Nteranya Sanginga, Director General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Courtesy of IITA

By Nteranya Sanginga
IBADAN, Nigeria, Nov 23 2015 (IPS)

Finding a way to allow youth to contribute their natural and ample energies to productive causes is increasingly the touchstone issue that will determine future prosperity.

It is a tragic irony that today’s youth, despite being the most educated generation ever, struggle to be included.

That’s true in advanced countries. But it is even more true in Africa, where almost two-thirds of the jobless are young adults, whose ranks swell by 10 to 12 million new members each year. The challenge is staggering in scale: Today there are 365 million Africans aged 15 to 35, and over the next 20 years that figure will double.

There is no magic wand. It is youth themselves who must find a solution.

Everyone else – governments, international organizations, the private sector, social groups and parents – has a huge stake in their success and so must not stand in the way. Normally one hears about the need to help cast in elaborate theories based on the need for redistribution. But the truth is, we need a step change.

That’s the spirit the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is adopting with our “agripreneur” coaching programmes. These aim to use self-help groups so that people can indeed help themselves. As I bluntly told a group of youth in Uganda, we will provide support in the form of technology, knowledge and advocacy, but the real activity has to be done by themselves. Another message was: “be aggressive.”

It is well known that Africa is a vast land of family farmers, many living in rural areas and regularly struggling with poverty and hunger. Figures can also be easily made to show how most family farms are exercises in subsistence, and don’t always succeed without external help.

Family farming is a way of life, to be sure. But that does not mean, when you really think about it, that it cannot be done as a business. Doing so would represent a change, but the time has come. Making agriculture a commercial trade offers a set of new tools to entice talented youth to a sector we all know they tend to run away from.

As Akinwumi Adesina, formerly Nigeria’s agriculture minister and now the president of the African Development Bank, likes to say, “Africa’s future millionaires and billionaires will make their money from agriculture.”

And it is quite likely that youth, being in a proverbial rush, will accelerate the transformations that will lead to better lives than a mad rush to cities where employment prospects aren’t keeping pace with urban population. Moreover, agriculture has been the weak link in terms of productivity growth across the continent – that means there is an enormous upside to doing it better.

Knowledge needs pollinators. While extension services are excellent and should be upgraded, young people are natural communicators when they think something is cool and useful. That’s what agriculture has to be.

IITA’s agripreneur campaign hinges on our version of a Silicon Valley hackathon. Incubators are created to allow youth to learn and exchange ideas of a practical nature – about how to keep accounts, new crops and farming techniques, the myriad possibilities of agricultural value chains that include roles for seed traders, food processors, weather forecasters, insurance salespeople, marketing specialists.

One of our agripreneur “interns” told me that what he took away was that success is not in fact all down to money. An enterprise really needs ideas, of course, and the ability to plan.

To be clear, his enthusiasm – as so many of our alumni say – was about the possibility of enterprise. Call it agribusiness. Agricultural commodity value chains provide just that, a series of transactional opportunities that work to improve efficiency for all and reward the talented. This is a major catalyst for youth. After all, it opens the door for the professionalization of agriculture.

To be sure, the agribusiness model crucially requires inclusive efforts to make sure credit is available to youth, to assure that gender equity becomes an operational assumption rather than just a goal, and a host of public goods including scientific research. Yet it begins with a changed mind set.

People must learn how to apply for a loan. Bankers always say they wish to fund on the basis of a business plan rather than collateral. It is time to put that to the test. IITA’s focus on agripreneurs is a well-placed bet on the idea that nobody learns faster than youth.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2015 (IPS)

Increasingly gender equality, rooted in human rights, is recognized both as a key development goal on its own and as a vital means to helping accelerate sustainable development. And while the field of gender has expanded exponentially over the years, with programmes focused exclusively on women and girls and greater mainstreaming of gender into many development activities, a range of challenges remain.

Women are still facing unequal access to economic and environmental resources. They often face numerous barriers linked to clear discrimination as well as bear the burden of low wages or unpaid work, and are susceptible to gender-based violence.

So despite the significant advances for women, the fact is that unless women and girls are able to fully realize their rights in all facets of society, human development will not be advanced. The year 2015 is a crucial time to further equality and if the new post-2015 development agenda is to be truly transformative, women must be at the front and also at its centre.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contain a stand-alone goal on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. All the goals are intrinsically interrelated and interdependant – and ideally gender will be adressed and mainstreamed amongst all goals. SDG 5 calls on governments to achieve, rather than just promote, gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

The proposed targets include ending violence, eliminating harmful practices, recognizing the value of unpaid care, ensuring that women have full participation – and equal opportunities – in decision-making, and calling for reforms to give women equal access to economic resources. The new post-2015 agenda is a universal idea with high hopes to “leave no one behind,” but to make this a reality, we must keep pressure on governments to follow through on their commitments.

The Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG Fund) has placed gender equality and women’s empowerment at the heart of its efforts to acceleterate progress towards the SDGs. By directly empowering women and by bringing a gender perspective to all development work we can build a more equitable, sustainable future for all.

Stemming from the comitments established in 1995 at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the SDG Fund adopted a dual strategy for advancing gender equality to support both gender-targeted programmes while simultaneaously mainstreaming gender as a cross-cutting priority. Gender mainstreaming entails transforming existing policy agendas by integrating a gender perspective into all policies and programming.

There is no set recipe to creating programmes that will solve gender inequality and perhaps it would be good if there was one single universally applicable and empirically proven method for achieving gender equality in every country around the world. A multi-dimensional issue such as gender inequality is deeply rooted in economic and cultural structures of society and it requires comprehensive approaches. Furthermore, one needs to explore the issue in the specific context of the country in question to effectively improve the quality of life for women and girls everywhere.

The private sector, together with NGOs and governments, are key actors in addressing the variable causes of gender inequality. In other words, achieving equality and empowerment for women is a challenge that requires the synergistic intervention of multiple actors.

For example, the Fund is working in Bangladesh, where women are employed at the lower end of the productivity scale. Labor force participation of rural women is only 36.4 per cent compared to 83.3 per cent of men. Creating employment and income generating opportunities for women as well as enhancing women’s access to social protection will help reduce gender disparities which are exacerbated by women’s poverty and vulnerability.

The SDG Fund programme entitled “Strengthening Women’s Ability for Productive New Opportunities” is led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), local governments and private partners with the overall goal to assist 2,592 women from ultra-poor households. As part of a pilot programme, women are trained in maintenance or rehabilitation of key community assets, public works and community service activities.

Furthermore, the programme is targeting 2,600 women in Kurigram District which has the highest incidence of poverty in Bangladesh. In particular, it aims to assist those who are alone because they are divorced, have been abandoned by their husbands or widowed and/or with low economic status including those with no assets or forced to beg due to poverty. The results will be replicated, targeting 1,900 women, in Satkhira district and the government is further committed scale-up this pilot in a further 20 districts. Overall, the 18 month programme is designed to:

– Helping primary beneficiaries permanently move out of poverty.
– Support human capital with activities to boost knowledge, skills, and confidence.
– Enhance economic inclusion with vocational skills training linked to viable job placement.
– Provide livelihoods options that are resilient in the face of climate change.
– Encourage wage saving or issued as a graduation bonus.
– Facilitate partnership linkages with small and medium enterprises and public-private partnerships to hire participant women after the programme ends.
– Integrate social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
– Enhance good local governance and develop the capacity of local government institutions.
Gender equality is often seen as the key to addressing the unfinished business of the Millennium Development Goals and accelerating global development beyond 2015. There is strong evidence that closing gender gaps accelerates progress towards other development goals. Poverty, education, health, jobs and livelihoods, food security, environmental and energy sustainability will not be solved without addressing gender inequality.

Urgent action is needed to empower women and girls, ensuring that they have equal opportunities to benefit from development and removing the barriers that prevent them from being full participants in all spheres of society. In the words of UN Women’s Executive Director, “equality for women, is progress for all” and so let us embark on this journey together.

(End)

Excerpt:

Rain forest in Zimbabwe, where the politics of access and control over forests and their carbon is challenging conventional understanding, and comes down to the question of land and whether local rural communities can benefit if they are not the owners of land. Credit: By Ninara/CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 14 2015 (IPS)

The efficacy of attempts to sustainably manage forests and conserve and enhance forest carbon stocks in Zimbabwe is increasingly coming under scrutiny as new research warns that the politics of access and control over forests and their carbon is challenging conventional understanding.

It all comes down to the question of land and of whether local rural communities can benefit if they are not the owners of land.

Even where they do “own” land, say researchers, these communities often find themselves competing with other players driven by different economic considerations, nullifying the very ideals being pushed under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

“Carbon forestry projects – as previous interventions in forest use, ownership and management – have not been the panacea some had expected … multiple conflicts have emerged between landowners, forest users and project developers” – Ian Scones
Despite the country’s agrarian reform programme, under which land was redistributed to millions of landless local communities, the state remains the biggest landowner, raising questions about community empowerment and the ownership of forests.

With researchers pointing to a spike in the demand for land based not only on rural population growth but also on people reportedly moving to rural areas, there is no doubt that any increase in the rural population brings with it increased demand for natural resources.

“The demand on natural resources for land is growing year on year at a rate which is not sustainable,” says Steve Wentzel, director of Carbon Green Africa, and this will mean reforestation in the millions, with these trees being planted on plots that do not belong to local communities at a time when some farmers are decimating forest cover by using firewood to cure their tobacco.

The promise held out by REDD+ was that through reforestation and by reducing emissions, communities would then have access to or earn certified emission reduction credits to be sold to or traded with the worst polluters to meet their own emission reduction targets, yet it is clear that like any economic transaction, those who owns the means of production profit most.

Land is still owned either by the state or big business, with little cascading to the “bottom billion” as some economists have called the world’s poor, and landowners and the rich industrialised countries benefit at the expense of rural communities.

According to Ian Scoones, co-editor with Melissa Leach of a recently published book titled Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa, “carbon forestry projects – as previous interventions in forest use, ownership and management – have not been the panacea some had expected.”

Scoones says that “multiple conflicts have emerged between landowners, forest users and project developers. Achieving a neat market-based solution to climate mitigation through forest carbon projects is not straightforward.”

On Zimbabwe’s REDD+ project, which has covered 1.4 million hectares under Carbon Green Africa, Scoones says that “as notional ‘traditional’ and ‘administrative’ owners of the land, they [rural communities] should have the authority. But they are pitched against powerful forces with other ideas about resource and economic priorities.”

Civil society organisations (CSOs) here argue that this explains why rural communities get the shorter end of the stick.

Meanwhile, a recent brief from Zimbabwe’s climate ministry noted that “rich countries have barely kept the promise” of meeting their pledges, casting doubts on whether rural communities will in fact trade any anticipated carbon credits for cash.

The rural poor could well be saying “show us the money” by 2020, the year targeted in Cancun, Mexico, for emission reduction pledges.

Climate and environment ministry officials agree that land ownership under REDD+ has remained a sticking point in its dialogue with CSOs on how local communities may derive premium dividend from forest carbon projects.

“CSOs represent the interests of local communities and lack of safeguards has made this issue an area of divergence between governments and CSOs,” says Veronica Gundu, acting deputy director in the Climate Change Management Department of the Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate.

“They (CSOs) are pushing for clarity on land ownership and the benefits to the local communities because they view the current regime of implementation to be beneficial only to the project implementers and leaving out the locals,” Gundu told IPS.

However, Wentzel of Carbon Green Africa which is implementing Zimbabwe’s sole REDD+ project in the Zambezi valley, told IPS: “As it stands the people of these districts are the rightful beneficiaries of revenue generated from their natural resources even if they are not titled land owners.”

Edited by Phil Harris 

Whether they like it or not, many Africans faced with the possibility of having to access water through prepaid meters have resorted to unprotected and often unclean sources of water because they cannot afford to pay. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 8 2015 (IPS)

While many countries appear to have met the U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, rights activists say that African countries which have taken to installing prepaid water meters have rendered a blow to many poor people, making it hard for them to access water.

“The goal to ensure that everyone has access to clean water here in Africa faces a drawback as a number of African countries have resorted to using prepaid water meters, which certainly bar the poor from accessing the precious liquid,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development, a Zimbabwean democracy lobby group, told IPS.

Prepaid water meters work in such a way that if a person cannot pay in advance, he or she will be unable to access water.Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users

As a result, African rights activists like award-winning Terry Mutsvanga from Zimbabwe and other civil society organisations are against the idea of prepaid water meters.

“If one has to pay upfront before accessing water, then it would mean those in most need would be denied access,” Mutsvanga told IPS, adding that water is a global human right.

Mutsvanga was echoing the United Nations General Assembly which, in July 2010, emerged with a binding resolution on the human right to water and sanitation – but for Africa, the human right to water may be far from reality.

Laden with a population of approximately 1.1 billion, Africa’s 300 million people have no access to safe drinking water, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Many rights activists on the continent attribute Africa’s mounting water challenges partly to the advent of prepaid water meters.

“We already have hundreds of millions of people without access to clean water, and imagine the severity of the water challenge if water prepaid meters would reach everyone on the continent,” Mutsvanga said.

Over the years, prepaid water meters have been widely used in African countries like Namibia, Nigeria, Swaziland and Tanzania, as well as South Africa, where the meters which were rolled out in 1999 are currently in low-income areas.

Zimbabwe is currently conducting a pilot project aimed at installing the prepaid water meters, in towns and cities to begin with. And the country’s impoverished urban dwellers like 51-year old Tinago Chikasha are in panic mode, fearing the worst may be coming their way.

“Local authorities are pressing ahead with the idea of prepaid water meters, but jobless people like me have no money to make prepayments for water while we already have unpaid water bills running into thousands of dollars, which local authorities say they will deduct through all future water prepayments, meaning we run into the danger of having dry water taps for as long as we owe local authorities,” Chikasha told IPS.

In non-African countries like the United Kingdom, prepaid water meters are no longer being used after they were declared illegal in 1998 for public health reasons.

They were also abandoned in South Africa at one stage following a massive cholera outbreak, but were reintroduced and have replaced previously free communal standpipes in rural townships.

Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users, and civil society activists like Melusi Khumalo in South Africa blame capitalist tendencies for necessitating the advent of prepaid water meters.

“Prepaid water meters are a result of such negative policies by institutions like the World Bank and they [prepaid water meters] deny water access to those in most need,” Khumalo, who is affiliated to Parktown North Residents’ Association in Johannesburg, told IPS.

In Zimbabwe, Mfundo Mlilo, chief executive officer of Combined Harare Residents’ Association (CHRA), told IPS: “We are vehemently against the prepaid meter project because it will not solve the problems of water delivery, and these prepaid water meters will not lead to residents receiving adequate safe and clean water, while the same prepaid water meters will also not lead to increase in revenue flows as the City [of Harare] claims.”

Last month, Harare’s Town Clerk Tendai Mahachi was reported by Zimbabwe’s Weekend Post as saying: “With these meters we expect roughly to save about 20-30 percent of the current costs we are incurring.”

According to Mahachi, at least 300 000 households in the Zimbabwean capital are scheduled to have prepaid water meters installed, while all new housing projects will be obliged to install meters.

Meanwhile, with prepaid water meters set to rake in big money for some of Africa’s local authorities, there are those like Nathan Jamela, an urban dweller in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, who fear the health consequences.

“We experienced the worst cholera outbreak in 2008, and we fear that if prepaid water meters are installed in every household here we will slide back to the crisis, with many people unable to afford to pay for water,” Jamela told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

“Poor and rural communities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. It is them – who did the least to create this problem – who are suffering the most from it”. Photo credit: UN Photo/Tim McKulka

By Dipti Bhatnagar and Susann Scherbarth
BRUSSELS/MAPUTO, Apr 1 2015 (IPS)

World governments expect to agree to a new global treaty to combat climate change in Paris in December. As the catastrophic impacts of climate change become more evident, so too escalates the urgency to act.

Mar. 31 should have marked a major milestone on the road to Paris, yet only a handful of countries acted on it. Unfortunately, the few plans that were announced before that date show that our leaders lack the ambition to do what it takes to tackle the climate crisis.

National plans for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will most likely form the basis of the Paris agreement. These plans – known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – are meant to indicate a government’s self-stated commitment to solve the global climate crisis through domestic emission reductions as well as through support for the poorest and most vulnerable countries.“People on the frontline of climate impacts are burning while governments fiddle. People are paying and will pay for the devastation of climate change with their lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, communities and culture”

This architecture will result in an agreement that is weaker than each country being legally mandated to reduce emissions based on their fair share, determined through science and equity.

Yet, even with this architecture, the idea was that national governments would declare these plans by the end of March so that they could then be scrutinised.

Only six pledges had been received by the United Nations by the deadline – from the European Union, the United States, Norway, Mexico, Russia and Switzerland. These nations, with the notable exception of Mexico, are among the worst historical carbon emitters, yet these pledges do not reflect that immense historical responsibility and do not show any real willingness to address the scale of the climate crisis.

The commitments are well below what science and climate justice principles tell us is urgently needed to avoid hitting climate tipping points. The European Union announced target to cut emissions by ”at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030” is merely re-hashed from last year’s announcement.

The United States has cobbled together a plan for a meagre reduction of 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels, by 2025. If these insignificant pledges are an indication of what is to come, we are on track to a world which will be 4-6°C warmer on average. To put this into context, the climate impacts we are facing today are the consequence of a planet which is only 0.8°C warmer than it was.

So far, none of these countries’ announcements would contribute their ‘fair share’ according to science and equity. All parties are capable of much greater ambition, and it is high time to bring it to the table.

The deadlines that matter most are not set by governments, but by our planet and its natural boundaries, which have already been stretched considerably by the impacts of the climate crisis, for instance by the lethal and extreme weather events from Vanuatu to the Balkans to the Sahel.

Climate change is already happening now, bringing more floods, storms, droughts, rising seas and more devastating typhoons and hurricanes.

The mockery made of this latest Mar. 31 deadline is just another revelation of our governments’ inaction – under the influence of powerful polluting corporations – in the face of impending disaster.

People on the frontline of climate impacts are burning while governments fiddle. People are paying and will pay for the devastation of climate change with their lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, communities and culture.

Poor and rural communities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. It is them – who did the least to create this problem – who are suffering the most from it.

We need a just and drastic transformation of our societies, our energy and food systems, and our economies. Proven and workable alternatives exist and are already being implemented.

Key decisions about our energy systems are made regularly, and will of course be made long after the Paris summit. Take for instance U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring planet-wrecking tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

A decision is expected soon and a rejection of the pipeline project would send a strong signal that our long-term future is not founded on the exploitation and burning of more and more fossil fuels.

European Union governments announced their INDCs back in February with their new ‘Energy Union’ vision for meeting the region’s energy needs. The bloc has recognised the need to reduce energy consumption and help citizens take control of clean, local renewable sources. But these moves towards the good must not be negated with new investments in the bad – new gas pipelines are also on the menu.

Throughout 2015, Friends of the Earth International and others will be bringing more and more people together to fight against the power of the polluters and make sure politicians hear the voices of the voiceless and take real action.

In the run-up to Paris, and along the road beyond, we, together with thousands of others, will be promoting the wealth of real solutions and proven ideas that are already delivering transformation around the world.

We will be on the streets throughout 2015, in 2016, and as long as it takes to realise community-owned renewable energy solutions that benefit ordinary people, not multinational corporations.

The Paris deadline will come and go, like others before. But the energy transformation is under way and, whatever our governments will pledge or not pledge at the climate summit in Paris, the transformation will not be stopped.

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* Dipti Bhatnagar is Climate Justice & Energy Co-coordinator for Friends of the Earth International, based in Maputo.

* Susann Scherbarth is Climate Justice & Energy Campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe, based in Brussels.

Excerpt:

Subsistence-oriented small-scale agriculture is often not the preferred choice of work for many young Africans. Photo credit: FAO

By Kwame Buist
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 27 2015 (IPS)

Over half of the African continent’s population is below the age of 25 and approximately 11 million young Africans are expected to enter the labour market every year for the next decade, say experts. 

Despite strong economic growth in many African countries, wage employment is limited and agriculture and agri-business continue to provide income and employment for over 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population.

However, laborious, subsistence-oriented small-scale agriculture is often not the preferred choice of work for many young people.

In an effort to reap this demographic dividend and attract young people into the agri-food sector, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have launched a four-year project to create decent employment opportunities for young women and men in rural areas.

The four million dollar project, funded by the African Solidarity Trust Fund, aims to develop rural enterprises in sustainable agriculture and agri-business along strategic value chains.

Speaking at the project signing ceremony on Mar. 25, NEPAD’s chief executive officer, Dr Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, said: “The collaboration between NEPAD and FAO will go a long way in ensuring that the youth, Africa’s future, are not forgotten.

“It is by creating an economic environment that stimulates initiatives – particularly by conducting transparent and foreseeable policies – and at the same time by regulating the market in order to deal with market failures that we will attain results and impact through the new thrust given to our farmers, entrepreneurs and youth.”

The project – which is expected to see over 100, 000 young men and women benefit in rural Benin, Cameroon, Malawi and Niger – is anchored in the Rural Futures Programme of NEPAD, which is centred on rural transformation in which equity and inclusiveness allow rural men and women to develop their potential.

FAO Assistant Director General for Africa Bukar Tijani said that the project “marks an important milestone in moving forward and upward in terms of empowering youth in these four countries – especially women, as 2015 is the African Union’s Year of Women’s Empowerment.”

The project is seen as part of a drive to stimulate the agriculture and agri-business sectors into becoming more modern, profitable and efficient, and capable of providing decent employment opportunities for Africa’s young labour force.

In 2012, the African Union Commission, NEPAD Agency, the Lula Institute and FAO formed a partnership aimed at ending hunger on the continent. A year later, the four partners organised a high-level meeting of ministers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leading to a declaration to end hunger and a road map for implementation.

This declaration was subsequently endorsed at the 2014 African Union summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, and incorporated into the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods as the “Commitment to Ending Hunger in Africa by 2025”.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The Dube AgriZone facility currently incorporates 16 hectares of greenhouses, making it the largest climate-controlled growing area under glass in Africa. Credit: FAO

By Kwame Buist
DURBAN, South Africa, Mar 22 2015 (IPS)

Agriculture is the major employer and a backbone of the economies of Southern Africa.

However, the rural areas that support an agriculture-based livelihood system for the majority of the nearly 270 million people living in the region are typically fragile and there is wide variability in the development challenges facing the countries of the region.

The agricultural sector is dominated by crop production, although the share of livestock production and other agriculture practices have been increasing.Chronic and acute food insecurity remain major risks and Southern Africa still faces enormous challenges in trying to transform and commercialise its largely small holder-based agricultural systems through accelerated integration into competitive markets in a rapidly globalising world

Chronic and acute food insecurity remain major risks and Southern Africa still faces enormous challenges in trying to transform and commercialise its largely smallholder-based agricultural systems through accelerated integration into competitive markets in a rapidly globalising world.

These and other challenges facing the sector were the focus of a three-day meeting (Mar. 10-12) in Durban of management and experts from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which ended with a call to prioritise broad-based partnerships and build synergies to provide countries with effective and efficient support in the agriculture sector.

In an annual event designed to provide a platform for discussion and exchange of information on best practices and the general performance of FAO programmes in the region, David Phiri, FAO Sub-Regional Coordinator for Southern Africa, reiterated the importance of different sectors working together.

“Achieving food and nutrition security in Southern Africa is a challenge far too great for any government or FAO to overcome alone,” he said. “As well as the governments of developing and developed countries, the civil society, private sector and international development agencies must be involved. Above all, the people themselves need to be empowered to manage their own development.”

Building on what works

As one example of the best practices under the scrutiny of the meeting, participants took part in a field visit to the Dube AgriZone facility – a high-tech agricultural development initiative pioneered by the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government.

The facility aims to stimulate the growth of KwaZulu-Natal’s perishables sector and aims to achieve improved agricultural yields, consistent quality, year-round production and improved management of disease and pests.

The facility – strategically located 30 km north of the important coastal city of Durban – currently incorporates 16 hectares of greenhouses, making it the largest climate-controlled growing area under glass in Africa.

Its primary focus is on the production of short shelf-life vegetables and cut flowers which require immediate post-harvest airlifting and supply to both domestic and export markets.

In addition to its greenhouses, the facility offers dedicated post-harvest packing houses, a central packing and distribution centre, a nursery and the Dube AgriLab, a sophisticated plant tissue culture laboratory.

Dube AgriZone is an eco-friendly facility, adopting a range of ‘green’ initiatives to offset its environmental impact, including rainwater harvesting, use of solar energy, on-site waste management, and the growth of indigenous plants for rehabilitation efforts.

Dube AgriZone provides growers with the potential to achieve improved agricultural yields, consistency of produce quality, close management of disease and pest infestation and year-round crop production with a view to improved sustainability and enhanced agricultural competitiveness.

“I could never have been able put up such a facility and produce at the current scale were it not for this innovative AgriZone,” said Derrick Baird, owner of Qutom Farms, which currently produces 150,000 cucumbers in the glass greenhouse leased from Dube AgriZone.

“This high-tech facility with all the necessary facilities – including transportation and freight – has allowed us to concentrate on producing cucumbers at much lower costs than in other locations where we had previously tried.”

The partnership between the provincial government and the private sector behind the facility was hailed as an example of a success story that could offer valuable lessons to others across Southern Africa.

“There is plenty we can learn from this facility and perhaps one of the more important ones is on forming partnerships and alliances,” said Tobias Takavarasha, FAO Representative in South Africa.

“We need to build on what is working by adopting and adapting technologies to the local situation, and then scaling them upwards and outwards to achieve even better results,” he added.

Edited by Phil Harris    

A woman planting a shea tree in Ghana to protect riverbanks, and for her economic empowerment. Much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation. Credit: ©IFAD/Dela Sipitey

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Mar 14 2015 (IPS)

Rural women make major contributions to rural economies by producing and processing food, feeding and caring for families, generating income and contributing to the overall well-being of their households – but, in many countries, they face discrimination in access to agricultural assets, education, healthcare and employment, among others, preventing them from fully enjoying their basic rights.

Gender equality is now widely recognised as an essential component for sustainable development goals in the post-2015 agenda, with empowerment of rural women vital to enabling poor people to improve their livelihoods and overcome poverty.“To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities” – IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze

This year’s International Women’s Day, celebrated worldwide on Mar. 8, marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), which called on governments, the international community and civil society from all over the world to empower women and girls by taking action in 12 critical areas: poverty, education and training, health, violence, armed conflict, the economy, power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, human rights, the media, the environment and the girl child.

Despite that call, much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation.

“Too often, rural women are doing the backbreaking work,” Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), said on the occasion. “To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities.”

This year, the three Rome-based U.N. agencies – the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP) and IFAD – along with journalists and students from Rome’s LUISS, John Cabot and La Sapienza universities met to share testimonials of innovative interventions aimed at empowering rural women in four key areas: nutrition, community mobilisation, livestock and land rights.

A large body of research indicates that putting more income into the hands of women translates into improved child nutrition health and education in all developing regions of the world.

Explaining why women and men need to be involved together to move forward on nutrition, Britta Schumacher, a WFP Programme Policy Officer, described how the Renewed Efforts Against Child Hunger and Undernutrition (REACH) programme had been able to tackle malnutrition and health problems using an approach based on positive gender-oriented objectives.

The REACH programme – a joint initiative of FAO, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), WFP and the World Health Organisation (WHO) – is based on the human right to nutrition security and seeks to transform the way governments and donors approach investment in nutrition to leverage existing investments most effectively and systematically identify priorities for additional investments needed to scale up.

Noting that “the long girls stay at school, the better is their health” because “lack of awareness represents a concrete obstacle to good practices,” Schumacher said that in Bangladesh activities had been carried out under the REACH programme to transfer knowledge within and between members of communities and local authorities, boost rural women’s access to services and strengthen their self-esteem. 

Stressing the need for community mobilisation, Andrea Sanchez Enciso, Gender and Participatory Communication Specialist with FAO, illustrated one of the achievements of FAO’s Dimitra project, a participatory information and communication project which contributes to improving the visibility of rural populations, women in particular.

In Niger, she said, “the Dimitra project encouraged the inclusion of a gender perspective in communication for development initiatives in rural areas … taking greater account of the specificities, needs and aspirations of men and women” and “creating participatory spaces for discussion between men and women, access to information and collective actions in their communities.”

Leading a two-year small livestock project in Afghanistan during the Taliban period, Antonio Riota, Lead Technical Specialist in IFAD’s Livestock, Policy and Technical Advisory Division, said that the project was developed and implemented in a context in which 90 percent of village chickens were managed by women and poultry was the only source of income for the entire community.

According to Riota, the project showed how small livestock can make a difference in rural women’s lives because one of its major results has been that “now women can walk all together” whereas previously they were accused of prostitution if they did so. “Some 75,000 women benefitted from the project and profitability increased by 91 percent,” he added.

Meanwhile, Mino Ramaroson, Africa Regional Coordinator at the International Land Coalition, described two African experiences of women’s networks – the National Federation of Rural Women in Madagascar and the Kilimanjaro Initiative – advocating for their rights to land and natural resources.

In Madagascar, the National Federation of Rural Women, which aims to promote rural women’s rights, improve members’ livelihoods and increase their resilience to external and internal shocks, has been joined by more than 450 rural women’s groups from the country’s six provinces.

The Kilimanjaro Initiative, initiated by rural women in 2012 and supported by the International Land Coalition, uses women’s rights to land and productive resources as an entry point for the mobilisation of rural women from across Africa to define the future they want, claim lives of dignity they deserve and identify and overcome the challenges that hold them back.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Wood market in Chitungwiza. Twenty percent of the urban households in Zimbabwe do not have access to electricity, and rely mainly on firewood for their energy needs. Credit: Tonderayi Mukeredzi/IPS

By Tonderayi Mukeredzi
HARARE, Jan 27 2015 (IPS)

Janet Mutoriti (30), a mother of three from St Mary’s suburb in Chitungwiza, 25 kilometres outside Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, frequently risks arrest for straying into the nearby urban forests to fetch wood for cooking.

Despite living in the city, Janet’s is among the 20 percent of the urban households which do not have access to electricity, and rely mainly on firewood for their energy needs.

Worldwide, energy access has become a key determinant in improving people’s lives, mainly in rural communities where basic needs are met with difficulty.

In Zimbabwe, access to modern energy is very low, casting doubts on the country’s efforts at sustainable development, which energy experts say is not possible without sustainable energy.

In an interim national energy efficiency audit report for Zimbabwe issued in December, the Sustainable African Energy Consortium (SAEC) revealed that of the country’s slightly more than three million households, 44 percent are electrified.“In rural Zimbabwe, the economic driver is agriculture, both dry land and irrigated. The need for energy to improve productivity in rural areas cannot be over-emphasised but current power generated is not sufficient to support all the energy-demanding activities in the country” – Chiedza Mazaiwana, Practical Action Southern Africa

They consumed a total of 2.7 million GWh in 2012 and 2.8 million GWh in 2013, representing 34 percent of total electrical energy sales by the Zimbabwe Electricity Distribution Transmission Company.

According to SAEC, of the un-electrified households, 62% percent use wood as the main source of energy for cooking, especially in rural areas where 90 percent live without access to energy.

A significant chasm exists between urban and rural areas in their access to electricity. According to the 2012 National Energy Policy, 83 percent of households in urban areas have access to electricity compared with 13 percent in rural areas.

Rural communities meet 94 percent of their cooking energy requirements from traditional fuels, mainly firewood, while 20 percent of urban households use wood as the main cooking fuel. Coal, charcoal and liquefied petroleum gas are used by less than one percent.

Engineer Joshua Mashamba, chief executive of the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) which is crusading the country’s rural electrification programme, told IPS that the rate of electrification of rural communities was a mere 10 percent.

“As of now, in the rural areas, there is energy poverty,” he said. “As the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), we have electrified 1,103 villages or group schemes and if we combine that with what other players have done, we are estimating that the rate of rural electrification is at 10 percent. It means that 90 percent remain un-electrified and do not have access to modern energy.”

Since the rural electrification programme started in the early 1980s, Mashamba says that 3,256 schools, 774 rural centres, 323 government extension offices, 266 chief’s homesteads and 98 business centres have also been electrified.

Zimbabwe Energy Council executive director Panganayi Sithole told IPS that modern energy services were crucial to human welfare, yet over 70 percent of the population remain trapped in energy poverty.

“The prevalence of energy of poverty in Zimbabwe cuts across both urban and rural areas. The situation is very dire in peri-urban areas due to deforestation and the non-availability of modern energy services,” said Sithole.

“Take Epworth [a poor suburb in Harare] for example. There are no forests to talk about and at the same time you cannot talk of the use of liquefied petrol gas (LPG) there due to costs and lack of knowledge. People there are using grass, plastics and animal dung to cook. It’s very sad,” he noted.

Sithole said there was a need to recognise energy poverty as a national challenge and priority, which all past and present ministers of energy have failed to do.

Zimbabwe currently faces a shortage of electrical energy owing to internal generation shortfalls and imports much its petroleum fuel and power at great cost to close the gap.

Demand continues to exceed supply, necessitating load shedding, and even those that have access to electricity regularly experience debilitating power outages, says Chiedza Mazaiwana, an energy project officer with Practical Action Southern Africa.

“In rural Zimbabwe, the economic driver is agriculture, both dry land and irrigated. The need for energy to improve productivity in rural areas cannot be over-emphasised but current power generated is not sufficient to support all the energy-demanding activities in the country. The percentage of people relying entirely on biomass for their energy is 70 percent,” she adds.

According to the World Bank, access to electricity in Southern Africa is around 28 percent – below the continental average of 31 percent. The bank says that inadequate electricity access poses a major constraint to the twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in the region.

To end the dearth of power, Zimbabwe has joined the global effort to eliminate energy poverty by 2030 under the United Nation’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative.

The country has abundant renewable energy sources, most of which are yet to be fully utilised, and energy experts say that exploiting the critical sources of energy is key in closing the existing supply and demand gap while also accelerating access to green energy.

By 2018, Zimbabwe hopes to increase renewable energy capacity by 300 MW.

Mashamba noted that REA has installed 402 mini-grid solar systems at rural schools and health centres, 437 mobile solar systems and 19 biogas digesters at public institutions as a way to promote modern forms of energy.

A coalition of civil society organisations (CSOs) led by Zero Regional Environment Organisation and Practical Action Southern Africa is calling for a rapid increase in investment in energy access, with government leading the way but supported in equal measure by official development assistance and private investors.

Though the current output from independent power producers (IPPs) is still minimal, the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) says that contribution from IPPs will be significant once the big thermal producers come on stream by 2018.

At the end of 2013, the country had 25 power generation licensees and some of them have already started implementing power projects that are benefitting the national grid.

Notwithstanding the obvious financial and technical hitches, REA remains optimistic that it will deliver universal access to modern energy by 2030.

“By 2018, we intend to provide rural public institutions with at least one form of modern energy services,” said Mashamba. “In doing this, we hope to extend the electricity grid network to institutions which are currently within a 20 km radius of the existing grid network. Once we have electrified all public institutions our focus will shift towards rural homesteads.”

For CSOs, achieving universal access to energy by 2030 will require recognising the full range of people’s energy needs, not just at household level but also enterprise and community service levels.

“Currently there is a lot of effort put in to increasing our generation capacity through projects such as Kariba South Extension and Hwange extension which is good and highly commended but for us to reach out to the rural population (most affected by energy poverty, according to our statistics, we should also increase efforts around implementing off grid clean energy solutions to make a balance in our energy mix,” says Joseph Hwani, project manager for energy with Practical Action Southern Africa.

Practical Action says that on current trends, 1.5 billion people globally will still lack electricity in 2030, of whom 650 million will be in Africa.

This is some fifteen years after the target date for meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which cannot be met without sustainable, affordable, accessible and reliable energy services.

Edited by Phil Harris  

Faced with starvation, hordes of jobless Zimbabweans in towns and cities here have turned to vending on streets pavements to put food on their tables. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Dec 9 2014 (IPS)

As unemployment deepens across this Southern African nation and as the country battles to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ahead of the December 2015 deadline, thousands of urban Zimbabweans here are facing starvation.

The MDGs are eight goals agreed to by all U.N. member states and all leading international development institutions to be achieved by the target date of 2015. These goals range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education.

Zimbabwe has a total population of just over 13 million people, according to the 2012 National Census – of these, 67 percent now live in rural areas while 33 percent live in urban areas.

According to the Poverty, Income, Consumption and Expenditure Survey report for 2011-2012 from the Zimbabwe Statistical Agency (ZIMSTAT), 30.4 percent of rural people in Zimbabwe are “extremely poor” – and are also people facing starvation – compared with 5.6 percent in urban areas.“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe being able to afford three meals a day nowadays” – Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers

Social workers find the stay of urban dwellers in Zimbabwe’s cities justifiable, but ridden with hardships.

“Remaining in towns and cities for many here is better than living in the countryside as every slightest job opportunity often starts in urban areas in spite of the expensive living conditions in towns and cities,” independent social worker Tracey Ngirazi told IPS.

According to Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers, urban starvation is being caused by loss of jobs – the World Food Programme (WFP) estimates unemployment in Zimbabwe to be at 60 percent of the country’s total population.

“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe affording three meals a day nowadays,” Bohwasi told IPS.

True to Bohwasi’s words, for many Zimbabwean urban residents like unemployed 39-year-old qualified accountant Josphat Madyira from the Zimbabwean capital Harare, starvation has become order of the day.

“Food stores are filled to the brim with groceries, but most of us here are jobless and therefore have no money to consistently buy very basic foodstuffs, resulting in us having mostly one meal per day,” Madyira told IPS.

Madyira lost his job at a local shoe manufacturing company after it shut down operations owing to the country’s deepening liquidity crunch, thanks to a failing economy here that has rendered millions of people jobless.

Asked how city dwellers like him are surviving, Madyira said: “People who are jobless like me have resorted to vending on streets pavements, selling anything we can lay our hands on as we battle to put food on our tables.”

The donor community, which often extends food aid to impoverished rural households, has rarely done the same in towns and cities here despite hunger now taking its toll on the urban population, according to civil society activists.

“Whether in cities or remote areas, hunger in Zimbabwe is equally ravaging ordinary people and most of the donor community has for long directed food aid to the countryside, rarely paying attention to towns and cities, which are also now succumbing to famine,” Catherine Mukwapati, director of the Youth Dialogue Action Network civil society organisation, told IPS.

Apparently failing to combat hunger in line with the MDGs, over the years Zimbabwe has not made great strides in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger due to the economic decline that has persisted since 2000.

As a result, earlier this year, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with the Zimbabwean government, extended its monthly cash pay-out scheme to urban areas.

Under this scheme, which started at the peak of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis in 2008, families living on less than 1.25 dollars a day receive a monthly pay-out of between 10 and 20 dollars, depending on the number of family members.

Economists and development experts here say that achieving the MDGs without food on people’s tables, especially in cities whose inhabitants are fast falling prey to growing hunger, is going to be a nightmare, if not highly impossible for Zimbabwe.

“Be it in cities or rural areas, Zimbabwe still has a lot of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day, which is the global index measure of extreme poverty, a clear indication that as a country we are far from successfully combating hunger and poverty in line with the U.N. MDGs whose global deadline for world countries to achieve is next year,” independent development expert Obvious Sibanda told IPS.

According to the 2013 Human Development Index of the U.N. Development Programmer (UNDP), Zimbabwe is a low-income, food-deficit country, ranked 156 out of 187 countries globally and UNDP says that currently 72 percent of Zimbabweans live below the national poverty line.

Although hunger is now hammering people in both urban and rural areas, government sources also recognise that the pinch is being felt more by urban dwellers.

“The decline in formal employment, mostly in towns and cities, with many workers engaged in poorly remunerated informal jobs, has a direct bearing on both poverty and hunger, which is on a sharp rise in urban areas,” a top government economist, who declined to be named, admitted to IPS.

For the many hunger-stricken Madyiras in Zimbabwe’s towns and cities, meeting the MDGS by the end of next year matters little.

“Defeating starvation is far from me without decent and stable employment and whether or not my country fulfils the MDGs, it may be of no immediate result to many people like me,” Madyira told IPS.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Mobile broadband services are seen as a key tool of development communication the world over, but people in rural Asia and Africa say telecom companies should cater to their needs and not simply impose technology on them.

Experts say spreading the benefits of the digital revolution to rural areas poses a huge challenge for telecom companies, which have so far focused on urban markets.

“The telecom industry has had an easy ride so far. It hasn’t seen what’s coming to them,” Mark Summers, co-founder of Inveneo, a non-profit company promoting broadband connection in Africa warned at the Telecom World 2013 conference here last month.“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life."

He was immediately challenged by a Zimbabwean in the audience who said he lived in a rural area and didn’t need the technology they had all been talking about. He wondered if telecom companies ever asked people like him what they wanted before trying to connect them to the technology.

Similar debates had taken place in the 1970s and 1980s when radio was promoted as a development communication tool, mainly by western consultants.

“They talk of us as if we are uneducated,” Reuben Gwatidzo of the Information Society Initiative Trust of Zimbabwe told IPS.

Gwatidzo said it wasn’t necessary to learn someone else’s language or to have high literacy to be a good carpenter, farmer or build one’s own house.

“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life,” he said. He said he was not against new technology but rural people must be allowed to choose what they want, and not have some “international strategy” imposed on them.

The telecom meet was organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the Thai capital. The meet picked up on longstanding issues.

ITU estimates there will be over 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world by the end of 2013, but points out that there are 1.1 billion people who do not have access to the Internet, with 90 percent of them in the developing world.

Telecom companies – which target urban markets – have increased their revenue by 12 percent between 2007 and 2011. The industry is largely driven by private operators.

Many argue that private companies are not interested in rural markets because of low purchasing power and high cost of connectivity and that is why governments should step in to provide connections.

“The real challenge is how to structure spectrum allocation to attract carriers to both urban and rural sectors,” said Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, a Ghanaian telecom sector analyst.

“The truth is rural markets are not attractive, but there are mechanisms to address them, including government intervention through which you can tax the urban markets to subsidise the rural markets,” he told IPS.

But not everyone is convinced about the role of the government.

Dhaka-based Abu Saeed Khan, senior policy fellow at LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank, argues that governments can create problems too.

“In Bangladesh, the government has auctioned this bandwidth. It is not cheap, so private operators load the price on the package,” he told IPS.

“When it comes to Internet bandwidth, operators don’t have direct access because the government has erected a barrier – a middleman – so the cost of Internet bandwidth is too high for consumers,” he said.

ITU’s report, ‘Measuring Information Society 2013’, argues that people living outside major cities in developing countries are the ones for whom information and communication technology (ICT) can have the greatest development impact.

In many countries across Asia and Africa, schools and health centres are connected to mobile and broadband technology and farmers are provided information on crop protection and marketing.

For instance, the International Fertiliser Development Centre provides information via mobile phones to farmers in five African countries to protect them from counterfeit fertilisers.

In Malaysia, seaweed farmer Kabila Hassan has set up a successful business – also providing employment to half her village – by using the Internet to market products in China, Japan and the U.S. She received the ITU’s Transformational Power of Broadband Digital Icon Award 2013 here in Bangkok for it.

Brahima Sanou, who is from Burkina Faso and is director of the Telecom Development Bureau at ITU, believes mobile phones can be the new development anchor.

He pointed out several examples of this – such as Senegal where fishermen use mobile phones to find out the price of fish before they come ashore; Rwanda where it is used to follow government services in rural areas; and Costa Rica where it is used to combat non-communicable diseases.

“People who never had access to any technology are now using mobile phones. We have to develop (services) for people (through) what they own already, not bring new tools,” he said.

Dr Rohan Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan telecom expert who is the founding chair of LIRNEasia, told IPS that the findings of a six-country sample survey on how poor people were revealing.

“It is very clear that they are accessing more than voice services through wireless platforms,” he said.

“We were surprised when, while doing research with poor people in Java (Indonesia), they clearly stated they were not using the Internet, but later they started talking about Facebook and various other activities.”

“This shows that they are using mobile phones without necessarily going through the steps they think are necessary to use the Internet,” Dr Samarajiva noted.

He said their sister organisation in Africa had the same findings.

“So it’s a different conception of the Internet,” he said. “The whole world is moving towards mobile devices. We will see an explosion of its use.”

As phones are transforming from merely voice communicators to what is called 3G or 4G, which transmits voice, visuals and data, a large chunk of humanity in rural Asia and Africa is waiting for a transformation in their lives but with technology that is relevant to their needs.

Marcela Villareal, Director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy, FAO. Credit: ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Under the leadership of Brazilian Director General (DG) José Graziano da Silva, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has been engaged in a process of deep reform meant to make the organisation leaner and more effective in the fight against hunger. 

“One transformational element in the vision of the new DG is to seek  synergies among the various aspects of our work, so that we can be more focused and efficient in eliminating hunger,” explains FAO’s Marcela Villarreal, director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy. “I have been working for this organisation for 16 years and I can say that we are best when we take a multi-sector and multi-disciplinary approach: it is this kind of approach that will allow us to find innovative ways to solve age-old problems.” Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: What are the core elements of the programme of work proposed by Graziano da Silva for FAO?

A: We are proposing five strategic objectives, the first of which is the elimination of hunger – we are no longer speaking just about reducing it. It is important to note here that, if years ago we thought that by increasing food production we could eradicate hunger, today we know that it is not only about production levels but also about access to food.

The second objective refers to increasing food production in a sustainable manner and the third calls for the eradication of rural poverty.

A strategic thinking process laid down the foundations of the current programme of work.  The MDG targets and indicators are very much focused on urban areas, despite rural poverty being one of the main challenges today.

In FAO’s work on rural poverty, we will focus on three rural populations at risk of poverty: the smallholders, whom we will help become more productive; those who sell their labour in rural areas, for the benefit of whom we will help countries generate decent employment increasing incomes and  access food; and, finally, for those who get left out altogether we need to advise countries on the creation of social safety nets, but in a way that is not just giving out of money but that eventually supports production and /or employment."If we in the U.N. systems can make [big corporations] be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way." -- Marcela Villarreal

Finally, last two strategic objectives refer to offering farmers better and more equitable access to markets and, respectively, building people’s resilience, thus lowering vulnerability to threats and crises.

It is our member states that will have to meet these objectives. Our role will be to contribute in a strategic and measurable way to their meeting of these objectives.

Q: How much leverage does FAO actually have on member states that might not be fully behind this vision of sustainable food systems proposed by the organisation?

A: We are very optimistic that we can implement this vision. We already see big progress happening: on Sunday, 38 countries were awarded for halving hunger levels, so the fact that we already got halfway gives us a good indication that we can work to achieve the real target, which is zero hunger.

At this conference, it is clear that governments across the board support the vision and the programme of work of the DG. Of course, a good measure of political will is to see budget allocated to these issues.

Q: Over the past years, FAO has expressed an increased willingness to engage with civil society. Have they been involved in the drafting of the five strategic objectives?

A: We cannot achieve any of these objectives without partnerships with civil society, the private sector, farmer’s organisations, cooperatives, research institutes and others.

The involvement of civil society is crucial in national policy dialogue processes, where their voices need to be heard and we are helping to facilitate their participation.

When it comes to the international level, civil society has been fully  involved in the World Committee on Food Security [the Committee is the part of the FAO structure focused on food security policies].

If we speak about partnerships, it is important to say that the private sector is also very important to us, from the smaller producers to the bigger ones, as they are the biggest investors in agriculture in the world, bigger than governments, international development aid, or foreign investors. Private actors can bring to the table a lot of knowledge and innovation.

Q: When it comes to the private companies, are you selective in choosing the ones you deal with, to make sure you avoid those whose business models hurt small farmers or the poor for example?

A: Yes! We have very clear mechanisms for assessing risk and dealing with it. When it comes to companies, we first run a due diligence process to see whether they have had problems with labour, human rights issues, environmental protection or other issues. Then we have a subcommittee on partnerships that analyses all the possible risks, and finally we have a committee on partnerships headed by the DG in person. So we take this issue very seriously.

We cannot ignore big corporations, they are big players in the world, but if we in the U.N. systems can make them be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way.

Q: When it comes to governments and national policies then, how can we expect FAO to react when a government allows for problematic practices to take place on its territory (e.g., land grabbing) or when it engages in problematic practices itself?

A: We are an intergovernmental organisation belonging to the U.N. system, so we work with governments who are our members. Our role is to ensure that they have the best knowledge and the best technical assistance so that they can meet the objectives set out above.

We promote good governance, which involves transparency, participation and accountability. Here, let me quote the words of Amartya Sen, who said that “by generating a public discussion, we have a part of the solution”.

Excerpt:

All Chinese-run businesses outside Malawi’s four major cities have to close down after a new law barring foreigners from trading in outlying and rural areas. This store, in Lilongwe, will have to apply for a new licence to trade. Credit: Claire Ngozo/IPS

By Claire Ngozo
LILONGWE, Aug 4 2012 (IPS)

The move in Malawi to close down Chinese businesses outside of the four major cities has been condemned as xenophobic by rights organisations. A new law enforced Jul. 31 barred foreigners from carrying out trade in Malawi’s outlying and rural areas.

The Investment and Export Promotion Bill required traders to move to the southern African nation’s major cities Lilongwe, Blantyre, Mzuzu and Zomba. The law is an attempt to protect local small-scale businesses from competition from foreign traders.

Two prominent civil rights organisations, the Centre for Development of People and the Centre for Human Rights Rehabilitation (CHRR), have warned the Malawian government against encouraging the victimisation of foreign traders.

“We are worried about the increasing xenophobia sentiments and attacks on foreign nationals who are doing legal business across the country,” the executive director of CHRR, Undule Mwakasungula, told IPS. He argued that the way Chinese traders were being treated was in violation of their human rights.

“Malawi should not be perpetrating xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals under the pretext of protecting the interests of local businesses.”

The new legislation comes immediately after Malawian traders in some rural areas grouped together in May and convinced local government authorities to force out Chinese traders. The protests first began in Karonga, a bustling town in the north of Malawi, which borders Tanzania, and later spread to all 28 districts in the country.

While there are no official figures yet as to how many foreign traders have complied with the new law, IPS confirmed that in seven of the country’s 28 districts, Chinese traders closed down their businesses.

They now have to apply for new licences to trade in the specified four cities. But many may not qualify, as the new legislation requires investors to deposit a minimum of 250,000 dollars in Malawi’s central bank as start-up capital.

Malawi’s Minister of Trade John Bande said that the new legislation was intended to regulate foreign investment.

“The new law clearly outlines what kind of businesses foreign investors will be allowed to get involved in. We will not accept foreigners to come all the way from places like China and open small businesses and shops in the rural areas of this country and compete with local traders,” Bande told IPS.

But Mwakasungula said that the main challenge faced by local businesses was that they lacked the financial and technical muscle to compete favourably with the Chinese. He said that it was unreasonable for the government to resort to such a “drastic decision”.

“It is unrealistic for the government to think that stopping foreign traders from doing business will automatically boost businesses run by locals,” he said.

There are no official figures on the number of Chinese or foreign traders there are in Malawi. However, Chinese-run shops, restaurants and lodges have sprouted across the country since 2007, when Malawi established diplomatic relations with China. The country had just abandoned its 41-year-old ties with Taiwan in favour of the economic giant.

China has become Malawi’s major economic partner since then. According to statistics from Malawi’s Ministry of Trade, the country’s trade volumes jumped to a record high of 100 million dollars in 2011 – a 400 percent increase from 2010.

The two countries have a 2008 memorandum of understanding about issues of industry, trade and investment. It commits China to increasing Malawi’s productive capacity in tobacco, cotton, mining, forestry, and fertiliser production, among other things.

China has also given Malawi 260 million dollars in concessionary loans, grants and development support. This year, the country’s first five-star hotel opened. It includes 14 opulent presidential suites and a state-of-the-art conference centre, and was built by the Chinese government.

In April 2012, China’s direct investment in Africa surpassed 15.4 billion dollars, according to statistics from the Chinese embassy in Malawi.

But ordinary Malawians are not happy with the influence that the Chinese have on the country’s economy.

Ellen Mwagomba, who has been at the forefront of the protests against Chinese traders in Karonga, has had a grocery store there since 2003. She told IPS that sales in her shop plummeted in 2008 when the Chinese started trading in the area.

“This place is a hive of activity since it is a border area. Business used to be good until the Chinese invaded us, bringing cheap goods and taking away our customers,” Mwagomba said.

She said that her grocery store lost business to Chinese traders as they charged as little as a quarter of the price that local traders asked for their goods.

“The goods I stock are from the local industry and from South Africa and are of good quality, they are not very cheap. But people would rather go for the cheap Chinese goods, which are also of cheap quality,” said Mwagomba.

She said that consumers preferred to purchase Chinese goods, to maximise their spending power. Up to 74 percent of the population in Malawi lives on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

But Mwagomba and other like-minded locals convinced the local assembly to remove Chinese traders from their district.

“They started leaving in June and business is now picking up for us, even before the new law became effective. I am now making up to 500 dollars a day in sales. I could barely make 100 dollars a day when the Chinese traders were here in full force,” Mwagomba told IPS.

But many Chinese feel they have been treated unfairly. Fu-han Chao used to run a restaurant in Mzimba district, in northern Malawi. But he was forced to close it down on Jun. 30, before the new law came into effect, following an order by local government authorities after Malawian traders complained about the cheap goods sold at low prices by their Chinese counterparts.

“The local traders don’t work as hard as we do. We open our shops much earlier and close them much later. We even open on Sundays when most businesses are closed, and we are hated for that. We have been treated very unfairly and I feel really angry about this. I felt threatened most times, and scared,” Chao told IPS.

He added that business was meant to be about competition. He said that until he was forced to close his restaurant, he had a number of customers and was making up to 800 dollars a day.

“We are contributing a lot to the economy of this country. I am yet to decide on what to do next. Maybe I will go back to China, but it is also tough to run a business back there because the population is high and the competition is also high,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has not supported its traders on this issue.

“It is up to the Malawi government to thoroughly screen the Chinese nationals willing to invest in the country. These are small vendors and why should the Malawi government allow them to do business? They are capitalising on government’s failure to screen foreign traders,” China’s Ambassador to Malawi Pan Hejun said at a press briefing on Jul. 23.

“Rules should be respected and we don’t encourage these traders to go into rural areas. We encourage real investors,” Hejun said.

Patience was also expelled from school along with Patricia Kollie, because they had both fallen pregnant. Credit: Winston Daryoue/IPS

By Winston Daryoue
Gbarnga, LIBERIA, Jul 5 2012 (IPS)

Patricia Kollie should be at school today but instead she is at home in Gbarnga, Liberia, pounding a pile of cassava leaves in a wooden mortar. Her entire body is slightly swollen. Her dress fits a little too snug at the stomach.

Kollie’s house is a few minutes walk from the St. Mark Lutheran High School in the city of Gbarnga, Bong County, 164 kilometres away from this West African nation’s capital, Monrovia. Kollie is 21 years old but attends grade 11. This is because she missed out on school during the country’s 14-year civil war, which only ended in 2003, but during which time the education system had collapsed.

The end of the war should have provided her with an opportunity to start her studies again. But last month she was expelled for being pregnant.

“We were five who were pregnant. They called us in the office. They said ‘You are pregnant. Since you feel you’re big, go home. I can’t keep you in my school,’” Kollie explained.

Kollie said she begged Peter Jutee, the principal, to let her stay at the private school but he refused claiming getting pregnant and then remaining enrolled is a violation of the school’s handbook. Private schools draw up their handbook and the education arm of the Lutheran church in Liberia developed the one at St. Mark Lutheran High School.

“We took the decision in line with our own handbook,” said Jutee. “Article 10.2d states that we can’t keep pregnant women in school. When they give birth, we readmit them.”

Kollie and the other four girls appealed to the administration to complete the school year, but the appeal was rejected.

The Liberia Education law is silent on what should happen to girls who get pregnant while enrolled.

Pregnancy and subsequently dropping out of school is just one of many problems limiting access to education for girls in Liberia.

Girls in the rural areas have even more obstacles in their paths. Traditional practices along with a lack of schools and financial support are some of the challenges they must overcome.

In April, more than a hundred schoolgirls in Mah District of Nimba County in northern Liberia were forcibly taken from school for traditional initiation. At the traditional school, the girls are circumcised and “prepared for marriage life”.

The situation in Mah District resulted in the complete closure of the entire school and the county education officer withdrew the teachers for reassignment elsewhere.

The challenges in educating the girl child are indisputable, but equally, their ability to contribute to Liberia’s growth is unquestionable.

At the launch of the Girl’s Education National Policy in April 2006, Liberia’s and Africa’s first democratically elected female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, spoke about how “the education of girls will become a cornerstone of development in Liberia.” Sirleaf said that Liberia is working “to see a new country with a shared vision for girls’ education…to free humankind from poverty, discrimination and disease.”

A Free and Compulsory Primary Education Policy was instituted by Sirleaf’s government as a means of achieving progress towards the Millennium Development Goal two, which calls for universal primary education for all children by 2015.

The policy is achieving its primary objective, which is increased enrolment. For the past three years school enrolment, especially at the primary level, has increased by 50 percent.

However, a challenging and troubling indication is the question of quality delivery; this includes adequate physical space for learning to accommodate the growing number of enrolled students and adequately trained instructors who are available to teach on a regular basis.

Sirleaf’s clear vision about education is still a long way from being achieved. Poverty, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and rape are taking their toll on the lives of Liberian young women.

British Charity Save the Children reports that one in three Liberian girls will give birth before their 20th birthday – one of the highest rates of teen motherhood in the world.

A February 2012 report by the group Defence for Children International indicates that rape is the most frequently reported crime in Liberia, with girls aged 10 to 14 as the most frequent victims.

Kollie’s situation exemplifies the challenges faced by girls seeking an education. She said she got pregnant because she needed the man’s financial support.

“The man who impregnated me was only helping me,” she said. Now in an ironic turn of events, because she is carrying his baby, Kollie can no longer benefit from the school fees the father of her child gave her. Private school tuition fees cost about 7,000 Liberian dollars or 92 dollars; the monthly salary of a Liberian Civil servant.

Rape and sex for grades are not uncommon here. A study by Save the Children found that as many as four out of five schoolgirls in war-scarred Liberia resorted to having sex for cash so they could pay for their education.

Another 2011 survey by Action Aid Liberia entitled “Women and the City” found that transactional sex or “sex for grades” is a major problem across three top universities in Monrovia, with many female students having encountered some form of harassment from male tutors.

As Kollie continued to pound the cassava leaves under the breezy shades of mango trees in her yard, she says she would never compromise herself sexually just to guarantee she remained in school.

“Me, I don’t have any one to go and beg for me or tell the authorities here’s something for you,” she said. She recalled how nine female students became pregnant last year but some of them were not expelled.

“I don’t know what they pass through to remain in school last year,” she said, looking distressed.

When asked about this, Jutee insisted that the students were only pardoned because they were graduating seniors.

Founder of the Liberia Women Media Action Committee, Tovian Estella Nelson, said that Kollie’s expulsion underlined the complexities of keeping Libera’s girls in school. The committee established Liberia’s first women’s radio station, the Liberia Women Democracy Radio F.M. 91.1.

“Poverty in Liberia is a chronic, deep-rooted problem confronting most grassroots families, and exposes girls to sexual violence and other risks, even in schools,” she said.

Nelson said that programmes intended to increase girl’s enrollment failed to adequately address issues surrounding retention and empowerment.

“While there is a law on girl’s education, there is no proper mechanism for effective implementation and monitoring. Also, the national budget does not respond directly to the learning needs of Liberian students from a gender-based approach, leaving girl’s education policy issues on the margin.

“Sadly many girls, like Patricia, will continue to engage in premature and unsafe sex just to survive and remain in school, until policy makers recognise and take appropriate actions to address the interaction between poverty and girl’s education.”

Meanwhile Kollie and the four other expelled grade 12 students had already paid their fees for the entire year. When they are readmitted after they have their babies, they will have to begin the year again and also, more critically, find money to pay the school fees once more.

“I had already paid my school fees and the junior and senior prom fees,” she said.

Kollie expressed disappointment that school officials took a long time to expel them. According to her, the administration was aware she and other girls were already pregnant, yet allowed them to clear all their financial obligations and then expelled them, just weeks before the end of the academic year on Jun. 30.

Jutee claimed he was simply following the rules of the school’s handbook, and insisted the girls were not being punished for getting pregnant.

But regardless next year the girls will have to source new funding to cover the same fees they already paid this year.

Four figures bend intently over their work in one corner of the large vegetable garden near the western Niger village of Dioga. Months after the village’s main harvest has been brought in – and eaten up – the irrigated green of the garden is welcome relief in a part of the country where hunger never seems far away.

The three-hectare garden is managed by women from this village and surrounding settlements in the rural district of Torodi.

Lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage; onions and peppers, aubergine, okra, and squash – Aminata Douramane may be 60 years old, but she shows few signs of slowing down as she ticks off the list of vegetables she grows here. Oh: and mango, guava, lemon and orange trees.

“I’ve also been growing moringa for the past three years,” she said, showing off a plot of land adjacent to her lovingly-cared-for vegetables, where she has a stand of 80-odd Moringa oleifera trees.

“The three children that you saw helping me are my grandchildren. The eldest is 13, and the youngest is eight. They’re all going to school, so it’s only when they’re not in class that they come to lend a hand,” Douramane told IPS.

Elsewhere on the lushly green site, covering an area of three hectares, other women are also busy caring for their plants.

“I’m here to make sure the labourer who helps me waters the plants well,” said Zeïnabou Boureïma. “It’s very hot now, so it’s important to do it right because the plants need lots of water.”

The women all belong to an association called Cernafa, which means “cooperation” in the local language, Djerma. “We were about fifty women at the beginning in 2002, when we got started here on a plot the chief made available to us,” said Douramane, who is president of the group.

“It was very difficult at the start, because of a lack of water. People took us for fools,” she told IPS.

“But now the group has more than 100 women, and through this garden we have become the pride of the village and the Torodi district. Three years ago, we had saved enough to buy 4.2 hectares of land for about 400,000 CFA francs (around 772 dollars) to respond to requests and diversify our range of produce,” she added.

“What motivated the women of Dioga to start growing vegetables was food insecurity, which is chronic in this region,” said Salou Moumouni, principal of the village’s school and an informal advisor to the group.

“Immediately following the harvest each year, their husbands leave for cities in the region, often leaving the women and children without enough food,” he said.

“Now they look after their households with the income from selling vegetables while the men are away,” Moumouni told IPS.

“I decided to volunteer to support the group because I saw it was led by very courageous women, ready to overcome any obstacle to avoid being dependent,” he said.

Bibata Garba, another member of Cernafa, told IPS: “When the project started, I would earn 60,000 CFA (around 115 dollars) from the growing season between December and April. But this time around, I got more than 210,000 CFA (405 dollars) over the same period, thanks to a good harvest.”

The women’s efforts have attracted support from beyond their village.

“The determination by the women of Dioga to fight against hunger and poverty through their gardening scheme led us to begin assisting them in 2004, strengthening their capacity, particularly in agricultural techniques and organisational matters,” said Amadou Boubacar, president of Action for Sustainable Development (ADD), an NGO based in Niamey, the Nigerien capital.

“We provided the group with four modern boreholes, a water tower for a drip-irrigation system which we installed on the site with support from ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), and a motorised pump. We supplied them with seeds and fertiliser and we also taught some of the members to read,” he said.

Boubacar told IPS that ADD also helped the women get financial support from Crossroads International, a Canadian NGO working to reduce poverty with a particular emphasis on empowering women.

According to Aïssa Boukari, Cernafa’s treasurer, the Nigerien authorities and other partners, such as the international charity Oxfam and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, have also provided assistance in the form of watering cans, rakes, hoses, hoes, and seeds.

“It is difficult to give exact figures for the production of lettuce and vegetables which are sold before harvest, or harvested and taken directly to the market by producers; but we do know that the total return from sales from December 2011 to April 2012 was around five million CFA (more than 9,500 dollars),” Boukari told IPS.

“And the harvest’s not over, since for the past three years we’ve decided to spread production over the whole year.”

According to the government, irrigated farming, including market gardens, has this year allowed the country to produce the equivalent of 325,000 tonnes of grain, against an overall deficit of 600,000 tonnes recorded during the 2011-2012 agriculture campaign.

This shortfall is at the heart of the food crisis which is still affecting 8.3 million of the 15.7 million people in this West African nation.

When she was 16, Kibriyo Khaitova’s parents told her that if she didn’t marry, she’d soon be a spinster. So, like many girls from Tajikistan, Khaitova married a man her family found for her. Now 20, she has two children, no husband and is fending for herself.

“My parents told me that I was old enough and that I needed to get married,” said Khaitova, who lives in the Ferghana Valley, an area of Central Asia where traditional, conservative social attitudes are entrenched.

“I told them that I wanted to continue my education, but they said that men do not like educated girls and you do not need an education to be a good wife. The first time I saw my husband was at my wedding. I was very scared, but my grandmother told me I would be fine.”

Tajikistan’s widespread poverty is a major cause of early marriage in the country, according to a recent report by the Eurasia Foundation. In rural families, boys become the main breadwinners and girls are often considered financial burdens.

“Some parents feel that their daughters can be better supported by the husband’s family, and marrying them off (early) is a way to conserve their own limited resources,” Azita Ranjbar, the author of the report, told EurasiaNet.org.

The groom’s family also has a motive to push their sons to wed young girls. When Tajik girls marry they become “kelins” (daughters-in-law) and usually live with the husband’s family. While an educated woman might challenge the submissive role a kelin is supposed to play, Ranjbar says, “younger girls are seen as more likely to be obedient, assisting their mother-in-law with chores and, in some areas of the country, subsistence farming.”

Since July 2010, Tajik law has said men and women must be 18 years old to marry. But in practice underage marriage is still common. In fact, the law has had an unintended effect: Because couples cannot register a marriage wherein one party is under 18 years of age, many simply have a local religious leader perform the wedding ceremony. Later, without a civil registration certificate, the bride has few rights in the eyes of the courts.

“Harsh punishments are required to reduce incidences of underage marriage,” says Azim Bayzoev, a professor of gender studies at the Tajik National University. “But by increasing punishment, you also decrease the instances of registration.”

“To be effective, the law needs to be strictly enforced, but there is a lack of capacity and will from local government to do this,” he adds.

Throughout Tajikistan, there is also a growing dependence on Islam to fulfill functions the wilting state can no longer handle. In many rural areas, where local officials do not have the power or the motivation to help, religious leaders offer solutions for everyday problems.

“Islamic law supports early marriage, offering families a way out of supporting their daughters,” says Bayzoev.

Moreover, Islamic clerics are often willing to perform the religious ceremony regardless of whether the couple has registered with the state.

“The Koran does not define a minimum age for marriage,” a Dushanbe imam who asked to remain anonymous told EurasiaNet.org. “Islam encourages women to marry at a young age. This means that they can have children, which is a woman’s duty.”

Women entering polygamous marriages, condoned by Islam but officially banned by the state, also cannot register.

At age 15, Dilnoza Rahimova’s family forced her into a marriage with a man over twice her age. As his third wife, Rahimova endured abuse from his first wife, who felt threatened by the newcomer.

“One night he came home drunk and forced himself on me,” she told EurasiaNet.org. “I told him I did not want to and that he was hurting me, but he would not stop.” Her mother told her that was just part of marriage.

Spousal rape is not uncommon in Tajikistan. According to a 2009 report by Amnesty International, whereas 11.1 percent of men admitted forcing their wives to have sex against their will, 42.5 percent of women report being forced by their husbands.

Divorce for an unregistered wife is often a last resort. “Without a registered marriage, it is extremely difficult for the wife to claim rights to jointly acquired assets and property, alimony, or child support,” says Ranjbar of the Eurasia Foundation.

There are no government statistics on underage marriages. Bayzoev of the National University says the practice became more common during Tajikistan’s 1992-1997 civil war, when “girls were forced to marry early to prevent falling victim to rapists and losing their honour.” But the practice also was common in the pre-Soviet period.

Today, an upswing in underage marriages means more divorces, Bayzoev adds: “The immaturity of young couples and the forced nature of many marriages have undoubtedly contributed to the growing number of divorces in the country.”

Soon after she was married, Khaitova’s husband joined the legions of young Tajik men working in Russia as migrant labourers. After three years, he returned with a new wife.

“He told me that he wanted a divorce and that I had two days to leave,” she told EurasiaNet.org. “Where could I go? I have two children. I have no education. I was forced to live off the charity of my relatives. I make 100 somoni (about 21 dollars) per month repairing clothes, but I cannot support my children.”

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 26 (IPS) – A plan by the Malaysian government to privatise its public healthcare system and get consumers to pay for it through salary cuts is rapidly turning into a major election issue.

Whistleblower doctors let the cat out of the bag this month by sharing details of ‘Icare’ that the government had shared with doctors and select stakeholders.

Currently, the government pays Malaysian ringitt 34 billion (11.2 billion dollars) annually for a healthcare scheme that it wants to pass on to consumers under ‘Health Care Financing’ that the public and conscientious doctors are opposing.

These doctors are fundamentally opposed to any scheme that requires citizens to pay a part of their earnings – in this case 10 percent of net monthly wages – if the cost of health financing is passed on to consumers.

The existing system, which consists of a network of government hospitals and clinics and caregivers throughout the country, provides cheap, affordable and effective healthcare.

“Why fix something that is working reasonably well,” said Dr. Ng Swee Choon, deputy president of the Private Medical Practitioners Association, a group of doctors opposed to Icare.

“Malaysia has excellent healthcare coverage as nearly 90 percent of the people stay within a five km distance from a government-run clinic or hospital,” he said.

Ng told a Feb. 18 forum that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had acknowledged in its annual report of 2007 that Malaysia had an effective and efficient healthcare system and had rated the service “excellent”.

Currently, 4.7 percent of the GDP is set aside for healthcare, way below the WHO recommendation of eight or nine percent.

“It’s more important to increase the bill of healthcare as a percentage of GDP than to go and change the system,” said another activist doctor T. Jayabalan.

The government is moving away from providing nearly free healthcare to a financing scheme that will be paid for by all citizens, he said.

 The government, however, says healthcare is getting more expensive by the day and believes that a better option is one that is financed by citizens.

“Everybody is entitled to equal healthcare…there won’t be a private or government distinction,” said health minister Liow Tiong Lai of a scheme in which people contribute monthly in return for getting best medical care available.

Currently, those who can afford it patronise the expensive, well-equipped private hospitals that have sprung up all over the country while others make do with crowded government hospitals that are under-equipped and under-staffed.

 Icare is expected to pool resources under the National Health Corporation (NHC) that will foot the medical bills, assign the sick to a doctor and regulate treatment according to a fixed schedule.

Many people are not confident about giving a part of their wages to a government-managed NHC and fear it will be mismanaged and overtaken by cronyism and nepotism, like other public sector outfits.

 “We fear pilferage and that other forms of corruption would overtake the scheme,” said Dr. Michael Jeyakumar, a lawmaker from the small Parti Sosialist Malaysia.

“Right now the government is simply telling the people to wait quietly for them to tell what is best for them,” he said. “This type of top-down policy does not work anymore,” he said.

Health minister Liow came forward last week to say the opposition is spreading “false” details to confuse the public about Icare.

He said the assertion that 10 percent of salary would be mandatory to finance Icare is false. “I myself will oppose the scheme if that is the case,” Liow told The Star daily on Feb. 19.

But neither the health ministry nor Prime Minister Najib Razak have accepted a challenge from the opposition to release all the details.

The government has asked Malaysians not to speculate about Icare and reserve judgment for when the system has been given a chance to develop.

The opposition Pakatan Rakyat has urged the people to vote out the ruling Barisan Nasional or National Front. “The Front cannot be trusted with the people’s money,” said Jeyakumar.

The opposition has rejected Icare as exploitative and is using the issue as campaign fodder for elections that are due by April 2013.

A top-down planning system is the hallmark of the National Front which has ruled the country since independence in 1957 and is dominated by the powerful United Malay National Organisation party.

Moves to privatise state-run public healthcare can damage the National Front which has projected itself as the protector of the socio-economic interests of its main constituency, the rural Malays.

Voters rejected the Barisan Nasional’s hold on power in the 2008 general election when nearly 49 percent abandoned the Front in favour of the incipient Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister in the Front government.

The Pakatan Rakyat and the National Front are nearly equally matched for a return match in their contest for state power in a general election that is widely expected to be called mid-year.

“Many members of the public are unaware of the implications of the scheme,” opposition legislator Charles Santiago told IPS.

“The federal government argues that Icare will make healthcare more affordable and its delivery more efficient to the public,” said Santiago.

“But they are actually privatising our healthcare services through a social health insurance scheme that will only further burden the people, especially the poor,” said Santiago who has started an awareness campaign in his constituency of Klang, 30 km west of the capital.

Soon parents in rural Kenya will be able to receive the HIV tests results of their infants as soon as the relevant blood tests have been done. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Feb 20 2012 (IPS)

Jesse Mtembe, a nursing officer at the Akithenesit Health Centre in Teso North, in Kenya’s Western Province, cannot wait for his centre to be connected to a new software system for diagnosing HIV in infants that is being developed in the country’s leading private university.

Soon Mtembe’s patients will be able to receive the HIV tests results of their infants as soon as the relevant blood tests have been conducted at one of the country’s central laboratories some 200 kilometres away. Currently parents in rural health centres wait up to 18 weeks for the blood test results.

Since 2011, students at Kenya’s Strathmore University have been developing and refining software of infant HIV diagnosis. The software has been implemented in 75 health centres in the remotest parts of the country as part of first phase trials.

The software seems simple enough. Once blood samples arrive at one of the country’s four central Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) laboratories all samples are logged into the system. Once this is done, the software automatically generates a short message service (SMS) to the rural health centre the sample was sent from to confirm receipt.

Once diagnosis has been completed, the system generates another SMS to confirm this, and if the result is negative, the results are also given. Results are received in rural areas on SMS printers and parents are notified by the clinic that their results are ready.

“On the SMS printers that we have already installed in rural clinics, we only send negative results in real time. This is because as a policy, all positive results on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) equipment have to be re-run for confirmation in order to avoid false positives that might be due to contamination,” said Oscar Mulondanome a lab technologist at the Alupe Centre, one of the country’s testing laboratories.

Unlike other HIV testing methods such as rapid tests, where a patient receives the results after a few minutes, testing for the virus in infants requires the PCR technique, which is used to amplify the genetic make-up (or DNA) of a single or a few HIV viruses.

In Kenya, early diagnosis in infants is conducted with the support of the National Aids and STIs Control Programme and the United States Army Medical Research Unit. The project is being funded by the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

“The database application has allowed real time analysis of data generated for active interventions and has a wide geographical coverage,” Silvia Kadima, a research scientist at the KEMRI HIV laboratory, told IPS.

“We are projecting that by April this year, the software tool will be customised to Kenya’s local needs, and that is when it will be officially launched and rolled out by the government,” said Kadima.

She said that 50 more facilities would be connected for further trial phases before the product is officially rolled later this year. Kenya has a total of 904 listed public health centres all over the country.

The system is a welcome relief to far-flung places like the Akithenesit Health Centre.

“Given the location of our health centre in a remote area, we have to rely on lifts offered by officers from the nearby military camp to transport the samples to (the Alupe Hopsital in Busia) some 200 kilometres away, where there is an infant HIV testing centre,” Mtembe said.

It is a journey that takes a minimum of 10 hours because of the poor state of the road.

“After a few months, we then go through the same route to collect the results. And if they are not ready, then we have to organise another trip on another day,” said Mtembe, who is also head of the centre, which only has three nurses.

However, in Kitui County in Eastern Province, residents say they are already experiencing the impact of the system.

“For my first two babies, I received their HIV test results 18 weeks after the blood sample had been collected, and this was given during the routine postnatal clinic visits. But for my third born, I received an SMS on my phone five days after the sample collection, asking me to collect the results,” said Elizabeth Mwende a resident of Mutomo village in Kitui.

The 17-week difference in receiving an infant’s HIV results is key to effective treatment.

“Diagnosis of infants within six weeks of birth allows timely initiation of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) of children below two-years-old and can save lives. Without ART, up to 50 percent of children who acquired the virus from their mothers, would usually die before the age of two,” said Dr. Lucy Matu of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

“Early infant diagnosis allows for early and timely intervention. If a kid from an HIV-positive mother turns out to be negative, then proper preventive measures will be put in place to ensure that they do not acquire the virus at all,” added the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission adviser at the foundation.

(END/2012)