 2010 (IPS)

More than 20 million people will be vaccinated between now and the end of the year in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger as a mass vaccination campaign using a new conjugate vaccine unfolds across West Africa. Manufactured in India, MenAfriVac offers health authorities a powerful weapon against a deadly disease.

Meningitis is an infection of the membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal column. It is most prevalent in a region known as “the meningitis belt”, which extends across sub-Saharan Africa from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east.

Between 1995 and 1997, a severe meningitis epidemic infected 250,000 people in this region, killing 25,000. Five to ten percent of patients who catch the disease die within 24-48 hours after symptoms appear; 10 to 20 percent suffer serious neurological damage, including loss of hearing and learning difficulties.

According to the World Health Organization,14 African countries put in place stronger surveillance in 2009 which recorded a total of 78,416 suspected cases of meningitis, and 4,053 deaths – the highest number since the 1996 epidemic.

Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are at the heart of the affected region, and all three countries are involved in the latest phase of the introduction of the new vaccine. Where the previous vaccine offered immunity for just three years, the MenAfriVac protects for ten years and can be given to people aged from one to 29 years of age.

It’s a victory that has harnessed the capability of Indian pharmaceutical companies to produce advanced drugs at an affordable price.

According to Dr Prasad Kulkarni of the Serum Intitute of India Ltd, which manufactures MenAfriVac, the company was approached by the Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP) in 2002 about developing a vaccine against group A meningitis for sub-Saharan Africa.

Kulkarni says several multinational pharmaceutical companies had already declined an invitation from the MVP, a partnership between WHO and the non-profit organisation PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health), because with group A meningococcus essentially non-existent in industrialised countries, the cost of devoting resources to this project rather than something more lucrative was deemed to high.

“Serum Institute’s company policy is dedicated to making affordable vaccines available to the children of the world,” says Kulkarni. “Therefore developing a meningococcal conjugate vaccine fit into our business strategy and philanthropic philosophy, and we told MVP that we could manufacture the vaccine in volume at a cost that would not exceed US $0.50 per dose.”

The vaccine is produced at SIIL using technology developed at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). SIIL scaled up the process for commercial manufacturing.

“Transferring the conjugation technology from CBER to SIIL was probably the greatest challenge, but acquiring this know-how gave SIIL the opportunity to add a better product and replace a polysaccharide vaccine that does not work very well,” Kulkarni told IPS.

Dr Marie-Pierre Preziosi, who works with WHO’s Product Development and Research Team of the Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals Department says MenAfriVac has many advantages over the previous vaccine, beginning with the longer protection it confers.

“It [also] confers “memory”, that is, if a person is immunised and meets with the bacteria or the agent of the disease again later on, the body will remember and will react better. And it works in younger children. All in all it’s a very good tool for prevention that we have in hand.”

The vaccine was approved by the Drugs Controller General of India in December 2009 – and MenAfriVac is a useful addition to India’s drug arsenal as well, as there have been outbreaks of group A meningitis in South Asia in the past 30 years. The vaccine was pre-qualified by the World Health Organization in June 2010.

“Transferring the technological expertise to make a conjugate vaccine to SIIL considerably reduced the production cost of the vaccine, and the model allowed for the opportunity to design a vaccine-based strategy [in line with] the actual vaccination needs in Africa,” Kulkarni says.

SIIL is now producing a meningococcal vaccine that will be used in 25 countries in Africa where 450 million people are at risk for meningitis.

SIIL will provide 25 million doses of MenAfriVac over the next ten years. According to the MVP, each dose will cost around 40 cents, compared to $10-20 cost of the vaccine elsewhere in the world or $100 for a tetravalent vaccine in the U.S.

Burkina Faso alone needs 14 million dollars to immunise the part of its population that is most at risk. In December, 70 percent of the 15 million Burkinabés will be vaccinated, covering the reservoir population for the disease. The country’s health minister explains that the remaining 30 percent of the population should then enjoy de facto protection.

According to WHO, 500 million dollars will be needed to vaccinate the at-risk population under 29 years of age across sub-Saharan Africa; the agency is working to mobilise this money from donor countries and institutions.

Excerpt:

The river basin organisation people are gathered in Botswana again: the theme this year is “benefit-sharing”, an approach to allocating water that, it is promised, will accomplish nothing less than to make more water.

Irrigation near Kakamas, South Africa : how can optimal and sustainable use of water be achieved? Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

As a region, Southern Africa faces water scarcity which is expected to grow more acute as the effects of climate change manifest. Almost all of the fresh water in the region is found in shared water courses – across Africa, 93 percent of surface water is found in rivers that spill over national boundaries.

The Fourth Regional Workshop on Strengthening River Basin Organisations, taking place in the Botswanan capital, Gaborone on Apr. 20-21, is part of a process of developing clear guidelines for the Southern African Development Community’s strategy on transboundary waters. The annual workshops, supported by GTZ, InWent, UKAID and USAID, bring together researchers and water policy makers from across the region.

Growing economies and populations mean growing pressure on water resources; competing demands for water are a potential source of conflict between – and within – states.

“Sharing freshwater resources equitably and reasonably is of the utmost importance in the African continent,” says Namibia-based David Phillips, managing director of water consulting firm Phillips Robinson Associates.

Phillips is a leading exponent of the idea of benefit-sharing, which avoids deadlock over allocations of water to competing users in a river system. Instead of seeing it as a struggle over a fixed volume of water, benefit-sharing sets up negotiations over a broad range of direct and indirect benefits arising from water use.

A tidy example is found in West Africa, where in 1972 three countries along the Senegal River agreed that the best way to achieve common aims of economic growth, food self-sufficiency, and resilience against drought was to collaborate on a development programme.

Mauritania, Mali and Senegal split the costs of dams based on the benefits each could receive in terms of hydro power, irrigation and enhanced navigation of the river.

The formula was not simply bear half the cost, receive half the benefits. The agreement attempted to account for the different needs and characteristics of each country, its riverine populations, and the changing possibilities of the river itself as it flowed through the region.

Senegal put up 42 percent of the cost of the dams, but was assigned 33 percent of the hydropower benefit and 58 percent of the irrigation benefit. Mali contributed 35 percent of the cost of the dams, but received 52 percent of the benefit of the hydropower, 80 percent of the navigation benefit.

The disruption of seasonal flooding by the Manantali and Diama dams has severely undermined previous agricultural practice (and the costs of water from the new irrigation have proved too high for many) while increasing incidence of disease like schistosomiasis, but despite the flaws in design and implementation of the projects themselves, the basin-wide agreement still offers a promising model of how to approach negotiating shared water resources.

It can be contrasted with the situation on the Nile River, where a fifty-year old treaty rigidly defines the beginning and end of a closed argument over how many cubic metres per second of water the downstream countries are entitled to. The 1959 terms that guarantee Sudan and Egypt a set allocation of water are constricting water use by the eight other countries upstream.

The benefit-sharing approach adopted on the Senegal River allowed the parties additional room to negotiate mutually acceptable development of the river, in ways intended to serve the specific and various needs and interests of each. The construction of a dam in one location was not on the table simply as the deprivation of users elsewhere of water.

Dr Nicholas Azza, a water policy specialist with the Nile Basin Initiative, points out that benefit sharing has to be attractive in order to get off the ground. “The sum of benefits to be gained from cooperation needs to be greater than the sum of benefits available to countries acting unilaterally.”

The Southern African Development Community’s ongoing effort to establish and strengthen river basin organisations is already working along these lines, says Dr Kenneth Msibi, from SADC’s Water Division.

Outlining how optimal, sustainable use of water might be achieved, he outlined several essential ingredients. These include expert study to provide a knowledge base for effective development; consultations with water users ranging from mining and industry to municipalities and small-scale farmers; basin-wide cooperation (shaped by recognition of common interests and the shared nature of the resource, as well as political will).

Assemble these, he suggested, with the “trigger” of the region’s sharpening water scarcity to bind negotiations together and move them along, and Southern Africa may have the recipe for the effective and cooperative use of its shared water.

The business and political leadership of the world’s strongest emerging economies meet this week in Brazil. Are these gatherings of the champions of a new and fairer global economy, or of new pretenders to the old throne?

On Apr. 15, Brazil hosts summits of the trilateral India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) organisation and the Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) group. Both organisations seek to strengthen the role of their members in the world economy.

“A part of the idea behind IBSA is to push for reform, but the reform is not about empowering smaller countries,” says Shawn Hattingh, a researcher at the International Labour Research Information Group in Cape Town.

“It’s about IBSA members getting greater voting rights (within the IMF and World Bank). It’s basically a power play within the existing system.” ? In Hattingh’s view, neither IBSA nor BRIC represent anything new for the majority of people living in the South.

China, he says, is locked in a dependent relationship with its major trading partner, the U.S., that limits its desire to press for deep changes.

Assessing trade and investment relations between Brazil, India and Africa, he says these relationships too are predatory – and he would include South Africa’s own transnational corporations in this analysis – offering little benefit to the majority in the countries they operate in.

“To protect the interests of their own corporations, (IBSA members) will clash occasionally with the U.S. or the UK at a regional level, but they would never seriously seek to undermine these powers – rather they by and large serve their interests. As such, they don’t seek to undermine the existing order.”

Is this assessment fair? Rathin Roy, director of the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, would not agree.

“The IBSA countries have, each in their own way, made significant advances in (showing) that inclusive growth is possible, that poverty reduction and human development need not await generations of narrowly focused growth maximization,” he told a forum of academics and policy makers who met in Brasilia on Apr. 12.

Cândido Grzybowski, head of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE) and a prominent member of the International Council of the World Social Forum (WSF) says it’s unfortunate that the new associations of emerging economies take the established economic order as their starting point.

But would a global economy dominated by the newly emerging powers be worse?

Grzybowski says “maybe, maybe not.” China’s approach “is better than sending armies, as imperialists have done in the last five centuries,” for instance in Africa, recalling several stages of colonialism in that continent, and the damage caused by British, French and Portuguese forces.

The difference with China, he says, is that it tries to negotiate.

“(China) doesn’t send an army, but it is a new imperialist,” he said, comparing China to another rising power in the BRIC group, Brazil. In South America, “Brazilian companies are buying everything they can lay their hands on.”

Grzybowski referred to the state-owned oil giant, Petrobras, which extracts oil and gas in many parts of Latin America, and multinational companies like the steelmaker Gerdau, Votorantim (mining, metalworking, cement, steel and paper) or the Odebrecht construction group. Odebrecht also has important investments in Algeria and Liberia. Petrobras is active in Angola’s oil sector.

These Brazilian transnational corporations are acquiring other companies and large productive sectors in other countries, following “the old nationalistic vision of ‘going multinational’ and taking over major industries in other countries to build their power.”

For an alternative vision, Hattingh points to ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, as an example. ALBA seeks to directly address social inequalities and develop alternatives to existing trade relations, including projects such as the Bank of the South, which would give developing economies an alternative to the IMF.

“ALBA is not creating a world of equality or socialism, but at least it’s creating a situation where people can get social services, where jobs are being created around very interesting programmes of food sovereignty for example,” he says.

“There’s no willingness on the part of the players in BRIC or IBSA (to join such initiatives). That would only come if there were major struggles and the state felt itself to be under threat.”

ALBA’s membership is mostly smaller economies – Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and three oil producers: Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

South Africa was twice invited to join the Bank of the South, and twice refused.

But the threat to the state that Hattingh mentions – viewed from the opposite perspective as pressure from below – is the factor that will determine the future form and impact of IBSA and BRIC, in Grzybowski’s opinion.

The emerging economies could have an important role in developing a world economy that will serve the interests of the majority, “if they do not aspire to be partners of the global powers-that-be, or their future substitutes, but promotors of a new global architecture.”

However, he stressed, “that will depend less on their governments than on their societies,” which would have to demand changes in the rules of global governance.

*Fabiana Frayssinet in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.

The U.N. Climate Change Conference enters its final week under a cloud of uncertainty as the Africa Group led a protest of the developing world against a perceived attempt to abandon the Kyoto Protocol.

People demonstrating at Bella Center in support of Africa and calling for Kyoto targets. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

Monday found long lines of delegates and observers waiting to clear security at the Bella Center’s entrance. The now-familiar invitations to this or that side event in the background, you could hear people discussing the fate of precious clauses over the weekend, and murmurings of trouble brewing in the official process.

One of the day’s early press conferences found the Africa Group unhappy with the way the formal discussions are being structured. The group spoke against an order of business that seems to follow a developed country preference to discuss a single track for negotiations. Africa prefers to continue with parallel discussions that would preserve the imperfect but legally-binding structure of the Kyoto Protocol while negotiations continue over a binding replacement for the long term.

By the middle of the day, the Africa Group’s displeasure had brought official talks to a halt. Africa told the chair of the working group on a long-term treaty that it would simply not participate in any negotiations or contact group discussions until movement restarted on the parallel discussion of the Kyoto Protocol.

The protest was supported by AOSIS (Alliance of Small Island States) and quickly became a G77 position, stalling the talks.

The Climate Action Network, in its daily media briefing on the state of negotiations, announced that having studied the various commitments on the table as the new week began, a deal signed on that basis today would lead to increased emissions that would mean an estimated 3.9 degree rise in the average global temperature.

The network, a coalition of 450 environmental and social justice organisations from around the world, said there had been progress by negotiators on technical cooperation and building capacity towards a plan to reduce damage to forests. Two years of very slow progress had been rapidly advanced by the release of draft texts by the chairs of the working groups, the network said, although little had been achieved on difficult political issues.

Several key points were highlighted, including disagreement over emissions targets, the question of long-term financing, and the scale of such support.

China and other major polluters from the developing world have proposed only conservative targets for reducing emissions – failure that is linked to the reluctance of developed countries to pledge significant funding to the roughly $200 billion a year that will be needed for adaptation, mitigation, technology transfers and capacity building.

As growing numbers of ministers arrived in Denmark, the Climate Action Network stressed that the biggest failure thus far was political leadership.

Marcelo Furtado, executive director of Greenpeace Brazil, said it was clear the negotiators had not been given mandates allowing them to resolve thorny questions.

Furtado pointed out that when Brazilian industry resisted the abolition of slavery 120 years ago, maintaining that they could not afford it, the moral argument that was raised prevailed in the end.

“Here we are 120 years later, looking at a very similar scenario. People are saying there is no moral discussion, (the debate has been) only about technology, only about finance,” the Greenpeace campaigner said.

Where major, long-term funding is called for, the developed world has thus far offered only short-term financing. Emerging economies such as China, India and South Africa have not responded to the call for them to make firm commitments to act quickly to reduce their emissions.

“The challenge this week is to ask for vision, responsibility and leadership. And that falls on the shoulders of everyone: of developing countries like Brazil, China and India who will have to agree to their commitments being measured and verified, but also to the developed countries that ought to put money on the table and show willingness to raise their ambitions,” Furtado said.

India’s negotiator told the press last week that its priority was economic growth and adaptation to harmful effects, with mitigation taking a back seat. South Africa’s behaviour was soundly condemned at another press conference, where Friends of the Earth International criticised a massive new World Bank loan to the country (double its total commitment to renewable energy worldwide) for the construction of massive new coal-fired plants.

A deal to reduce emissions due to deforestation has been prominent since the start of the conference. But on this front, campaigners were concerned that over the weekend vital safeguards for indigenous people have been moved out of the legally-enforceable main body of the text, to the preamble.

Dr. Rosalind Reeve of Global Witness pointed to Papua New Guinea, Ghana – speaking for the Africa Group – and India as having worked over the weekend to remove the clear phrase saying parties “shall implement” and replace it with the much weaker “should protect”.

If these safeguards are lost, Reeve said, there are no guarantees for indigenous people’s rights in REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

*This story appears in the IPS TerraViva online daily published for the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

The midpoint of a conference on climate change in which tremendous hope has been invested; unsurprising then that demonstrations of popular desire for decisive action against global warming took place around the world.

One of many marches Saturday in Copenhagen. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

Candlelight vigils were held in 139 countries Saturday, halfway through the Conference of Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In Copenhagen itself, in Halmtorvet near the site of a parallel conference organised by civil society, Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) held the Flood for Climate Justice. Some 5,000 people, many clad in blue plastic ponchos, surged through the streets bearing signs calling for “Climate Justice Now” before merging with a march of 100,000 people.

Protesters praised Tuvalu, the South Pacific island state for proposing the stiffer 1.5 degree target so many believe will be necessary to avoid ecological and social catastrophe.

Marchers challenged some of the accepted orthodoxies that shape the proposals being officially debated. FoEI chair Nnimmo Bassey, a long-time opponent of the fossil fuel industry in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, rejected the idea that carbon offsetting – trading funding for green projects for the “right” to pollute in excess of agreed targets – could benefit the planet.

“Carbon offsetting has no benefits for the climate or for developing countries – it only benefits developed countries, carbon speculators and major polluters who want to continue business as usual,” Bassey declared.

Fellow FoEI activist Marta Zogbi told TerraViva carbon trading was a false solution, opposed by civil society. “We have an enormous influence; the issue of climate change has been carried forward by organised civil society,” she said. “The corporate lobby is also very powerful, which is why society cannot advance as fast as it would like.”

The “Flood” march advanced to Parliament Square, where it joined a broader mobilisation involving trade unions and environmentalists, peace activists and relief organisations, political parties and carbon traders.

Hope in a hundred flavours has been invested in this Conference of Parties. The aim of drawing 60,000 people to peacefully demonstrate popular desire for decisive action was easily achieved. Danish police estimated 100,000 took part in the six kilometre procession from the Christiansborg Slodsplads to the Bella Center where the UN Conference on Climate Change is taking place.

The sea of people contained a range of opinions.

Activist Clodimir Bogaert came from Belgium just for Saturday’s march. “We hope things change, because the problem is urgent. We see that the first to suffer the effects of climate change are the poorest countries.”

Peter Sprengers, a carbon business analyst with Norwegian renewable energy company Statkraft, said “I came to Copenhagen to get a feeling about what is going to happen with CO2 and energy policies, because it has a huge impact on our business.”

He said he did not come to Copenhagen to lobby or try to influence the agreement because he does not think he can have an impact: “The main decision-makers are the U.S. and China at the moment.”

A very different position was taken by Chilean activist Alicia Muñoz of Via Campesina, the global movement of small- and medium-scale farmers, rural women and indigenous people. She has spent a week taking part in different activities in Klimaforum, the civil society meet held parallel to COP15.

“It is very clear to Via Campesina that we must pressure for an agreement to be reached, because we know the negotiations are not coming up with positive results,” Muñoz told TerraViva.

Also part of the main march as it set off was the now-familiar Black Bloc which brings a radical critique to most major demonstrations.

“I think the Copenhagen Conference is a good sign, but I doubt this meeting will bring a true agreement. It will be just like Kyoto,” Henrik, one of those marching with the anarchists, told TerraViva.

“I am here because we must do something, bureaucrats cannot solve anything. It is the people who must have the power.”

Wearing black clothes, many covering their mouths, the Black Bloc demonstrated with the main march for about half an hour, part of a group calling for “System Change, Not Climate Change” and shouting slogans against capitalism and the police.

Not far from the Amagerbro Metro station in central Copenhagen, police blocked the march’s main route with vehicles and arrested at least 100 of the anarchists.

Elsewhere in the city, a separate anarchist march under the slogan “Never Trust a COP” was broken up by police. By evening, 900 people had been arrested. Climate Justice Action issued a press statement condemning police handling of those arrested – the group says many were kept waiting out in the open for several hours, denied access to water, toilets or medical attention.

The Climate Justice Action (CJA) global network also questioned arrests that took place far from any sign of trouble. Activist Helga Matthiessen, held for an hour before being released, said “Not only have we been denied the right to protest, but our basic human rights have also been ignored in this ludicrous, staged police exercise.”

At the Bella Centre, the final event of the day was a candlelight vigil attended by Noel Laureate Desmond Tutu. The intent was to set out a minimum demand from civil society for the negotiators who have six days to come to an agreement.

The call is for a deal that is fair – providing $200 billion to help poorer countries cope with climate change; ambitious – responding to the scientific consensus that emissions must peak no later than 2015 to keep carbon dioxide levels below 350 parts per million; and binding – only a legally enforceable deal will hold governments accountable.

*This story appears in the IPS TerraViva online daily published for the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

Look, there’s no drama with the borehole in Mokobeng. And that’s the way it should be.

The village of Mokobeng has just fewer than 3,000 people staying here. Most people in Mokobeng, they are seasonal farmers. They are keeping livestock on the northern part of the village, while fields are to the south. This is to keep the animals from destroying the fields.

The fields are fenced with tree branches. Those who have money, they use barbed wire. You will see mud houses with thatched roofs on the farms.

But Mokobeng is slowly growing, moving forward gently. The people of this settlement are adapting to the changing world. Walls of mud and roofs of thatch in the village are now outnumbered by cement bricks and corrugated iron roofs. There is a health post, a primary school and a junior secondary school.

The village has four small general dealer shops. This gives the people here a choice of where to buy sugar and tea and razor blades and soap.

The borehole

You wanted to know about the borehole and the garden.

There are standpipes evenly distributed in the village. This has reduced the congestion which used to be in the middle of the village, when everyone came to take water at the same time.

The oldest standpipe is no longer in use. A wall, high like this, to your knee here, a wall has been erected around this standpipe. The wall carries the beautiful colours of the Botswana flag. These outstanding colours distinguish the standpipe from others and the rest of the buildings in the village.

But the borehole. It supplies all of the needs of the villagers and enough for the garden.

The garden

In the heart of the village there is a garden measuring about 50 metres square. Here a group of women have joined hands to alleviate poverty.

The Ngwaoboswa Conservation Group is a group of volunteers who are making use of the village garden to grow vegetables, fruits and keep bees. They grow green pepper, spinach, tomatoes, butternuts, watermelons, orange, mango and rape. Each season they plant vegetables and fruits suitable for that particular season.

See the Ngwaoboswa chairperson here. Mmandaba Makola, you say the garden is watered from the village borehole.

“For our garden we use the hosepipe and watering can for watering. We use groundwater. It is the only source of water in our village. It is able to sustain our watering.

“Most of the vegetables we grow they need to be watered regularly. Watering is done in the morning and afternoon. We have also planted flowers for our bees.”

Thank you. The garden, you know, used to belong to the entire village. But due to laxity the garden became a white elephant.

More on the garden

These women have been encouraged by the village chief to group themselves as a form of women empowerment, to make use of the garden.

Everyone was allowed to join the group, and it used to have ten members. Now the group has six. Four have opted out to join their families in towns.

The Ngwaoboswa women come here all as a group only on Monday and Friday. On other days they have divided themselves into two groups of three people. These women come to the garden in the morning and leave at midday. In the late afternoon, when the heat has ceased, then they return to the garden. This is done to monitor the garden.

When everything is ready for harvesting, the fruits and vegetables are sold at a reasonable price. Most customers are the villagers and sometimes customers are drawn from neighbouring villages.

The group shares the profit every month end. Some of the money is kept to be used when the need arises. The project start up has been funded by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), but now it must carry itself.

Sis’ Makola, you as Ngwaoboswa women also assist in the village with food.

“Yes, this project is not only about making profit. We sometimes donate the vegetables to the community home-based care. Whenever there is a function in the village main kgotla, primary or secondary school we contribute with these vegetables and fruits.”

Kgotla, for you who do not know seTswana, is the meeting place in the village. Kgotla can also be a community meeting called by the village chief.

The chief

This is the chief, Obert Thuthwa. He is supportive of the garden, although he is worried about what will happen if the only borehole in the village runs dry, is it not so Chief?

“The project is very commendable. These women are doing a good job. My only worry is that we have only one borehole which is the only source of water in our village.

“Our village has plenty of groundwater. As the village develops the population will grow and we will run short of water.

“The other worry is that the government is not doing enough in rural areas in terms of water management. We are not well equipped with integrated water resources. The quality of the water here is questionable.

“In my view, groundwater is not given much care compared to surface water. This is because groundwater is believed to be not much easily polluted. But it is hard to detect the pollution in groundwater.”

The chief has been complaining about the quality of water for consumption.

“The water should be checked every three months. Myself as the village chief I have never seen such a report. This indicates that regular checking is not done. We need to be empowered on how to use integrated water resources so as to not exhaust one resource. Because of this lack of knowledge we cannot even manage our aquifers.”

The groundwater

For those of you who don’t know this language of groundwater, the water that is flowing from the borehole and supporting the whole village is from an aquifer. This is a store of water underground that can be “unconfined”, that is rain can fall on us here and into the ground directly to the underground store. Or an aquifer can be “confined”. That is when between us here and the water underground is a layer of rock closing it in, unless we are to drill a borehole through to reach it.

Barbara Lopi knows this language of groundwater very well. She is a communications specialist in Gaborone for SADC’s Groundwater and Drought Management Project. She says groundwater has a great potential to contribute to the socio-economic development in the region.

“Groundwater contribution in the region is very critical to the majority of rural; community and small towns. In some areas in the region, groundwater is the only reliable source of water, resulting in 60 percent of SADC’s population and 70 percent of the rural population using groundwater as their primary water source.

“Groundwater plays a number of very important roles in the economies and environment. It is a major source for small-scale irrigation and livestock farming in countries like Botswana and other SADC member states.”

She says that yields from farming are sometimes even much higher than yields in areas where they use water from surface water sources for irrigation. Groundwater, she says, is a key resource of poverty alleviation.

She could be talking about Mokobeng.

Ngwaoboswa has been running the garden for more than five years now. Sis’ Makola says that a certain farmer has shown interest in renting the garden. She and the others however have decided to rather partner with the farmer instead of leaving the garden over to him completely.

“We are partnering with him so as to help us expand our business in terms of market. Since he also has resources, we can be in a better position to have a borehole specifically for the garden. The farmer has a vast experience in agriculture. And this is not only to our advantage but to the whole community.”

She could be talking about integrated water resource management.

This is Mokobeng.

By Stanley Kwenda and Terna Gyuse
HARARE, Sep 19 2009 (IPS)

Desperate for investment to lift its moribund economy, the Zimbabwe government welcomed hundreds of prospective mining investors to a conference in Harare this week.

Asbestos mine at Mashava: royalties and taxes will be set to 'rational' levels and bureaucracy simplified to attract mining investment in Zimbabwe. Credit: Kevin Walsh/Wikimedia

Zimbabwe has the world’s second-biggest platinum reserves after South Africa and large unexplored deposits of diamonds, coal and nickel; the conference attracted strong representation from major multinational mining concerns.

Uppermost in the minds of investors was the need for guarantees that their assets would be protected.

In 2007, a law was passed allowing Zimbabwe’s government to seize a majority share in all mines, in some instances without paying a cent. Niels Kristensen, a senior executive with Australia-based mining multinational Rio Tinto wanted to know that government will guarantee that such asset seizures would not be repeated.

“Until we see some certainty, there won’t be significant investment in mining,” said Kristensen.

The country’s Mines and Mineral Act, presently under review, states that locals must hold at least 51 percent of any mining venture. Government’s message to investors was that royalties and taxes on mining will be simplified and lowered, but that companies would be expected to invest in local communities.

Elton Mangoma, minister of economic planning and investment promotion, told IPS that “it is important to balance these competing interests in a manner that benefits both the investor and the country. Mining royalties should be viewed as compensation for exploitation of finite resources and not as tax.”

Which way forward?

The Affirmative Action Group (AAG), an organisation with interests in advancing the participation of Zimbabwean blacks in business, told IPS that whatever mining deal the government enters into, it must make sure that it significantly benefits local people.

“If they are not pushed, they will not move. So we believe government must stipulate up to 50 percent ownership in mining by locals so that 50 percent of benefits go to Zimbabweans.”

But the wind is blowing in a different direction. Prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai assured mining industry players that “rational” royalties and taxes would be implemented.

Tsvangirai said he sees mining as the best opportunity to attract substantial investment in the immediate term, and added that any laws concerning ownership of mines by Zimbabweans would be in line with what he called “international norms”.

Elsewhere in Africa…

Emmanuel Jengo, president of Tanzania’s Chamber of Minerals and Energy, told IPS that his country’s mining sector picked up after the introduction of a raft of mining policies beginning in 1992.

Among these were measures aimed at stimulating small-scale mining operations as part of raising mining’s contribution to the economy to 25 percent of the country’s GDP.

The 1998 Mining Act sought to eliminate bureaucracy in licensing procedures, something Zimbabwean mines minister Obert Mpofu also pledged to do at the conference. Tanzania also introduced reforms providing improved fiscal terms for the mining sector and guarantees to allow companies to trade minerals freely.

A report published earlier this year by Tax Justice Network Africa and ActionAid questioned the terms on which mining multinationals operate in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa. It found that favourable legislation has set low royalty rates, which combines with mining contracts – often negotiated behind closed doors – to routinely grant companies further tax concessions and holidays of up to 25 years.

Sharply critical of the “international norms” that have shaped mining laws on the continent, the report suggested that Tanzania lost 30 million dollars of revenue in 2008 as a result. South Africa lost 359 million.

“African governments have enacted laws giving tax subsidies to the industry and mining companies have been pushing for tax breaks in secret mining contracts, amounting to an aggressive tax avoidance strategy,” says the publication. Among many recommendations, the report called for legislation that ensures mining contracts are scrutinised by parliaments, to guard against corruption.

Investor friendly

The permanent secretary in Zimbabwe’s ministry of mines and mining development, Thankful Musukutwa, who is spearheading reforms of Zimbabwe’s Mines and Minerals Act, told IPS that he is looking at coming up with a proper balancing act.

“Foreign investors will pay royalties to government treasury and it is the government which will spearhead development in areas that the mining companies are operating in,” said Musukutwa.

In the past the government of Zimbabwe has received these royalties but channelled the money for use in other areas, but Musukutwa said “we had to do that because of the economic problems that the country was facing.”

He said the government is looking at improving infrastructure in areas that the foreign investors are looking to invest in by building dams and increasing electricity generation to boost production.

He added that the government has liberalised the marketing of gold and now guarantees foreign mining investors the option to repatriate profits and investment and profits when they decide to disinvest.

The years to come will reveal in whose favour – citizens’ or mining multinationals’ – the balance being struck by the government of national unity will tip.

Excerpt:

By Diletta Varlese, Terna Gyuse, and Joyce Mulama
SIRTE, Libya, CAPE TOWN and NAIROBI, Jul 3 2009 (IPS)

No gathering hosted by Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is ever dull, and the Thirteenth Ordinary Session of the African Union, concluding in Sirte, Libya today has not disappointed.

Will AU deliberations lead to stronger food sovereignty? Credit: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

A surprise invitation to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is facing down massive popular protest over his disputed re-election as president, briefly threatened to overshadow the meeting, but he did not in the end attend.

The other source of drama was the renewed challenge to the International Criminal Court, on grounds that it unfairly targets Africans. With Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir (who has been charged with grave war crimes in Sudan by the ICC) a confident and welcome guest in Sirte, a proposal originating with Libya calling for non-cooperation of AU member states in the arrest or handover of ICC indictees was unexpectedly put forward for discussion.

As is customary, the meeting of heads of state took place behind closed doors, but signs of tension leaked out Thursday when Gaddafi briefly walked out of the meeting, reportedly frustrated by continued opposition to his dream to strengthen continental government through a “united states of Africa“.

There is general agreement that the AU will move towards greater integration, but few leaders are prepared to accede to Libya’s demands that this summit give powers over foreign relations, trade and defence to a new African Authority.

In contrast to recent AU summits, where civil society has been gradually gaining greater access to proceedings, few if any non-governmental organisations were present in Sirte.

Ruthpearl Ngángá, of the Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development, which works on issues of social justice from offices in 17 African countries, says non-governmental organisations found it very difficult to get documentation to attend, and warned that without participation by civil society, it will be difficult to gain wide support for implementing any decisions taken by the AU.

“African civil society participation and engagement in every summit of the African Union has seen them maintain significant influence in addressing decision makers on behalf of citizens of the continent. Their evident low participation and presence in Sirte makes it difficult to visualise African citizens actively involved in driving the AU agenda.”

And that engagement will be necessary if there is to be meaningful progress on the theme of this year’s summit: investment in agriculture for economic growth and food security.

Speaking from Nairobi, where ACORD and others organised a symposium on agriculture on Jul.2, Ngángá said Africa’s agriculture has been on the AU’s agenda previously, but only seven of the 57 African states are meeting pledges made in the 2003 Maputo Declaration which committed AU member states to spend at least ten percent of their budget on agriculture

“A key demand from civil society would be to focus on investment that increases countries’ food sovereignty – the right of its peoples to determine their own food and agricultural systems. It must focus on providing adequate nutrition for all its citizens, more than on increasing economic gain.”

South-South cooperation

A prominent guest in Libya was Brazilian president Luiz Ignacio de Silva, better known as Lula. He called for investment in family farming and the creation of jobs and higher incomes in rural areas.

“The Brazilian experience proves that productivity in small-scale agriculture and sustainability in food production are crucial to eradicate hunger. Investment in agriculture that will lead to job generation is the best means of ensuring a dignified living to our citizens,” he said.

The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) established an office in Ghana in 2006, in response to growing requests for technical assistance from Africa. Based at Ghana’s Council of Scientific and Industrial research, the Embrapa office identifies research needs that are then worked on by Brazilian researchers. The office also organises training for African agricultural workers.

Lula also spoke in favour of Africa following Brazil’s lead in becoming biofuel producers, albeit without sacrificing food production.

“For that reason, I have commissioned studies for the implementation, in Africa, of a model farm in association with a pilot plant for ethanol manufacturing,” he declared.

Touching on the global economic crisis, Lula argued for changes to the world’s political architecture. He called for greater influence for the South in institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and criticised trade barriers and domestic subsidies by developed countries on agricultural products.

“Within the framework of the (Doha) Round, Brazil is going to grant access to its market, free from tariffs and quotas, to products originated in relatively less developed countries,” he declared.

He also sought African support for Brazil’s bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and asked AU leaders to make a declaration against the coup that deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya on Jun. 28.

With a finely judged sense of the microclimate of an African Union summit, Lula spoke of a historic debt owed to Africa by the United States, Europe and Brazil with regards to the slave trade and colonisation, which he said was “impossible to settle from the financial point of view”.

Outcomes

Time will tell what concrete actions will emerge from this latest summit of African leadership. There is the prospect of strengthening the African Union’s peacekeeping force in Sudan and Somalia; the lifting of Madagascar’s suspension after formation of a transitional government there; and the deepening of a potentially fruitful partnership with Brazil on agriculture.

On agriculture, Ngángá offered this advice: “Increased investment in agriculture must include targeted investment in small scale farming, and in particular providing incentives to women small-scale farmers, building the entrepreneurship capacity of women to engage in agribusiness and grow cash crops, and ensuring that state investments in social protection, particularly those targeting children, are not sacrificed.

“Investing in agriculture goes hand in hand with addressing the marginalisation of entire sectors of African society.”

Excerpt:

By Rosemary Okello and Terna Gyuse
BRUSSELS and CAPE TOWN, Jun 30 2009 (IPS)

The right to the highest attainable standard of health: not the most fashionable of human rights, but the limits on people’s enjoyment of their right to health often coincide with continuing inequalities behind claims of economic growth or political reform.

Women must gain greater involvement in shaping maternal health policies and practices. Credit: Ken Opprann/Norway/UNFPA

The quality of life of women and children – particularly poor women, rural women, and women from ethnic and indigenous minorities – is a strong measure of real change for the world’s most vulnerable people. During the month of June, women’s sexual and reproductive health rights received some welcome attention.

“Of the 500,000 maternal deaths that occur annually worldwide, more than 250,000 occur in Africa. Pregnant women in Africa are at grave risk,” Soyata Maiga told the 11th Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council. “Additionally, there are many countries at war in Africa, which compounds pregnant women’s risk, with hundreds of thousands of women dying every year.”

Maiga, U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of women in Africa, continued: “Socio-cultural practices such as early marriage, early pregnancy, violence, female genital mutilation, marginalisation in decision-making regarding issues that concern women, low status of women within the African family, and the fact that women are not enabled or permitted to plan their pregnancies – each of these factors leads to maternal mortality, an issue that can be addressed and prevented if we tackle it as a human rights issue.”

The ways in which sustained high levels of maternal mortality stem from a denial of rights was also the central focus of a conference held in Brussels at the end of May to review progress since the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. The 1994 conference was a watershed in terms of bringing a rights-based approach to population control and women’s sexual and reproductive health.

In Brussels, Indu Capoor, executive director of India’s Centre for Health Education, Training and Nutrition Awareness, shared the following anecdote, tracing how poverty sentences millions of women to a cascade of denials of their basic rights before maternal mortality brings impoverished lives to a full stop.

“What kind of human rights can you [speak of to] Lakshmi, a 13-year-old girl forced into marriage because her parents were poor? She was married off to a boy living in a nearby village. She got pregnant immediately, because she was expected to prove her fertility.”

Poor women are systematically denied their right to education, to adequate and accessible health care, or to make family planning choices and control their sexuality – multiple inequalities that too often narrow their future prospects to zero.

“Being both poor and young, she has no access to money, information or health services such as ante-natal check-ups. As she has been poor all her life, she was also severely anaemic. She had a premature delivery at five months,” Capoor continued, “and the baby did not survive. She herself suffered from excessive bleeding and due to her anaemic state, died soon after.”

On average, a woman somewhere on the planet dies in childbirth every minute. Three quarters of these deaths are preventable.

“Maternal mortality is a human rights issue. Underlying the systemic failure to prevent maternal death is, depending on specific circumstances, the denial of the right to health, to equality and non-discrimination, to reproductive self-determination and to the benefit of scientific progress,” said Ariel Frisancho of the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality as a Human Right.

The most recent global estimates of deaths in childbirth – 2005 figures released jointly by the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, the United Nations Population Fund and the World Bank – show limited progress.

From 1990 to 2005, maternal mortality declined by 26 percent in Latin America; in Asia the decline was 20 percent over the same period. In Africa, the decline was less than one percent, from 830 per 100,000 live births to 820 – an estimated 276,000 African women died from pregnancy-related complications in 2005.

Speaking on the same Human Rights Council panel of experts as Maiga, Frisancho explained that the majority of these deaths are a result of what activists describe as the Five Delays.

“One, the time it takes to recognise that a woman is facing a life or death health problem; two, the decision-making time to seek services; three, the travel time to receive services; four, the delay in receipt of services upon arriving at the health facility; and five, the political delay by governments and donors in effectively addressing the issue of maternal mortality.”

Some programmes that respond to this need are in place, but they require greater funding and support from governments.

In Frisancho’s native Peru, non-governmental organisations found that in addition to the familiar problems of distance, cost and staff shortages, indigenous women in the Ayacucho district did not trust state public health facilities.

Consultations with the community led to the adaptation of pre- and postnatal care and delivery in new – free – birthing centres to make them more culturally sensitive – including Quechua-speaking birth attendants, facilities for women to give birth in an upright position if they wished, and provision for a family member to receive the placenta in accordance with local traditions.

In West and Central Africa, a project run jointly by UNICEF and USAID in Ngaoundere, Cameroon and Kaedi, Mauritania trained several dozen doctors, midwives and assistants, and provided the towns’ clinics with new equipment.

Training in better communication, management of labour and infection prevention improved maternal health, and community health workers were deployed to raise awareness on warning signs for complications in pregnancy, so that women and their relatives would not wait too long to seek emergency care.

In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the rights NGO SAHAYOG has mobilised thousands of poor women to take issues of maternal care and other human rights violations to policy-makers. The women have formed the Mahila Swasthya Adhikar Manch (Women’s Health Rights Forum in Hindi), which aims to allow marginalised women to gain a voice in policy-making in order to curb high rates of maternal mortality in the state.

The vision of a rights-based approach to reducing maternal mortality has been around for 15 years and more; what is needed are diverse, wide-scale actions to put it into practice.

On Jun. 17, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution recognising that preventable maternal mortality is a violation of a woman’s rights to life, health, dignity, education and information. It is hoped this will be a tool allowing women to press for greater accountability.

“Sustainable, substantial change will only be achieved if poor people have greater involvement in shaping health policies and practices,” said Frisancho.

Excerpt:

Water from a storage pond at Barrick Gold’s North Mara mine in Tanzania is seeping through containing walls, leading local villagers to fear their water sources are contaminated.

Containment pond at North Mara: villagers complain that water from the mine is affecting crops and livestock; Barrick says no water is discharged into the environment. Credit: Chacha Wambura/Foundation HELP

Monitoring equipment detected abnormally low pH levels in the Tigithe River, in the Tarime district in the north of Tanzania beginning on May 4 following a period of heavy rainfall. Villagers reported that the water had turned a reddish colour.

District councillor Agostino “Neto” Sasi told IPS over the phone that trees along the river banks were dying and that three children and an old man experienced skin problems after contact with the water.

“The river has overflowed its banks into the fields and caused crops such as millet, maize and sorghum also to dry up. About five cows have died from drinking water from the river.”

Chacha Benedict Wambura, executive director of Foundation HELP, an NGO based 100 km away in the town of Musoma, has been to see the mine. Foundation HELP works on advocacy on a range of issues including resource management, health, sustainable agriculture and gender equality.

“The community has testified that they have seen dead fish in the river although when we visited the place on Thursday [May 14] we did not find any fish due to the heavy rains. If there are any dead fish, they can be found downstream,” he told IPS.

“We had the opportunity to visit the affected areas, where the water had spilled and we went up to the mouth of the Tigithe river where the water from the ponds owned by the gold mine were dumping water directly into the river.”

Though the mine is described by Barrick as operating at zero discharge, meaning no water is released back into the surrounding environment, villagers have long complained that the mine has negative effects.

“This problem began in 2006. The impact of the contaminated waters of Tigithe river is huge,” according to Machage B. Machage, councillor of Matongo ward. “Cattle are dying from drinking from the river, fish are dying, plants near the river have all dried up and the community is complaining.

“The problem intensifies during heavy rains because the water spreads to a larger area, with crops wilting, and the community making big losses.”

The May 9 contamination was reported to local authorities, but failing to get a response, Bogomba Rashid, the chair of the Kewanja Village Council, also contacted Barrick headquarters and national environmental officials in the capital, Dar es Salaam.

Barrick responded quickly, dispatching experts to the scene. The company’s environmental and water specialists found the river water to be acidic. A sample taken approximately a kilometre downstream found a pH level of 4.8, more than ten times more acidic than the typical pH of rainwater.

“The decreased pH levels are believed to be the primary result of water moving from containment ponds designed to contain water that comes in contact with waste dumps,” Barrick’s PR and communications manager, Teweli K. Teweli wrote in a May 14 statement.

The discharge is from a pond containing acidic runoff water from the mine’s waste rock.

“To avoid seepage from the ponds, they are lined with a special PVC plastic liner material that is laid at the base of the pond. However, the liner material has recently been damaged and compromised by thieves. A secondary source is the adjacent temporary ore stockpile, from which water with increased acidity drains as a consequence of rainfall.”

The company statement says the increased water flow in the river has diluted the discharge, and pH levels have returned to normal, but it is also taking further measures.

“Work to intercept and divert water coming in contact with the river is scheduled for completion in the next week. Several options are under active consideration to address the situation in the long term,” said the company.

Councillor Machage rejects the company’s accusation of theft of plastic liner by the community. “It’s not possible for anyone to steal the plastic. And if they knew someone was going to steal the plastic, then they should have replaced it. Why didn’t they replace the plastic? Or put concrete?”

Responding to IPS via email, Teweli insists the company has done everything in its power to maintain the lining.

“PVC liners are cut into manageable pieces and pulled from below the water level. They are mainly used for roofing in the local community,” he writes. “The PVC liners in the affected ponds have been replaced more than four times in less than a year.”

Relations between the company and people in surrounding villages are not the best, stemming both from dissatisfaction with the levels of compensation paid to those displaced by the mine when it was established in 2003 and from the belief that the mine has negatively impacted the environment.

“We as a council have commissioned our experts to assess the situation but we are incapacitated because we lack equipment to do the job,” Machage said.

“What we have done is to request for experts from the government to come and take samples of the water for testing. They have repeatedly come back with reports saying that the water is clean, while people continue to suffer. We challenged them to drink the water to convince us that it is clean and they refused fiercely”.

At the time of writing, officials from Tanzania’s National Environmental Council had still not visited the site.

*Joyce Mulama in Nairobi and Terri Ayugi in Cape Town contributed to this report.

(*The story moved May 18 erroneously said water began overflowing from the containment pond at the North Mara mine on May 9. In fact, the acidic water discharged into the river was seeping through containing walls of the pond, and was first detected by monitoring equipment downstream on May 4.)

By Terna Gyuse
NAIROBI, Mar 6 2009 (IPS)

“Africa has the singular and tragic distinction of being the only place in the world where overall food security and livelihoods are deteriorating,” reads the website of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an initiative to boost food security and agricultural productivity on the continent.

Women organic farmers at a composting training in Kenya. Credit: Institute for Culture & Ecology

A large part of AGRA’s programme to fix this consists of the extension of improved seeds, fertiliser and credit to small-scale farmers. Is this approach the right one for Africa?

Critics of this model fear that this model will strengthen commercial farming while doing little for the small-scale farmers that form the backbone of Africa’s food production, as well as lead to the loss of precious biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.

Gathuru Mburu, who is also the director of Nairobi’s Institute for Culture and Ecology, an NGO which seeks to strengthen traditional knowledge for better environmental and resource management, spoke to IPS from Kenya.

IPS: Has a Green Revolution not already been tried in Africa? Gathuru Mburu: The Green Revolution is not new to Africa. I think all countries in Africa have had a green revolution in their own way, because we have been using fertiliser, we have been using herbicides and fungicides. And we have also been introduced to many improved varieties of crops in Africa.

IPS: Let’s talk about results. What impacts have fertiliser and high-yielding seed had in Africa? GM: We have seen that it is those who practice commercial farming, like everywhere else in the world, these are the main beneficiaries. They have the money and can afford to have a continuous flow of funds to buy fertilisers and chemical sprays, and to buy even the seeds – because for a Green Revolution to succeed, it must come as a package… and then you need to have political will that supports the implementation of the Green Revolution.

We are seeing that in Africa it has had varying levels of success depending on where you are as a farmer. If you are a commercial farmer, then you gain; if you are a small-scale farmer, you lose.

IPS: We’re told the backbone of Africa’s food security is made up of small farmers. Why hasn’t the Green Revolution benefited small farmers? In effect what it has done is to disrupt farming systems. It has disrupted [small farmers’] systems and their income. So it hasn’t really assisted small-scale farmers because of all the requirements and pre-conditions for the Green Revolution to work. Small farmers cannot afford them.

It needs a continuous flow of income, of money. It requires you to have a continuous supply of improved seeds which small-scale farmers cannot afford to buy because their cash flow is erratic. It is dependent [solely] on the yield that they get from their investment in farming. If you don’t get good yields, then your flow of income is severed and in the next planting season you will not get anything because you do not have the money to buy seeds, you do not have the money to buy other chemical inputs.

So for Africa, for small-scale farmers, it hasn’t worked. But it is not a new thing that is being brought to Africa. It has been tried here.

IPS: The Green Revolution in Asia is credited with massive increases in agricultural output. What’s your assessment of that? Why is that not applicable to Africa? GM: I think in Asia, what we can say is that it succeeded to the extent that it managed to produce high yields. But it failed in other ways because in order to get the high yields, they had to remove completely the diversity of crops and grow monocultures.

And essentially this is the basic approach of the Green Revolution. It doesn’t favour diversity. It promotes monoculture. So in Asia they succeeded in getting very high yields from specific monocultures. But on the other hand, they lost a lot, because their biodiversity, their farmers’ seed varieties: all of these were eliminated.

At the moment, what is happening in Asia is that farmers are actually going back, retracing what they have lost in terms of biodiversity. And it is an uphill task because the knowledge of managing that biodiversity is gone. Because the elders who have that knowledge are no longer there. The people who are farming today have grown up with monocultures; there are very few people who can take farmers back in Asia, back to where they came from before the Green Revolution.

An uphill task. Recuperating seeds is not an easy thing. They have to look for them, sometimes they may have to even buy the original seeds from the few people who still have the original varieties. And all this is happening because they lost their indigenous seeds to the Green Revolution, which favours monocultures of improved seeds only.

IPS: Returning to Africa: we know that the majority of smallholder farmers are women. What are the gender implications of the model that’s being put forward? GM: This is actually another trap for women. Over a long period, Africa has been trying to empower women. But this has not really succeeded.

AGRA coming in is actually going to put the last nail in the efforts for empowerment of women in Africa. Reason being AGRA is going through banks, it’s giving loans to farmers. And those people who have bank accounts, who have access to loans are men.

The women who do most of the work do not have access to these loans, because they cannot open bank accounts. Some of them may, but these are not the farmers, they may be business women.

But the majority of people who can access these loans, this AGRA money, are men. And they’re not the ones who work on the farms. They are just going to the banks, getting money and doing whatever they want with it and the women are still toiling on farms.

This money is not going to assist women, it’s going to aggravate the situation of women becuse they’re going to continue being slaves on their own farms. They are continuously working, but they’re not getting any returns from their work because a lot of these farms are controlled by men.

IPS: You’ve laid out many problems you see with the Green Revolution approach. But if the future of agriculture in Africa is not with this model, if it is not agribusiness, how are we to address the real problems that face African farmers? There are issues of soil fertility, issues with food security, declining yields: what are the alternatives? How else can Africa’s nutritional needs be met? GM: Well, there are various modes of addressing this. Before the introduction of the Green Revolution, or commercial farming, African people were feeding themselves. Many people argue that Africa had fewer people at that time, but they were feeding themselves. They still had people who had the indigenous knowledge of their food, of their seeds, of their crops.

Basically what Africa needs to do is promote local innovations, especially the farmer varieties that the farmers have the knowledge of.

Then there are so many organisations, both government and non-governmental, that are promoting organic farming, or ecological farming in Africa. But these are not getting a lot of support. And the corporate world is not investing in these ecological farming methods because they may not get the returns they are looking for.

What we need to do in Africa is to promote ecological farming, promote farmer varieties of seeds and even support or pass laws that support local farmers and their indigenous plant breeding innovation.

It has to go down to the people. It cannot be led by the corporations, because the change, the social change we are looking for needs to start with the minds of people in Africa.

When they realise that what they have is the only thing that is going to save them, that’s when they will extricate themselves from the trap that they have been put into through making the food chain a corporate affair.

IPS: But the stakes are high… what are some examples of where people farming organically, or going back into their own past for methods and seeds are attaining not just food sufficiency, but a decent livelihood? There are so many examples in Africa. I spoke earlier about Zimbabwe, where the Green Revolution’s techniques were tested. In Zimbabwe there is also a very strong organic movement. It may have been affected by the current political situation.

Here in Kenya we have so many NGOs that are promoting organic agriculture. It is gaining currency because so many people are turning from food grown with chemicals to organically-farmed crops.

And in India, there are so many people who have realised that the way to save the population of India is not going chemical, but going back to the natural ways, the ecological farming systems. And they are reclaiming, they are recuperating the seeds and the culture around the seeds and they are bringing them back [into use] and they are sharing.

We have to bring back that culture. It’s not just the seeds but the culture around the seeds. It’s the value of sharing – in the corporate world, there is no sharing, but in Africa in our own indigenous cultures, seeds were not sold, they were shared.

And I do not think that there is any corporate in the world that can actually bring meaningful social change. Social change must come from the people. When you’re talking about the Green Revolution, this is profit-driven. Because the corporations have their own researchers, they have their own things that they want to make profit from.

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By Terna Gyuse
ACCRA, Feb 28 2009 (IPS)

Resource extraction in West Africa has often coincided with environmental degradation and brutal conflict. Activists further charge that the agreements between governments and transnational mining companies do little to benefit local communities.

Mining has brought few benefits to people like this mother and child in Foinda village, Sierra Leone, displaced to make way for expansion by the Australian-owned Sierra Rutile Mining Company. Credit: Manoocher Deghati/IPS

Yet in 2008, an attempt by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to change this by developing a common mining code for the region was unexpectedly challenged by civil society groups.

Third World Network Africa (TWN) was among those opposed, and Abdulai Daramani told IPS that TWN – part of an international coalition engaged in research and advocacy on environment and development issues – supported creating a common code. However, he felt the ECOWAS initiative was premature. In his view, the process blocked citizen involvement – he says development of an inclusive code will only be possible after regional and local consultation and input.

The criticisms had their effect: what is now in place is a convention, a set of broad principles of intent that may form the basis of a future common code. IPS asked Daramani about the challenges of ensuring environmental justice for resource-rich communities in West Africa.

IPS: What are some of the worst examples in the region?

AD: We have numerous human rights violations which are well-documented. The Ghana Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice itself affirmed quite a number of violations in a report which it presented in 2008.

In addition to that we have so many scars of environmental degradation. If you go to Mali, you have the Sadiola mine, which has taken over thousands of hectares of land and deprived communities of access.

You have water problems caused by mining across the entire region. When we come to Guinea, there are also problems with the bauxite industry there where communities’ environments have been degraded. In Nigeria, where apart from oil you also have mining of gold and other minerals taking place, you have severe problems of emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

So there are environmental, social and economic problems.

IPS: Who is worst affected by mining?

AD: Obviously once the community’s rights are violated in terms of access to livelihoods, in terms of access to their dignity, in terms of access to housing, it affects the totality of the nation. But the ones who are exposed to all of these three impacts – social, economic and environmental – are local communities. They are usually located directly by the mines and they receive the day-to-day impact of whatever problems mining generates.

But it is not just the totality of the community, because within the community there are different clusters of social groups. If you take, for example, women, they are the hardest hit because they depend on land. But in terms of compensation, women receive a very, very insignificant portion of the compensation because even though they occupy the land, they don’t own the land.

Then you have traditional authorities, who are a separate interest group when it comes to mining. They are direct beneficiaries of mining in local communities.

IPS: What are some problems with the agreements signed by governments with the transnational companies that dominate mining in Africa?

AD: The main problem is that first of all the agreements tend to lock national governments in, in terms of their capacity to reverse those agreements when they feel cheated. The agreements also tend to block the space for citizens’ engagement in policy or to address some of the problems arising from mining, whether it’s economic or environmental.

Most of these agreements tend to diminish the national standard. For example, you have a situation where Newmont Mining entered an agreement with the government of Ghana, and set the royalty they will pay every year to the minimum. It’s the same thing with AngloGoldAshanti: they all tend to pay the minimum allowable royalty.

Ghanaian law says you can pay a royalty of between three and six percent, but in those agreements these companies ahve agreed to pay three percent through a period of 15 years. Now this is a case where the agreement tends to lower the national stanadard. The Ghanaian government may come out with a regulation which says royalties of five percent should be paid, but in light of these agreements they cannot raise payments from AngloGold and Newmont beyond three percent.

IPS: What changes would you like to see to the way mining is regulated?

AD: During the years when economic reforms were launched in the 1980s through the early 1990s, we saw a complete lowering of standards in all aspects of mining. Talk about environment, talk about human rights, talk about economy. We see that the role of the state, which is central in catalysing mining for development has also been diminished very seriously. So its power to regulate, its power to enforce – these have all been diminished.

What we want to see in the coming years is – and processes of reform have already begun at the African Union level – we want to see the state again become very strong in the development process. In fact, the current crisis of the credit crunch, where even Europe and America are calling for the intervention of the state, testifies to the argument we are putting forward, that the role of the state is central.

Secondly, we also want a strong focus on the diversification from the traditionally-exploited minerals like gold and damonds to other minerals which are very critical, but which we have tended to overlook.

Third, we want to see strong value addition. That value addition must come through a strategy for processing our various minerals so we don’t just remain exporters of primary commodities, but move towards a point where we begin to export finished products.

IPS: One of the new efforts to improve things in the mining sector is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which works to strengthen accountability by making clear what companies pay and what governments receive.

AD: I think that to a very limited extent, the EITI can contribute to some level of transparency, to the public knowing what companies are paying and what governments are receiving from companies.

The challenge of this initiative contributing to the developmental aspirations of individual African countries is this: one, the process seeks to subvert the argument for a re-organisation of the levels of payment that companies make to governments. At the moment the levels of payment, whether it’s taxes, import duties or royalties is terribly low. And the EITI seeks to subvert attempts to raise the level of taxation, so that is a major challenge.

The second challenge, even though some countries like Nigeria have moved one step from voluntary codes to a state law, is that the totality of the EITI is moving away from mandatory codes to more voluntary codes. And these are ultimately not enforceable. They depend on the gestures of the companies. And we cannot rely on the companies who are mainly seeking profits to contribute to development.

Finally, the scope of the EITI is limited, because it is focused on the revenue aspect without questioning the larger environmental or human rights standards and this is very problematic when it comes to mining.

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By Terna Gyuse
CAPE TOWN, Jan 29 2009 (IPS)

Onyango Oloo was the national coordinator of the Kenyan Social Forum in 2007 when the last global World Social Forum (WSF)took place in Nairobi. As another gathering of activists from around the world unfolds in Belém, Brazil, IPS asked Oloo for his views on the Forum’s past and future.

Onyango Oloo Credit:

IPS: Two years on from Nairobi, how would you evaluate the last WSF? What were the successes? What were the shortcomings? Oloo: WSF Nairobi 2007 was a groundbreaking event. The fact that it took place at all given its myriad challenges, was definitely an indicator of success. We were able to bring thousands of activists from around Africa and across the world together on Kenyan soil.

Issues to do with climate change, food sovereignty, awareness about GMOs, South-South solidarity, campaigns against the EPAs to cite a few were foregrounded and later on became a basis of pan-African initiatives across the continent.

Locally, the emergence of the Kenyan gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community was a dramatic manifestation how the WSF can strengthen the struggles of marginalized social groups.

One of the key shortcomings had to with locking poor communities out of the event. Another drawback was how elements within the organising committee fostered the privatisation and commercialisation of the WSF space. Unfortunately, corruption – which is endemic in Kenyan society – reared its ugly head at the 2007 event.

IPS: There were many who expressed disappointment after Nairobi, who suggested the WSF may have outlived its purpose as an alternative to the very different ideas and networking at the World Economic Forum, and has been domesticated into a trade fair for NGOs and the better-funded sections of civil society – what’s your view? OO: While I sympathized with the essence of the sentiments described above, I do not fully share that pessimistic assessment.

As a social justice activist, I firmly believe that cynicism is a luxury we can ill afford. The World Social Forum is an arena of struggle, not just between the big imperialist forces and those working for fundamental transformation, but also of contestation within and among progressive forces. It is not a static platform.

From time to time, negative tendencies will appear in the WSF process. It is our responsibility to combat and transcend these reactionary tendencies within our movements and communities.

IPS: How has the WSF been good for African civil society? OO: I strongly feel that activists should challenge the very definition of “African civil society”. Is it limited just to the NGO community and those organisations associated with the African petit-bourgeois elite? Or does it extend to embrace social movements, radical and revolutionary forces (some of them in the anti-establishment political arena) and other spheres?

I am conscious that I am pushing the envelope here since the WSF process is quite wary about including organised political actors [ie. political parties] within its milieu.

IPS: “Another world is possible” – it feels like a limited set of those possibilities have been absorbed into mainstream. Africa is maybe just past the crest of a wave of elections, of the steady consolidation of bodies like the AU and regional bodies. The continent is in the relative aftermath of the IMF’s economic prescriptions to liberalise and privatise, cut back on government spending and instead recover costs from citizens-as-clients – the casualties of structural adjustment have been buried and now we see solid macro-economic numbers in Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa…

And it seems some of the passion and effectiveness of the Jubilee campaigns, of various pro-democracy movements, the urgent and organised demands for things like free anti-retrovirals has subsided.

Is this it? Are we already living in the other possible world? Who and how is pushing beyond this?

OO: As a slogan, “Another World Is Possible” is woefully inadequate with its core assumption that all possible worlds can only be better than the existing one.

Yet the experience of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Bush in the USA, Idi Amin in Uganda, Pinochet in Chile, Papa Doc in Haiti, Suharto in Indonesia and a slew of blood stained dictators and despots across the globe attests that for every utopia, there is a nightmarish dystopia waiting in the wings.

We need to define the contents and parameters of these other possible worlds.

It is a weakness of the WSF process that over the years it has valorised ideologically ambiguous terminology that seems, in my view, calculated to mollify the waffling liberals and right-leaning social democrats. What happened to old-fashioned terms like imperialism, socialism, revolutionary transformation and so on?

I am saying that the WSF will eventually lose relevance as long as it is unable to frontally confront global monopoly capitalism and suggest clear socialist alternatives and organize progressive humanity to defeat this imperialist monster.

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By Terna Gyuse
CAPE TOWN, Jan 14 2009 (IPS)

Each episode of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s long-running civil war has weighed particularly heavily on women, yet women have relatively little voice in the negotiations for peace.

The renewed fighting that broke out in August 2008 between the National Congress for the Defence of the People (known by its French acronym, CNDP) and the DRC’s army and allied militias has again exposed Congolese women to displacement, death and widespread sexual violence.

As director of the Society of Women Against AIDS in Africa in the DRC, Aimée Mwadi Kady conducted a study of the effects of pervasive sexual violence in the eastern DRC.

Katana Gégé Bukuru set up the organisation Solidarity of Activist Women for Human Rights, which trains women to defend their rights.

Both women are active in local and regional efforts to bring peace to the DRC. They are also advisors for the Global Fund which supports women’s organisations working on human rights issues, including gender-based violence and peace building.

They spoke to IPS in Cape Town during the November 2008 conference of the Association of Women in Development; part of the interview is published here.

IPS: I’ll begin with a broad question – what’s the situation for women in the DRC now?

AIMÉE MWADI KADI: The situation for women in Congo is not good. Poverty has a woman’s face. Women living in urban areas used to have things a bit better, but with the war, poverty has left the countryside and come into town.

Women face great difficulties. There are more women living alone, more people living in women-headed households. There are growing numbers of young mothers, that is girls becoming mothers very early and becoming a further burden on their own mothers as they still live at home. This has been made worse by the war.

There is a lot of internal displacement; women who have left conflict zones to squat in the urban centres face great difficulties. They work hard to survive.

IPS: Who gives assistance or support to these women?

KATANA GEGE BUKURU: It’s primarily the feminist movement, women’s organisations that are trying to bring together women to share in the struggle.

Women are deeply involved in the search for peace and some have participated directly in the negotiations, while the majority of women have participated indirectly by sending petitions, sending memos, staging demonstrations. Even now when the war has started again, women continue to organise.

IPS: Do women’s organisations have contact with the various parties in the war?

KGB: In terms of local negotiations and diplomatic efforts, we’ve had small meetings with the different armed groups, but not summits. We’ve met with some local leaders who were open to our vision of peace, but it’s not easy. Sometimes a person tells us, No, we’re not for war, but on the other hand if his leader/patron insists, it’s difficult.

We know the actors that we see on the ground, but those who are behind the scenes we don’t know. That’s the problem.

IPS: What do you think of the role played by the UN mission, MONUC, at the moment?

KGB: I can say that even if they play a positive role and even if they are part of the call for a ceasefire, what really stands out at the moment is this: why is the war continuing while they’re here?

AMK: MONUC is an institution put in place to keep the peace. Now, I often work in the zones where there is war. I’ve been in Goma, in Kiwanja, Tamugenga, Rumangabo, all these places. But in the villages, what are people saying? “No Nkunda, No Job, No Money.”

You follow?

That is to say, in some places MONUC has also played a role that I can say is negative, because I have spoken a lot with women in the course of my work supporting women who are victims of violence. And everywhere, this is what they told me: they say, No, the war will start again because MONUC’s members are finding their satisfaction in it, because they are well-paid. If there was no war, they wouldn’t have any money.

No job, and no Nkunda (leader of the CNDP). No job, no money.

So it’s very important, at this juncture, to speak the truth. People must understand that MONUC has also played a role in the return to war.

KGB: What I’ve got to say is that everyone’s using the name of Nkunda. Nkunda is just an individual. An individual cannot make war on his own. Nkunda is the image, so we don’t want to continue to talk about Nkunda, but to speak of the real authors of the war in DRC.

IPS: And who are the real authors?

KGB: That’s what we want to know! Because an individual can’t make war alone. He doesn’t make weapons. Nkunda doesn’t have sufficient means to carry out a war. It’s not him – that’s why we want to know who the authors are.

IPS: It seems that the same solutions are always put forward. There’s always an ex-president called on to mediate, always the search for suitable soldiers for a peace-keeping mission where there is no peace to be kept. What other approaches would you propose?

AMK: Pertinent question. Let me propose a solution. Because we always pretend that the FDLR, the ex-Rwandese army is in Congo causing insecurity for Rwanda.

But, my brother, Rwanda has – the DRC was divided in two for how long? For three years, the DRC was divided, and they [Rwanda] had all the time they wanted to sweep out, even massacre them, to kill all the FDLR even to the last baby. But they couldn’t.

The solution – the international community has to take charge… Because they are asking the DRC to disarm the FDLR, but how? Demobilise them – with what means?

Let the international community find a place. We’re not insisting they go back to Rwanda and take part in a dialogue like we had in Congo.

We sat down around the same table, we even accepted people from outside the DRC who today we find in high positions in Kinshasa.

All this to say that we Congolese are pacifists. People said, We want peace. Now together, let’s build it, forgetting our differences.

But today Nkunda says I’m going to fight until the FDLR is gone from DRC. They’re fighting because the FDLR is supposed to be preventing Rwanda from developing? That’s mad.

The solution… The international community has the means. They know where the FDLR is and they can make a corridor and take them to Rwanda. And if Rwanda refuses to talk to them, to their brothers, then the international community should take this FDLR to Cameroon. There’s space there; we’ll put them over there and that’s it.

And then we’ll show you peace. We constantly pretend that the FDLR is the reason [for the conflict]. But the reason for war is theft.

Go and look at the lake. How many sacks of cassiterite? How many sacks of coltan? How many aircraft land at Walungu? And in Borega? How many?

Go to Rwanda now, they’re busy constructing the country. With what? Rwanda is selling diamonds now, signing contracts to sell diamonds, and you ask yourself: where do the diamonds come from?

Let the international community listen to the voice of a woman who has seen other women crying. The international community needs to take the FDLR and take them… I don’t know where, even to the desert. Ok? Take them to the desert, because we don’t want war.

Go to Kinshasa; there are so many amputees. Mothers, young people. When we speak with Rwandan women, they are also crying, because so many of their children have come to die in DRC.

So my final word on this is that the solution is not to continue to say to the DRC that we have to arrange to disarm, no. It’s the international community which has been complicit that must take on the task.

If not… we will all take up arms.

I’m a woman, I’m over 50 years old, but I’m ready to take up arms, and so are our children. We are in the process of creating suicide bombers – after ten years of war, we’re creating them. My tailor comes to me and says, I’m ready, we’re ready to take up arms and do no matter what, place bombs all over.

That’s what we’re preparing here if you leave us like this, abandoned, to our own sadness.

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