Category: News & Politics

In 2014, it’s unacceptable for girls in Malawi to be unable to go to school

Every Wednesday, Shakira Yakiti gets together with a group of at-risk girls at the Nampingunja School in the rural Mangochi district of Malawi. Their Girls Club organises home visits to girls who have dropped out of school to get married, works with teenage mothers to encourage them to return to school, interfaces with school headmasters to make sure the returning students are welcomed, and provides social support for girls facing serious challenges in a country where poverty is endemic, secondary school attendance for girls is significantly lower than for boys, and girls routinely get married and have children as teenagers.

Shakira said: “Whenever those girls come back, we sit down as a club to discuss what problems they’re facing and what problems caused them to drop out of school. Sometimes we even raise money to help them out if the problem is poverty, so they can buy soap and the like. We are always proud when we see a girl coming back to school.”

Shakira is a force of nature, slim and poised and speaking with the easy eloquence of a seasoned politician. When I met her, she was talking to a team of aid workers and visiting journalists jamming microphones in her face and jotting down her every word. She handled our questions fluidly and coherently, providing incisive answers and encouraging the members of the Girls Club to share their stories. As we left, we all agreed that her grassroots organising skills and her persuasiveness indicate a fine future in politics.

Did I mention she’s 13?

I met girls like Shakira across Malawi: bright, resilient, and working hard in their communities to make life better for women and girls. I also met girls who are hanging on by a thread, desperate to go to school but facing enormous barriers. There was Ethel, whose parents were too poor to buy soap for her to wash her clothes, let alone pay for her school uniform (the Girls Club got her soap and encouraged her to come back to school; Ethel is now enrolled).

There was Chrissa, who got pregnant as a teenager and had twins. The man who impregnated her is 21 and left her and the children for a more lucrative job in South Africa. She came back to school, despite being ostracised by some of her peers. “I don’t mind if they’ll be laughing at me”, she said. “I’m going to continue with learning.”

There was Christie, whose mother abandoned the family, leaving Christie to raise her six siblings alone and in extreme poverty. Her only way out was marriage at 14 and a child the same year. She dropped out of school after eighth grade, and wants to go back, but can’t quite find a way.

Challenges
They face barriers that are cultural as well as practical. When family income is limited, paying for a male child’s schooling can seem like a better investment than paying for a girl’s. Cultural norms promote early marriage, and a lack of access to comprehensive sexual health education and contraception means pregnancy is common among young women – nearly two-thirds of women in Malawi have given birth by their 20th birthday. Adolescent pregnancy poses serious risks to the mother and the child: 65% of fistula patients developed the condition as adolescents, and infant deaths in the first month of life are 50-100% higher when the mother is under 20 than if she’s older. Girls who get pregnant are more likely to get married, and once a girl is married she quits school.

Secondary school girls in Malawi. (Pic: AFP)

Girls also face the practical challenges of getting to school in a country with a largely rural population. At another school in the Mangochi district, headmistress Molombo Basuro said some students walk as far as 16 km each way to a schoolhouse where there are no chairs, not enough exercise books, no electricity, a limited water supply and as many as 65 students to a class. With no boarding facilities, 32 girls who live far away currently sleep in one of the classrooms.

Seemingly simple problems become substantial barriers for girls’ education. Lack of access to soap and sanitary pads means girls miss school when they’re menstruating. No chairs make it harder to sit comfortably and focus on the lesson instead of modesty when your school uniform is a dress.

But the girls keep showing up, in large part thanks to innovative efforts led by community members and the girls themselves, funded mostly by international aid organisations. Some of the girls at Headmistress Basuro’s school have bikes, purchased by a joint United Nations program carried out by Unicef. The bikes mean the girls not only get to school faster, but safer – walking for kilometres along rural roads puts them at risk for harassment and sexual assault. Other Unicef funds go to things like soap, sanitary pads, school fees, supplies and exercise books.

Thanks to endemic corruption, though, these girls who are doing everything in their power to stay in school may see the few resources they have stretched even further, or taken away all together.

Cash Gate
The problem is a scandal called Cash Gate, where Malawian officials are accused of plundering millions of dollars in aid money from a country where 40% of the budget comes from donor funds. In response, many big Western donors are withholding aid until the Malawian government can prove that donor funds will be used appropriately. It’s a harsh decision, and not necessarily unfair – why funnel millions into a system that has proven itself to be corrupt?

And yet it’s girls like Shakira, Chrissa and Christie who will lose out.

There’s no easy solution. The Malawian government has a series of options, including allowing international auditors to evaluate the scope and depth of the corruption. Donors, though, have to make tough decisions: keep giving aid and essentially fund corrupt officials with little consequence, or pull aid with the knowledge that the ones who suffer most are the many Malawians who need basics like health care and education.

Nearly three-quarters of Malawians are extremely poor, living on less than $1.25 (US) per day. Over and over, the girls and women I spoke with emphasised that the most effective programs were the most local – the ones that were developed with leadership from girls, community members, health care providers and grassroots organisers, not outsiders parachuting in. But they need money to be implemented effectively.

The Malawian government needs to step up, and allow international auditors full access for an investigation. But donors shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. And girls like Shakira, polished and intelligent as they may be, are still children – babies deserving support and protection.

Jill Filipovic for the Guardian

11 years ago

‘This is not a good place to live’: inside Ghana’s dump for e-waste

The orange flesh of a papaya is like an oval gash in the landscape at Agbogbloshie, Ghana’s vast dumping site for electronic waste, where everything is smeared and stained with mucky hues of brown and sooty black. A woman kneels among the carcasses of discarded computer monitors, scooping the fruit’s flesh for workers hungry from a morning’s work scavenging to eat.

If the appliances at Agbogbloshie were not being dismantled – plucked of their tiny nuggets of copper and aluminium – some of them could almost be technology antiques. Old VHS players, cassette recorders, sewing machines, computers from the 1980s and every period since lie haphazardly on large mounds in the dump, which stretches as far as the eye can see.

See photos of electronic waste dumping in Ghana here

“Electric waste comes here from all over the world – but especially from Europe,” says Karim (29) who, like almost all the scrap dealers at Agbogbloshie, originally comes from northern Ghana but has been salvaging, buying and selling at the dump for 10 years. “We get a lot of health problems here, but we manage, because we need the money.”

Last week, the UN’s “Solving the E-Waste Problem” initiative (Step), which was set up in 2007 to tackle the world’s growing crisis of electronic waste, warned that the global volume of such refuse is set to grow by 33% over the next four years. Much of it will be dumped in sites such as those in Agbogbloshie, increasing the risk of land contamination with lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and flame retardants.

Agbogbloshie seems chaotic, apocalyptic in places, but there is an order to the large, desolate, rubbish-strewn site. At one side, boys and young men gather in groups, picking their way through piles of old hard drives, untangling wires, and breaking up old air-conditioning units and even irons.

Abdoullaye (19) and a group of other teenage boys sit under makeshift iron shelters on the upturned cases of old PC monitors, working at a pile of e-waste with chisels and pliers and by hand.

The boys are surrounded by rows of rusty chest freezers, each one dangling a heavy padlock. Inside them, they store the fruits of their labour – piles of copper and aluminium – until the metal is bought by traders.

Ghanaians working in Agbogbloshie. (Pic: Wikimedia/Marlenenapoli)

“I came here from Tamale five years ago,” said Abdoullaye, who wears turned-up blue jeans and a blue and white striped polo shirt smeared with dirt. “I make between two and five cedis (£0.50 to £1.30) each day, and each month I send 50 cedis (£13) back to my family in the north. I would like to go back home, but my family needs the money, so I stay. We get too many problems here – sometimes I have to go to the hospital. It’s not good for us.”

Deeper into the heart of Agbogbloshie, huge plumes of foul-smelling smoke rise up from three large fires, where the dismantled items are burned to remove traces of plastic, leaving the metal behind. The fumes are head-pounding, but the men, women and children weaving in and out of the fires seem oblivious. Goats sleep deeply beside the upturned remains of a tree, now strewn with plastic rubbish.

Roles are gender divided at Agbogbloshie. Women and girls wander the sprawling site, hawking peeled oranges, water sachets and cooked food. Many have tiny babies wrapped in cloth tied tightly to their backs, all inhaling the toxic fumes. There are special jobs for children, who trawl the site with magnets tied on to the end of a piece of string, picking up any tiny scraps of metal left behind in the dirt.

In the centre of the dump, a clearing has been turned into a football pitch, and two teams are in the midst of a match. Agbogbloshie is not just a site for trading, burning and dumping electrical waste; it’s also home to thousands of people, who carry on their lives and raise their children in the midst of its filth and fumes. There are shacks dotted throughout the central area of the dump. In the doorway of one, next to a large heap of discarded computer hard drives, is a large, grubby cloth poster of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Ghanaians have nicknamed Agbogbloshie “Sodom and Gomorrah,” after two condemned Biblical cities, but its residents take a less hostile view.

“This is not a good place to live. But we don’t want the people in Europe and all those places to stop sending the waste,” said Karim. “This is a business centre, and we are using the money we make here to help our families to have a better life.”

11 years ago

Solar lamps flying off the shelves in Kenya

It’s hard to know where to look in the crowded interior of the Murenju general store. The entrance is flanked by multicoloured mattresses stacked like surreal sandwiches. Rolls of linoleum flooring stand under shelves groaning with speakers, while cooking pots hang from the rafters amid the bunting of adverts for a pay-TV service.

Sally Kayoni, the shopkeeper, stands on tiptoe to be seen over a counter lined with car batteries, radios and DVD players. Yet the prime retail space on the eye-level shelf behind her is given over to small solar lamps presented in a neat row. They get pride of place because they are among her bestsellers.

“I had so many customers asking for them,” she says. Each month she sells more than 200 of the simple devices, which cost a little over £6 and when charged in direct sunlight will light a small room from dusk to dawn.

The 34-year-old runs one of the busiest shops in Bomet, a fast-growing town of four streets and clanking construction two hours’ drive from Kenya’s world-famous safari destination, the Masai Mara. With its paved roads and electricity, it is typical of east Africa’s new boom towns, servicing a hinterland of small farms that operate off the grid, accessible by dirt roads plied by motorcycle taxis.

Kayoni first started to notice the solar lamps when they were brought to the area in 2012 in a striking canary-yellow van owned by SunnyMoney, a subsidiary of the UK-based charity SolarAid.

They were initially distributed through the area’s schools, where head-teachers were persuaded to pitch the lamps to parents as a way of helping children to do their homework. One year on, a conventional market for the lights has been created and they are sold in shops.

(Pic: Patrick Bentley)

A business owned by a charity may sound novel, but rather than giving away solar lamps, SunnyMoney has deliberately chosen a commercial strategy, in the belief that this way its simple but effective technology can find an enduring foothold.

“We take a business approach because that is what this market needs,” says Steve Andrews, chief executive of the not-for-profit company. He wants to see solar technology follow in the footsteps of mobile phones, which have become ubiquitous in Africa over the past decade, thanks to a support network of retailers and services.

SunnyMoney has sold close to one million lights, making it the biggest retailer of solar lamps in sub-Saharan Africa. On average it makes a loss of 13p on each light it sells, but when the goal is to open up new markets by selling as many as possible – rather than make an immediate return – that is a sign of success.

“Philanthropy allowed us to be aggressive and pursue markets that didn’t exist before,” says Andrews, “because we don’t have to answer to shareholders seeking an immediate return.”

Some 40 000 lights have been sold in the Bomet area alone and SunnyMoney is on course to break even in the next two years, at which point profits will be ploughed back into the parent charity SolarAid. What some donors might find controversial is the chief executive’s belief that people value more a product they have to pay for than something given away.

Access to electricity
Much of sub-Sahara Africa is littered with the detritus of good intentions – projects from refrigerated fish-packing factories on desert lakes, to secondhand computers – that failed to meet real needs in the communities where they landed.

Fewer than 20% of Kenyan homes have access to electricity and are therefore forced to use fossil fuels such as kerosene for lighting. Households that give up the kerosene lamps they used previously can expect to make a saving of roughly £40 a month, which can be spent on school fees, food and other goods. “Previously the money was leaving the community and going to global oil companies [through kerosene sales],” Andrews says. “Now it is going to local businesses.”

The educational impact of thousands of solar lights in once-dark homes can be measured around Bomet. Christopher Sigei, the area education officer, has been doing just that: “In the evening it has been working small miracles.”

Asked about local access to electricity, he smiles and describes it as “zero point something”. The average mark in national exams in the poorest neighbourhood, he points out, has risen from 215 to 233 in the first year since the lights went on sale.

These kinds of benefits have turned headteachers such as Stanley Rugut into solar evangelists. The beaming 58-year-old, who has sold about 6 000 lamps, drives around the area’s rutted roads in a battered old estate car with leopard-skin seat covers and a solar panel on the dashboard. “I like to charge the lights while I’m driving,” he explains.

He talks about old model S1 and S2, as well as newcomer light system Sun King, with the same enthusiasm with which smartphone owners debate the pros and cons of new brands and handsets. Rugut has been rewarded for his hard work with lights rather than cash, and his skills as a salesman have allowed him to amass dozens of the lamps.

“I have all of them, and people are always coming round and very excited to see them,” he says.

Meanwhile, back at the Murenju general store, the one thing you will not find is kerosene. “I no longer sell it,” says Kayoni. “After I started selling these,” she points at the solar lamps, “there was no one asking for it any more.”

Daniel Howden for the Guardian

11 years ago

Mandela film gets three Golden Globe nominations

A film about the life of former South African president Nelson Mandela titled Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom received three Golden Globe nominations on Thursday.

The nominations were announced in Los Angeles, the company that produced the film, Videovision Entertainment, said in a statement.

Idris Elba, who plays Mandela in the film, was nominated for Best Actor and the film’s music composer, Alex Heffes, scooped a nomination in the Best Original Score category.

Irish rock band U2 was nominated for the Best Original Song for Ordinary Love, a song written specially for the film.

The film’s producer Anant Singh said it was an honour to have received three Golden Globe nominations. This was a first for a South African film.

Elba also received a nomination for Best Actor in a Mini-Series made for Television for his role in the television series, Luther. “We congratulate Idris on his amazing performance in the film and his double nomination, and we congratulate Alex and U2 on receiving this recognition,” said Singh.

The 2014 Golden Globes take place on Sunday 12 January.

11 years ago

African presidents, AU pay tribute to Mandela

The African Union mourned the passing of South Africa’s liberation leader Nelson Mandela on Friday, ordering its flags to fly at half mast as it praised a “pan-African icon”.

“Mandela has fought a good fight, and bowed out with great reverence,” said Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, chair of the African Union Commission of the 54-member bloc.

“His passing on is a great loss to his family, to our continent and indeed to humanity itself,” Dlamini-Zuma added, herself a South African and the former wife of President Jacob Zuma.

Mandela died late Thursday aged 95.

“Madiba, as he was fondly known, symbolises the spirit of pan-Africanism and solidarity in the struggles of humanity against apartheid, oppression and colonialism and for self-determination, peace and reconciliation,” she added.

Nelson Mandela. (Pic: AFP)

In Ghana, President John Dramani Mahama hailed Mandela as “a man of peace and tolerance” and “the man who sowed unifying peace in South Africa.

“Mandela was an icon, not only of hope, but also of the possibility for healing, Mahama said in a statement. “His utilisation of peace as a vehicle of liberation showed Africa that if we were to move beyond the divisiveness caused by colonisation, and the pain of our self-inflicted wounds, compassion and forgiveness must play a role in governance,” he added.

“The world has lost one of its greatest citizens,” Tanzanian President Kikwete said, calling Mandela “a voice of courage, a source of inspiration and a beloved leader to us all.” The East African nation has declared three days of mourning for the former South African leader.

Kenyan deputy president William Ruto said that with the death of Mandela, “the world has lost a moral example of selfless leadership”.

“The African continent is poorer without Madiba,” he told The Standard newspaper. “We are mourning a father to multiple generations of Africans. Madiba was a shining example that we should all emulate.”

Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan said: “Mandela will always be remembered and honoured by all mankind as one of its greatest liberators, a wise, courageous and compassionate leader, and an icon of true democracy. Mandela’s death will create a huge vacuum that will be difficult to fill in our continent.” Jonathan also declared three days of national mourning for Mandela.

Senegal’s President Macky Sall said: “We have lost a giant, one of the greatest figures in contemporary Africa. No man of our time has given so much for the cause of his people, for Africa, and for the good of mankind. Nelson Mandela taught us courage, strength, forgiveness. He showed us that a human being could be better.”

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda said in a tweet: “Madiba, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, passes on. But what is certain is he will continue to live in the hearts of many of us. Rest in peace.”

UPDATE: Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe called Mandela the great icon of African liberation, freedom fighter, a beacon of excellence and a humble and compassionate leader. His delayed message of condolence was delivered on Saturday, raising speculation that Harare was reluctant to recognise Madiba’s legacy. Read more here.

– Mail & Guardian, Sapa