By Isaiah Esipisu and - -
MAKUENI DISTRICT, Kenya, May 22 2011 (IPS)

Gadam sorghum was introduced to semi-arid regions of eastern Kenya as a way for farmers to improve their food security and earn some income from marginal land. The hardy, high-yielding sorghum variety has not only thrived in harsh conditions, it has won a place in the hearts – and plates – of local farmers.

Gadam sorghum. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

KASAL, the Kenya Arid and Semi-Arid Lands programme of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), introduced gadam sorghum in eastern Kenya in 2009 for commercial production.

“The programme is a public-private partnership with an aim to improve income and food security among smallholder farmers in arid and semi arid parts of Kenya,” said Dr David Miano, the programme’s national coordinator.

The idea was to introduce a viable crop for largely marginalised land in Kenya’s arid zones, giving farmers there an additional crop that can sustain their livelihoods.

Eastern Kenya is characterised by drought, sometimes going without rain for two to three years at a stretch. After careful selection from several existing sorghum varieties, scientists say that gadam has been found to be the best placed variety able to survive and yield well in such tough climatic conditions.

“Apart from being ideal for beer brewing, it is as nutritious as any other variety of sorghum,” said David Karanja, a research scientist at KARI and the principal investigator for the Gadam Sorghum Production and Marketing Project

Sorghum making converts

Sorghum is not a new crop in this part of the country. Farmers here have always grown red sorghum varieties, but in small quantities as few people cared to eat it, and there was no market for it.

Despite persistent drought in this semi-arid part of the country, farmers have for years opted to grow maize, which is highly vulnerable to the conditions.

Gadam is a sorghum variety from Southern Sudan. It is early-maturing, high yielding, and is highly adapted to stressful drought prone areas. KARI is in the process of crossbreeding it with other varieties – hopefully to come up with a more superior variety.

“When the government introduced this sorghum variety for the first time in 2009, I was reluctant to take it on despite the promise of a ready market,” said Teresia Munyau, the chairlady of the Tears of Women Farmers Self Help Group and one of 3,200 farmers who took part in the project.

She committed two hectares to sorghum – a quarter of the land owned by her family in the village of Mwaani, in Makueni District. She harvested twelve 90-kilogramme bags of grain. Through the self-help group, she sold eight bags to Smart Logistics, the firm contracted by the breweries company to purchase sorghum on its behalf at 1530 Kenyan shillings per bag (17 dollars), and kept four for domestic use.

She plans to plant sorghum on four and a half hectares next planting season.

“Seventeen shillings per kilo – paid by the breweries company – is far higher than the Sh 10 or even less paid for the same quantity of maize, during the harvesting period,” said Veronica Mutindi, a farmer from Kitwasi village. “It’s a premium price, given that before we got access to the commercial market, we used to sell a kilo of red sorghum at five shillings a kilo to local consumers.”

Makueni district farmers were happy with the yield, but researchers say that an outbreak of quelea birds was a major setback. “In some areas, the birds consumed more than a half anticipated yield while still in farms. This means that another season without such an outbreak will guarantee much higher yields,” said Karanja.

Crop proves unexpectedly popular

The initial plan, supported by EABL and KASAL, was for clusters of farmers to combine their harvests for sale to Smart Logistics which would further consolidate the crop and deliver it to the brewers in bulk.

However, only 875 of the more than 3,000 farmers who took part in the pilot project, agreed to sell even part of their harvest to East African Breweries – originally expected to purchase the entire crop.

Like many other farmers, Munyau says it does not make sense to sell her grain when the countryside is expecting drought in the next few months. “I will not go begging for food and alms from humanitarian organisations for my children to eat,” the mother of four told IPS. “That is why I will make sure that I have at least three bags of sorghum in my house at any time.”

“It was due to the plentiful harvests that we started exploring new methods of cooking sorghum, a move that has made the crop popular in just a year,” said Munyau.

Locals have taken to grinding it into flour to make ugali (the flour is mixed with boiling water) or porridge. They also mix the grain with rice, pigeon peas, or beans and other legumes to make delicious meals.

The KASAL program, which is funded by the European Union and the Kenyan government, has now been extended to 3,800 more farmers in other parts of the country, including the Coastal, Rift Valley and Western regions. “We are up-scaling because so far we have not been able to meet the commercial market demand,” said Karanja.

Last year, EABL was seeking 12,000 tonnes of sorghum; farmers in the project delivered close to one thousand tonnes. This year, the company wants even more.

“The breweries company has requested us to supply them with 24 million kilogramnes of sorghum. That is why we must introduce as many farmers as possible to sustain this growing commercial market demand,” said the researcher.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents and - -
WINDHOEK, Apr 3 2011 (IPS)

As water resources in Southern Africa come under pressure from growing population, climate change and increasing industrial and agricultural use, economic accounting for water is among the tools that could aid better management.

Fetching water from a Namibian canal: accurate data on water use is lacking across Southern Africa. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

EAW complements information in the System of National Accounts, the standard tool for economic reporting and planning. It collects and quantifies detailed data about water use to understand the value of non-marketed goods and in so doing better appreciate the true contribution of water to the economy, which is presently underestimated.

“To put it very simply, EAW helps us to better understand the trade-offs that are made when using water,” says Dr Amy Sullivan of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network who heads the Limpopo Basin Development Challenge.

The SADC Economic Accounting of Water Use project set out to establish standard methodologies, raise awareness around water accounting and build capacity for countries to set up their own water accounting systems.

The pilot was run in Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia and Zambia as well as in two river basins, the Orange-Senqu and the Maputo. It revealed several challenges to implementing EAW in the region, including collecting the wide range of data required from numerous institutions and in the case of transboundary river basins, coordinating this across national boundaries.

“EAW requires substantial data and data availability varies greatly among SADC member states,” says Manase.

Economic accounting for water produces six accounts that track quantity and quality of water, as well as its flow into the economy and back out again – including monitoring pollutants in wastewater and sewage. It presents the physical stocks and movements of water alongside the economic figures for productivity of the many sectors that use water as an input.

The picture that emerges provides a more comprehensive valuation of water’s contribution to sectors like agriculture and mining and as a consumer good in its own right in the case of domestic water supply. It also accounts for the environmental value of water, for example in the contribution wetlands make to water purification and flood control.

“Economic accounting of water combines different factors relating to water use such as hydrology, economic assessment of water resources, pollution and social distribution. It is a multidimensional system,” says Sullivan.

“It doesn’t just look at the hydrological component or the economic returns, but also takes ecological sustainability and equity into account. So it is a step up from either taking a purely hydrological, economic or ecological point of view. It is an attempt  to plan and manage water resources on a basin level in the best possible way.”

“Although EAW is a critical tool for efficient and effective management of water resources,” says Manase, “it is not yet widely applied in the SADC region.”

At present, only Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa are compiling water accounts at varying levels of detail.

More accurate assessment of the role water plays in the economy – and the effects of economic uses of water on present and future availability – will aid comparison of benefits across sectors and accurately document inefficient use. It could also help water managers make a strong case for investment in water infrastructure.

“Water accounting started as a research tool, but it is slowly moving on to be a useful tool to inform policy-making,” says Sullivan. “It is still early days, the potential of economic water accounting has not yet been reached, but as the models get more detailed and allow for elaborate scenario-testing EAW will be better suited for decision-making.”

Excerpt:

On Apr. 5, the United Nations Children’s Fund will launch a report on teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone. Teenage pregnancies account for 40 percent of maternal deaths in the country, and the report comes as public health authorities recalibrate strategy to address a problem that endangers both mothers and children.

This young woman from Makeni dropped out of school when she had her first child at 16. Credit: Anna Jeffreys/IRIN

Seventy percent of teenage girls in Sierra Leone are married, according to a 2008 survey by the World Health Organization, in a country where early marriage is supported by traditional practice.

The United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) report, “A Glimpse Into the World of Teenage Pregnancy in Sierra Leone”, states that “such importance is given to girls marrying as virgins that the age of marriage often coincides with the first occurrence of female menstruation”.

Drawing on research conducted in four regions, UNICEF’s report finds the typical consequences of teen pregnancy are social stigma, unstable marriages, poverty and the end of a girl’s education. UNICEF cautions that comprehensive evidence-based data on the phenomenon is still limited, but the issue has become a focus of concern for educators, doctors, politicians and parents alike.

Poverty and stigma

Kadiatu – not her real name – lives in Kissy Mess Mess, in the eastern part of the capital, Freetown, with her three children. Now 27, she recalls how she became pregnant with her first child.

“We were a poor family and I was really in want for virtually everything, from food, clothing, to even paying school charges… so I got this man that was ready to provide all of these, so i yielded to him,” she told IPS.

Her boyfriend was 30; she was just 15 at the time, preparing to take her Basic School Certificate Examination. She was taken to the doctor with what was suspected to be appendicitis – it turned out that she was three months pregnant.

“I told my boyfriend immediately,” Kadiatu recalls.

His reaction? “You have to get an abortion! Just get rid of it!”

“The man – who had been showering me with gifts and telling me all kinds of loving words – denied that he was responsible for the pregnancy,” Kadiatu recounts. She had the baby, but like many others in her position, she dropped out of school.

“I became pregnant again at 17 for almost the same reasons as the first pregnancy. Now I have three children, I am still a single mother and my only means of survival is to hawk fruits in the market and rely on favours from men who promise love,” she says, “but what they really want is to sleep with you and run away afterwards.”

In 2009, village chiefs in one northern province passed bylaws that require that when a schoolgirl falls pregnant, she and the father must both drop out of school. This scheme quickly drew criticism for only compounding the problem of stigma and a high dropout rate.

In Koinadugu District, also in the north, the Biriwa Youth Association for Development took the opposite tack, offering school-age girls between the ages of 12 and 16 the chance to win scholarships to attend university – if they passed regular examinations by a community nurse to “prove” they were virgins. This initiative too was quickly scrapped.

Stigma aggravates problems

In a draft report for the World Health Organisation, Dr Helenlouise Taylor noted that few teens have ante-natal checkups, instead trying to hide their pregnancy or try to abort. This makes early detection of potential problems in a high-risk group very difficult.

For her research, directed towards developing strategies to reduce Sierra Leone’s maternal mortality rate, Taylor visited 14 districts of the country, observing conditions, interviewing health workers and using a questionnaire to collect information about patterns and trends of maternal care as well as training and equipment in health facilities.

In the draft report’s recommendations for teenage pregnancy, Taylor says measures to reduce coerced sex and unsafe abortion and increase access to contraception for adolescents are all important, and makes several important suggestions regarding information and reducing social stigma to encourage young mothers to make use of available health care.

She urges a review of life skills and biology in the school curriculum, as well as tighter links between schools and antenatal clinics – possibly even offering antenatal care at schools. She also calls for appropriate training for health personnel and teachers to help both groups communicate accurate and effective information on sex and birth control to teens.

Maud Droogleever Fortuyn, child protection director for UNICEF in Sierra Leone, told IPS that bringing about changes in behaviour and attitudes will take time. She said UNICEF has been supporting local NGOs conducting baseline surveys to improve understanding of the extent and nature of teenage pregnancy, developing modules to improve knowledge, as well as working with traditional authorities to develop effective bylaws that will support teen mothers, especially with completing school.

By Wambi Michael and - -
KAMPALA, Apr 1 2011 (IPS)

Clementine Auma was still living in a displaced person’s camp in Gulu district when she acquired the treasure she’s gone into the house to fetch. She re-emerges from her home with a white box in her arms: a solar oven.

Women get a first look at a Sun Oven in northern Uganda. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

“You have to make sure that you see the shadow of the oven while facing the sun, so you have positioned it well to trap the sun,” she says.

Auma is one of a small handful to receive a Sun Oven during a pilot project in southwestern and northern Uganda, testing them before manufacture and sale nationwide.

“It is very good,” she says of her oven,” because you can boil tea even while you are digging in the garden.

Sun Oven

Her oven is a box roughly 50 x 50 centimetres, and 30 centimetres deep. Its outer shell is made of plastic, lined with insulation to keep heat in, and then an inner shell of anodised aluminium and a clever swinging shelf that both allows the hot air in the cooking chamber to circulate all around the pot and automatically levels the base of the oven, which should be tilted towards the sun using an adjustable leg built into the back of the box.

The cooking chamber – matt black to better convert the sun’s rays into heat – is covered with tempered glass to keep the hot air in: the Sun Oven, say its manufacturers, reaches temperatures comparable to a standard oven. The whole ensemble weighs 9.5 kilos.

Margaret Sempijja, says these ovens can be used to cook almost any kind of food, as long as the chef knows how to mix it before putting it in. “Some people don’t know that posho [a staple meal of ground maize] can be prepared in this oven. But posho which is prepared in this oven is wonderful,” she smiles.

Another woman with experience using the solar oven, Saida Matovu, says she has found it both convenient and efficient, but she complains that the pot is very small if one has a large family to feed – and of course the whole apparatus is useless on rainy days.

A larger version of the solar oven is also available, big enough to serve in institutional settings such as a school or an orphanage.

Over 90 percent of Uganda’s population relies on biomass – usually wood – for cooking and heating in rural and urban areas alike. Studies by the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) indicate that firewood and charcoal contribute 88 and 6 percent to the country’s total energy consumption, respectively. Electricity and hydrocarbons account for the remainder.

Appropriate technology

Prince Ronald Mutebi first saw a Sun Oven at a Rotarians’ conference in a Chicago hotel seven years ago and immediately thought that it could be a useful tool to both slow deforestation from harvesting firewood and protect the health of Ugandan women suffering from respiratory diseases linked to long hours spent cooking over a smoky wood fire.

Mutebi, now the Executive Director of Sun Oven Uganda Tek Consult Group, partnered with U.S.-based Sun Oven International to import the stoves which he has since field tested in rural areas. He now plans to set up a manufacturing plant that will distribute the sun stoves across East Africa.

“I knew about the technology but I had never seen the technology this effective. And when I saw it at the conference in my mind I said Ugandan sits just at the equator so we have the abundant sun. So if it works elsewhere, then it will work in Uganda,” Mutebi told IPS in an interview.

He explained that the oven is so well insulated that it can keep food warm for up to four hours, as long as the cooking chamber is not opened.

“It is culturally sensitive: you can cook dinner at 5:00 p.m. and not serve it until later in the night. So it can work in most communities where dinner is normally served in the night [long after the sun has set].”

These ovens were developed in the mid 1980s by Tom Burns, a retired restaurant owner in the United States and long-term member of Rotary International, who set out to make a durable and inexpensive solar oven. Rugged and rust-proof thanks to the use of aluminium, the ovens, according to Mutebi, should have a a fifteen-year lifespan.

Mutebi says the oven will initially be sold in Uganda for the equivalent of 170 dollars, but that price could go down once mass production starts. “Still that cost is high for an average Ugandan. So we’re planning to create sort of a hire-purchase scheme for the ovens, whereby people can pay in installments,” he said.

Spreading the word

Several development groups in Uganda have seen the Sun Oven as an opportunity to bring change in communities. The Nyanya-Kentale Kukama Butonde Group, a local environmental group based in Rakai district in southwestern Uganda is promoting it.

David Sentongo, the group’s chair, told IPS that demand for the ovens is steadily increasing as the communities come to know about its benefits.

“We got fifteen ovens which we distributed to a first group of our members. Out of the fifteen, we gave two to some people in the communities who are not our members, just to show those Sun Ovens are for everyone,” he said.

He wants the group to acquire an industrial-size unit that could be used as a community oven for baking.

Mutebi said Sun Oven Uganda already has the components to assemble 365 solar ovens in the country; he hopes to put them together and on the market before the end of the year.

He told IPS that price remains the biggest obstacle to the ovens rapidly gaining a foothold. Relatively few households will have that much money to put down, but high interest rates for consumer loans make arranging financing a difficult challenge.

Back in Gulu district, Clementine Auma is reluctant to lend her precious oven to anyone, despite its portability. “Some people come to borrow it to make bread, but my fear is that it could get damaged.”

Back into her thatched-roof house it disappears: a valuable tool to protect health and the environment. And to make marvelous, flavourful posho.

Excerpt:

French economist Esther Duflo thinks poverty can be alleviated or even eradicated with the right policies. All it takes is for politicians to “translate research into action,” implementing programmes that have been shown to work.

French economist Esther Duflo Credit: A. D. McKenzie/IPS

But that is easier said than done. Duflo, who last year won the American Economic Association’s prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, acknowledges that it is sometimes frustrating to get policy makers to apply the results of research that could improve people’s lives. Sometimes they do not know the evidence and so cannot take the right approach, she adds.

In April a new book by Duflo and co-author Abhijit Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, will once more turn the spotlight on actions to tackle poverty. The book aims to make 2011 the year that the “economics of poverty” become a key part of international political discussions.

“Fundamentally, I think it is a subject that people are interested in,” Duflo told IPS. “The differences in income between the poor world and the rich world are so great that people have to be interested.”

The 38-year-old Duflo, who is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and who often lectures in France as well, is credited with making development economics “chic”, according to some French reviewers.

Doing her PhD at MIT, Duflo chose to enter an unusual sphere of research — at a time when most students specialised in other fields, and the subject was not as “popular” as it is now becoming.

“It was not considered a fancy area of study,” she says. “There was a generation of people who had started looking at development from other fields. They had their own theories and only a few were economists. What I contributed to doing was to start going into detail. But I did have advisers and mentors.”

Duflo’s major role in the field has been to use research to show which programmes are the most effective in combating poverty. According to MIT, her work “uses randomised field experiments to identify highly specific programmes that can alleviate poverty, ranging from low-cost medical treatments to innovative education programmes.”

In a landmark study, Duflo, along with Banerjee and Rachel Glennerster, executive director of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), discovered that the rate at which families in northern India will immunize their children jumps from about 5 percent to nearly 40 percent when parents are offered a small bag of lentils as an incentive.

Duflo seems an unlikely person to try to argue with those in power. Slightly built and eschewing the glamourous-intelligentsia look for which many French intellectuals are known, she seems at first glance to be a down-at-heel graduate student.

When she begins talking, however, there is no doubting the importance of her research. What she does is backed by scientific evidence, demonstrated by graphs and other tools.

Duflo is also a director of MIT’s J-PAL, an organisation she co-founded in 2003 with Banerjee, MIT’s Ford International Professor of Economics, and Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist who now teaches at Harvard University.

J-PAL’s researchers do scientific studies in various countries, working with national governments as well as non-governmental organisations to implement programmes to eliminate poverty, says Helene Giacobino, the general director of J-PAL Europe.

“Much of our work is to evaluate the different policies or programmes against poverty and to see the impact and effectiveness,” Giacobino told IPS.

Since 2003, more than 235 evaluations have been carried out in 38 different countries, examining unemployment, absenteeism in education, social programmes and other issues.

Many of the evaluations are long-term studies, lasting up to three years or more. In Kenya, for instance, J-PAL’s researchers found that school absenteeism was linked to intestinal worms. When de-worming pills were administered to children, researchers found that absenteeism was reduced by 25 percent.

Since then, the Bill Gates Foundation has supported a programme to provide de-worming medicine to those who need it, and J-PAL helped to start Deworm the World, a non-profit group that helped the Kenyan government treat 3.6 million children in 2009, according to MIT.

In another investigation on the use of mosquito nets in Africa, the J-PAL affiliated researcher Pascaline Dupas showed that people who were given free nets used them just as much as those who bought them.

The findings debunked the myth that people who get things for free do not appreciate or utilise them.

“This showed that it was better to hand out nets freely to people so as to prevent malaria,” said Duflo. “It’s a way of helping those who couldn’t afford to buy them anyway.”

According to many of her colleagues, Duflo brings “something new” to the field of development.

“She’s totally involved, and she contributes to making a change in the world,” Giacobino said.

Duflo herself says that she is motivated by the example of her mother, a doctor who used to travel to developing countries to help victims of war.

“I was always interested in these questions of is there something that can be done to help the lives of the poor,” Duflo said. “I realised that economics was a good angle even if it seems a little remote.”

She said that with the new book and J-PAL, she and her colleagues “hope to try to improve policies that affect the lives of the poor, leading to better health, education, and access to finance.”

By IPS Correspondents and - -
LILONGWE, Mar 31 2011 (IPS)

Post-partum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. A decade of applying research to midwifery practice in one Malawi district demonstrates that PPH is quite easy to prevent.

One in four maternal deaths worldwide is due to post-partum haemorrhage (PPH) – excessive bleeding after childbirth; for Africa the figure is one in three.

Malawi has an extremely high rate of maternal mortality, at 807 women per 100,000 live births, with 25 percent of these due to PPH. But these figures represent an improvement over 2004 when maternal mortality was 1,120 per 100,000 live births.

Prevention

Maternal deaths are overwhelmingly preventable, if warning signs are noted, timely action is taken, and affordable and easy-to-use drugs are available to birth attendants.

Elimase Kamanga, the reproductive health coordinator at Dedza District Hospital in central Malawi, told IPS changes to birthing practices have brought great success to the unit.

“We used to remove the placenta manually before a policy was put in place to for the placenta to come out naturally. The women would bleed uncontrollably in such a situation and many would die due to loss of blood,” said Kamanga.

Research shows that active management of the third stage of labour – during which the umbilical cord is tied off and the placenta is expelled – is key to preventing post-partum haemmorhage. This involves giving the labouring woman oxytocin, controlled cord traction as needed (assisting delivery of the placenta), and massage of the uterus once the placenta has been delivered.

Kamanga said skilled birth attendants are no longer allowed to conduct manual removal of the placenta in Malawi.

“Now a deliberate policy is in place for the administration of active management of the third stage of labour (AMTSL), a medical process for preventing and treating PPH,” said Kamanga.

Challenges

But challenges remain, says the senior midwife. Many women in Malawi give birth outside of a health facility and this is frustrating the efforts to manage birth complications. The 2004 Demographic and Health Survey says up to 43 percent of pregnant women in Malawi give birth without skilled attendants.

“Many women still go to traditional birth attendants and some give birth at home where they are attended to by their mother or mother-in-law. In this case the women do not have quality care and when they bleed heavily they die. Most times such women are brought to a medical facility when it is too late to be given medical help,” said Kamanga.

But the Dedza district where Kamanga works an area where initiatives to reduce maternal mortality are working; a community maternal health programme was set up here in 2000, and not a single maternal death has been registered in Chaponda village since 2006.

The maternal health programme involves local people and traditional leaders in task forces and committees on safe motherhood. Pregnant women are encouraged to visit clinics for antenatal care and to deliver their babies in hospital if possible. The community has enacted by-laws against giving birth at home or at the hands of traditional birth attendants.

Evelyn Kaphuka, 43, a mother of four from Chaponda village, is one woman who had a narrow escape due to post-partum haemmorhage. “I went to a traditional birth attendant when I gave birth to my first born child, who is now 24 years old. I bled a lot soon after he was born.”

She was rushed to the hospital after she fainted. “I was lucky because there was a vehicle in the village belonging to one of my nephews who was visiting from town. I surely would have died otherwise, because it takes close to three hours to get to the hospital on a bicycle, but my nephew was able to get me there within 30 minutes,” said Kaphuka.

For more than a month afterwards she was too weak to even nurse her son.

“I realise the importance of going to hospital to give birth and I encourage all pregnant women in my area to access medical care at birth. The other three children I have given birth to were born at the hospital,” Kaphuka said.

Malawi is working towards sustaining and expanding implementation of measures against PPH, according to Eliza Chodzadza, a lecturer in maternal and child health at University of Malawi’s Kamuzu College of Nursing.

“Active management of third stage of labour is one of the major issues in the midwifery curriculum. It is traditional practice now in every labour ward in Malawi,” said Chodzadza.

Excerpt:

By Miriam Gathigah and - -
NAIROBI, Mar 29 2011 (IPS)

Talk about foul foundations: the Katwekera Tosha Bio Centre is built on the stuff that goes into toilets. This community centre in the Nairobi slum of Kibera goes well beyond solving sanitation problems – it is a model for green energy, a meeting place for locals, and turning a profit for its operators.

The dire sanitation systems available to the hundreds of thousands living in Kibera, often called Africa’s biggest slum, has been well-documented.

Less talked about than the infamous flying toilets – bags full of faeces tossed as far as possible, neighbours beware! – is the challenge of household energy for the urban poor.

The high, and rising cost of fuel – kerosene, paraffin, charcoal, firewood – takes an enormous bite out of the income of poor households. The use of polluting energy sources in closed spaces levies an additional charge against the health of the poor; the wider environmental implications of fossil fuels or inefficiently burned biomass completes a glum accounting.

Every challenge an opportunity

“The Umande Trust is a rights-based agency which believes that modest resources, strategically invested in support of community-led initiatives, can significantly improve access to water and sanitation for all,” says Paul Muchire, the Trust’s communication manager.

This mission statement has guided the Trust towards partnerships with community-based organisations to improve the living conditions of people in places like Kibera.

The Trust first set out to build toilets and bathrooms, but had a larger vision: TOSHA, “Total Sanitation and Hygiene Access”, was born.

“The idea was to exploit biogas from these toilets to provide household energy that could be used by the community in preparing their various dishes,” says David Kihara, who manages the business side of the Katwekera Tosha Bio Centre.

The centre has toilets and bathrooms on the ground floor – the toilets are connected to a bio-digester, with a dome-shaped holding tank in which biogas is produced. Raw human waste from the toilets flows in, and bacteria break it down, releasing methane gas which collects at the top of the domed tank.

“A pipe is then plumbed into these toilets and connected to the first floor, which is where the cooking area is located,” says Kihara. The gas is piped to collective stoves one floor up – and is usually sufficient for community members to cook on throughout the day.

“We pay a very small fixed fee for whatever dish we would like to cook. It is a very cheap source of energy and we cook on a first-come, first-served basis,” says area resident Nina Oyaro.

More than merely functional

Muchire explains that the centre is intended to be much more than a utilitarian place where people can relieve themselves, take a bath or cook.

“They are centres for many things. We have built the capacity of the CBOs attached to various bio centres to a level where they can fully exploit the space on where the centres stand.”

It is left to the community to decide what sort of venture to set up on the top floor. “Some bio centres have set up DSTV [satellite television], where people can come and watch matches for a fee, as is the case with Katwekera Tosha,” says Otieno Owour, another resident.

Muchire says the centres have become important places to exchange information as well, as can be seen from the posters lined up on the walls communicating one message or another.

“They are not just community kitchens but also meeting places where people can leisurely while away the evening after a long day’s work,” Muchire adds.

From a business perspective, the profits from these centres are also significant. Katwekera Tosha makes a monthly profit of between 350 and 650 dollars.

This money benefits the residents who have registered with the community-based organisation.

The centre opens at 5:30 a.m. and closes around eleven at night. Muchire would like to extend these hours: “The ideal situation would be to operate 24 hours, but insecurity in the slums is a reality.”

Perhaps that’s the next challenge for the community and Umande Trust. Centres like Katwekera Tosha are a giant, sustainable step towards assuring the energy security of slum dwellers.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 28 2011 (IPS)

In the early 1990s, a group of researchers set off for a small rural village in the eastern part of South Africa. Their intention was simple: teach the community how to rehydrate sick babies.

Armed with a one litre soda bottle, a simple rehydration recipe, posters, pamphlets and talks, they spent weeks sharing their knowledge as part of a national initiative to reduce child mortality.

But months later, there appeared to be little change in the village. Researchers sent to document the campaign’s success were surprised. The instructions were correct and had been distributed; the message had been received… but no one in the community had a one-litre bottle.

It was a simple oversight, easily rectified by changing the guidelines to use a different container to make up the recipe – every kitchen in the village had a cup.

Soul City’s Dr Sue Goldstein tells this story to illustrate how it’s possible to fail to communicate simple, useful scientific knowledge without an adequate understanding of your target audience.

Tailoring the message

The Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication, a non profit organisation, was started in 1992 in a bid to reduce child mortality caused by dehydration. “Children were dying unnecessarily and it was because people did not know what they were supposed to be doing,” says Goldstein.

Information was widely available on the process of rehydration but it did not seem to be having an impact on the desired audience. After studying the situation, Soul City decided to launch a television soap opera to capture their target audience. A radio show and newspaper series quickly followed.

In trying to describe the relationship between research and mass media campaigns, Goldstein uses the phrase “simplification versus complexity.” At one end stands the scientist who seeks in-depth knowledge and at the other the ordinary non-scientific individual who prefers a simple explanation.

Melissa Meyer, Project Coordinator for the HIV/AIDS and the Media Project, says, “Research and entertainment need not be at odds with each other. With just a slight adjustment in perspective, they can be used very effectively to complement each other.”

Programmes such as Soul City reinsert real people into research. “Truly good entertainment is well-researched,” says Meyer.

Signs of success

Soul City appears to have found a formula that successfully conveys important health messages while grabbing the attention of its audience through a dramatic storyline containing all the elements of a prime time soapie.

Rumbidzai Musiyarira, a fan of the show, says, “Soul City opens your eyes to taking precautions and protecting yourself.”

HIV and AIDS-related issues have been a recurring theme in the series.

“The show is very enlightening” says Musiyarira. “I realised how easy it is for HIV to spread within a family or community.”

One storyline followed a woman unknowingly infected with HIV by her husband through several episodes. She believed her husband was being faithful, but as things unfold, he proved to have had multiple partners. The readily identifiable scenario highlights research showing that multiple concurrent partners play in the spread of HIV in Southern Africa.

“It is my absolute passion to get scientific knowledge out,” says Goldstein. Through an intensive nine step process, scientific research is translated into Soul City content by a team of creative agencies, researchers, test groups and others.

“We not only measure our reach, but we also measure what people understand from the campaign and whether they have actually made any changes in their lives in relation to the show,” says Goldstein.

Issues such as depression, tuberculosis, housing and alcohol abuse have all featured in the series.

Deborah Ndlovu, another long time follower of Soul City, believes watching the programme can change behaviour, having seen changes in her own life.

“It teaches you to be honest to your partner,” she says. “You must be fair and you should know your status and practice safe behaviour.”

More than just tv

Soul City is a marriage between education and entertainment. A booklet is released after each thirteen episode series has been aired, to reinforce the basic messages and provide supplementary scientific information. Soul City also has a Facebook page and a website, but Goldstein admitted that the organisation has yet to truly harness the power of the web. “I think we are still in the learning phase with that kind of media.”

The television show reaches approximately 16 million South Africans and has drawn the attention of numerous organisations who hope to get their messages across via this medium.

It is not always easy. “We currently have a meeting with a group of people interested in climate change and they want the scientific evidence to go out in quite a scientific way,” Goldstein says. “it’s not necessarily going to speak to people. You have to reach people, otherwise they are just not going to listen.”

She admitted that not all the show’s themes have been successful. No changes in people’s attitudes were recorded after an episode in series 6 focusing on xenophobia was aired. “It wasn’t negative change but there was no change, we made the local character too sympathetic and that was a problem,” says Goldstein.

Careful testing prior to the show being aired has reduced the number of failed attempts.

Goldstein emphasised the need for innovation, research and a thorough knowledge of the intended target market for any organisation that was seeking to create a similar programme. “Identify who needs this information and what media they consume.”

Television, newspaper, radio and magazines are available to organisations to reach broad audiences. South Africa’s Public broadcaster is a powerful partner, although it sometimes presents a problem for the edutainment model as it tries to dictate that the show will air at a less than optimal time.

“Journalists are always looking for material, and if you can provide it in an easy to read way they will be very happy with you,” says Goldstein.

Research, dedication and a firm belief in the importance and relevance of its messages have enabled Soul City to put research findings, scientific knowledge and life-saving messages into broad circulation.

Excerpt:

Smallholder farmers in Bandundu Province are boosting their harvests with the help of the sweetly-named velvet bean.

Mucuna pruriens var utilis Credit: Japan National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences

For some time, farmers in Bandundu, particularly in the Kwilu district, have been battling static or declining agricultural output – not entirely surprising when they were forced to plant on the same land without applying fertiliser or allowing fields a fallow period.

But several dozen smallholders in Kwilu have adopted Mucuna utilis – the velvet bean – as a means of protecting soil fertility.

“Ever since we started using this plant, we haven’t had any problems with infertile soil. Thanks to the plant, this year our family has produced five bags of groundnuts, whereas in the past, without the Mucuna utilis, we were getting only one and a half or two bags,” says Nicolas Mimpaka, a peasant farmer from Kwenge, 25 kilometres from Kikwit, the capital of the mainly rural province of Bandundu.

Mimpaka and others in the the Kwilu district in the south of the province come to Kikwit to sell their produce – groundnuts, maize, cassava, rice, marrows, beans, and other vegetables – to traders or to transport companies who provide Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, with fresh food.

The velvet bean has been introduced to the area by the Support to Peasant Farmer Development Initiatives (known by its French acronym, AIPD), an umbrella organisation for agriculture in the area.

“From 2008 to 2009, we carried out experiments in the Kwenge and Lukamba regions, and we observed positive results,” says Emmanuel Malenda, an agronomist and one of the managers of AIPD.

Mulenda says out of 50 fields under observation during that research period, 45 became more fertile thanks to Mucuna utilis, and produced great quantities of cassava, maize, groundnuts and marrows. The plant is a legume that is grown in conjunction with other plants as a cover crop, a live mulch that helps retain moisture and transfers nitrogen from the air to the soil via its the nodes on its roots.

During workshops to promote the plant, agronomist Cyprien Ngeleto highlighted the plant’s useful characteristics. “Mucuna utilis can be planted towards the end of the rainy season, as it is drought resistant. After cultivation, it protects and regenerates the soil, due to the rapid germination of the plant’s seeds over a period of four to six days.”

Farmers enthusiastic

“As agriculture is our livelihood, this plant is helping us a lot. My husband doesn’t have work, but we eat nearly every day,” says Jeanne Mplilikwomo, a Kikwit farmer. She says farming has allowed her to buy her children’s school uniforms and pay their school fees.

On a community radio programme, another smallholder, Jeanine Mandondo, comments: “Instead of practising the system of making forests fallow, a system that takes five, six or eight years, we prefer to grow this plant ourselves, and it is definitely the secret to increasing our agricultural production.”

“Six months is enough for Mucuna utilis to fertilise the soil,” adds Robert Manianga, a farmer from Lubungu, another village within a few kilometres of Kikwit.

The velvet bean is quickly securing a place in the farming practice in this corner of Bandundu, where it is contributing to food security and rural livelihoods.

By Zukiswa Zimela
NAIROBI, Mar 23 2011 (IPS)

Climate change has become an important part of the development agenda. In Africa, farmers and consumers alike are feeling its effects on productivity and food security.

Professor Judi Wakhungu is the lead researcher on the Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change project, which is gathering data and case studies of adaptation to provide policy makers with technical and scientific evidence to guide them.

Q: How will the results from the research project help farmers? A: We are working in eight different countries and looking to see how communities are coping with climate change.

What we are doing in Kenya is comparing the dry land area in eastern Kenya with another one which is in western Kenya, close to Lake Victoria. The experiences in the two zones are almost opposite each other in this regime of erratic weather that we are experiencing.

The one closest to the lake is challenged with continual flooding every year, while in the zone on the eastern side, rains fail to fall.

We don’t have the answers: what we are doing is trying to look at what the different communities are experiencing and then drawing on that to inform policy.

What we hope to see is plans to be implemented as international policy so that we can have institutions and laws on how we are supposed to respond when the situation becomes tragic. At present we do not have a response mechanism.

Q: What are examples of farmers who are already successfully adapting to climate change? A: For instance in eastern Kenya in the Makueni district, we saw a lot of innovation in terms of how farmers were coping with drought. Whereas in Oyola and Wakesi, which is near Kisumu we saw that farmers were having difficulties coping with the flooding.

In some cases farmers depend almost entirely on the national government  to get seed [with drought or flood-resistant qualities]. On the other hand, in some communities, we have found that the farmers themselves have really become innovators. In the sense that some farmers now became specialists and are able to produce hybrid seeds which could cope with the extreme climate.

Q: What are your concerns with farmers relying on the government for seed? A:  It brings a sort of dependency which as a subsistence farmer is a very dangerous position to be in. The whole notion of being a subsistence farmer is to be self-reliant.

On the other side we have seen that farmers have started to depend on what we call “orphaned crops”. Farmers used to depend on sorghum and millet, then they moved on to maize and in some cases rice. Now they have turned back to the old crops.

Farmers ought to be the custodians of the seed.

Q: But would it not be better for farmers if governments had a well-managed system that would provide them with seed in times of need? A:  Absolutely. That’s why we continue to do the work that we do is so that government can put programmes in place where they have the infrastructure to get food to people who need it.

Q: If agriculture and food security are priority areas when facing climate change, how can using arable land for biofuels be justified? A: The answer is yes and no. You have to look at the conditions in each and every African country; we cannot make a blanket statement.

Let me give you an example: Tanzania has made agriculture a national priority – they even have a national slogan which says, Agriculture first and agriculture for the future.

Tanzania has a lot of land and a different land tenure system in that the land belongs to the government. So they have set aside a trust and some of the land has been set aside for biofuels in the form of jatropha and sugar cane farmers for ethanol. The argument is that if the ethanol production is successful, then the people will be able to earn revenue in order to grow food.

Q: Yet in the case of Tanzania, IPS recently reported on a botched biofuels project in the Kilwa District… A: That particular project was badly planned, and they also chose to use one biofuel – jatropha – which is not the best for this area.

So this was rushed through, without the policies in place and the company seemed ill-prepared to deal with the local conditions and the local politics. Also, misinformation was given to the farmers on how they were to benefit.

We have used this project to show how important it is to have the right policies in place, the right legal framework in place so that all partners understand what their responsibilities are.

A: In Kenya, we just don’t have that kind of land [available], to put aside tracts of land to attract foreign investors for biofuels production. This has been attempted, but it has been very politically charged with people coming out and saying that some of these deals are not being conducted above board.

So it would be a disaster here and it would lead to food insecurity.

Excerpt:

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Mar 16 2011 (IPS)

A community-based organisation in the Kenyan slum area of Kibera set out to clean up garbage and deal with waste water; Ushiriki Wa Safi ended up creating a community cooker that turns waste into an energy source.

Laina Saba residents can now cook on a communal stove fuelled by garbage. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

But some have seen this as an opportunity to bring change to communities. Ushirika Wa Safi – (loosely translated, the name means “an association to maintain cleanliness” in Swahili) – a community-based organisation in Kibera, was formed to deal with the garbage problem in Laini Saba, one of the thirteen villages that form Kibera slums, often described as Africa’s largest.

The CBO has come up with a remarkable solution in the form of a community cooker that turns garbage into energy. It is a recycling project that is transforming the lives of local residents.

Discovering the wonders of the “cooker”

“When we started the CBO, the idea was to start a project that could help keep the environment clean. We therefore began by constructing trenches where people could pour dirty water. Further, we divided Laini Saba into four zones and each zone would meet once a week to collect and burn garbage,” explains Bernand Asanya, the project manager.

The four zones would meet every three months for a general cleaning exercise. This approach seemed satisfactory for a while but with time, people began to dump garbage into the trenches meant for dirty water.

This presented a fresh problem as the trenches began to look and smell like open sewers. It is at this point that Ushirika Wa Usafi decided to experiment by coming up with a garbage-fired boiler that would provide hot water for showering.

“We had already built a number of toilets and bathrooms where the community pays a few shillings to either use the toilet or to take a shower. The reality in Laini Saba, as is the case with most slums, is that there are neither toilets nor bathrooms. People bath in their tiny houses and relieve themselves in plastic bags,” Asanya explains.

Transforming the lives of the poor

But when they presented their idea to Planning Systems Services Limited (PLANNING) – a group of international architects – to assist them in developing a design, their idea developed into a pilot project that has transformed the lives of many residents of Laini Saba village.

The architects proposed that instead of developing an incinerator that would only heat water for bathing, they could develop a community cooker where the locals pay a fixed fee to cook their food.

As fate would have it, the chairman of PLANNING, Jim Archer, had been developing a plan to address waste management in Africa and was determined to work together with the CBO.

“We therefore went back to the drawing board and bought 500 nylon sacks. We then approached the local chief with our idea and he helped us organise a meeting with the locals. During this meeting we communicated our intention to maintain cleanliness and also to build a community cooker,” adds Asanya.

The sacks were distributed to the people with the instructions that once the sack was full the CBO, with the help of a group of young people would come by to collect the garbage in a wheelbarrow, immediately return the sack to the owner.

The garbage would then be deposited at the project site for sorting. “We don’t burn everything,” Asanya says. “We sell some of the garbage as scrap and make money from it. Material that can be burnt is then channeled into the cooker and used to generate heat.”

Changing lives

“This community cooker has changed our lives. For a very small fee I can cook the meal of my choice, bake, and even take a hot bath at the adjacent bathrooms as I wait for my food to cook,” explains Nora Kaseu, a beneficiary.

To keep the garbage burning, a quantity of used diesel is employed, that would otherwise have been disposed of in a manner that further harms the environment. At the bottom of the cooker is a metal plate, where a drop of water and a drop of diesel are released at the same time and in equal measure to continuously generate sparks that keep the garbage burning.

The CBO has employed a caretaker who is always on standby to keep the cooker burning. What seemed like an impossible situation of garbage control has led to the creation of employment for youths who collect the garbage, as well as the caretakers working at the project site. It has given the community an environmentally friendly way of disposing of waste.

Resident Daina Waithera, says that compared to other sources of fuel, it is proving quite economical: “The ashes from the cookers are also useful. They are collected by people who have pit latrines at home to keep away the foul smell and to keep the waste from rising to the surface.”

Excerpt:

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Feb 15 2011 (IPS)

David Lenamira, watching as usual from a seat outside his compound, has no trouble picking out his sheep as the herd boys drive them home every evening. The red-brown animals are smaller than those in his neighbours’ herds, but he’s proud of them just the same.

Red Maasai sheep in Kenya. Credit: John Atherton/Wikicommons

Unlike most of his neighbours, Lenamira’s herd are Red Maasai sheep. Most of Lenamira’s fellow pastoralists in this semi-arid part of the country keep Dorpers, an exotic breed of sheep originally from South Africa. The breed has been promoted by the government since 1952 due to both their size and their high productivity.

Custom-designed sheep

“The Dorper sheep breed was developed specifically for semi-arid climatic conditions. But compared to the Red Maasai, Dorpers have bigger bodies, which mean that they need more feed. As well, Dorpers are less resistant to pests and diseases compared to the Red Maasai breeds, and they have been developed for a shorter time compared to the Red Maasai,” said Dr Pat Lenyasunya, a pastoralist veterinarian from Samburu.

Herders in Kenya’s dryland areas say that Dorpers are now proving less resilient under more frequent drought linked to climate change.

The conditions are bringing the qualities of Lenamira’s Red Maasai to the fore. This indigenous Kenyan breed, typically reddish-brown in colour, has not enjoyed much popularity internationally both due to its small stature and because it grows hair on its body rather than wool.

“I have seen my neighbours lose their Dorpers to drought, and this is an experience I wouldn’t want to go through,” says Lenamira.

His friend Kalani Lenguris, from Nontoto village, is still feeling the pinch after he lost 300 sheep during last year’s drought.

“I lost nearly all the pure Dorpers during the drought. The remaining are crossbreeds with the Red Maasai, but they are already emaciated by the drought that is ravaging our countryside at the moment,” Lenguris told IPS.

But the Red Maasai breed is under pressure, says Dr Jacob Wanyama, coordinator of the African LIFE Network, which works to defend the rights and livelihoods of pastoralists. “It is not easy to find pure indigenous breeds especially of cattle, sheep and goats.

“The few surviving animals have at least some genes from exotic animals, which dilutes the purity of the original indigenous genetic makeup,” he says.

“When I worked as an agricultural extension officer in the 1980s, one of the government’s policies was to promote high-producing animal breeds through encouraging herders to keep exotic breeds, or to crossbreed. At some points, we encouraged farmers to castrate the indigenous bulls so that they depend either on artificial insemination or have their animals sired by exotic breeds.”

At the time, Wanyama says, improving productivity of livestock seemed to be the magic bullet answer to poverty. “But little did we know that it was going to haunt us; most of the animal breeds currently available in Kenya and many other African countries are neither pure indigenous breeds nor pure exotic. The pure genetic biodiversity especially in Africa is almost extinct.”

Though no proper survey has yet been done to confirm this, Wanyama’s observations tally with the herder Lenguris: with increasingly frequent drought, farmers with pure exotic breeds are usually the first to lose their animals, followed by those with crossbreeds.

“This reveals how important it is to protect the genetic biodiversity,” says Wanyama.

Shepherds saving sheep

In an effort to safeguard the remaining stock of pure indigenous sheep, Lenamira and others have with support from the LIFE Network formed a conservation group composed of 60 pastoralists from the district, who have specialised in rearing Red Maasai. Each of them has between 200 and 500 animals.

The conservation group may have found some allies in an unexpected quarter. Animal genetic experts at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi have discovered that the Red Maasai breed has genetic traits that make it resistant to intestinal worm parasites, a major problem for sheep herders not only in Kenya, but on commercial farms in Australia and New Zealand.

Dr Okeyo Mwai, one of the lead researchers at ILRI, says that the individual genes have not yet been isolated; and scientists are still a long way from being able to transfer specific traits to other sheep breeds.

“At the moment, the most logical option is to have the Red Maasai bred [conventionally] for improved growth, fertility and feed efficiency,” says Dr Okeyo Mwai, one of the lead researchers at ILRI, “crossbreed with other hardy breeds to ensure that such important genes are not lost, but are sustainably conserved in commercial flocks, as we hold a waiting brief for genomic technologies to be become affordable and more practical.”

The government of Kenya has quickly recognised that, save for the modest efforts of groups like Lenamira’s, genetic treasures like the Red Maasai are under threat and indigenous breeds need urgent protection.

This realisation has led the government of Kenya to launch the National Advisory Board on Animal Genetic Resources to coordinate indigenous livestock farmers, research institutions, universities and all other interested parties in an effort to preserve the remaining genetic resources.

“The Board has already been launched. At the moment, we are in the process of drafting a bill on the same, which will be presented to the cabinet during the month of February 2011 to be turned into law,” said Cleopas Okore, the Deputy Director of the Kenya’s Ministry of Livestock and Development, and the Coordinator of the Advisory Board on Genetic Resources.

Isolation of worm-resistance genes from the Red Maasai sheep may see this most neglected sheep breed catapult into a very important resource, providing farmers with the most needed biological worm control mechanism.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
ABIDJAN, Jan 19 2011 (IPS)

Even while the country has faced civil war and political crisis, innovative research organisations have worked to meet the challenges of food security and rural poverty.

Tomatoes for sale in Abidjan. Credit: Zenman/Wikicommons

On his low-lying half-hectare of land, not far from Abidjan, François Adou usually grows cabbage, aubergine, potatoes, tomatoes and groundnuts on mounds. A year ago, the 43-year-old dug trenches in an 800 square metre section to devote it exclusively to a new technique for growing tomatoes.

The non-soil, or hydroponic, technique is being promoted by an independent organisation working on alleviating poverty in rural areas, the Agribusiness and Contract Farming House (known in French as GenieAgro). Farmers plant tomatoes or other crops in a substrate made up of cocoa hull fibres, sawdust and industrial waste of plant origin.

This mixture can be used to fill plastic-lined trenches, wooden boxes, or sacks supported above the ground on wooden trestles. The plants grow directly in this material.

Farmers smiling

“It’s a soil-less cultivation technique,” Adou told IPS, adding that the results have been great. In the first three-month planting cycle – March to May – he harvested between four and five tonnes of tomatoes. In August, he was already preparing for another harvest – this time anticipating six tonnes.

A kilo of tomatoes fetches between $1 and $1.25 in Côte d’Ivoire. On an initial investment of a million CFA francs (roughly $2000 dollars) to buy the substrate in which to grow the plants, he saw a return of $5,500 from the sale of his first harvest alone.

After Adou’s second harvest last August, his neighbour Amidou Traoré had seen enough. He followed Adou’s lead and set up with the hydroponic technique on 600 square metres of his own. “I pulled in 962,500 FCFA [almost $2,000 with my first harvest]. Half went to pay back part of the investment of 850,000 FCFA ($1,700).”

Converting discarded material from cocoa and coffee processing, as well as wood chips and sawdust means manufacture of the substrate that the plants grow in dovetails neatly with a problem of disposal of industrial waste.

Simplice Kouassi, a researcher and geneticist who before he joined GenieAgro worked at the country’s National Centre for Agronomic Research, explains that farmers working with hydroponic techniques can reap four or five times as many tomatoes than they would planting directly in the soil.

“For an area of 1,000 square metres, you need to invest three million FCFA (around $6,100 dollars). It’s possible to recover the investment in your first three months,” he told IPS. “Each growing cycle runs three months, and each time, a farmer can put 1.19 million FCFA ($2,500) in her pocket.”

Farmers have no need for chemical fertilisers, if they use the substrate produced by the facility GenieAgro set up for the purpose. The Bureau de Formulation de Substrats produces a mixture that contains all the nutrients growing plants need. A batch of substrate can be re-used two or three times before it has to be replaced.

Presently, the factory, based at Songon, southeast of Abidjan, produces only 200 bags of substrate a day. Some of the raw materials needed are often in short supply.

Reviving production

In recent years, the production of tomatoes in Côte d’Ivoire has fallen by more than 50 percent, from 320,000 tonnes to 150,000 tonnes, according to producers groups. This decline is primarily all due to bacterial ring rot (a plant disease). Additional factors include the late arrival of the rainy season and strong competition from tomatoes imported from Burkina Faso, Mali and Europe.

“There was a real threat to the local production of tomatoes which demanded that we find a response quickly… [useful] in the south. Because the north [of the country] remains attached to the traditional cultivation on the earth or still relies on irrigated farming that is very productive,” Antoine N’Guetta, an agricultural engineer, explained to IPS.

Non-soil cultivation of tomatoes has been adopted by nearly 200 of the countries 3,000-odd producers since 2009. The country’s tomato production has rebounded sharply to 225,000 tonnes in 2010.

Since 2009, with the adoption of cultivation soil-less by nearly 200 producers, the production has seen growth of around 50 percent, coming up to 225,000 tonnes in 2010. The country has some 3,000 producers of tomatoes.

This highly-productive, labour-intensive farming technique holds great promise for farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and beyond.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
LUAPULA, Zambia, Jan 4 2011 (IPS)

In Zambia, a silver lining has emerged for widespread rural hunger and poverty, thanks to homegrown agricultural research. Local scientists have successfully developed four new, early-maturing and high- yielding cassava cultivars in an ambitious research project conducted in the cassava-rich Luapula Province, under the on-going Root and Tuber Improvement Programme (RTIP).

Drying cassava Credit: Ken Wiegand/USAID

Dr Martin Chiona is the RTIP team leader based at the state-run Zambia Agricultural Research Institute (ZARI) station in the Luapula provincial capital, Mansa. With 20 years experience at the ZARI Mansa station, the plant breeder is the only surviving member of the 13 local scientists who started the RTIP in the early 1990s.

“This is a great achievement – not only for us but also for the whole country. The benefits of the new varieties speak for themselves if you consider there are so many things you can do with cassava which you cannot do with other crops like maize or wheat,” he says.

“What can we fail to do with cassava? With this crop, you throw away literally nothing at all. I strongly believe that we have the capacity to do the same in Zambia only if we become a bit more organised in this sector,” says Dr Chiona.

He adds that in certain rural communities of Luapula Province, some traditional uses of cassava include floor polish, hair chemicals, animal and fish feed from the leaves, firewood and seeds from the stems and fodder from the peels.

Many poor rural folk are embracing the new cassava cultivars as the panacea for changing their poverty-stricken lives. Rose Mwelwa and Elias Mwila of Mansa have many things in common. They each have five children, supported on the subsistence growing of cassava.

After participating in the RTIP demonstrations for the new cultivars, they are now community leaders in the programme’s promotion campaigns. Both now have a new optimistic view about cassava growing.

“As a widow with a big family, the new varieties will enable me to feed my family. I will also be able to sell the surplus and raise more money for other uses like health and education,” says 41-year-old Mwelwa.

For the unemployed 40-year-old Mwila, the new cultivars have given him renewed impetus to fend better for his family: ” I have been using the old variety of cassava since 1992 only for meeting my family’s basic food needs. But things have changed and now I am even planning to start selling the surplus.”

Meanwhile, researchers and authorities may have delayed the harvesting of the improved varieties to facilitate the implementation of the seed multiplication component of the RTIP that involves the free redistribution of the stems among many other prospective farmers.

Yet that decision has not daunted MwelwaMwila and 2000 other members of the Mansa District Farmers Association (MDFA), a key implementing partner in the RTIP.

MDFA organising coordinator, Joseph Chanda, says they are all still elated by the belated harvest. Chanda is also a full-time government-employed agriculturalist with over 21 years of service in Mansa alone. “We fully support this programme because it will help even more farmers access the new varieties. Cassava is a staple food here in Luapula and almost every household is involved in growing the crop.”

Luapula is Zambia’s leading cassava producing province. The Central Statistical Office (CSO) projects that the region is expected to harvest 1.5 million metric tons of cassava in 2010, up from last year’s 1.3 million metric tons.

The 2008 statistics further show Luapula Province as having the largest cassava production area of 115,000 hectares compared to Lusaka Province’s tail-ending 544 hectares. Cassava has indeed ‘come of age’ as an effective weapon not only to help combat hunger and poverty but also to support socio-economic growth at all levels.

For Zambia, the period 2001 to 2010 has been a successful decade for the agricultural sector in general and cassava sub-sector in particular. While the decade has closed with a record-breaking bumper harvest for maize, the nation’s staple food, cassava has also recorded steady progress.

The CSO statistics show a steep cassava production rise from 815,000 metric tons in 2001 to the 4.7 million metric tons projected for 2010. But while fears are growing that Zambia’s 2010 maize bumper harvest may go to waste owing to poor storage, distribution and marketing policies, the story looks different for cassava. In collaboration with donors, the government has just produced a document called ‘Cassava: A Strategy for Zambia’ as a blueprint to guide the development of the sector from 2011 and beyond.

The Civil Society for Poverty Reduction (CSPR) believes that to be effective, all attempts to alleviate poverty in Zambia must target rural areas, where the majority of the poor live. The CSPR, a network of civil society organisations, suggests that authorities should use the Sixth National Development Plan (SNDP) beginning in 2011 to transform rural areas and reduce poverty with emphatic support to agricultural development.

All the indicators are that cassava is still poised to grow in stature, as not only an important staple to reinforce the national food security but also as a cash crop to stem hunger and poverty through sustainable economic growth. And the sky is the limit if the collective zeal and will of the farmers, researchers, authorities, donors and other players and stakeholders in the cassava sector in Zambia is anything to go by.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 29 2010 (IPS)

While China faces grave water shortages, researchers at institutions across the country are working on new water- saving and desalination technologies that they hope can alleviate the crisis in the crucial years to come.

Despite billions of dollars spent on damming rivers, building reservoirs and digging deeper wells, farmers in the north toil on parched land while hundreds of cities across the country face water shortages and deteriorating water quality.

Beijing’s water shortage will soon reach 200 million to 300 million cubic metres, according to state media reports, as the city awaits the completion of the 62 billion U.S. dollar South-North Water Transfer Project, which will displace some 330,000 people.

The World Bank has warned that the country’s water crisis could spark unrest, pitting rich against poor and urban against rural. Without serious changes in water use, tens of millions of Chinese will become environmental refugees in the next decade, the Bank argues.

Meanwhile, countries downriver from the growing superpower – including Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – argue that China’s aggressive dam building in the Mekong River is robbing their citizens of water.

For some, the answer lies in desalination technology. China has been engaged in desalination research since 1958, and in 1975 it began research on medium- and large-scale distillation devices. In 1986, it finished construction of a seawater reverse-osmosis desalination device.

Tianjin, a coastal port city about 150 kilometres from Beijing, has become a national leader in desalination technology. In fact, the city has refused water from the south and instead focused on desalination efforts. According to the local government, the nearby Dagang Xinquan Seawater Desalination Project is the “largest seawater desalination plant in Asia.”

“Indeed, the municipality has been developing desalination technologies since the year 2000, and this has been regarded as a more likely source of water to meet the water supply needs of the municipality,” said a report by Probe International, an independent environmental advocacy group.

Wang Shichang, director of the Desalination and Membrane Technology Centre at Tianjin University, says researchers in China are currently working on more than 200 desalination projects, receiving support from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Science Foundation of China.

The centre that Wang leads introduced the first multi- stage flash (MSF) distillation devices, which distills water through several “multi-stage” chambers, each operating at progressively lower pressures. The vapor generated by flashing is condensed at each stage and turned into fresh water. The technology uses 25 percent less “feed water” than other desalination devices, Wang says.

The country’s desalination capacity reached nearly 200,000 tonnes per day in 2008, up from 30,000 tonnes in 2005. According to the government’s current development plan, the figure is expected to reach 800,000 to one million tonnes by the end of this year.

But Wang says support is still not enough. He notes that the gap between China’s innovation capacity and development and manufacturing capabilities compared to those of foreign countries remains vast. He says greater state subsidies and access to bank loans are needed to bridge that divide.

While Wang works toward creating new usable water, Tian Juncang, a professor at Ningxia University, is trying to reduce water wasted in agriculture.

Tian’s work focuses on using plastic mulch in conjunction with drip irrigation to suppress weeds, maximise the effectiveness of fertiliser and conserve water in crop production. Plastic mulch and drip irrigation can reduce the amount of water used in irrigation process by up to 50 percent, Tian says.

China’s agriculture industry currently uses 70 percent of all the country’s water, and much of it goes to waste, he says. Drip irrigation under plastic mulch can reduce the industry’s use to 50 percent.

“China’s agricultural industry faces grave challenges,” Tian tells IPS. But by implementing new technology, “the current amount of water can support double the farming land.”

The government has moved to promote water conservation. In 2007, it issued it’s 11th five-year plan for water conservation, proposing detailed targets, including increasing the agricultural water conservation rate to 50 percent from 45 percent between 2005 and 2010.

But Tian says water conservation must be a systematic effort with the support and cooperation of industry and society as a whole. Efforts to conserve water also require increased funding from the state, improved laws and regulations and more advanced and better-managed facilities, Tian says.

“Agricultural water conservation efforts have been strengthened in recent years,” he says, “but it’s still not enough.”

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Dec 28 2010 (IPS)

When French Jesuit priest and passionate agriculturist Henri de Laulanie developed the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation for Madagascar’s poor farmers in the 1980s, he probably had no idea that millions of farmers elsewhere in the world would one day benefit from it as well.

The Mandava weeder, a farmers' innovation, is lightweight and easy for women to use. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Ranging from new tools to the use of local materials to create organic fertilisers, these innovations have resulted in higher yields at lower costs for many rice farmers using SRI.

“SRI in India has often been made possible by small networks of innovators who have dared to experiment with an untested system of practices,” observes C Sambu Prasad, associate professor at Bhubaneswar’s Xavier Institute of Management.

“SRI is a farmer-to-farmer extension,” he adds. “Farmers experiment and their success convinces others to take up the innovations.”

India is considered by experts as among the original rice cultivating centres in the world. As in other Asian countries, rice remains a staple in this country, where some 44 millions of hectares are planted with the grain.

Conventional paddy cultivation practice consists mostly of raising seedlings in flooded nurseries for up to 30 days before these are transplanted. There is usually no regular spacing between clumps of plants, and inundation of the field is a must. Weeding is done manually.

By contrast, in the SRI method, single 12-day seedlings are transplanted at a precise spacing of 25-centimetre squares. The soil at the roots is also kept moist, well-aerated, and well-drained, while adding organic nutrients to it is encouraged. Frequent weeding is done with implements that also “churn” the soil, aerating it.

According to agriculture experts, this keeps the water requirement at a minimum. The attention paid to spacing the plants, meanwhile, means that the roots of each plant has enough room to grow, enabling it to flourish to its full grain-bearing potential.

SRI thus requires less seeds, water, and fertiliser even as it leads to greater yields.

Indeed, according to a comparative study by the Watershed Support Service and Activities Network (WASSAN), a non-profit organisation working with farmers here in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, SRI results in returns that are 52 percent higher than those from convention cultivation. And while gross yield was 18 percent higher with SRI, total input costs were 32 percent lower.

WASSAN researcher S Bhagya Laxmi says the reduction in expenditure with SRI can be traced in large part to the 37-percent slash in labour costs for transplantation. More than half of these labour costs are for weeding, she says, but with the local SRI innovations, “twice as much time” was even freed up for the women who used to do the backbreaking work.

In Andhra Pradesh, SRI has already inspired the creation of at least two kinds of weeders.

One is called the cono-weeder, which was designed by scholars at the state Acharya N G Ranga Agricultural University. The other is the Mandava weeder, which was named after the home village of a group of farmers who found the cone-weeder too heavy and cumbersome for them to use.

Putting their heads together, the farmers led by 50-year-old Parcha Kishan Rao bent the main stem of the university-designed implement, and replaced the straight handle with a curved one from a bicycle. Instead of the cono-weeder’s single-toothed drum, the farmers’ version has two, making it lighter and far easier to push.

Today the Mandava weeder is being manufactured locally and sold for 800 rupees (18 dollars) each.

Bommi Reddy Sudhakar Reddy, who comes from the same rain shadow region as Rao and company, has also come up with a multi-row marker that saves time SRI farmers at the transplanting stage.

Prabhavathamma Reddy in Mahabubnagar district, for her part, says she is now harvesting nearly double what she used to get from her four-hectare land. She says it is because of SRI, but it could also be because she feeds her paddy with a five-ingredient organic fertiliser that she herself makes at home.

She has kindred spirits in Karnataka state in the country’s south-west, where fellow SRI farmer Narayana Reddy recounts how two of his friends are using neem leaves to ward off pests and sowing traditional seed varieties first soaked in cow’s milk.

“For strange reasons,” says WASSAN director K Suresh, “the rice intensification method has been evolving more within the domain of people’s knowledge and through farmer network innovations than through the formal science establishments.”

And ever-fresh ideas from farmers translate into higher yields, many more small-time rice-growers are getting attracted to SRI, which in 2009 was included by the federal government in the National Food Security Mission.

Vinod Goud, a scientist with the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), says more SRI farmers can only be good news at a time when climate change is wreaking havoc on crop yields. Through SRI, he adds, greater food self-sufficiency and resource – especially water – conservation are ensured.

Excerpt:

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 28 2010 (IPS)

Agriculture remains one of the most significant economic activities in Kenya. It accounts for over 24 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with an estimated 70 percent of total production coming from small scale farmers who typically have about 2-5 acres of land, depending on the region.

Vegetable market in Kenya Credit: Miriam Gathigah

Various Government reports show that over 50 percent of children under five years are underweight and/or are suffering stunted growth.

“Although the situation might seem bleak the government has, as a result of innovations by researchers, made various attempts to improve the agricultural sector, particularly in the field of horticulture,” explains Naomi Chepkorir, an Agricultural Officer from the Rift Valley Region which is Kenya’s bread basket.

According to the Policy Paper in the Horticultural Industry, the outcomes of accelerating the growth of horticultural production should encompass aspects such as alleviating poverty and improving food security.

“With regard to vegetable production, the government is working closely with researchers to not only improve the quality of vegetables but to also diversify the variety,” explains Catherine Kuria, a small scale farmer in Kinale, Central Kenya.

Crop experts have established that the best kale in the entire country comes from Kinale, in Central province.

Kale is also popularly known as “sakuma wiki”, a name that loosely translated means that it can sustain people throughout the week due to its extreme affordability, particularly for those who earn a dollar and below a day. It is thus the single most popular and available vegetable.

“In spite of its popularity, varieties of kale available to farmers are generally of poor quality, yield easily to diseases and their production is also low,” explains Catherine Kuria.

Vegetables are grown by an estimated 90 percent of Kenyan households, with Kale accounting for the highest production.

In a bid to improve food security and consequently alleviate hunger, Kenyans can now enjoy new varieties of kale that are more productive and can cope better with the unpredictable climatic changes across the country.

In May this year, the Kenya National Variety Release Committee authorised the release of two varieties of the improved kale seed and were published by the Ministry of Agriculture, as is stipulated in the Kenya’s Seeds and Plant Varieties Act.

Three more varieties will be released into the market once they are finally approved. This is a result of a seed-bulking project funded by the Center for Agricultural Bio-Science International (CABI) Africa, which is a science-based organisation specialising in agriculture.

“Seed bulking is an innovative strategy to increase access to reliable seed varieties at a rate affordable to particularly small-scale farmers who may not have the funds to buy expensive hybrid seeds.” expounds Naomi Chepkorir. “It is also a way of empowering poor households who directly depend on agriculture for subsistence.

The new varieties are an improvement of the kale seed that is already in the market and has been for many years.” This innovation is a key development in light of the United Nations proclamation that 2010 should be an international year of biodiversity, which is basically the diversification of animal and plants and a concept that underpins agriculture.

The licensing of new kale varieties is also in line with a government programme dubbed ‘Njaa Marufuku Kenya’ which basically means eliminating hunger in Kenya .This programme supports agricultural development initiatives targeting the poor in rural areas, where an estimated 60 percent live below a dollar a day.

The licensing of the new kale varieties has seen farmers, particularly from central Kenya where kale is grown in plenty; speak in favour of the innovation.

Alice Itoti from Central Kenya, one of the farmers involved in the process of growing and testing these new varieties says that, “I have been growing vegetables for ten years and I have observed a huge difference between the old and the new variety of kale. The new varieties have bigger leaves and are of a notably higher quality.”

“They also give a higher production which is good for commercial purposes. Most of my consumers who have tasted the old and the new prefer the new variety.”

As the country continues to grapple with food insecurity, with a large percentage of the population relying heavily on agriculture for both food and cash crops, innovative strategies to diversify crops can be part of the solution towards improving food options, and consequently contributing towards the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 27 2010 (IPS)

Researchers in China, the world’s leading provider of wind turbines and solar panels, are working toward making renewable energy cheaper, more efficient and a bigger part of the country’s power grid.

A wind farm outside Tianjin. China is the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines and solar panels. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

Zhao Xingzhong, professor at Wuhan University’s School of Physics and Technology, is researching dye-sensitised solar cells, a low-cost, high- efficiency alternative to more prevalent solid-state semiconductor solar cell technology.

The practical implications are apparent, Zhao says.

“The production process of dye-sensitised solar cells doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, which means it won’t induce environmental pollution,” Zhao tells IPS. “And dye-sensitised solar cells only cost one- fifth of traditional semiconductor solar cells made from crystalline silicon.”

Although Zhao’s team’s research is unique at home and abroad, he says support from the Chinese government is far from enough. He notes that Japan and South Korea have jointly invested about 1.6 billion U.S. dollars on research on third-generation solar technology since 2000. In China, however, Zhao says there have been just five native projects in the solar field in the last decade, with spending of around 4.5 million dollars per project.

“It is difficult to break through the technological bottleneck because of the inadequacy of (financial) input,” Zhao says.

In recent years, China has become the global leader in renewable energy technology manufacturing, surpassing the United States in terms of both the number of wind turbines and solar panels it makes. The accounting firm Ernst & Young in September named China the best place to invest in renewable energy.

Chinese companies, led by the Jiangsu-based Suntech, have one-quarter of the world’s solar panel production capacity and are rapidly gaining market share by driving down prices using low-cost, large-scale factories. China’s 2009 stimulus package included subsidies for large solar installation projects.

In terms of wind power, home-grown companies have rapidly gained market share in recent years after the government raised local partnership requirements for foreign companies to 70 percent from 40 percent (the government has since removed local partnership requirements) and introduced major new subsidies and other incentives for Chinese wind power companies.

By 2009, there were 67 Chinese turbine providers and foreign companies’ market share fell to 37 percent from 70 percent just over five years ago.

But most of the parts produced by Chinese companies are based on technology developed from abroad, with scant focus on homegrown innovation in the renewable energy field.

Wang Mengjie, deputy director of the China Renewable Energy Society and former vice chairman of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Engineering, works in the biomass industry. He says bioenergy can be used to improve living standards in rural areas, and he is currently involved in projects aimed at providing farmers with equipment that can turn organic waste into clean biogas and fertiliser.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the number of biogas pools in China’s rural areas reached over 35 million as of the end of 2009, producing 12.4 billion cubic metres each year. The government has increased financing of biogas pools in recent years, to 5 billion RMB (754,547 million dollars) in 2009 from an average of 2.5 billion RMB (377.2 million dollars) in 2006 and 2007.

Despite the investment, Wang says China still faces technological hurdles in the biomass industry.

“In terms of biodiesel technology, Western countries like the United States and Germany lead the world, while China is still at its infancy stage,” Wang says. “China has no definite regulations or policies on biomass energy right now. Under the present circumstances, there’s no possibility for relevant enterprises to develop further.”

Critics say China’s interest in renewable energy is essentially a business opportunity – most of what it produces is sold abroad – and that it is less interested in applying the more expensive technology at home.

China has not yet caught up to the United States in terms of renewable energy production. The country is the biggest consumer of coal in the world and is expected to burn 4.5 billion tonnes of standard coal by 2020, according to figures from the National Energy Administration.

While coal will still make up two-thirds of China’s energy capacity in 2020, the government has promised to invest billions of dollars into the development of wind, solar and nuclear power. The country’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress, now requires power grid companies buy 100 percent of the electricity produced from renewable energy generators.

Official statistics released last April said that low- carbon energy sources would account for more than a quarter of China’s electricity supply by the end of 2010, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The figures revealed that hydro, nuclear and wind power were expected to provide 250 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2010, while coal will account for 700 gigawatts.

Excerpt:

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Dec 27 2010 (IPS)

She is already eight months old, but Aiman Azam can neither sit up nor clutch anything with her tiny hands. She cannot even hold her neck up or roll on her back. All she does is moan.

Eight-month-old Aiman, who has bacterial meningitis, in her mother Maria's lap. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

It took a couple of trips to doctors before baby Aiman was diagnosed as possibly having meningitis, an infection of the lining surrounding the brain and the spinal cord.

There are two types of meningitis: viral and bacterial. Aiman has been afflicted with bacterial meningitis, which often leaves those who survive permanently disabled – paralysed, hearing impaired, and even brain damaged.

Every year, too, an estimated 23,000 children die of bacterial meningitis in Pakistan. But Asif Khowaja, public health scholar at the paediatrics department at Karachi’s Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) says, the true burden of the disease remains invisible because of “limited laboratory facilities, prevalent use of antibiotics, and poor health-seeking behaviours in Pakistan”.

AKUH is currently conducting research to assess the impact of the introduction of a vaccine against the Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) bacterium, which is the leading cause of childhood bacterial meningitis in this South Asian country.

The research is also looking into the neuro-developmental outcomes among cases of bacterial meningitis.

The researchers hope that the results would underscore vaccine effectiveness against bacterial meningitis and estimate the burden of meningitis in Pakistan. If everything goes well, they say, the results could strengthen the advocacy argument for the sustainability of the Hib vaccine under Pakistan’s Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI).

“We are to enroll approximately 200 cases of bacterial meningitis, and five times the number of healthy age-matched children as the control group to establish dose specific vaccine effectiveness,” says Khowaja. “About 100 cases and 200 healthy children are also being evaluated for neurological and developmental outcomes.”

So far, the researchers have recruited half of the sample size from each group. According to Khowaja, the vaccine coverage among both groups is below 50 percent, a fact that only highlights the need for community awareness regarding meningitis and the availability of a vaccine against Hib.

Health professionals say public awareness is crucial to maximise the benefit of having the EPI and the Hib vaccine.

The family of baby Aiman, for example, had not known that the Hib vaccine was available for free through the public health system. Azam Khan also admits that before Aiman was diagnosed as possibly having the meningitis, he was only vaguely aware of the disease. Not one of his older children – all boys, aged seven, four, and two – had been given the vaccine either.

Pakistan introduced a new combination vaccine to protect its-under five population against Hib bacterium in January 2009. At present, the EPI is providing the three doses of Hib vaccine free of cost to children less than two years of age.

In 2011, the health ministry plans to introduce the vaccine against the Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterium that is yet another cause of bacterial meningitis.

Both the Hib and the pneumococcal vaccines are available in Pakistan, but are far too expensive for most people. The Hib vaccine, for instance, costs 1,200 rupees (about 14 dollars) per dose. An infant would need to be given three doses at six weeks, 10 weeks, and 14 weeks.

EPI deputy manager Dr Agha Ashfaq says that the introduction of the vaccine via the state health system “will not only reduce the disease burden, but will also considerably contribute towards achieving the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG), which is to reduce under-five mortality by two-thirds”.

AKU Medical Centre paediatrics head Dr Zulfikar Bhutta says that having the Hib vaccine, and later the pneumococcal vaccine, available through the state health system is indeed admirable. But he says these will not reach those most in need, largely because the routine immunisation coverage is dismal.

“The vaccine(s) need concerted media awareness campaigns,” says Bhutta.

Khowaja echoes this, noting that the current promotion of the vaccine is negligible. To get rid of meningitis, he says, a vigorous campaign is needed. “It must be taken door-to-door, the way anti-polio campaigns are carried out,” he stresses.

Health professionals say this is one way to ensure that the efforts of the cash-strapped health ministry to provide 15 million doses of the Hib vaccine alone per year would not come to naught.

The vaccine is being co-financed by the health ministry and Gavi, a Geneva-based public-private partnership aimed at improving health in the world’s poorest countries. Gavi is committed to the initiative until 2015. But EPI’s Ashfaq says, “Once Gavi leaves, we will be able to carry on just the same.”

Indeed, there is even a plan to reach over 90 percent of under-fives within the next two years, says Bhutta.

“We are trying to bring all stakeholders together to agree on a national plan,” he says. “There will be money, a lot of it for vaccines, but we need to ensure that we spend it wisely.”

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Dec 21 2010 (IPS)

Just two years ago, Ratha Majhi was at his wits’ end trying to eke out a decent living from his modest vegetable farm.

A woman farmer using the treadle pump in Orissa. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

But since then he says his life has changed, adding with pride, "The farm is now my own patch of green paradise."

It’s all thanks to a simple and cheap micro-irrigation tool. Indeed, since 1994, the treadle pump has been changing the lives of millions of farmers in this country, where some 60 percent of the population are estimated to be directly involved in farming.

Made of iron, the treadle pump is similar in principle to a hand pump. But instead of the latter’s single barrel or cylinder and the use of hands to pump water, the treadle or pedal pump has two cylinders and uses foot power to lift water from underground.

"Most farmers in India are able to grow just the monsoon crop," says Amitabha Sadangi, the man behind this wonder pump. "If they have a reliable irrigation system throughout the year, they could, even on their small patch of land, grow up to three crops annually."

The treadle pump is, in fact, one of two micro-irrigation gadgets developed by the Sadangi’s Delhi-based International Development Enterprises, India (IDEI) specifically for marginal farmers who tend to crops that occupy less than a hectare.

The other is the drip irrigation tool that was designed for use in southern and western India, where the water table is usually found only below 30 metres.

The treadle pump, meanwhile, is suited to regions with high water tables, such as here in eastern India. To use it, one drops the attached pipe into a dug well, or a river or hill spring, and then starts pedaling. An hour’s pedaling can pump out as much as 5,000 litres of water. Two hours’ pedaling would be enough to irrigate half a hectare of dry season vegetables.

Sadangi, 51, comes from a poor family here in Orissa state. Knowing firsthand the hardships subsistence farmers in these parts go through while trying to keep their crops irrigated, he says he became interested in manually operated treadle pumps in Bangladesh. Pretty soon, he had adapted the technology to suit local requirements.

One nifty feature of IDEI’s treadle pump, for example, is that it is foldable. At 18 kilogrammes, it is also portable – a necessity for most small farmers who have non-contiguous farmland holdings.

Tapan Pattanayak, IDEI’s chief general manager for the firm’s eastern India operations, says that operating the pump is "so easy that even a child, (female) elders, and even disabled people" can do it "by manipulating the body weight on two foot pedals or treadles and by holding a bamboo or wooden frame for support".

"One may even sit and pedal," he says.

Nabin Amanatya, 35, can attest to the pump’s user- friendliness. Afflicted with polio, he struggled for years farming his family’s spit-sized plot that reached a mere tenth of a hectare. Then in 2006, he bought a treadle pump.

His neighbours teased him when they saw him trying to make a go with the pedals. But he was soon tending a thriving garden of cucumber, ridge gourd, and lady’s finger – vegetables that are very popular in the local market. Within two years, Amanatya had repaid his father’s loan and had switched to better seeds and fertilisers.

"Now my family eats fresh vegetables and household expenses are met out of the income from vegetable sales," he says. "I have plans to purchase a bicycle after constructing the house. I have also decided to get an electricity connection for our house."

IDEI, which is a non-profit venture, made it a point to make the treadle pump as well as the drip irrigation affordable for marginal farmers. While the pump costs between 550 to 2,000 rupees (12 to 44 dollars), the drip irrigation is priced at 4,000 rupees (88 dollars).

Commercial irrigation equipment would costs much more. A diesel pump, for example, goes for at least 40,000 rupees (880 dollars). And then there would be the recurring diesel expenses.

Says Sadangi: "Affordability is crucial. Marginalised farmers cannot invest much more than their labour. We keep the cost and maintenance as low as possible."

But Pattanayak admits that some farmers are still finding the treadle pump and the drip irrigation beyond their means.

"With bankers’ loan ticket size not less than 10,000 rupees, farmers are facing difficulty getting loans to buy these equipment," he says. "Steel prices, too, have trebled the original treadle pump’s price tag over the last few years."

Sadangi, however, is poised to disburse loans to half a million farmers by next year. The scheme would involve a nano-finance (smaller than a micro-finance) company with 20 million dollars from U.S.-based financier JP Morgan.

IDEI has also tied up with JP Morgan up to 2014 to sell carbon credits at seven cents annually per unit from the fuel-saving treadle pumps. It sold 1.7 million tonnes carbon equivalent between 2004 and 2007 alone, and has received 87,000 dollars in total so far from the arrangement.

Sadangi is now busy working on low-cost sprinklers and water storage tanks, as well as looking into solar and wind pumps – still with the small farmers in mind.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SEIBERSDORF, Austria, Dec 17 2010 (IPS)

After successfully suppressing scourges of fruit, tsetse and screwworm flies in the Americas, researchers are exploring whether the same sterilised insect technique can be used to control malaria, which kills some one million people every year, many of them in Africa.

Malaria, the Silent Killer in Africa Credit: John Robinson/IPS

Entomologists and other researchers at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are testing whether sterilised insect technique (SIT) can be used to reduce populations of malarial mosquitoes. Experiments are taking place at the agency’s laboratory facilities in eastern Austria, and researchers emphasise that their work is at an early stage.

“What we are doing is not going to solve the malaria problem in Africa, that I can tell you,” said Marc Vreysen, who heads the insect pest control project run jointly by IAEA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

But a breakthrough could one day strengthen more traditional defences against malaria, such as bed nets and insecticides, Vreysen said from the sprawling laboratory complex 35 kilometers southeast of Vienna.

Though the IAEA is better known for inspecting nuclear sites and non- proliferation treaties, its researchers are engaged in other activities, such as using atomic technologies and precision measuring devices to develop more efficient crop irrigation techniques, improve medical diagnoses and calibrate scientific equipment. They also train scientists from developing countries.

The focus of the malaria research so far has been on Anopheles arabiensis, a mosquito species that thrives in the Nile River basin in Sudan. Sudan’s government requested IAEA assistance in reducing the prevalence of malaria in the region. More than 500,000 malaria cases are reported every year in the country of 43 million, and malaria accounts for some 32,000 deaths annually, according to the Global Fund, the public-private partnership that channels money into combating malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis.

Researchers at the Austrian lab have established a colony of the Anopheles mosquitoes that are the target of SIT research. Experiments involve a painstaking process restricted by the relatively short lifespan of the insects – – less than a month — and the handful of hours when the sterilisation procedure is optimal.

In the lab, the mosquitoes are separated by sex. The males get a blast of up to 100 Gray in a cobalt irradiator, a lethal radiation dose for a human. The sterilised males are then placed in a mesh-covered box where males and females mix in a frenzied mating ritual.

“This is like a crowded discotheque,” said Jérémie Gilles, a French entomologist and one of eight researchers working on the project.

SIT has been used successfully to suppress other pests — often invasive species — by flooding nature with insects that cannot reproduce.

Gilles and his colleagues admit that their lab research is a long way from possible application in the wild. A greenhouse is being built in this wintry part of Austria to create a more authentic habitat for future SIT testing.

There is the chance that what worked in eradicating other pests like the tsetse fly Glossina austeni from more confined areas, such as the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar, may not work with mosquitoes in the vast tropical regions of Asia, Africa and South America.

With 3,000 mosquito species, 50 of which transmit malaria, the IAEA researchers face daunting challenges. Techniques that are effective with the species found in Sudan may not work elsewhere. Infertile male mosquitoes reintroduced into the wild may not be as aggressive in the mating clouds as their more potent counterparts.

This is the first major project focusing on male Anopheles mosquitoes, whose main function in their short lives is reproduction. It is the blood-seeking female that transports the Plasmodium parasites that infect humans.

Though the technique is time-consuming and costly compared to preventive measures, researchers say SIT has advantages. Harold Townson of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, writing in a recent edition of Malaria Journal, says SIT could provide a more enduring solution than other eradication and prevention methods. For example, mosquitoes can develop immunity to pesticides, and over time, prophylactic measures may become ineffective against the parasites.

Vreysen, who worked on the tsetse fly eradication project in Zanzibar, says it could be as long as a decade before his team can put their laboratory studies on mosquitoes to practical use. “We are far, far from the endpoint,” he said. In the meantime, better prevention and treatment will have to suffice.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG*, Nov 15 2010 (IPS)

Researchers are testing a new combination of tuberculosis drugs on patients in South Africa which they are hoping will shorten the treatment term of the disease to six months.

Examining a patient with drug-resistant TB. Credit: Dominic Chavez/IPS

Kyazze is a TB patient at Uganda’s Mulago National Referral Hospital, and worried that he has been asked to stay in the hospital for two months.

“The doctor told me I will get 60 injections – one every day. And I have to be here for all that time, because the injection is administered early in the morning at 6:00 am,” he says.

Treatment will continue long after he’s released. Dr Okot Nuwagara, a TB specialist at Mulago, says the lengthy course of drugs can be difficult for patients.

“There many cases of patients missing their dose and that complicates the treatment. In fact they have to start the treatment afresh,” says the doctor, who has been handling TB cases for 14 years.

The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development says the new drug combination has already shown promise in individual tests, and could reduce the duration of TB treatment sharply.

The trial will take place in South Africa, at the Lung Institute at the University of Cape Town and the TASK Research Centre in Bellville. Sixty-eight patients will each receive two weeks of treatment and three months of follow-up to evaluate effectiveness, safety, and tolerability. After the results of this first phase are analysed, researchers will extend the test for longer exposure to the drugs.

The combination shows promise to treat both drug-sensitive (DS-TB) and multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). The current treatment of MDR-TB patients requires daily injections and drugs for a period of up to 24 months.

The Phase II trial called NC001 or New Combination 1, tests the new TB drug candidates PA-824 and moxifloxacin in combination with pyrazinamide, an existing antibiotic already commonly used in TB treatment.

No conflict with HIV treatment

Dr Andreas Diacon, the co-ordinator of the trials, says HIV is a big factor in TB as well. “None of these drugs have properties that might interfere with the HIV drugs … this is an especially good reason to test these new drugs, as some of the old drugs that were used did interfere with the treatment of HIV.”

Diacon also says researchers are planning to test other combinations of drugs, which could shorten the current testing processes substantially.

“At the moment we are trying to design new trials where new drugs are taken in new combinations from the start, which could shorten the time-span in which new drugs become available. Especially in South Africa we cannot wait for 20 years to have results.”

The South African government has welcomed the research, saying that a successful trial will benefit the world in the fight against TB.

“The development is also more important for us [South Africa] because of the high burden of TB,” said department spokesperson Fidel Hadebe.

The World Health Organization’s Stop TB Department Managing Director, Mario Raviglione, says there is a desperate need for new and better TB treatments to address today’s growing pandemic, which kills nearly two million people each year.

“It is extremely encouraging to see a growing pipeline of TB drug candidates that may revolutionize TB care and committed sponsors moving with speed and efficiency towards new regimens.”

The result of the trials are expected in the next three to four months.

*Joshua Kyalimpa in Kampala contributed to this report.

Excerpt:

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Oct 21 2010 (IPS)

As controlled field trials of a genetically modified (GM) crop are about to begin in five African countries amidst promises of improved crops grown under poor conditions, critics are charging organisations with selling out the interests of African farmers.

Improved maize varieties could boost crop yields in drought-prone areas in the south of Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana

Soon controlled field trials of 12 WEMA varieties will begin in the five African countries.

The drought-tolerant WEMA varieties were developed in partnership with the Nairobi-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF); the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico; multi-national biotechnology company, Monsanto; and the national agriculture research organisations in the five African countries. The programme started in 2008.

But organisations against GM crops, such as Gene Ethics, argue that this biotechnology is not about food security, but profits for commercial interests. Bob Phelps of Gene Ethics in Australia charged that the WEMA project with selling out the interests of African farmers. He said the project was advancing corporate access to public resources and markets in order to maximise private profit.

“This is nothing more than a scheme to unfairly promote and advantage GM techniques and their products over all other means to achieve rural sustainability for African communities. The AATF considers only genetic manipulation solutions to Africa’s drought problems, ignoring all other technologies and management strategies,” Phelps told IPS.

“The strategy also substitutes ‘drought tolerance’ with ‘helping plants to cope with the stress of drought’ – a more rubbery, unquantified and undefined concept open to interpretation,” Phelps said.

But Africa has more mouths to feed despite strides to boost agriculture investment and its under-resourced small holder farmers. Some farmers desperate to earn a living think the GM crops should be given a chance.

Berean Mukwende, a maize famer in Zimbabwe and vice-President of the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, said given poor growing conditions and low yields in drought-prone countries like Zimbabwe, drought-resistant varieties of staple maize should be considered.

“Seed is expensive and normally not available in rural areas and (are) often not the suitable varieties. But with yields low, higher yield and drought-resistant varieties (of maize) would raise productivity and are welcome,” Mukwende said.

He added: “Farmers do not have finance to purchase the seeds and welcome a reduction in cost and are always on the lookout for high yields, drought tolerance, and resistance to pests and diseases traits in seeds.”

AATF’s Project Communications Officer, Grace Wachoro, told IPS that the WEMA project is using advanced breeding technology based on germplasm from CIMMYT’s Drought Tolerance Maize for Africa. The project will incorporate the transgenic drought tolerance trait into some of these new drought-tolerant hybrids.

AATF said during moderate drought, the new varieties are expected to increase yields by 24 to 35 percent compared to current varieties without this form of drought tolerance. If the project succeeds, the increase in yields would translate into two million additional tonnes of maize harvested during drought years.

“That means 14 to 21 million people in the five countries we are targeting would have more to eat and sell,” Wachoro told IPS from Nairobi, Kenya.

In addition, AAFT says, the new varieties have human and environmental health benefits through the reduced need and use for pesticides. The crop is also fortified with increased minerals and vitamins for better health.

But biotechnology promises for boosting food security have not waned despite growing scepticism about the safety of GM crops. If anything, they have fed the case against GM foods.

Gene Ethics believes the WEMA plan focuses exclusively on higher yields with GM crops dependent on increasingly expensive and scarce inputs, such as oil-based fertilisers, pesticides and machinery fuels. The organisation said integrated, biodiverse cropping and management systems that would better serve the long-term needs of rural communities for environmental sustainability, nutrition and balanced diets should be considered as possible solutions.

AAFT has said smallholder farmers will have to pay for the seeds because Monsanto was donating advanced breeding, biotechnology, and expertise to improve the drought tolerance of maize varieties adapted to African conditions. However, they will not be charged royalties.

The varieties will be licensed without charge through AATF for development, testing, and eventual deployment through multiple seed distribution channels.

But Phelps is not convinced. He said nothing is free in the long run and African farmers will pay year after year for GM seed that they cannot save for replanting.

“Monsanto offers its GM seed products free at first, as it did in South America with soy and corn,” he said.

“Monsanto and AATF plan to hook African farmers and governments who will buy GM products later at top prices when other options such as farm-saved seed have disappeared.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 14 2010 (IPS)

Though practically invisible to the naked eye, a uniquely South African satellite has been orbiting the earth for the past year, creating an archive of images and jumpstarting what its creators hope will be a space revolution in the country.

SumbandilaSat awaits vacuum testing shortly before its launch in 2009. Credit: Dr. Corné Eloff

To date, South Africa’s forays into space have been modest and experimental. But scientists hope the country’s growing space agency can revitalise science, propel South Africa into the space race and empower the country as a whole.

In its 5,600 orbits around Earth since being launched in September 2009, SumbandilaSat has created 186 usable images. These images are processed and compiled into an archive by the Satellite Applications Centre (SAC) in Hartebeesthoek, which controls the satellite.

Dr. Corné Eloff, SAC Earth Observation Centre manager, said that though limited in their quality, these images can be used with imagery from other earth observation satellites to better monitor everything from the growth of informal settlements to the levels of South Africa’s dams.

“We could (monitor) every house in South Africa,” said SAC manager Raoul Hodges, as he displayed two photographs of Soweto, one taken in the 1960s and another taken recently. The photographs provide visual evidence that allows them to track government-built affordable housing. “Then we’d say, ‘Okay, what has really changed? What did government really build?’”

Prior to the launch of SumbandilaSat, the SAC had no automated process for processing the images captured by the satellite. Not only did a process have to be created but scientists had to learn how to recolor and resize the images.

“The main focus is to image as much as possible, and to use (the photographs) as a learning curb in terms of the actual tasking and image processing,” Eloff said. He added that a later stage the process would have to be an automated one.

While SumbandilaSat is controlled by the SAC, soon it will fall under the supervision of the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), which will be launched sometime before the end of the year, Hodges said. He added that the SAC will merge into the organisation on April 1, 2011.

The larger goal of invigorating the space program is for it to act as a catalyst for scientific progress in the country, trickling research and development down to students at institutions of higher learning and creating jobs which are needed in a country with a 25 percent unemployment rate, Eloff said. “Our main goal is to stimulate industry. Why? For social development.”

Shortly after the launch of SumbandilaSat, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology inaugurated its Satellite Systems Engineering Programme to train scientists in the emerging space field. Eloff said he expects programmes like this to become more prevalent as SANSA is launched and consequently expands.

SANSA hopes to have two more satellites running by 2018, Eloff said. Currently, the center is surveying the scientific community to determine what capabilities these satellites should have, Hodges said.

“There’s a lot of excitement in South Africa at the moment. We are entering an area of science and technology that was previously closed to us,” Eloff said.

Chris Engelbrecht, a senior lecturer of physics at the University of Johannesburg, said an expanded space program would allow new industries to benefit from the proliferation of detailed satellite imagery.

“(Enterprises) linked to agriculture, landscape and urbanisation will be allowed to grow. This should prove to increase productivity,” Engelbrecht said.

SumbandilaSat is experimental, primarily an opportunity for SAC to take full control of a satellite and guide it through its launch and maintenance while in space, an essential task that SAC has not undertaken before, Eloff said.

The centre is no stranger to controlling satellites, said Hodges. About 90 percent of satellites in the world pass over South African airspace on their way out of the atmosphere. And for about 60,000 dollars, the scientists at SAC will guide any satellite through its first few days in orbit.

SAC has performed this service for satellites developed both by international space programs and private enterprises. But SumbandilaSat is the first satellite SAC calls its own.

“The mission is to (keep) the satellite (working) and do the housekeeping ourselves,” satellite operations technician Farhad Hassim said, specifying tasks such as uploading programming and photography assignments to the satellite as part of routine operations.

Still, the satellite is not without its flaws. Three of the colour sensors on the satellite’s cameras failed after about two months in space, and all of the pictures the camera sends back — which typically encompass a 45 by 45 square kilometre of earth — are tinted red. Eloff said this is unsurprising given the satellite’s experimental nature.

Excerpt:

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Oct 9 2010 (IPS)

Kimani Wanyama*, a homosexual man living in Nairobi, knows what human rights violations are all about. His attempts over three years to receive treatment for reoccurring rectal gonorrhoea had resulted in verbal abuse and intense stigmatisation from the very people who were meant to help him.

“In many clinics the medical experts called me names and made me believe that I had committed a very bad sin for having anal sex,” he said. “Every time I went to a medical centre for treatment, I got a very cruel reception. And for the three times I was treated, the disease reoccurred.”

After three years of suffering, eventually Wanyama was properly treated at Liverpool VCT, an NGO. And though progress is slow, attitudes are changing in Kenya.

In August 2010 the country signed into law a new constitution which provides for political, land and gender reforms. But in a country that saw two months of post-election violence and ethnic killings from December 2007 to January 2008, issues of human rights and governance still have to be addressed.

The Ibrahim Index on governance released on Oct. 4 indicates that much still has to be done to move towards good governance, as Kenya’s governance rating declined since the last index.

The 2010 survey by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation listed Kenya at 27 in general governance, a drop of five places from its ranking of 22 in 2009. The country scored 55.5 percent in human rights and participation. This was far ahead of Egypt which scored 35 percent but was in position 10 for general governance; and Tunisia which scored 37.7 percent in participation and human rights and ranked eighth in governance.

But Kenyan Human Rights Lawyer, Catherine Mumma, believes that the fight for human rights is gaining momentum and slowly leading to good governance. Recently Kenya’s Special Programmes Minister Esther Murugi publically supported the right of the gay and lesbian community to access healthcare services like everyone else. “I have no apologies to make. The gay community is classified under high risk HIV/AIDS populations; thus, they have the right to access healthcare services, and should not be stigmatised,” she had said.

Similar bold activism in support for human rights saw Kenyan prisoners vote in the recent referendum polls, which led to the August promulgation of a new constitution in Kenya. “This is what we have been fighting for as the civil society through the Kenya National Human Rights Commission. All Kenyans must have equal right, regardless of their health status, religion, beliefs, lifestyle and so on,” said Mumma. “Governance either facilitates or obstructs human rights.” Participation and human rights was just one of the four indicators used to gauge governance in all the 53 African countries listed on the index. The other three included safety and rule of law, sustainable economic opportunities, and human development.

“With the new constitution in place and (with an) active civil society, we expect major changes in the country’s governance system,” said Dr Ekure Aukot, a human rights lawyer, who headed the Committee of Experts of the recently promulgated constitution.

Though, he says, this might not be easily achievable without political goodwill and commitment of law makers.

“As many experts say, Kenya has drafted and promulgated the best law in the region that can highly improve the way it is governed. However, it will remain a useless document if it is not implemented in totality,” he added.

He observed that good governance depends on the type of leadership and the unity of citizens in a given country.

“It is interesting to see how countries are worlds apart in terms of governance, despite being on the same African continent. It all begins with the leadership, and unity of citizens in a country,” he said.

However, experts believe that apart from corruption, political instability in a country is a major cause of poor governance, and hence the poor livelihood of citizens.

“We must ensure that the political side of governance in Africa is not neglected. We have seen from evidence and experience across the world that discrepancy between political governance and economic management are unsustainable in the long term,” said Salim Ahmed Salim, a board member of the Ibrahim Foundation – in a statement released at the launch of the report.

“If Africa is going to continue to make progress, then we need to pay attention to the rights and safety of citizens,” he added.

Aukot notes that observing the governance indicators has a huge role to play in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in Africa.

“Leaders must consider this index as an important tool, which will help them learn where their countries have performed poorly, and improve by learning from countries that have performed well,” said Aukot.

All the poorly ranked countries on the Ibrahim Index have high child and maternal mortality rates, high levels of poverty and lawlessness.

*Name has been changed.

Excerpt:

Mother-to-be Agnes Ncube budgets up to 100 dollars each month from her informal roadside business just so she can pay for the maternal services at her local government clinic.

Ncube usually pays a maximum of 20 dollars for each consultation, depending on the service. But sometimes there are other costs that emerge, such as a referral – usually to a private doctor – where she has to pay cash upfront for a consultation.

Even though the City Council Clinic is a government facility, Ncube has to pay for each consultation because currently the Zimbabwean government does not provide free maternal care. This is because the money is needed to resuscitate a health care system that has been dysfunctional after years of underinvestment and massive staff exodus.

“I think maternal services should be provided freely for unemployed mothers-to-be,” Ncube said. “At times it is difficult to meet the cost of such services when you do not have a job and depend on selling tomatoes or some informal trade.”

Bulawayo’s government clinics charge a fee of about 83 dollars, a figure many expecting mothers can ill afford. These costs have been attributed to one of the contributing factors to the country’s high maternal mortality rates. According to the Zimbabwe Maternal and Prenatal Mortality Study of 2006, the country has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality estimated to be 725 deaths per 100,000 live births.

But the ministry of health and child welfare hopes to save the failing system and, most importantly, to curb child and maternal mortality rates.

On Oct. 8 the Zimbabwe government revealed the ‘Zimbabwe Health Sector Investment Case (2010 – 2012): Accelerating progress towards the Millennium Development Goals’ which outlines plans designed to: provide access to health services to the poorest citizens; ensure safe motherhood; and save lives.

The report launched by the Deputy Prime Minister, Thokozani Khuphe, outlines the 700 million dollar investment needed for Zimbabwe to meet the Millennium Development Goals, particularly those on reducing child mortality and improving maternal health. The investment plan is backed by the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health Organisation.

In the last decade as Zimbabwe witnessed a dramatic decline in primary health care services it led to a striking increase in maternal and child mortality. Currently one in three children are stunted, 100 children die daily due to easily preventable diseases while maternal mortality is more than double what it was in 1990.

According to the ministry of health and child welfare, the costs of health care are shifting to the end user as health institutions struggle to survive, keeping even the most basic services out of reach of the poorest people. For example, to deliver a baby in an urban public facility costs between 10 and 50 dollars.

The percentage of deliveries attended by trained medical personnel has declined over the last 10 years. And the poorest mothers are the ones who bear the brunt of this. The number of trained medical personnel attending births of poor women has dropped by 30 percent.

This, the ministry said, has directly contributed to the increase in maternal deaths as many poor rural women, unable to afford the government clinic fees, end up delivering at home. This has put them at risk of death and other serious complications.

Preliminary estimates indicate that 20 million dollars will be urgently required per annum to abolish user fees.

“The Inclusive Government of Zimbabwe has committed that by the end of 2011, no pregnant woman or child under five will be deprived of their right to health care because they cannot afford the fees,” said Khupe at the launch of the investment report in Harare.

“To realise this commitment, it is urgent that we succeed in making the necessary financial investments to build a comprehensive public health system that can cater for everyone.”

Meanwhile, many pregnant women are forced to attend private centres like Dr. Barbara Sibanda’s maternal care centre. Sibanda’s Kings Maternity Home has full nursing and medical care staff and is seen to be cheaper than private hospitals and an alternative to government facilities, which often have poor services.

Situated in the heart of Bulawayo, the centre is a bustle of activity as expecting mothers come in for scheduled appointments or to enquire about the cost of services. Some come back, others never return.

While most of the up to 15 expecting mothers who use the maternal care home are working or have a steady income, some can barely afford the service. Sibanda is worried that the number of women who cannot pay for maternal services is on the rise, she has experienced it firsthand.

“I consider our rates for pre and maternal care to be among the cheapest in town but we have seen a trend where up to 50 percent of our clients often have serious difficulties paying the fees,” Sibanda, explained to IPS. “At times some will pay the 10 dollar monthly consultation fee and face difficulties in paying the post natal fees opting to pay in instalments.”

The Minister of Health and Child Welfare Dr. Henry Madzorera said the Health Investment Case has assisted his department to identify areas of urgent need and to further strengthen and effectively coordinate channels of funding.

The black-eyed pea, commonly known as the cowpea, is the new kid on the block when it comes to improving the welfare of women and their families in West Africa, researchers say.

Entrepreneur, Aissatou Diagne Deme's milling business produces 800 kilograms of cowpea flour a month. Credit: Jeff Haskins/IPS

Scientists meeting in Dakar, Senegal for the Fifth World Cowpea Conference believe that the black-eyed pea has the potential for economic development and poverty alleviation in the region.

The conference, which ends on Oct. 1, also heard that adding value to cowpeas has the potential to improve the welfare of farmers, processors and marketers in the cowpea value chain.

Research conducted by Miriam Otoo, a PhD student at the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University in the United States presented a study on cowpea-based street food enterprises in Niger and Ghana.

Otoo’s study focused on the sales of akara (a deep fried cake sold on the street markets) or kossaï as it is also known. This fried cake is produced almost entirely by women and sold as a street food. Data was collected in Ghana and Niger in 2009 through personal interviews with 336 women entrepreneurs.

For example, the study found that kossaï vendors earn four to 16 times more income than they would from a minimum-wage job in Niger and Ghana, respectively.

The women entrepreneurs, the majority of whom had no formal education, also used the income from their businesses to contribute directly to the health, education and other basic needs of their families, the research found.

In addition, over 1.2 million kgs of cowpeas are demanded by kossaï vendors each year in Niamey, Niger alone, thus creating an increased market for local cowpea producers.

“Considering all the different components of the cowpea value chain, cowpea-based street vendors use significant quantities of cowpeas yet it is a sector that has being largely neglected by researchers,” Otoo told IPS.

She emphasised the need for increased access to credit, market space and better processing technologies by cowpea entrepreneurs so as to increase the production of cowpea-based products and meet the growing consumer demand.

“Where credit has been accessible to street food entrepreneurs, there has been an “enviable record of success” in their enterprises,” the report noted.

It also stated that presently there are very few African countries where NGOs have made efforts to give working capital loans to street vendors. The report hence recommended that there is a need for a government intervention.

The study also identified that while industrial processing of cowpeas is virtually nonexistent in West Africa, processing exists in the informal sector – particularly the street food sector. And this has created a significant demand for cowpeas.

Entrepreneur, Aissatou Diagne Deme’s milling business produces 800 kilograms (kgs) of cowpea flour a month capitalising on the legume’s growing importance as a source of nutrition and income.

“I supply flour to bakers and to people who are using it for preparing meals for children,” Deme told IPS during a tour of her business nestled in the heart of Dakar. “I have good orders and I would like to grow the market because there is growing interest for cowpea flour.”

Deme’s company, Kumba Enterprises, is a success story in adding value to the cowpea or the black-eyed pea, commonly called Niebe, in most of Francophone West Africa.

Deme employs 52 women and she started the business in her home in 1994 with an investment of 12,000 dollars. She is eyeing the export market for Niebe flour but what she produces presently does not satisfy local demand. Already, Deme produces millet flour which she exports to Europe and is in discussions with her agent to push cowpea flour too.

According to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), more than four million tonnes of cowpea are consumed worldwide each year. In Africa alone, 70 percent of this amount is eaten The cowpea, ignored for many years owing to low production and poor marketing, is back as a ‘wonder crop’ because of its high protein content, its adaptability in the face of climate change and importance as fodder for livestock in Africa

The Institute of Food Technology in Dakar, working in collaboration with the government of Senegal is developing fortified bread to reduce protein deficiency among school children. The fortified bread is made with wheat, cowpea and peanuts.

But despite the new opportunities offered by a fresh interest in cowpea, supplies of the cowpea are low for commercial use. One reason being the cost of production and cowpea’s susceptibility to insects and diseases. According to the September 2010 IITA R4D Review, pests, such as aphids and bruchid weevils attack the cowpea plant during its life cycle; it is also damaged by bacteria, fungi, and viruses that cause diseases.

“The quantity of cowpea produced presently is inadequate for consumption,” Christian Fatokun, a cowpea breeder at IITA, told IPS.

Bussie Maziya-Dixon, a crop utilisation specialist with IITA concurs. “In terms of using the flour from cowpea, we have done very little, simply because we do not have enough cowpea produced to provide a surplus for diversifying its uses. When it is available, it is not enough to make traditional products which people are used to.”

Currently, Maziya-Dixon said, cowpea flour is used in complimentary foods where it is mixed with cereals such as millet, sorghum or maize to improve their nutritional quality for children. Research is helping to strengthen the role of black-eyed peas by solving production and storage constraints.

Plant physiologist at Purdue University, Dr. Larry Murdock told IPS that there was a possibility of growing improved cowpea varieties that could offer better milling qualities given that cowpeas would have different nutritional and physical characteristics. “Perhaps some varieties would be better for milling than others and this could be an opportunity for cowpea breeders,” Murdock said.

Anthony, a 22-year-old call centre agent, goes to work at 6 p.m. and finishes at around 2 a.m. But instead of going home, he heads to a bar to meet another male agent over beer, and if the late night looks promising, they spend more time together until daytime.

“The rest of the day is a struggle to sleep,” Anthony said in an interview. The young man’s typical day consists of work, chill time with his buddy, often having sex with that same buddy, and then forgetting what happened during the night to try to sleep when the sun is up.

Since the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry created a growing number of call centres in the Philippines – its BPO industry is second to the world’s largest, India – professionals like Anthony and his friend found their niche in the world of work.

Here, they can be comfortable being gay. They can come to work in jeans, sneakers and hoodies, and can grow or colour their hair without being reminded of office rules. “You can be who you are,” said Anthony. When asked why having sexual relations seem casual among his colleagues, he said it might be because of the unconventional work hours and the comfort that the workplace offers.

“It’s just us seeing each other during odd hours every single day, and because nobody seems to be looking, we can do things we don’t normally do outside,” he said. The non- judgmental atmosphere creates an accepting environment for homosexual males like him.

In other words, a new social phenomenon is taking shape around the lifestyle of Anthony and nearly half a million young people like him working in call centres in this South- east Asian country of 94 million people. Their unusual hours stem from the fact that centres provide services – including customer and technical support – to banks, telecommunication and Internet companies – during work hours in places like the United States.

This environment has come about not only because of the promise of employment and income – studies say call centres provided 70,000 new jobs in 2009 and 2010 in this country where 33 percent of citizens are poor. It is also due to the accepted permissiveness among workers that is perceived as risky sexual behaviour, several studies say.

The high prevalence of risky behaviour might put the youthful workforce in call centres at risk of sexually transmitted infections (STI) and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), two studies say. A third study found 12 of its respondents testing positive for HIV.

One of these studies into risk behaviour, conducted by the Ateneo de Manila University among 650 respondents aged 15 to 29, from 20 call centres in Metro Manila, showed that casual, unprotected sex is quite widespread among both males and females.

More males had multiple sex partners – nine out of 10 males and seven of 10 females had sex, but in the sexual encounters, 73 percent of males and 80 percent of females did not use protection such as condoms. Among the men who have sex with men younger than 20, all said that they did not use condoms, and 70 percent reported having four or more partners in the past 12 months.

Dr Isabel Melgar, head of the Ateneo university’s psychology department, said that “sex under the influence of alcohol” is rampant in the call centre industry, and that since sexual contact, often with different partners and at one-time encounters is accepted, dating is no longer the norm. “We also saw changes in socialisation, gender identity, and sexual attraction,” she said.

The mobile phone is the most common mode for meeting up, while personal interactions have been minimised due to social networking, email and chatting on the Internet. The Internet is also the major source of information about STI and HIV among males, as against magazines for females.

Although awareness of STI and HIV is relatively high, the young workers do not seem mindful of the risks of their sexual behaviour even if, as one respondent said, “sex sometimes occurs during the 15-minute or one-hour break”.

Melgar said “there is a fear factor attached to STI and HIV, and they don’t want to talk about it,” especially because call centres and HIV infection are already in the news. One male respondent admitted, “I’m embarrassed to say I’m a call centre worker because people think I have AIDS.”

But “to consider the call centres a hotbed of HIV infections is stigmatising and totally wrong” points out Melgar.

Prior to the Ateneo study, the University of the Philippines Population Institute (UPPI) and the UP- Philippine General Hospital (PGH) released findings of their studies on young professionals’ vulnerability to STI and HIV.

Conducted from November 2009 to January 2010, the UP-PGH study interviewed 406 young male respondents and conducted free rapid HIV tests; 130 of the total respondents were call centre agents. The study found 48 HIV-positive respondents, 26 of whom worked in call centres.

The UPPI study on sexual risk behaviour among young workers in call centres and other industries found that call centre workers reported having more sexual encounters than those in other industries, and that more males than females practise unsafe behaviour.

Regardless of industry, the risky behaviour was high, but levels were slightly higher among call centre agents in unprotected, casual, paid sex, and sex with multiple partners.

These point to the fact that “there is a need to embed HIV prevention in a total health package for call centre agents, and this needs the cooperation of managers and owners”, Melgar pointed out.

She said a young person’s sexual behaviour is strongly influenced by the immediate environment, and values from one’s family and any sexuality education learned from school, even in this mainly Catholic country, can only do so much.

By Busani Bafana
DAKAR, Sep 30 2010 (IPS)

While researchers and farmers are still divided on the benefits of growing crops for biofuel production as Africa grapples with food security, Senegal is steadily working to balance the growing demands for food and biofuels.

Senegal targets to plant one billion Jatropha Curcus plants grown using in-vitro, nursery and cuttings in the next two years. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

For years Senegal has been working with investors in biofuels, farmers, researchers and private sector to promote Jathropha curcus. Jatropha is an oil-bearing plant commonly used as a fence around homes to keep out livestock. It also has medicinal properties.

The director general of the Senegal Institute of Agricultural Research, Dr Macoumba Diouf, told IPS that low-cost energy was key to modernising Senegal’s agriculture and boosting food production. The country has already developed a bioenergy plan over five years to 2012.

According to the plan, Senegal targets to plant one billion Jatropha curcus plants grown using in-vitro, nursery and cuttings in the next two years. Currently, the country is propagating material to complement existing plants growing in the wild and about a quarter are expected to be planted by end of the year. The country will cultivate 321,000 hectares of land under jatropha with 321 districts growing about 1,000 plants per hectare.

“We project that from the over 300,000 hectares under jatropha over five years we will be able to produce three million tonnes of oil to give us one billion litres of biodiesel which will make us energy sufficient by a long mark,” said Diouf, whose institute is coordinating the programme.

The programme is estimated to cost over 140 million dollars and create 100,000 jobs directly while increasing farmer incomes from agriculture. Yet Senegal will not easily find allies in pursuing the bioenergy dream against claims that bioenergy projects have fuelled land grabs and forced marginalised farmers from their ancestral lands.

This is despite the conclusions of the June study by the Imperial College in London, which reviewed existing research and case studies of biofuel production and policy in six countries, that there is enough land available to significantly increase the cultivation of crops, such as sugar cane, sorghum, and jatropha for bio fuels without diminishing food production.

Dr Rocio Diaz-Chavez, the lead author of the report, noted that bioenergy was crucial for unlocking Africa’s potential but that policies were needed to address potential conflicts between food and fuel crops. “If approached with the proper policies and processes and with the inclusion of all the various stakeholders, bio energy is not only compatible with food production but can greatly benefit agriculture in Africa,” wrote Diaz-Chavez in the report, titled Mapping Food and Bioenergy in Africa. “Bio energy production can bring investments in land; infrastructure and human resources that could help unlock Africa’s latent potential and positively increase food production.”

But farmers like Phillip Kariri, president of the Eastern Africa Farmers Association disagree with the Imperial College study findings.

“The impression that Africa has excess land is not right,” Kariri told IPS. “I do not think it is possible to get to a situation where food and fuel crops can be grown simultaneously in many parts of Africa. The players in the biofuel industry are not targeting local food security and are likely to deprive food security systems of inputs and even labour to bio fuel resulting in people not producing food.”

Lydia Sasu, a farmer from Ghana, said many of her colleagues have been disappointed that they have not received money after clearing their lands for biofuels projects.

Even the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, two key African institutions promoting the development of agriculture in Africa are cautious about prioritising bio fuels crops ahead of food crops. Both institutions concede that research is a vital tool of development, especially in agriculture to ensure governments made informed decisions on bio fuel policies.

“Africa has a lot of innovation but these have remained on the shelves.” Monty Jones from the Ghana-based FARA told IPS.

AGRA president, Namanga Ngongi told IPS that Africa was in a food deficit situation and priority should be food crops ahead of fuel crops. “If we were in a food surplus situation and had appropriate crops that can be used for bio fuels probably the question would be different,” Ngongi said.

In a July 23 2010 paper published by Green Business, Bryce Wolfe noted that one of the significant drawbacks of biofuels is the large amount of land and water used to meet energy needs. “Converting crops to ethanol essentially takes food from our mouths to put fuel in our cars,” Wolfe said calling for more efficient methods of producing bio fuels.

The United States-based Institute for Food and Development Policy has said not all positive promises about biofuels were true. Claims that agrofuels were clean and green, will not result in deforestation, will bring rural development, will not cause hunger and will herald better second generation fuels were myths because the opposite was true.

Excerpt:

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Sep 29 2010 (IPS)

In the semi-arid Laikipia district of Kenya’s Rift Valley province, research scientist Sarah Ogalleh Ayeri travels from one village to another, documenting methods used by peasant farmers as they attempt to adapt to changing climatic conditions.

Judith Mwikali Musau is one farmer who has successfully introduced the use of grafted plants for crop and fruit harvesting. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

“Farmers in this area can hardly grow any crop because of the prevailing drought. Instead, they keep livestock that include local cattle breeds, camels, goats and sheep,” said Celestino Achole Shikuku, a farmer from Piyenti village in Rumuruti, Laikipia.

“Residents of this village have had to take their livestock animals miles away in search of water, until five years ago. Then a British farmer mobilised them to construct a huge water dam, from which all our animals drink,” said Shikuku.

The dam was constructed by a seasonal spring. However, water from the spring has to be supplemented from rainfall, which is erratic.

“Such are the local adaptation measures I am out to document. They can be both indigenous or those learned from elsewhere. My recommendations will then be on how they can be improved in order to serve the local community in the best way possible,” said Ayeri.

She is a research scientist at the Centre for Training and Integrated Research for Arid and Semi-Arid Lands Development and her study is titled “Lessons from Farmers: localised adaptations in agriculture as building blocks to climate change adaptation in Laikipia district.”

She said it was important that new adaptation methods be localised, then evaluated and tested before they are released for use by local farmers. In many cases farmers were introduced to new technologies that they failed to sustain in the long run.

But on a farm in Eastern Kenya, Judith Mwikali Musau is one farmer who has successfully introduced the use of grafted plants for crop and fruit harvesting.

“Since my childhood, I saw my parents grow particular types of fruits, grains and legumes …to improve the yields on my farm, I have integrated the indigenous knowledge with appropriate technologies like grafting and permaculture,” she said.

On Musau’s three hectare plot in the semi-arid Mwala district, she grows 500 grafted mango trees, 800 grafted orange trees, 150 tangerine trees and some pawpaw trees. All trees are intercropped with legumes like pigeon peas and cowpeas.

But not all farmers have been as successful as Musau. “It becomes very difficult for the farmers to adapt to completely new adaptation technologies. They might look lucrative at the time of introduction, but evidence has shown that most of them cannot easily be sustained locally,” said Ayeri.

She said that before introducing any climate change adaptation measures to any community of smallholder farmers, some key issues must be considered.

“We must first understand the preferred local adaptation strategies. But most importantly, we must know how farmers perceive climate change, how they link their existent adaptations to the phenomenon, and how these existent adaptations can be improved to be more effective, efficient and sustainable,” explained Ayeri.

Examples of such methods include the introduction of high-yielding hybrid maize varieties, which have failed to survive without adequate farm inputs like fertilisers, and genetically improved dairy cattle that have been proven to be highly susceptible to harsh climatic conditions and diseases.

Ayeri said it is important for agriculturalists to understand what drives farmers to choose particular adaptation measures, and find out which ones may or may not work for them.

The May 2010 United Nations’ conference in Nairobi, which aimed to provide advice relating to the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity, acknowledged the importance of reverting to the indigenous knowledge in African farming as an appropriate adaptation measure.

“At the moment climate change is the most important phenomenon to watch because studies have shown that it perpetuates nearly all the other challenges,” she said.

Climate change is expected to affect Africa greatly and scientists say that agriculture will be most affected – impacting millions of families who depend on it for their livelihoods.

But Ayeri hopes her research findings will make a difference. The findings will be used to inform policy on climate change and decision making in agriculture within Kenya and beyond. “This will ultimately increase agricultural production of farmers and positively contribute towards sustainable development,” she said.

Ayeri’s research is part of a fellowship programme sponsored by the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development programme, hosted by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

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The number of pregnant women being tested for HIV and accessing treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa has shown significant progress – indicating that virtual elimination of mother-to-child transmission of the virus by 2015 is possible.

According to a new report Towards Universal Access, the proportion of pregnant women in Sub-Saharan Africa who received an HIV test increased from 43 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2009. The report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS assessed HIV/AIDS progress in 144 low- and middle-income countries.

It found an estimated 24 percent of the approximately 125 million pregnant women in these countries received an HIV test in 2009, an increase from 21 percent in 2008 and eight percent in 2005. Fifty-four percent of HIV-positive pregnant women in Sub-Saharan Africa received antiretroviral drugs to prevent transmission to their children in 2009, up from 45 percent in 2008.

Speaking to IPS during the launch of the report in Nairobi on Sep.28, UNICEF regional director Elhadj As Sy said the progress made in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission is testimony of the fact that virtual elimination by 2015 is achievable.

“What we need is strong political leadership, funding, good programs and activism. If we build on the progress and with renewed commitment we are well on our way to achieving virtual elimination by 2015,” Sy said. However, despite the progress there are still challenges with disparities between regions and within countries.

Despite the marked progress, countries in Eastern and Southern Africa fared better than their counterparts in West and Central Africa. In Eastern and Southern Africa, 50 percent of pregnant women received HIV testing and counselling, an increase from 43 percent in 2008. In Western and Central Africa, coverage increased from 16 percent to 21 percent between 2008 and 2009.

“While the figures in Western and Central Africa are low, this does not mirror failure on their part. The burden of HIV/AIDS has leaned heavily on Eastern and Southern Africa and this is where most interventions have been directed. Western and Central Africa are just beginning to pick up the problem and their burden of the epidemic is lower,” said Dr. David Okello. Okello is director, HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Cluster at the WHO regional office for Africa.

Seven countries including Nigeria, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ethiopia provided HIV tests to less than one third of pregnant women. “Knowing and accessing treatment is very crucial. Greater investments are needed to increase HIV testing and counselling among pregnant women in order to effectively prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV,” Okello said.

Nigeria, DRC, Ethiopia and Uganda are still far from attaining the UNGASS target. These four countries contributed to 50 percent of the global gap in reaching the UNGASS target. The global gap is the difference between the current number of pregnant women in need who have access to ARVs and the estimated number who must be reached to achieve the UNGASS goal. Nigeria alone accounts for almost one third, 32 percent of the gap.

The number of children receiving antiretroviral therapy in Sub-Saharan Africa rose from 224,100 to 296,000. However, the total coverage among children in the region is still low at 26 percent compared to adults at 37 percent. “Too many children are still dying in this time and era when we can test and treat. We need to do more to reach the 10 million who still need treatment,” Sy said.

Among infants and children exposed to HIV, access to early testing, care and treatment is still a challenge. More than 90 percent of children living with HIV are infected through mother to child transmission during pregnancy, around the time of birth or through breastfeeding. The challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa include weak integration of services, persistent drug stock-outs and little follow up of patients started on treatment.

“To address these challenges, countries need to strengthen health systems, improve integration of services and bring facilities closer to the people,” Okello said.

Integration of services means having related areas close together such as child and maternal health, tuberculosis and reproductive health services. “We need to develop strategies to reach out to every woman and child especially those in marginalised areas, the poor and those living in rural areas. We need to counter stigma and discrimination and the risk of violence against women particularly,” Sy said.

Countries need to develop mechanisms to engage communities as partners and establish links between health facilities and the local people. Address challenges that keep people away from health facilities such as financial barriers and user fees. Strong follow-up systems are needed to monitor and ensure identified needs are actually being met. Many infants and pregnant women who test HIV-positive are lost to follow up.

However, Sub-Saharan Africa which greatly relies on donors for its HIV interventions, faces tough times in the future, with the announcement that funding is steadily declining. “Funding for HIV has flat-lined for the first time in 15 years. In 2009 we had 8.7 billion dollars, now we have 7.7 billion (dollars), the funding gap has increased to about 10 million dollars,” Okello said.

African governments are being urged to increase national budget allocation to healthcare. “Countries must live up to the Abuja declaration of 15 percent of national budget going towards health. With good governance structures and accountability, these monies can be put to good use. The advantages of increased investment in healthcare are immense,” he said.

The platform at the Global Fund replenishment conference in New York in October will be used to appeal to governments to reduce the funding gap.

By Safeeyah Kharsany and Chris Stein
JOHANNESBURG, Sep 21 2010 (IPS)

A new solution to power and fuel problems worldwide may be developed by using a resource long characterised as dirty and non-renewable: coal.

One of Africa's largest rubbish dumps, the Dandora Municipal Dumping Site in Nairobi, Kenya, could be used as a source of fuel. Credit: Julius Mwelu/IRIN

Professor Diane Hildebrandt is the co-director of the Centre of Materials and Process Synthesis (COMPS) at the University of the Witswatersrand, which developed the new technique, called Any Carbon Source to Liquids (XTL).

“We can take almost any carbon source and turn it into liquid fuel,” Hildebrandt said. She was speaking at a two-day science and skills-training conference titled From Evolution to Revolution being held at the University of the Witswatersrand from Sep. 21 to 22.

One of the possibilities, Hildebrandt said, is converting solid coal into liquid fuel using the Fischer-Tropsch process, where coal is converted into hydrogen and carbon monoxide before being exposed to a catalyst such as iron or cobalt, then finally condensed into diesel, synthetic lubricants and gasoline.

The downside of this process is the amount of carbon dioxide that is released during the coal’s transformation, Hildebrandt said. To solve this problem, Hildebrandt said the refiners can harvest the emissions and use it to grow algae.

Professor David Glasser, who directs COMPS along with Hildebrandt, said the technique was developed specifically to address Africa’s power needs while using the resources available.

“A rubbish dump in South Africa is a source, not a problem,” Glasser said.

Organic materials, from coal to compost, are stores of energy for conversion into liquid fuel, Glasser said. And by harvesting the carbon dioxide and using it to grow algae, jobs can be created and fisheries developed, thus increasing the local food supply.

“While other researchers around the world are doing similar research with super algae, in that they try to genetically modify them,” Hilderbrandt says, “we believe that whatever local algae exists in the site area is the algae that should be used.” This would aim to maintain the balance of the ecosystem in the area.

Finally, by increasing the amount of fish available, Glasser said another source of protein will be introduced into the African diet. Currently, most Africans get their dietary protein from chicken, Glasser said, which could be threatened by an outbreak of bird flu.

“It’s no good use building plants the same way as in the developing world when people in here don’t have money. We have to find a better way,” Glasser said. “The African equation is a better life equals access to energy.”

Roll Out

Two small pilot plants in China were used to refine fuel using gases from making coking coal, Hildebrandt said. The venture is so far a private enterprise, developed in partnership with the South Africa-owned construction firm Golden Nest, she said.

To avoid creating large concentrations of carbon dioxide, Hildebrandt said COMPS was focusing on small-scale refineries, which she characterised as producing 1,000 barrels of fuel a day as opposed to the 50,000 barrels a day at larger plants.

South Africans count on coal for 93 percent of their electricity, which is not only polluting but inefficient, according to Glasser.

“Burning coal to make electricity is very inefficient,” Glasser said. “Less than half of coal’s chemical potential is used when you burn it.”

Glasser said he hopes to establish a number of small XTL refineries around South Africa, each taking advantage of the local resources, be they coal, biological waste or some other type of matter.

“Our vision is to use our technological skills and vision to benefit South Africa,” Glasser said.

The next step is for the technology to receive support from governments in order to build more refineries, Hildebrandt said.

“We would love to work with governments to get access to their resources,” she said.

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By Omer Redi
GADAB ASSASSA, Ethiopia , Sep 17 2010 (IPS)

Like most farmers in Ethiopia, Jundi Hajji expected that the profit from his wheat harvest would be sufficient to feed his family of eight until next year’s harvest.

Jundi Hajji is concerned how his family will survive if the yellow wheat rust claims his entire harvest. Credit: Omer Redi/IPS

Hajji has a five hectare wheat farm in Qawa village of Gadab Assassa, a rural district at the heart of wheat-producing central Ethiopia. He is one of the millions of farmers whose plantations are seriously affected by yellow wheat rust. Hajji used to harvest up to six tonnes of wheat per hectare in previous years. “This time, I’m afraid we are going to end up with no harvest,” Hajji told IPS.

The yellow wheat rust epidemic has reached all wheat-growing areas of Ethiopia, covering over two million hectares land, and will lead to an over 50 percent harvest loss unless farms get sprayed with chemicals in a matter of weeks, said Solomon Gelalcha, Director of Qulumsa Agricultural Research Centre, one of the organisations under the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research.

But the outbreak comes at a time when Ethiopia has just developed two new wheat varieties that researchers say are durable against any wheat disease. Unfortunately the new varieties are not available for public use as yet. The varieties, which are yet to be officially named, are resistant to multiple current and possible future wheat killer pathogens of yellow, stem and leave wheat rusts, researchers say.

The varieties were developed by researchers at Qulumsa through a new approach called Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat, said Gelalcha. The latest approach focuses more on giving the new wheat varieties durability against any wheat disease. The previous model gave varieties “vertical resistance” to a single disease, and is easily defeated by new diseases or when the disease they are resistant to evolves.

“Due to the natural gene-for-gene reaction (from the pathogen to the host/the wheat variety) the resistance comes to an end when the photogene evolves or mutates,” Gelalcha said. “But the new horizontal resistance approach gives the wheat multiple genes that complement each other in the face of different pathogens.”

The cumulative or additive effect in the “horizontal resistance” will take diseases much longer time to defeat the wheat, if at all they do. By that time the wheat will be ready for harvest, Gelalcha said. The varieties have proven to be resistant to yellow, stem and leave rusts when tested at the research centre’s farms. However, the new varieties are yet to be approved by the agriculture ministry’s Seed Approval Committee before it can finally reach farmers. The approval and the subsequent propagation and multiplication processes normally take years.

But the country’s farmers cannot wait that long. “The state of the wheat harvest in Ethiopia this year is not good at all,” Gelalcha, told IPS. “Due to the early onset of the rainy season months ahead, rust spores (yellow wheat rust-causing particles) have been accumulated in almost every wheat-growing area.”

Most of these areas lie in the mid and high altitude parts of the country making them highly vulnerable to yellow rust. While Gelalcha estimates over 50 percent harvest loss unless chemicals are sprayed urgently, other pathologists fear the loss could be as high as 90 percent.

So far, government has sprayed a few private and all state-owned farms. Most farmers have to pay to have their farms treated. In an attempt to save his wheat, Hajji has paid 150 dollars to have 2.5 litres chemicals sprayed twice on his farm. But he is not sure whether this will save his crop. He will see the results in October, when the crop reaches maturity.

Most farmers cannot afford the chemicals. And if they can, chemical supplies have been meager, farmers complain. But, Dr. Abera Derressa, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, told IPS that the government has just imported over 1.2 million dollars worth of chemicals that arrived on Sep. 13. “There will be a minor loss but now that the chemicals are available we will save most of our harvest,” Derressa said.

Meanwhile, Qulumsa is attempting to release the new varieties of wheat before officially having them approved. They are hoping that by 2011 at least five percent of farmers will have access to the new wheat.

“But we are now following a different approach. As opposed to a quintal (about 100kgs) in the past, we now provided the state and private seed propagators with 18 to 28 tonnes that we developed through irrigated farming. Similarly, they are expected to multiply and provide farmers with these varieties at a faster rate and speed than in the past,” Gelalcha told IPS.

Even in this way, the new varieties will reach only a small portion of wheat farmers in the next harvest season, which is almost a year away. “In the next harvest season at least five percent of the farmers will get the new varieties,” Gelalcha said. And if the millions of farmers like Hajji survive the epidemic this time, they will be lucky to be among the five percent who get the new varieties next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By David Njagi
NAIROBI , Sep 14 2010 (IPS)

Like many primary school teachers in Kenya, Nemwel Mokua is not coping. He has to teach at least six subjects a day, which include a mix of arts, mathematics and science.

Brian Muriithi of Moi Avenue Primary School in Nairobi is a mathematics student. Credit: David Njagi/IPS

And the teacher of Le Pic Primary School in Riruta, Nairobi, lives in fear of school inspectors, who often grill him and his colleagues on the poor performance their school posts in mathematics and science subjects. In 2008, the first standard eight class Mokua taught scored an average grade of a D+. However, according to results of the 2008 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education this was also the average of other students across the country.

Like many primary school teachers in Kenya, Mokua blames the poor performance of his students on the little time he has to invest in mathematics and science-related subjects.

“Although my pupils have improved in mathematics and science-related subjects in the last two years, I must admit that the Kenyan education system places too much work on the teacher. He or she does not have enough time to invest in technical subjects,” said Mokua.

But the ministry of education insists that primary school teachers must be assigned at least six subjects a day. But education experts disagree saying this compromises the quality of education in Kenya’s primary schools. And a study released on Aug. 25 supports this.

The Classroom Observation Study in Nairobi by the African Population and Health Research Centre, indicated that mathematics teachers in Kenya’s primary schools had a poor understanding of the subject. And it has researchers questioning the quality of the country’s free primary education system.

The findings of the report shocked Kenyans after teachers only managed to score a mean grade of 60.5 percent in mathematics tests.

Researchers said they would have expected teachers involved in the study to score over 90 percent in the subject, but only a margin of 13 percent separated the teachers’ results from the pupils’.

In one incident, a teacher with over five years experience scored 17 percent on the test. APHRC senior research scientist, Dr. Moses Oketch, described the findings as ‘shameful’.

“This was very shocking to us,” said Oketch. “We expected teachers to be scoring a grade of more than 90 percent, but their performance is almost at par with that of their pupils, who scored 46.89 percent. Something needs to be done.”

According to the researchers, the poor performance could also explain why pupils continue to perform poorly in the subject.

But Peter Githinji, a mathematics teacher at Gikandu Primary School in central Kenya said teachers should not be blamed as government has failed to provide teaching aids that would demystify mathematics and science as difficult subjects.

“There is a nationwide attitude that mathematics and science subjects are difficult,” said Githinji. “I think the government is not doing enough to induct and encourage Kenyans to embrace these subjects.”

But the report has been subject to an ongoing debate, with teachers’ trade unions blaming government for its failure to train enough teachers to specialise in mathematics and science.

The Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers secretary general Njeru Kanyamba said when Kenya launched the ambitious free primary education programme in 2003, it was done so without a clear plan on where the resources to actualise it would come from.

When the free primary education was introduced in 2003, over 1.3 million new students enrolled to attend classes that first week. And teachers still remain overwhelmed, Kanyamba said.

“Primary school teachers are overloaded by the number of pupils enrolled in one class due to shortage of staff,” said Kanyamba. “Because of the heavy responsibilities they have to bear, they do not get an opportunity to pursue professional development.”

He agrees that the findings of the report have a poor bearing on the future of science and technology in the country.

Ministry of education permanent secretary, Professor James Ole Kiyiapi, defended the free education programme adding that Kenya’s higher education system is based on a value-added model where students have been able to show progress in science and technology at this level.

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