A nurse attends to an expectant mother at Walgak Primary Health Care Centre in South Sudan's Jonglei State. Credit: Charlton Doki/IPS

By Charlton Doki
JUBA, Jul 9 2012 (IPS)

One year after the formation of South Sudan, the country’s women say that independence has not resulted in the positive political, economic and social changes that they had hoped for.

Women activists worry that even after separation from Sudan on Jul. 9, 2011, when South Sudan became the world’s newest country and Africa’s 54th nation, the government has not done enough to improve the lives of its women.

But as people across the country celebrate the first anniversary of independence from Sudan, after a 21-year civil war, the year has been fraught with crises.

The country is in the midst of an economic crisis after South Sudan’s decision in January to shut down oil production, which accounts for 98 percent of the its revenue, following a dispute with Sudan over fees charged to use its pipelines.

There is also dire food insecurity here. In June, the United Nations World Food Programme said that more than half of the country’s 8.2 million people would need food aid by the end of the year.

In the country’s Upper Nile state, the Jamam refugee camp is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. The camp is home to some of the 200,000 refugees who, according to the U.N., have fled the conflict in Sudan’s Blue state.

However, Médecins Sans Frontières has warned that the mortality rate among children at the camp was 2.8 per 10,000 per day. This figure is above the emergency threshold of two per 10,000.

Amidst all of this both women leaders and activists admit that they had high expectations of the country’s first year. Some feel that the reality of independence has failed to live up to the hype and euphoria.

“We had high expectations, but I think they are not unrealistic and should not be pushed aside. Women are doing badly politically, economically, socially and education wise. The government needs to take measures to address the challenges facing women so that they can truly enjoy life in their new independent country,” Lorna Merekaje, of the South Sudan Domestic Election Monitoring and Observation Programme, told IPS.

Others disagree.

The Central Equatoria state Governor’s advisor on conflict resolution, Helen Murshali Boro, said that women’s concerns would be addressed.

“There is freedom of speech to allow women to express themselves and this means women’s concerns will not go off the radar until they are addressed in the coming years of our country’s independence,” she said.

Though the reality still remains far different.

“Like in the past when South Sudan was still part of Sudan, today women live in poverty,” said Lona James Elia, executive director of a local women’s rights agency, Voice For Change.

The National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS), conducted in 2009 and released in June 2012, indicates that over half of South Sudan’s 8.2 million people live below the poverty line on less than a dollar a day. The majority of the poor are women.

Elia added that South Sudan is still unable to provide maternal health services to the country’s women, especially in rural areas.

According to the U.N. Children’s Fund only 19 percent of births are attended by a skilled health worker. According to the NBHS, 30 percent of the population has no access to basic health services.

The few available health facilities lack supplies and qualified personnel to provide the required services. And in some rural areas women cannot receive maternal and antenatal care because they live too far from the nearest maternity clinic. Thirty-seven percent of poor households have to travel for more than an hour to reach their nearest most-used health facility, according to the NBHS.

“Women are still dying while giving birth. They are still not accessing maternal health services. A woman is not supposed to die because she is giving birth to a new life, a new baby. This is not acceptable,” Elia told IPS.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2011 the country recorded that 2,054 out of every 100,000 women died during childbirth. The high mortality rate has not changed much a year later, according to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

In June, Kate Gilmore, assistant secretary-general and deputy executive director (Programme) of the UNFPA, told reporters in Juba that maternal mortality rates in South Sudan remained the worst in the world.

“The latest evidence that we have is that using standard figures in every 100,000 births there are over two thousand women who die from preventable causes in South Sudan. In Afghanistan, which surely is one of the most troubled countries in the world, it is half that. Across Africa it is five hundred,” she had said.

Elia said the government needed to invest in maternal health services to ensure that women could participate in developing the country.

“A mother should not have to travel all the way from Gondokoro to Juba to deliver a baby because there is no hospital in her home city,” Elia said. Gondokoro is about 20 km from Juba and also within Central Equatoria state. She added that because the nearest health care centre was too far, some women died along the way.

However, government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin said that the government had worked hard to improve living standards.
“We have initiated projects, including building schools and health centres, which will benefit all South Sudanese citizens, including women,” he told IPS.

In addition, the government has implement an affirmative action policy that ensures 25 percent women’s representation in all government jobs at national, state and county levels.

“You see after independence the president appointed six women to the cabinet and about nine to 10 assistant ministers. I think with about 16 women in the national government, the government has responded positively,” said Boro.

Currently there are four female ministers out of a total of 29, and eight female assistant ministers from a total of 27.

However, activists say that this has not directly affected the lives of the country’s women.

“When you look at the middle-class women and those at the grassroots they are still not in positions where they can make decisions that benefit women,” Merekaje told IPS.

Boro admitted that women still occupy low entry positions in the work field.

“Although these days you see more women coming to work in the morning, at the end of the day they go home with peanuts because they work in the less-paid, low positions,” Boro said.

Elia said that women were unable to find employment because the majority are illiterate and do not have the vocational skills required by employers. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, 88 percent of South Sudanese women are illiterate. In addition, the U.N. says that only one percent of girls complete primary school.

“Women are the most illiterate and because, despite the independence of our country, women at the grassroots level still remain the most underprivileged segment of society as they have to depend on men for survival,” Elia told IPS.

Jerisa Yide is one such example. The 65-year-old grandmother earns a living breaking stones and rocks into gravel, which she sells to builders.

“I used to crash stones before independence to enable me to pay my grandchildren’s school fees. We are now independent, but we are even paying more fees for our children to go to school,” said Yide.

Primary and secondary school education are not free in South Sudan. And as a result of the shut down on oil production, the government introduced an austerity budget in January where it scrapped free university education.

Yide said that when she voted for independence she expected the government to provide better services, including education and health.

Selina Modong agreed that not much had changed. She said that the cost of living in Juba had increased since independence. As a result of the economic crisis, inflation has soared to a staggering 80 percent in May.

“I was eating one meal per day before independence. Today I still eat one meal per day and sometimes we hardly eat good food these days,” Modong said.

“I think independence has not changed anything for us poor people,” Modong concluded.

Elia said that everyone should participate in ensuring that the women’s agenda is addressed.

“If you want this independence to benefit everyone, the issue of women should not be for women alone. It should be for everybody. Let us ensure that our daughters have a bright future. That they will get the education they want, that they will get the employment they want and that they will get the health services they deserve to build healthy families for themselves,” said Elia.

Dozens of women and children dig into the earth in a dried out watering hole in the Jamam refugee camp in South Sudan in order to extract water from waist-deep pits after water ran out. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2012 (IPS)

Within the next nine days, drinking water at refugee camps in South Sudan’s Upper Nile state will run dry, warned the aid agency Doctors Without Borders on Tuesday. Meanwhile, refugees continue to stream into the state, as the few camps set up to house to entrants are stretched even further beyond capacity.

According to the most recent update by the United Nations, tens of thousands of people are currently moving from Sudan’s Blue Nile state, fleeing violence and fighting in Sudan that aid workers call “horrific”. During the first week of June, an estimated 4,000 people per day reportedly crossed the border into Upper Nile.

Those numbers have massively overshot initial preparedness estimates by the international aid community. For instance, the U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR, originally planned for approximately only 75,000 people in the state of Upper Nile.

As of Tuesday, an estimated 110,000 people have crossed the border into Upper Nile alone, according to Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). That number includes some 35,000 in just the last three weeks and doesn’t account for the tens of thousands more in the neighbouring states of South Sudan and Ethiopia.

In Upper Nile, that number now includes 70,000 in three camps – one of which is still under construction – as well as another 40,000 that are still on foot. Of these, half are living temporarily in settlements along the road and planning to move to one of the camps.

“This is group is our biggest concern, as they have been travelling for weeks to months, living under extremely poor conditions,” Voitek Asztabski, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Juba, told journalists on Tuesday. “Mortality is above emergency thresholds. These people are exhausted and have gone through horrific insecurity in Blue Nile.”

MSF says that right now, the most critical and dire problem is the lack of water in a notoriously water-scarce region, a problem for those both in and outside the camps.

A looming crisis

Even at the three camps, which were built in areas with known water reserves, available resources are quickly being drained. Asztabski says that aid workers are currently rationing 7.5 litres of water per day to refugees, but warns that supplies are set to run out in a little more than a week’s time.

“We have nine days to see these people relocated,” he said, calling for emergency hydrological exploration to help find water reserves.

Although the imminent start of the rainy season will ease the water situation somewhat, it will also complicate other pressing issues.

Washed-out roads will make it difficult to transport both refugees and critical supplies of food, medicines and even treated water. The U.N., meanwhile, has pointed out a lack of heavy equipment to deal with road closures.

Already, Asztabski said, “people have been eating tree bark and leaves.” Refugees in the camps are currently receiving food every four or five days, he reports, while aid workers have also been able to distribute plastic sheeting and blankets.

“The critical situation requires scaling up capacity of all involved actors on the ground in every aspect of support for the refugees,” he warned.

Clinics in the camps are seeing around 200 to 300 people per day, according to Erna Rijnierse, a medical doctor who spoke on Tuesday by satellite phone from the Maban camp in Upper Nile.

Most of these people are suffering from diarrhea given the lack of basic sanitation, a health issue that compounds the already urgent problem of dehydration. And as the rainy season starts, Rijnierse warned that doctors will see new cases of respiratory diseases as well.

The clinics are treating 20 to 30 new children every day, particularly for complications due to malnutrition. Rijnierse reported that official malnutrition levels are at emergency thresholds, but quickly added that the actual numbers are almost certainly higher.

International intervention

According to UNHCR, some 200,000 refugees have fled Sudan since June 2011, heading to South Sudan as well as Ethiopia.

The recent influx stems from a new round of fighting between the Sudanese military and rebels in May, violence that has included an ongoing campaign of bombing civilians. This violence has been coupled with a severe food shortage afflicting much of the region.

Fleeing refugees report widespread violence in Blue Nile and South Kordofan, also in Sudan, including “fighting, burning of villages and houses, contamination of water points”, Adrian Edwards, a UNHCR spokesperson, said on Tuesday. He noted that the U.N. has not been able to verify the situation because it does not have access.

UNHCR is “very concerned” about the population that remains in the areas of Sudan experiencing violence, Edwards said. “We’re currently requesting access to those populations, but at the moment this is not forthcoming.”

On Monday, Jenn Christian with the Enough Project, a Washington-based anti-genocide advocacy group, called on the international community to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government.

“A concerted diplomatic effort must also be initiated to pressure Sudan to negotiate a ceasefire” with the rebels, she wrote. “Such negotiations are critical in terms of stemming further human suffering within Sudan and are also necessary to the further progression of Sudan-South Sudan talks.”

Over the past weekend, UNHCR was finally able to begin an emergency airlift of supplies, having recently gained access to an airstrip 90 to 150 kilometres from the three Upper Nile refugee camps.

This airlift was the first of its kind since December. Supplies included equipment to drill new wells for drinking water. Additional supply routes have also been created through Ethiopia and up the Nile River.