Developments 44

AFGHAN WOMEN FIGHT BACK

CAMBODIA’S ROAD TO RECOVERY

ART WORKS FOR DEVELOPMENT

COUNTING THE FOOD COST

ISSUE 44 2009 www.developments.org.uk

up close and personal The Millennium Development Goals can seem a long way off – but in many local communities real change is underway

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contents SPECIAL FOCUS: STORIES IN DEVELOPMENT

Up close and personal When all’s said and done, development actually works.

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Pumpkin revolution

Food – how planting pumpkins can provide for flood stricken families in Bangladesh.

Fair play to Georgina

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Food for thought

Education – how providing meals gets school attendance up in India.

Children covered

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Gender equality – how a new justice initiative is giving women in Malawi a fairer deal.

Children’s health – how new approaches are combating killer diseases.

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Global news

Congolese given star billing.

How to end malaria.

Rwandan female MPs make history.

Afghan farmers swap poppy for wheat.

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Maternity benefits

Women’s health – how mothersto-be in China can be confident of safer delivery.

Keeping log

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Environmental protection – how Indonesians and Tanzanians are protecting their forests from destruction.

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This won’t hurt

Major diseases – how global immunisation is saving millions of lives.

Comfort and joy

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Working together – how a Ghanaian farmers cooperative and a UK chocolate company are making sweet music.

Front cover: © Jenny Matthews/Panos This page: © Geoff Crawford/Tearfund

Developments magazine and website are produced by DFID to raise awareness of development issues.

The views expressed do not necessarily reflect official policies.

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editors

Subscribe free to Developments at www.developments.org.uk

Martin Wroe Malcolm Doney

contributors Danny Boyle Geoff Crawford Mike Durham Jane Eason Shenggen Fan Paul Northup

Charlie Pye-Smith Mark Rosegrant Mxolisi Sithole Glyn Strong Anatasia Taylor-Lind Louise Tickle

This magazine is printed on 90gsm Royal Web Silk, from 100% FSC (Forestry Stewardship Counci) certified pulp. It is manufactured in the UK and has a low carbon footprint on transport.

Designed and printed by Engage Group www.engagegroup.co.uk

Leading the British Government’s fight against world poverty.

www.dfid.gov.uk Public Enquiry Point: 0845 300 4100 (UK only) or +44 1355 84 3132 (from outside the UK) enquiry@dfid.gov.uk

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looking good close up

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The everyday battle

Afghan women are making new lives for the communities behind the bleak headlines.

Building from rock bottom

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Cambodia starts the road to recovery with local democracy.

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Art and minds

Film director Danny Boyle on why children who suffer need creative expression as well as food and shelter.

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Every picture tells a story

A community artist on how South African street children find a voice when they pick up a paint brush.

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It all adds up

If we’re to feed everyone in the world, how much will it cost?

t the end of 2008, an American journal published the results of trials of a new malaria vaccine in Tanzania and Kenya. The vaccine more than halves the number of serious bouts of the disease in small children, bringing tantalisingly close the prospect of an effective malaria vaccine. This could save nearly a million people a year.

Just a couple of months before this, at the Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York, world leaders committed $3 billion in an ambitious plan to virtually wipe out malaria by 2015 – starting with methods that already work, but have only lacked funding: bed nets, indoor spraying, diagnosis and treatment.

The combination of groundbreaking scientific innovation with serious and sustained funding could make malaria history within a few years. The chances are that before long we will have forgotten a disease that currently takes a million lives a year and ruthlessly reinforces poverty (it costs Africa alone around $12 billion a year). How many of us remember the way that, only 20 years ago, polio paralysed 1,000 children a day? Since then, thanks to the WHO’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative, more than two billion children have been immunised and polio is now endemic in only four countries – fewer than 1,500 cases were reported in 2008. Slowly but surely it has been eradicated.

The point is that because development often takes place so slowly, under the wire, because its progress is measured in decades not months, we often fail to notice that it’s happening at all. That’s why in this issue we’re focusing on some of the hidden stories of development. Across the range of the Millennium Development Goals there are real signs of promise – 90% of primary kids now in school, deaths from measles cut by a third, the number of extremely poor people falling by 400 million in just 15 years.

Yes, half a million mothers in developing countries still die annually from complications related to pregnancy, but in some countries, such as China (p 20), the signs are becoming more hopeful.

And while half the people in developing countries still go without decent sanitation, a quarter of the world’s population got clean drinking water in the last 20 years.

Progress towards the MDGs is uneven and stop-start – recent rising food prices threaten millions more with hunger.

But even if improvement is often so slow that you’d never notice unless you really concentrated – it is taking place. Read on…

Martin Wroe and Malcolm Doney

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From catwalk to Congo Photographer Rankin in war-zone exposure

© Rankin/OXFAM

Famous for his portraits of Kate Moss, Kylie Minogue and the Queen, photographer Rankin has joined forces with Oxfam to bring the faces of those caught up in the war zones of the Democratic Republic of Congo to London’s South Bank.

Rankin’s exhibition – sponsored by the Co-operative Bank and hosted outside the National Theatre – featured his celebrity portraiture with entirely different subjects, the residents of Mugunga camp, home to 17,000 people displaced by Congo’s harrowing violence.

Photographed against Rankin’s trademark white backdrop rather than in their everyday surroundings, his subjects boldly defy the war victim tag and shine out as real people with individuality, humour and warmth. Jasmine, a young girl, mimics Rankin with her own camera made from a tin can; Tumanini, a tailor, smiles broadly as she balances her sewing machine on her head; and Marina, a grandmother, stands proudly with her grandchildren by her side.

The exhibition’s title, Cheka Kidogo, means ‘laugh a little’ in Swahili, and celebrates the spirit of the Congolese people in the face of adversity, but it was also the phrase that people called out to their friends when they were being photographed – a kind of Swahili version of ‘say cheese’. An estimated 250,000 people saw the exhibition at the end of 2008.

“I think we have become anaesthetised to traditional photographs of conflict victims,” said Rankin. “By taking my

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celebrity portraiture style of photography and applying it to the survivors in the camps in Congo I have tried to get beyond the statistics and show the human side of the conflict.

“I heard awful stories of young girls being raped and people fleeing attacks on their villages. Despite the suffering that they have been through the people of Congo are just like us and need our help. I hope the exhibition will wake people up to what is going on.”

Since 1998, the country has lost 5.4 million people to conflict, and the disease and hunger it has unleashed. At the time of going to press, over a million people are displaced in the eastern part of the country, with over 500,000 people having fled from violence in the last year alone. Rape is epidemic.

Speaking about his experience in the Congo, Rankin said: “I felt energised by the strength of the people and their will to survive and to make their lives better. Yet they all have these really awful stories. They have all seen their brothers and sisters, wives, husbands, daughters or sons killed in front of them, and you can see it in their eyes.”

As well as taking portrait shots, Rankin and Oxfam staff put on an impromptu exhibition of Rankin’s work in Mugunga camp, with printed photos hung by clothes pegs on washing lines.

“It got an amazing reception. Hordes more people lined up and insisted I took their photographs too. They all wanted to have their pictures taken, so they could have their stories told in the West. It was humbling stuff.”

Oxfam designed the exhibition to raise awareness of the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo and build support for its work there. The charity is supplying clean water and sanitation to camps and communities across eastern Congo.

It is also lobbying nationally and internationally for better protection of civilians.

MORE INFORMATION www.oxfam.org.uk

Panama Canal expansion to boost trade

Turning opium into bread The first Governor-led initiative to tackle opium poppy in Afghanistan has received a £6 million boost with the launch of a programme to support wheat farming in Helmand. Farmers will swap poppy for wheat.

The Food Zones programme, coming at a time of national wheat and food shortages, will see wheat seed and fertiliser being distributed to 32,000 farmers in Helmand province – enough to grow 26,000 hectares of wheat.

All farmers who receive the free wheat seed will sign a commitment not to grow poppy, and future eradication will be targeted at the areas where farmers have signed up to the Food Zone programme. Farmers who join the scheme can be confident that they will have a market for their crop, as an Afghan company has offered to purchase the province’s surplus.

“The Food Zone programme is an opportunity for farmers to provide much needed food for their country and turn their back on poppy,” said Helmand Governor Gulab Mangal at the launch.

“Poppy is hurting our communities, closing our schools and financing criminals and terrorists. It is especially immoral to be growing it at a time when fellow Afghans are going hungry.

We should be using our rich natural resources and talents to grow food for the country, not poppy, which is against Islam.”

The Food Zones programme is being run by Gulab Mangal with $4 million in support from DFID while the Provincial Reconstruction Team, an international team of experts based in Lashkar Gah, has donated a further $4.25 million, and USAID $3 million.

MORE INFORMATION www.dfid.gov.uk

The international Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank is lending $300 million to help expand the Panama Canal.

This 20-year financing will support a $5.25 billion project to double the canal’s capacity to more than 600 million Panama Canal tons, allowing it to handle large postPanamax container ships that have become the new industry standard. The expansion includes construction of new locks with water-saving basins and improvements to navigational channels. “The IFC’s participation in the Panama Canal expansion project, at a time of a global financial crisis, reflects our confidence in one of the most important infrastructure projects in Latin America and the Caribbean,” said the organisation’s CEO Lars Thunell. The canal handles 5% of all maritime trade between all major economies in the world.

Poor management causes fish losses Sea fishery industries worldwide lose up to $50 billion a year, due to poor management, inefficiencies, and overfishing, according to a report from the World Bank and the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform reveals that losses over the last 30 years totalled more than $2 trillion, starving developing countries in particular of much needed earnings. The report argues that “well-managed marine fisheries could turn most of these losses into sustainable economic benefits for millions of fishers and coastal communities”. It says fishing businesses can more efficiently harvest well-managed fish stocks than overfished fisheries.

“First, a reduction in fishing effort would increase productivity, profitability, and net economic benefits. Second, rebuilding fish stocks would lead to increased sustainable yields and lower fishing costs.”

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What kind of shopper are you?

MORE INFORMATION www.dfid.gov.uk/ ethicalcompass

World leaders have committed nearly $3 billion in an ambitious new plan to reduce malaria deaths to near zero in Africa by 2015.

The funding commitments, made at the Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York, will support rapid implementation of the Global Malaria Action Plan launched by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership.

With input from 250 malaria experts, the plan is the first-ever comprehensive blueprint for global malaria control and could save more than 4.2 million lives by 2015.

“With more than one million people dying from malaria every year, this is a real turning point,” said Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

“It brings together a new coalition of forces – government, the private sector and NGOs – to ensure we all rise to the challenge of eradicating malaria deaths by 2015.”

The Global Malaria Action Plan aims to dramatically reduce malaria by achieving three goals: • Short term: Reduce deaths and illness from malaria by half from 2000 levels, by scaling up access to bed nets, indoor spraying, diagnosis and treatment, including preventive treatment for pregnant women, by 2010.

• Medium term: Reduce the number of malaria deaths to near zero by 2015, through sustained universal coverage with proven anti-malaria tools.

• Long term: Maintain near-zero deaths worldwide while eliminating malaria transmission in key countries, with the ultimate goal of eradicating malaria completely with new tools and strategies.

“The Global Malaria Action Plan is a milestone in the international response to malaria,” said Professor Awa Marie Coll-Seck, Executive Director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership. “We have had isolated accomplishments over the years, but this is the first time we have drawn together those experiences to produce guidelines to replicate success globally.

Putting the plan into action must now become our number one priority.”

© Sumitomo Chemical/Olyset net

Are you in touch with how your shopping choices affect the people and the planet around you?

DFID has just launched a witty online game to help consumers plot their own “ethical compass”. Visitors to the DFID website are urged to tackle 10 quick questions to find out which “shopping tribe” they belong to. You could be a “green warrior,” an “ethical guru,” “a caring consumer” or a “Coulda Woulda Shoulda…”

The game takes two minutes to complete, and is designed to help people understand what their consumer choices tell them about their values and beliefs – and how the way they shop can help towards fighting global poverty.

War against malaria hots up

“The African Union has made fighting malaria a top priority, recognising that the disease affects millions of Africans and costs the continent an estimated $12 billion each year in direct losses, but a great deal more in lost economic growth

The new commitments Totaling around $3 billion, these include: • Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – $1.62 billion over two years including plans for distribution of 100 million additional bed nets.

• World Bank – $1.1 billion to expand the Malaria Booster Programme.

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – $168.7 million to the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative for research on a new generation of malaria vaccines.

• DFID – £40 million to support the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria.

over the long term. “So many of our nations have been crippled by malaria,” said Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda.

“African nations are united in fighting this disease through the Global Malaria Action Plan, and we commit to ensuring that expanded funding will be well used.”

Data released by the World Health Organisation show the potential of malaria control to save lives: between 2000 and 2006, 25 countries with large-scale malaria control programmes reported reductions in malaria deaths of 50% or more. Worldwide, access to proven malaria tools is at an all-time high, according to the report.

On World Malaria Day in April 2008, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for universal coverage with proven malaria tools by the end of 2010, and appointed Ray Chambers as the UN Special Envoy for Malaria to mobilise global support for action on the disease.

“To halt and reverse the incidence of malaria is not only a specific Millennium Development Goal,” said Chambers, “it is also essential to improving maternal and child health, improving education and significantly reducing poverty.”

MORE INFORMATION www.rollbackmalaria.org

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African diaspora groups get organised A UK-based network is to support the involvement of African diaspora-led groups in the economic, social and political development of the African continent.

The African Diaspora Alliance for International Development (ADAID), formed by more than 100 UK African NGOs and organisations, aims to lobby the UK government and other funding agencies to make their funds available to African diaspora organisations on the same basis as other NGOs involved in international development.

“The UK has done a lot of work to help Africa and lifted millions out of poverty,” said Ernest Rukangira, coordinator of member organisation Conserve Africa, a member of ADAID. “But it also needs to help diaspora organisations. We want support here, so we can do more to help communities in Africa.”

Members of ADAID, like the African Community Development Foundation, Albert Joyle Relief Agency Foundation, Black Community Development Project and Conserve Africa, want to increase their capacity to engage in international development initiatives. “Diaspora organisations face difficulties in raising funds and often lack the experience and capacity to compete with other UK-based NGOs,” said Rukangira.

More Africans send money to support family and communities in their country of origin than members of any other migrant group settled in the UK, with Ghana and Nigeria the leading beneficiaries. Rukangira said they would work to influence policy within DFID and other other agencies, as well as using their “collective clout” to put pressure on African governments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and recognise fully the human rights of all their citizens.

MORE INFORMATION ernest.rukangira@ conserveafrica.org.uk

Library catalogues barriers to women in business

Rwanda’s history-making women MPs launch a campaign to reduce the number of mothers dying in childbirth.

Female MPs in Rwanda make history Rwanda’s women MPs have made history by becoming the first in the world to outnumber their male counterparts.

They now make up 56% of seats in the Rwandan parliament – compared to 19.3% of female members in the UK parliament. And they’ve now come together behind a campaign to reduce the number of mothers dying in childbirth. In a bid to improve health support for women across Rwanda, female parliamentarians, together with the First Lady, Jeanette Kagame, and development partners, including DFID have backed the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood Rwanda.

The Alliance aims to increase awareness about safe pregnancy and childbirth in Rwanda and unite the many existing initiatives aimed at improving motherhood in the country. The country’s rate of women dying during childbirth is among the world’s highest. Around 2,770 mothers die each year while giving birth – close to one death every three hours, every day of the year.

“Rwandan women are key players of our national development, starting with the wellbeing of Rwandan families,” said Jeanette Kagame. “It is ironic that in the process of giving life, mothers are losing theirs. But I am certain that the Rwanda Ribbon Alliance will be able to improve the livelihoods of pregnant mothers and babies in Rwanda.”

Women’s rights have gradually improved since the genocide in 1994. A steady increase of female parliamentarians over the last 10 years has seen laws passed allowing women the rights to inherit land, work without the permission of their husband and make rape and physical violence illegal.

“The remarkable increase in female representation in parliament will give women across Rwanda a far greater voice in the decisions that affect their lives,” said the UK’s International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander. “It is shocking that so many mothers die while giving birth, and that is why the UK is committed to improving health care across Africa.”

An online library launched by the World Bank highlights laws and regulations affecting the ability of women around the world to participate in business. The initiative aims to help researchers gain data to enhance women’s economic prospects. A spokesperson said that until now, “researchers have lacked easy access to national legal provisions needed to do cross-country analyses of how business-related regulations affect women.” The library will help develop reforms to laws that particularly restrict women from contributing to economic development. Topics covered include national legal statutes on property and inheritance rights, business registration, and employment – with information being culled from 181 countries. According to a bank memorandum, “The library encourages peer participation: inviting researchers, donors and other development practitioners to contribute law texts, summaries, and comments.”

Livestock plague hits Morocco The Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has been helping Morocco deal with an outbreak of serious livestock disease, peste des petits ruminants (PPR) that threatens millions of sheep and goats and could spread to neighbouring countries. The disease is very contagious, transmitted through close contact.

If the epidemic continues, says the FAO, it could devastate Morocco’s livestock sector – the country has 17 million sheep and 5.3 million goats. The FAO, has helped the government plan movement controls, stock destruction and vaccination.

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A ‘fight malaria’ roadshow draws Tanzanian crowd. © James Hole/DFID

Time to reform EU aid The spirit of multilateralism, which emerged at the end of 2008 in order to combat the threat of world recession, should be extended to development cooperation.

That’s the view of Simon Maxwell, Director of the Overseas Development Institute, who says just as a coordinated effort was needed to rescue the world’s banks, so countries will need to work together to protect the world’s poor from the impact of recession.

He maintains that while the EU has demonstrated its potential and is a major player in aid, trade and the politics of poverty reduction world-wide, EU aid needs to be more efficient, transparent and cohesive.

“In the field of international development, the agenda is moving sharply in a trans-national direction, on topics where Europe has a strong comparative advantage.” says Maxwell.

“With European elections in June and a new European Commission in November, 2009 is the year for change.”

Maxwell offers a six point plan to reform EU aid including: re-thinking the role of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group, taking advantage of a new arrangement which allows member states to route more money through Brussels for the MDGs; and expanding the Peace Facility, to give the EU more opportunities in the fragile states of the ‘Bottom Billion’.

Headlining the poor

Sweet anti-malarial pill easier to swallow

MORE INFORMATION www.odi.org.uk

“

With European elections in June and a new European Commission in November, 2009 is the year for change.

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”

Could a cherry-flavoured, easy-to-swallow pill save the lives of children in malariaaffected areas? Yes, according to researchers from the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania.

They say the newly developed tablet is less bitter than other anti-malaria drugs and does not need to be crushed before eating. This would make it easier for children to stick to the treatment.

Malaria kills more than a million people every year, many of them young children

and, while there is no vaccine, it can be cured if treated promptly. Salim Abdulla of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania said the new cherry-flavoured pill was easy to administer and effective.

Health experts believe the pill could encourage better results from treatment, and also delay the development of drug resistant strains of the disease.

HIV prevention among Indian men who have sex with men, and children’s commitment to adapting to climate change in the Philippines were the themes of the final two winning articles in the UK’s Guardian International Development Journalism competition.

Aspiring writer Sylvia Rowley, winner in the amateur category, described how community-based organisations were helping to promote safe sex amongst homosexuals, transgender people and sex workers in India. Rowley gathered the information for her winning article while visiting Andhra Pradesh with the HIV/AIDS Alliance.

Journalist Ben Willis, winner of the competition’s professional division, used a fact-finding visit to the Philippines, courtesy of children’s charity Plan, to research his winning article. He described how children in the Philippines are leading the effort to reduce the effects of climate change in the country.

The competition, developed in cooperation with Marie Stopes International (MSI) and sponsored by DFID, was designed to enthuse more people to write about the challenges faced by the poorest people in developing countries.

“I was delighted by the high calibre of the entries and congratulate both overall winners on their outstanding contributions,” said International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander. “Informed and balanced journalism plays a crucial role in raising the profile of international development.”

MORE INFORMATION

MORE INFORMATION www.ihi.or.tz

www.guardian.co.uk/ journalismcompetition

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Ugandan bananas turn a corner

Mandeep ran away from home and was found on a Bangalore railway platform. Street children and children who are separated from family environments are likely to suffer abuse, be exposed to HIV infection, suffer from mental health problems and go onto abandon their own children, says a new EveryChild report. © Matt Writtle/EveryChild

Global recession and armed conflict will cause a big increase in the number of children in orphanages and on the street over the next decade, warns an international children’s charity. These children, separated from their families, are more likely to suffer abuse, be exposed to HIV infection, experience mental health problems and later abandon their own children.

Children’s charity EveryChild issued the warning through a briefing paper, Why do separated children matter?, which explores child separation as a global development issue.

No accurate figures exist for the total number of separated children world-wide but the charity estimates between 100 and 150 million children already live or work on the streets, 8 million live in residential institutions and over 1 million are in detention.

Educating farmers in simple disease control techniques has forced back a Uganda cooking banana plague, which threatened to destroy this staple crop, depended on by 14 million people. A project between the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation and the Ugandan government has advised 3,000 farmers on fighting banana bacterial wilt (BBW). The disease has now been contained in their target districts, with several participants doubling or tripling their production.

BBW kills banana trees and makes their fruit inedible. No banana varieties are resistant and there is no effective chemical control. This outbreak was detected in two districts in 2001, and by 2005 had spread to 31 more but it has been rolled back by simple and chemicalfree methods. This included planting only clean seedlings, applying wood ash, and removing male buds (an entry way for the disease) by hand, rather than knives, which spread the bacteria. The FAO’s Wafa Khoury said “the disease is manageable, but many farmers simply didn’t know what to do”.

It predicts a jump in the number of ‘invisible’ children caused by global recession, military conflicts such as in the Congo, failure to tackle violence and abuse against children, and increasing reliance on institutional care in poor countries.

“With current trends like the global recession set to significantly increase the number of children separated from their families and communities,” said Anna Feuchtwang of EveryChild, “policy makers must do more to address the underlying causes of separation such as family disintegration due to violence, abuse and exploitation.”

MORE INFORMATION www.everychild.org.uk

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International Development Department

Helping to make poverty history The International Development Department (IDD) is dedicated to poverty reduction through the development of effective governance systems. We are a leading UK centre for postgraduate study of international development, and we also do practical, hands-on development work with governments and organisations around the world.

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Our activities In addition to teaching, IDD academics are involved in international research, evaluation, consultancy and training for agencies such as DFID, Danida, African Development Bank, European Commission and United Nations.

IDD hosts two information services: Governance and Social Development Resource Centre www.gsdrc.org Providing access to the best thinking and research on governance, conflict and social development.

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Learn more: www.idd.bham.ac.uk or contact: On-campus:

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Distance learning: Linda Curry +44 (0)121 414 4969 distancelearning@contacts.bham.ac.uk quoting reference “DFID”

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voluntary sectors Knowledge management and information

dissemination Teaching and training of development leaders

and practitioners

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stories in development A world where people are less poor. A place where women have the same opportunities as men.

Somewhere where anyone can get a good education and healthcare.

A planet and a people which has a sustainable future.

That’s the script for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed by 189 countries in the year 2000. Half way to the 2015 target date this vision has ignited genuine change for good. The number of extremely poor people fell from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005, the proportion of extremely poor people fell from 41.7% to 25.7%. Progress is uneven, and far too slow, but sometimes the individual stories of development tell a more promising tale than the statistics. Across the world, in country after country, there are 3 signs of promise on each of the goals, as the following pages chart.

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stories in development

BANGLADESH

pumpkin revolution Jane Eason on how planting pumpkins is providing food and income for flood stricken families in Bangladesh.

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M

pump m ki k n pits ts gro owi wing ng aalm lmos ostt

pu ump pki kins ns – w wor orth th mor o e th than an

Almost 1,300 families have now benefited from the project, producing between them more than 162,000 pumpkins. The cost of each pit – taking in labour seed and materials – is just 24 pence. Last year alone the pumpkins had a market value of £1.27 million.

Pumpkin growing – along with floating gardens, cluster villages, schools, animal husbandry, and alternative livelihoods – has increased the earning capacity of more than 20,000 households. This means around 100,000 people have seen direct benefits and over 500,000 benefited indirectly – almost 70% of them women. Saiful says: “The opportunities and the technology is a blessing for us, it has opened our eyes to see a better life and a new hope to live.”

Practical Action is also developing a sustainable model for replication in other parts of the country.

MORE INFORMATION www.practicalaction.org.uk

MDG 1

illions of Bangladeshis live on the riverbanks of the country’s 230 unstable rivers, relying on the land not only for shelter, but also to provide them with a livelihood. In 2007 Bangladesh suffered some of the worst flooding in its history, only to be hit weeks later as a devastating cyclone tore through the country. The poor became poorer as the precious land where people lived and earned a living were washed away, their crops destroyed.

As floodwater receded, it left its own legacy; sand and silt rendered land useless for even the most skilled farmer.

So how were they to feed themselves and their families, or make any money to sustain their lives?

One imaginative solution has emerged in the remote area of Gaibandha, badly hit by river erosion. Here, with the help of NGO Practical Action, thousands of families are now able to eat and survive using a deceptively simple technique.

They plant pumpkins. They simply dig holes in these sandy areas, and fill them with manure, compost and pumpkin seeds.

As well as producing a high yield and being packed full of health benefits, pumpkins can be stored for up to a year, meaning people have a crop both for their families and also to sell, when employment opportunities are low.

Saiful Islam, a 30-year-old labourer has seen his life transformed by this project. His family, who live on river embankments, has been displaced five times over the past ten years, with no way of sustaining a livelihood. The only option Saiful had was to migrate for low paid labouring work.

But it all changed once Saiful received training and seeds, and began cultivating 50 pumpkin ‘pits’. He later increased this to 433 pits, growing almost 4,000 pumpkins – worth more than £1,300.

He used the money to lease land, invest in fish production and in beef fattening.

Spurred on by such a simple technology, he was subsequently trained to share his knowledge to support 200 landless farmers, who between them cultivated more than 32,000 pits.

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

More than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Without money to buy food they go hungry every day – under-nourishment plays a part in half of all child deaths.

Twin targets for 2015 demand halving the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day and halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger.

The UN reports that the overarching goal of reducing absolute poverty by half is within reach for the world as a whole, largely because of economic success in most of Asia. On the upside extreme poverty levels fell between 1990 and 2000 and, if this trend continues, 370 million more people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty by 2015.

On the other hand, progress is slow, with an estimated 360 million people set to be living in extreme poverty in 2015. Higher food prices may push another 100 million deeper into poverty.

Double crop Another simple procedure introduced by Practical Action is producing real food dividends for smallholders in Bangladesh. Cultivating fish and rice all at one go.

Farmers plant rice in ditches which is half filled with water, purified with lime.

When the rice starts to shoot, the water level is increased and fish fry are added.

The fish grow safe from birds because they are hidden in the dense rice plants.

The fish become fat on – among other things – rice pests.

The fish’s ‘droppings fertilise the rice helping it grow.

As a result, keeping fish with rice fields increases rice yields by up to 10%.

When the rice is harvested, the fish are caught.

Families have a double supply of food for themselves and a surplus to sell.

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A te At tend dan ncee hass jum ump peed fr from o

in 20 00 05, 5 to

INDIA byy 200 0 6.

6

food for thought Lateral thinking – like providing free meals – can produce startling rises in school attendance. t is a hot summer morning in Ganeria village primary school in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Teacher Sunita Misra is correcting worksheets as her Class 3 students quietly read their books.

As the clock strikes 11 am, bedlam breaks out. Even seven-year-old Kaushal, who is hearing-impaired, needs no special signal. He joins in with the rest of his class in rushing to form a queue outside the school kitchen where the mid-day meals are being dished out.

“Before hot, cooked, mid-day meals were served, children would go home to eat and not return,” says Sunita.

“Now they know that meals will be served in school. This has given them an incentive to come to school and stay on till the end.”

Free school dinners came to Utter Pradesh in 2004 as part of a major government education initiative supported by DFID. Within three months all primary schools in the state were providing pupils with something to eat. For many children in this poverty-stricken region, this will be the only meal they get all day.

I

Good for girls All schools now have utensils, fuel and a cook hired especially to prepare the meals. This has helped to bring children, particularly girls, to school and greatly improved attendance.

Anant Singh of Primary School Ajgan, District Unnao, has noticed the difference the meals have made in drawing in girls. Attendance has

jumped, he says, from 106 in 2005 at the start of the scheme to 142 by 2006.

“Since there is no additional expenditure on food and their daughters are assured of at least one meal per day, parents are willing to send them to school.

“Once they are here, our teachers are able to focus their attention on studies.”

The taste test Menus change daily, ensuring that children get a balanced diet, receiving nutritious vegetables, soya and pulses.

But efforts are made to make sure it’s tasty too. “The real challenge is to combine nutrition with taste,” says Kamlesh Tiwari, a local leader in Unnao town, who is in charge of implementing the scheme in his neighbourhood.

“This is why we have two mothers taste the meal before it is served every day.

If they are satisfied, we know their children will be too.”

Parvati Chaurasia doesn’t mind coming to sample the food every day, even if it means leaving her chores undone. She knows that her daughters, Sonal, six, and Komal, 10, look forward to their daily meal. “Their health has improved and so has their motivation. At least now they will not remain illiterate like me,” she says.

While the mid-day meal remains a big incentive to attend school, it is not the only reason that numbers have gone up.

Other improvements carried out by the programme – such as supplying free text books and installing toilets – help make sure that once children get through the school doors, they have a reason to stay there.

High school pupils eating lunch in Andhra Pradesh, India. © Sean Sprague/ Panos

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MDG 2

Achieve Universal Primary Education

Seventy five million primary-aged children are not enroled in school, more than half of them are girls. In sub-Saharan Africa alone 35 million children are not in school.

It doesn’t just deprive young people of opportunities, it makes it harder for countries to tackle poverty and disease. But there’s real progress towards the 2015 goal. Global enrolment jumped by 41 million between 1999 and 2005 and there are now 95 girls enroled in school for every 100 boys.

If achieving universal primary education is a tall order some countries provide real grounds for optimism. In Uganda and Malawi, for example, the number of children enrolling in primary school has doubled in five years and is now over 90%.

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Š Geoff Crawford/Tearfund

stories in development

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MALAWI

fair play to Georgina Primary Justice Forums across Malawi are helping poor people get a fairer hearing – especially women.

F

Love potion backfires Before long however, the marriage came under strain. Her husband was spending more and more time with his first wife, and Georgina felt neglected. In desperation, she tried to feed him a herbal love potion. This was a rash move, and, when her husband found out, he took legal action.

The subsequent court case went badly for Georgina. She felt the hearing was biased, and that she was not given an opportunity to argue her corner. With the court finding against her, she was ordered to pay a substantial fine, which her family couldn’t afford. Unable to raise the necessary money, Georgina was sentenced to jail.

Settling the issues Just as things looked very bleak, a new DFID-backed initiative came to the rescue. The local Primary Justice Forum, introduced by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), paid the fine, saving Georgina from prison. Mediating between Georgina’s family and the family of her husband, the Forum also helped the two parties to reach an out of court settlement.

Next, the CCJP started discussions with the Ministry of Education to get Georgina back into school.

Georgina’s case is typical of how Primary Justice Forums across Malawi are helping more poor people to get a fair hearing. The membership of each Forum is decided by the needs of each local community – often, they will include marriage counsellors, senior villagers, magistrates, and a CCJP representative. By persuading such

a breadth of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ justice providers to come together, the Forums attempt to resolve cases in a more rounded way.

Community rewards DFID has funded a range of other CCJP initiatives to improve the delivery of justice, including convening meetings between justice providers at the district and village levels to discuss local issues and how to cooperate more closely, and providing training in conflict management and human rights.

Throughout Malawi, communities are feeling the benefits of the new initiatives. People now have a wider range of options when trying to settle disputes, and training has improved the skills of those providing justice.

As a result of these improvements poor Malawians feel more secure. There is a greater sense that, should they encounter legal difficulties, their cases will be dealt with fairly. This leaves them free to can get on with life and free to make a decent living.

MDG 3

or a bright 16-year-old like Georgina, secondary school should have been the next step after passing the primary school leaving exams. However, coming from a poor family (her father died when she was nine, and she was raised by her mother on less than 50 pence a day), marriage seemed like a better option than staying on in education.

So, as soon as she left primary school, Georgina became the wife of her former maths teacher – a sure passport to a better standard of living.

Promote gender equality and empower women

Women and girls in poorer countries find it difficult to get an education or a job – and they generally get paid less than men for the same work. Yet in Africa it’s women, not trucks, who carry two-thirds of all goods on the move. Instead of going to school, 44 million girls stay at home to fetch water or work around the house. Many women are susceptible to violence, rape and infection with HIV and AIDS. There has been progress: girls’ primary enrolment increased more than boys’ in all developing regions between 2000 and 2006 and two out of three countries have achieved gender parity at the primary level.

In employment, the UN reports that women occupy almost 40% of all paid jobs outside agriculture, compared to 35% in 1990.

Investing in basic education for girls and women boosts family incomes, reduces fertility rates and contributes to better health and nutrition. More girls in school leads to greater economic growth and less poverty.

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children covered Far-sighted health initiatives are dramatically reducing child deaths in several countries.

GHANA

getting better n an unprecedented attempt to save the lives of 20,000 infants and children, Ghana embarked on its biggest ever integrated child health campaign in November 2006. Millions of children were immunised against measles and polio and given Vitamin A supplements and, in the three poorest northern regions of the country, children were also de-wormed.

Around 80,000 children under the age of five die every year in Ghana, most of them from preventable or treatable diseases. Malaria is the biggest single childhood killer, accounting for about 25% of these deaths. Sleeping under a bed net can reduce child deaths by as much as 20%.

Led by Ghana’s Ministry of Health, 2.1 million longlasting insecticide-treated bed nets were distributed free of charge for all children under the age of two.

This campaign was a first for Ghana – made possible by a £6 million DFID grant. A household survey carried out two weeks after the campaign revealed that 96.4% of all children under age two received bed nets, and 72% slept under a net the previous night.

I

VIETNAM

‘silent killer’ arrested aternal and neonatal tetanus is a disease that kills tens of thousands of newborns each year, most of them in developing countries. The disease is often called the “silent killer” because many babies affected by it die at home in very remote and poor communities where both the births and the deaths go unreported. But Vietnam’s Ministry of Health has eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus, with support from WHO and UNICEF. A survey in the country’s disadvantaged districts in Binh Phuoc Province found less than one neonatal tetanus death per 1000 live births in 2005. In the 1980s, some 20,000 Vietnamese babies died annually of tetanus before the age of one month. Since 1991, pregnant women have been vaccinated throughout Vietnam through its Expanded Programme on Immunisation, resulting in a high vaccination coverage rate. Vietnam is the ninth country in the world, and the first East Asian country, that has eliminated these diseases.

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MDG 4 A health education mural on the importance of sleeping under a mosquito bed net to avoid malaria at the UNICEF funded Redemption Hospital. Š Giacomo Pirozzi/Panos

Reduce child mortality

The number of under-five deaths has declined by 20% since 1990, to a record low of 9.7 million a year in 2006, but this remains short of the target of a two-thirds reduction by 2015. Forty per cent of child deaths occur in the first days of life, due to the lack of basic maternal and newborn care, so improving the health of children goes hand in hand with improving the health of their mothers (MDG 5).

Most child deaths are preventable and avoidable with the delivery of better health services. Internationally, the UK, along with the health-related UN agencies and donors, has championed the International Health Partnership (IHP) which focuses on stepping up efforts to strengthen health systems so that hospitals and health centres have well trained doctors, nurses and midwives as well as the medicines and equipment to do their job.

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CHINA

maternity benefits China shows how to speed up stubborn progress in improving maternal health. others-to-be in some of China’s most far-flung areas can approach the birth of their children with far more confidence than 10 years ago. Following an eightyear project funded by DFID, the World Bank and the Chinese Government, years of decline in rural healthcare have been turned round. And the number of women who die during childbirth has been radically reduced.

When the project was launched in 1999, its aim was to persuade pregnant women in rural areas to go to hospital to deliver their babies rather than have them at home. The trouble was, all that was on offer were shabby facilities and sub-standard medical care.

M

Centre makeovers But now local health centres received a substantial investment to make them places that people would want to visit.

A flurry of building and renovating followed, which saw rooms being heated for the first time, new toilets installed and patients’ concerns about privacy incorporated into designs. Up-to-date equipment, selected with local needs demands in mind was also introduced.

Alongside this, training sessions were held to improve the way that health workers dealt with their patients. As

well as being taught vital technical skills, they were shown how to listen better and be more responsive to expectant mothers’ needs. Special training saw staff of maternal and paediatric departments work closely with village midwives to encourage more women to deliver in hospital.

Getting the word out A programme of awareness-raising was launched to spread the word about how much safer it was to have a baby in hospital – using local media, community champions and group learning activities. The project also introduced new schemes to ensure that obstetric services were affordable.

Some of the rural counties involved in the project used their funding to subsidise hospital births, while others provided health insurance so that patients could be reimbursed part of the cost of delivery. But a ‘safety net’ scheme ensured that when the very poorest women went into labour a place in a medical institution was guaranteed.

By the time the project ended in 2007, the statistics showed that the biggest benefits were being felt by women who lived in remote parts of the country and often suffered great poverty, but had brought their children into the world in a safer, more comfortable way.

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MDG 5

Š Qilai Shen/Panos

Improve maternal health

Every year more than half a million women die from complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Over 300 million suffer from avoidable illness and disability. In the poorest parts of the world, the risk of a woman dying as a result of pregnancy or childbirth is about one in six – compared to one in 30,000 in Northern Europe. Worldwide, around 210 million women and men who say they want to use family planning can’t get good quality contraception. Little progress has been made on the target to reduce maternal deaths and providing universal access to reproductive health. A sustained, long-term investment in health services and infrastructure is required, including having skilled birth attendants who have supplies and equipment, improving access to family planning services and addressing unsafe abortion. Improving the status of women and promoting their rights are also critical. Ensuring access to reproductive health and family planning services for all could avert up to 35% of maternal deaths.

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this won’t hurt Immunisation is a vital tool in combating killer diseases, reports Louise Tickle. And coverage is improving rapidly. baby’s eyes open wide in shock. A second later its face crumples and a shriek of misery cuts the air. A mother laughs nervously and hugs her child, rocking gently to soothe it better.

And another life is saved with an injection of vaccine, delivered at the right temperature, at the right time, and before a deadly disease has had chance to devastate a family’s future.

Replicate this scene tens of thousands of times a year in poor countries across the world and astounding results can be observed.

“Globally, we are now reaching 80% of under-ones each year, versus 6070% ten years back, and less than that previously,” says Dr Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, director of the World Health Organisation’s Department of Immunisation, Vaccines and Biologicals.

“This is due to the fresh input of

A

financial resources and the attention paid to (immunisation) by partners. The GAVI Alliance has been very important.”

The GAVI Alliance (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) has been crucial in bringing together the right people to forge effective solutions to the problems in delivering immunisation programmes. The Alliance was established eight years ago at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, as a way of harnessing the money, logistics expertise, ingenuity, research experience and connections of public, private, charitable and academic sectors. GAVI support has to date, the organisation says, prevented 2.9 million potential deaths, protected 36.8 million additional children against diptheria, tetanus and pertussis, and protected 176 million more children with new and underused vaccines (hepatitis B, Hib and yellow fever).

At last September’s UN summit, convened specifically to urge action on the Millennium Development Goals, immunisation was one of the areas in which progress was made (see News).

And success in this apparently simple intervention is significant – vaccinating children has far wider beneficial implications for the development of poor countries than ‘just’ the saving of those individual lives.

“Immunisation is the most cost-effective intervention you can provide,” says Jeffrey Rowland, head of communications at the GAVI Alliance. “Not only are you enabling an economically viable future for that person, but when a country implements an immunisation programme, it has to train health workers and establish a cold chain (a system of refrigeration and distributing vaccines), in the process establishing a pathway that may not have existed before, on which you can load other interventions and services.”

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of und der er-o -one -o nees ea ach c yea ar, r, ver ersu sus

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Immunisation – the extra benefits • Preventing someone’s death means they have an economically viable future.

• Treating diseases is expensive and long term, so preventing disease then frees up money for other priorities such as reducing maternal mortality in childbirth, education and other development initiatives.

• When a country implements an immunisation programme, it trains a network of health workers who can then implement other health programmes.

© Geoff Crawford/Tearfund

From a western perspective, the fact that vaccine is cheap makes immunising children seem a simple matter, even for a country whose budget is tight.

Think about it from the perspective of a poor country in a hot region that lacks adequate infrastructure however, and the fact that such tremendous progress has been made is all the more remarkable, says Dr Okwo-Bele. “How do you get the vaccine safely into the areas that need it which may be remote? How do you keep it cold as you distribute it to places where there is patchy electricity, and where you must rely on fuel for generators which comes from private sector suppliers? How do you ensure that children get vaccinated at the due intervals?”

These are all barriers that have to be overcome before a successful immunisation programme can kick off. A different kind of difficulty arises, says CAFOD’s partner in northern Nigeria, Sister Bernadette Uko, diocesan health co-ordinator for the Kano district, when governments themselves spread misinformation.

“We had real problems a couple of years ago when the government told people not to vaccinate their children as it would make them sterile.”

The government later retracted this message, but once the word was out there, she explains, “it has been hard to convince communities otherwise”.

The Christian population, she adds, has gradually started bringing children to be immunised, but the Muslim population remains reluctant.

Immunisation may be cost-effective, but it still costs. And, more importantly, if lives are to be saved, the cash needs to be available now, rather than waiting around for rich countries to cough up their pledged aid funding as and when it suits them. This has been at the heart of the financing that GAVI has been able to offer health ministries. So getting the cashflow sorted has to be done.

Under a new system, however, money for immunisation is sourced through an innovative mechanism initiated by the UK government called the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm). GAVI issues bonds to private investors against government pledges of aid, which raises cash up front to enable immunisation to take place.

Over $1 billion was raised when the

bond was first issued in 2006, enabling GAVI to double its disbursements to health ministries who had applied, says Rowland, and the IFFIm mechanism is now being held up as a model for different kinds of aid.

The remote villages where this money gets spent – on health posts, or a generator to fuel a vaccine fridge, or on information sessions on the importance of booster injections – may feel a world away from panic afflicting global financial markets. But to the mother comforting her crying baby after the syringe needle has been withdrawn, this particular market mechanism is the difference between a healthy child and a life spent mourning a dead baby.

MORE INFORMATION www.gavialliance.org www.iff-immunisation.org

MDG 6

The downsides of not immunising, on the other hand, can be devastating, says Fayaz Ahmad, Asia health advisor for the charity Merlin. For a developing country whose health budget is already stretched, “diseases and their associated long-term health problems are very expensive to treat”.

Prevent disease in the first place, he explains, and you’ve freed up money for other priorities such as reducing maternal mortality in childbirth, which in itself has far-reaching benefits for society as a whole. Think about it a bit harder and the pluses seem rapidly to multiply: prevent the kind of long-term incapacity which can be caused by polio, for instance, and you won’t have to commit health and social services spending to support that person and their family into the future. That could free up money for your education budget, which underpins a country’s economic future.

Combat HIV & AIDS, malaria & other diseases

Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria. More than 1 million people die from malaria every year. Almost a third of the world’s population is infected with TB. Every year it kills about 2 million people.

In countries with high rates of HIV, a baby born today is unlikely to live beyond 40.

An estimated 33 million people were living with HIV in 2007.

However, these are diseases which are preventable and treatable and in recent years expenditure on fighting them has jumped – with impressive results. At the end of 2003 only 50,000 Africans were receiving anti-AIDS treatment, now more than 1million HIV-positive people are receiving life saving medication.

Several African countries have managed to slash malaria deaths in the space of a few years. In five years the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria has prevented nearly 2 million deaths through providing AIDS treatment, provided TB treatment for nearly 3 million people and distributed 30 million insecticide-treated bed nets for the prevention of malaria.

Poor people’s health is a top priority in fighting poverty because healthy people can look after their children, hold down jobs, and help their country to grow.

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stories in development hen a logging company announced it had permission to cut down 30,000 hectares of West Papuan forest and replace it with an oil palm plantation, the local people were deeply concerned.

The Moi people of the Sorong district of West Papua, a remote area of the Indonesian archipelago, depend on the rainforest for their survival. For generations they have dwelt in the forest, relying on it for food, medicine, raw materials and, in some senses, their very identity. Their name for their part of the forest expresses this spiritual relationship: “Mother Moi”.

Small wonder that, when the logging company made its announcement, while a few Moi were in favour, most were not. But how to express their outrage, question the logging company’s claims, tell the world outside of the disaster befalling them, and put their case for proper enforcement of forest law?

Step forward PT Triton, a small environmental and human rights NGO, based in Sorong with just seven staff, all ethnic Papuans. Working with the UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), supported by DFID, Triton has been learning how to gather information and testimony from locals for advocacy purposes and helped Moi villagers with research, media and advocacy skills. EIA has taught Triton and its field operatives to use digital video cameras to get footage of the loggers at work, as well as interviews with the real landowners, the local Moi people.

The resulting 11-minute film, The Tears of Mother Moi, screened at the Bali climate change conference, has become an Internet hit. The Moi people’s story and their battle to save their forest heritage is available for all to see – a shining example to other small NGOs and communities struggling to protect their environment.

After three years working with NGOs and other local people in Papua, EIA is now taking its unique brand of training and empowerment to another continent – to Tanzania. In November, a three-year project was launched in the east African country, using the experience gathered

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in Indonesia to pass on expertise to communities in Africa facing similar environmental problems.

Jago Wadley, EIA forest campaigner who coordinated recent Papua skills sharing, says empowering NGOs to look after their own environments helps foster development as well as protect local ecology and wildlife. “Our projects are not directly anti-poverty measures – we don’t buy people cows or new fishing tackle,” Wadley said. “But the ideas and skills we are planting will help people develop a culture that is more equitable, accountable and transparent.

“The idea is to empower people to take part in decision-making processes about the land and resources that affect their lives and futures. That can only be good for development – and it works.”

EIA’s investigators are known for their undercover work.

But behind this derring-do lies a sober and serious scenario: environmental crime is a serious bar to development, good governance and the health of local ecologies, affecting the smallest communities as well as nation states.

Poached wildlife means fewer tourists; illegally logged forests mean lost revenues for national exchequers; whole communities can lose their livelihood, or be affected by flooding, fires, or loss of resources. And organised environmental crime all too often fosters corruption and poor governance, leading to policy decisions that undermine community development, while enriching political elites and their commercial backers.

However, back in 1999, EIA realised that its investigations alone were not enough to combat the level of eco-crime.

In Indonesia a flood of illegal logging swept the country. In order to stem the tide, EIA had to find a way to create a network of groups with the ability to document forest crimes in their locality. With its Indonesian partner Telapak it began quietly training local NGOs in Central Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. Over three years, the programme trained 147 people in research, note-taking, advocacy, media, effective campaigning and documentary recording, as well as using video cameras, and editing suites (see panel).

This is the model for what is now

taking place in Tanzania. Here, the problems local communities and budding environmental NGOs face are already manifold. As in Papua, illegal logging is a serious problem. With 33 million hectares of forest land (about 40% of the country), Tanzania is one of the most heavily forested countries in east Africa – but up to 500,000 hectares of forest are disappearing every year, up to 96% of it illegally felled.

Logging and other environmental threats are already having a serious effect on development and the emergence of civil society. As well as threatening rural livelihoods, the huge incidence of illegal logging is causing soil erosion, watershed damage and biodiversity loss.

EIA’s new project got off the ground in November with basic training for three Tanzanian partner NGOs. Eventually the training will cascade down to local communities which are being invited to participate.

“What we are doing could have a really positive impact on development in Tanzania in the long term,” said EIA’s coordinator in Tanzania, Pallavi Shah.

“People are very enthusiastic. There is a real need for this, and once we have delivered our bit it will be up to them to run with the skills we have passed on.”

Mike Durham is a press officer at the Environmental Investigation Agency MORE INFORMATION www.eia-international.org

INDONESIA & TANZANIA

keeping log Mike Durham on how forest communities in Indonesia and Tanzania are being equipped to preserve their – and our – environment.

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Š Dave Currey/Environmental Investigation Agency/Telapak

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Ensure environmental sustainability

Poor people often have limited access to clean water and fresh air, fertile land and crops, and healthy livestock essential for livelihoods and health. They also bear the brunt of environmental degradation while being particularly dependent on natural resources such as timber, agricultural crops, fuel and minerals for their livelihoods.

Forests play a crucial role in combating climate change. They also conserve biodiversity, soil and water resources and, when managed sustainably, can strengthen local and national economies and promote the well-being of present and future generations.

Because of a rise in forest planting, landscape restoration and the natural expansion of forests, deforestation in the period 2000-2005 was reduced by about 1.9 million hectares a year against the previous decade. The total forest area designated primarily for biodiversity conservation has increased by an estimated 9 million hectares, or almost one third, since 1990, and now accounts for over one tenth of the total forest area.

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stories in development Social premium delivery around

$150

per tonne of cocoa produced on top of the guaranteed price that Kuapa Kokoo farmers earn at market.

32,275 tonnes of cocoa was produced by the Kuapa Kokoo Farmers Cooperative in 2007.

2,500 tonnes of this went through the Fairtrade scheme – yielding

$375,000 for re-investment into the Ghanaian cocoa farming communities.

1,420 tonnes of this Fairtrade cocoa was used by Divine for its chocolate production

7.7%

of Kuapa Kokoo’s cocoa earns the Fairtrade premium.

Wherever a schoolroom is built with social premium funding, up to

360 218 150

children receive an education for the first time.

wells have been sunk – each of which serves around

people – so

33,000 people now have clean drinking water. Such wells also liberate girls to participate fully in school, and families develop income-generating projects rather than travel long distances to fetch water twice a day.

Aminatu Kasim – pictured with her daughter in the village of Bayerobon 3 – is part of the Kuapa Kokoo co-operative. © Aubrey Wade/Panos

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GHANA

comfort and joy

t first glance, there seems nothing that remarkable about the small, softly spoken cocoa farmer who lives just outside Mansomem in rural Ghana – but it doesn’t take long to discover that Comfort Kumeah has a remarkable story.

For starters, as well as being a smallscale cocoa farmer, Comfort is now the most senior woman on the national executive of Ghana’s biggest and brightest cocoa farmer’s cooperative, Kuapa Kokoo. She chairs its Farmers’ Trust – the body responsible for administering the Fairtrade premium (the money paid on top of the agreed Fairtrade price for investment in local development projects) which comes from the cooperative’s trade through Divine Chocolate. Not bad for a 60 year-old mother of five in a developing economy with a deeply patriarchal culture.

Her story begins 15 years ago with the foundation of the Kuapa Kokoo Cooperative. Before that time, there was only one buyer of cocoa in Ghana, a government-owned operation. Comfort’s farm produced between 15 and 20 sacks of cocoa each year and she would have to sell all these to this monopoly; an outfit that even ‘controlled’ the scales at the heart of the cocoa trading process.

When Comfort became an early member of the Kuapa Kokoo Cooperative she got to see the scales on which her sacks of cocoa were weighed for the first time – and even to vote for the person recording these weights.

This transparency was one thing, but Comfort also began to enjoy being part of a democratic organisation too – one in which women were welcomed and empowered.

These new experiences of transparency, fairness and empowerment marked the beginning of a journey which has seen her trade her way out of poverty and into the position she enjoys today – one where, she says, “I am proud and honoured in my community.”

A vital turning point came when, in 1998, the cooperative found its

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first overseas market and became a 45% shareholder in a new Fairtrade chocolate company in Europe, Divine.

The Divine idea – a direct and equitable alliance trading arrangement between a European chocolate maker-distributor and the west African cocoa growers – was given a leg up by a DFID loan guarantee enabling Divine to raise the necessary startup finance. Over the 10 years since this groundbreaking alliance was formed, Comfort has seen the lives of her fellow Cooperative members transformed.

The Kuapa Kokoo farmers can now “speak for themselves”. explains Sophi Tranchell, Divine’s Managing Director .In fact they are increasingly being consulted about labour conditions in their own country by the Ghanaian government and beginning to shape their own history. As Mr Kwabena Ohemeng-Tinyase – the Managing Director of Kuapa Kokoo Ltd, the trading company of Kuapa Kokoo Farmers Union – says: “The farmers are taking their destiny into their own hands”.

Comfort’s story personifies what trade like this can mean for developing countries. She now earns a decent, guaranteed income for her product, and participates in the way that product is brought to market and in educating others about it. Most powerfully, she is now directly involved in administering the money flowing back into her country’s cocoa-growing communities from the Fairtrade premium – money that pays for clean water wells, sanitation, schoolrooms, better roads and new farming equipment. This is essential, because the rural communities of Ghana find themselves underresourced, despite the fact that they produce much of the country’s wealth.

There is an infectious confidence about Comfort today. It’s not difficult to see why, on a recent Kuapa Kokoo advocacy visit to the United States, she held her own on Capitol Hill and made the front cover of the Washington Post. Her remarkable story, emblematic of the difference trade can make to communities and countries.

MDG 8

On the 10th birthday of Divine Chocolate, Ghanain cocoa farmer Comfort Kumeah celebrates the benefits of more and fairer trade. Paul Northup reports.

More & better aid, fairer trade & debt relief

Developing countries need to be able to trade internationally under an open and fair system. They need more aid from richer countries to reduce poverty, as well as help with debts.Trade is not working for the poor: the world’s 49 poorest countries accounted for 0.4% of world trade in 1999, half the level of 1979.

The World Bank estimates that eliminating all barriers to trade in goods would generate $350 billion for low and middle income countries. But moves to reform global trading rules have been slow.

Big increases in aid agreed in 2005 must be spent properly. Development practitioners and partner governments agree that aid is more effective if it is spent in line with the country’s own budget priorities. It must be focused on the poorest; untied to the provision of goods or services; delivered through effective institutions; and focused on results. To date, of 41 heavily-indebted poor countries, 33 have received $48 billion in debt relief.

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Bradford Centre for International Development

Our Programmes MSc in Development and Project Planning MSc in Project Planning and Management MSc in Public Policy and Programme Management MA in International Development Management MSc in Macroeconomic Policy for Development MSc in International Economics PhD/MPhil Degree Each of the MSc or MA programmes can also be studied as a Postgraduate Certificate (60 credits) or Postgraduate Diploma (120 credits)

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Being a postgraduate student at the University of Bradford has been an unforgettable experience for me. The University of Bradford is the most multicultural place I have ever experienced.

It is a microcosm of African, American, Asian, and European worlds. I have learnt a lot about the rich and diversified cultures of the citizens of the world.

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Mamadou Camara, MSc in Development and Project Planning

Special features of our courses High-quality teaching and learning Teaching informed by research and practice Flexible course structure Transferable skills and personal development Friendly and inclusive atmosphere The Bradford Centre for International Development (BCID) is one of the UK's leading university-based centres for development studies.

The Centre has a particular reputation for excellence in professional development and training, having worked in a wide variety of countries across the world.

Contact Details BCID Postgraduate Office, Department of Development and Economic Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, BD7 1DP, UK T: +44 (0)1274 233979 F: +44 (0)1274 235280 E: bcid-pgrad@bradford.ac.uk W: www.bradford.ac.uk/acad/bcid

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Getting back to business Pakistani style – on the DFID-built Kahouri bridge. © DFID Pakistan

Behind the deadly headlines in Afghanistan, inspirational women are making slow, significant progress, reports Glyn Strong.

the everyday battle A

fghanistan has long been defined by men and war. The men have included politicians, religious leaders, foreigners and warlords. The wars have been waged by them, or on their behalf.

Four years after Hamid Karzhai was sworn in as President, and three years after the first ‘democratic’ elections for 30 years, the country is still described as a failing or failed state. It is still a battleground on many fronts. Fundamentalism, poverty, tribal rivalry, greed and the drug trade have taken their toll. Corruption is a fact of life and freedom of movement for women still a pipedream.

On her first visit to Britain, in October, to receive The Anna Politkovskaya Award for human rights activity, the suspended Afghan MP Malalai Joya told the House of Lords that while her country has received $18 billion in aid in the last seven years, “ordinary people have not benefited from it. Only 2% of Afghan people have access to electricity and, according to recent figures released by the UN FAO, 70% (18 million people) live on less than $2 a day.”

But behind this grim analysis, behind the claims and counter-claims of national and international politicians, lies the story of the ordinary women of this country, whose experiences

depict a more inspirational tale – albeit shot through with fears that funding might be withdrawn or fragile initiatives left to founder as security deteriorates. Everywhere Afghanistan’s women are both frustrated and hungry for a better life.

In Kabul their number includes Fatima and Arifa whose loans from the Microfinance Investment Support Facility for Afghanistan (MISFA) enabled them to make money from curtain making and embroidery. Loans of 10,000 then 15,000 AFS (£250 in all) made it possible for Fatima to open a shop, train and employ other women and enrol her son in English and computer classes.

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(Above) This midwifery student will use her skills to save lives in her rural village. © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

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afghanistan women Right: Victoria Parsa, Head of Midwifery at the CURE hospital admires two new, safe arrivals.

Below left: Najiba stands with her children among the flourishing results of a kitchen garden project.

Below right: Fatima (left) and Arifa run curtain making and embroidery business thanks to small loans. Š Anastasia Taylor-Lind

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3 Just days after a suicide bombing, many citizens are nervous but Fatima is upbeat and keen to show off her shop.

Not far from the ruined palace of Zahir Shah, two other women benefit from resources provided by NGO CURE International to fund its flagship hospital. Afghanistan will not meet any of the MDGs, which means that too many women will still die needlessly from pregnancy-related complications.

But if they can get to the CURE Hospital and come under the care of Head of Midwifery Victoria Parsa, 27, they are blessed. Pioneering treatment of fistulas, obstetric and gynaecological training for GPs and an excellent midwifery department is something the charity is justifiably proud of. Musuna, 27, has just given birth to quads by C-section.

Against the odds, all will survive.

In Helmand province, women attending a residential midwifery course at Lashkah Gar’s Bost Hospital, range from late teens to mid-30s and they will take skills back to their remote villages that will save lives.

Not all female empowerment is related to gender issues however. The green energy company Tolo-e Zanane-Afghan (TZA), in partnership with the Department of Renewable Energy, provides women with the chance to build on engineering training and give the country desperately needed reliable and cost-effective energy.

By harnessing wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric resources, engineers like Shafiqa, Halima and Samiya are able to earn a living and transform lives. A five-volt panel that absorbs sunlight all day can power four light bulbs for an entire night enabling children to read and study. It isn’t cheap by Afghan standards but it’s reliable and, once purchased, attracts no further running costs.

A job at the solar project for Samiya, 25, means that one day she may be able to live with her children again.

She was forced into marriage during the Taliban era by a man who spotted her in the bazaar. “One day he followed me home and told my parents ‘I want to marry your daughter’. He already had a wife and I didn’t want to marry him, but my parents were scared. He was an important man. Now I want to divorce him. I live with my parents but they have no room for my children and I cannot afford to rent anywhere.”

The tiny village of Hazrat-e-Sultan, a seven-hour drive from Kabul in Samangan province, was once the conservative stronghold of anti-Taliban guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Nothing stirs in this arid place where the sky goes on forever and the mountains stand like sentinels in

Transformed: Engineers Shafiqua, Halima and Samiya at the offices of the Department of Renewable Energy. © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

the distance. The classroom of Khadija Hadiri and her girls peer group are reached via a gateway in a mud-walled enclosure where a sign acknowledges the support of Comic Relief.

The 16 girls receive an education, instruction in handicrafts, children’s rights, women’s rights and business.

Khadija finds their bank book with everyone’s name in it. “They are saving as a group; they want to invest in a shop where they can sell their own products.”

It’s supported by Afghanaid, which is involved in 195 projects in Samangan alone. ranging from water provision, training for women, carpet weaving and tailoring to establishment of kitchen gardens and agriculture.

Afghanaid’s Women’s Coordinator in the area, Khori Gul, navigates the dusty roads that lead to the kitchen garden and home workshop of Najiba – ventures that enable the family to eat well through the harsh winter.

This cultivated plot, invisible from outside the dried mud walls of the compound that contains it, is idyllic.

It is also a thriving commercial enterprise that owes its existence to international aid and mentoring.

Attached to the home that Najiba shares with her husband Zainuddin and three children, is a 12,000 sq m garden and flourishing orchard. It is a breathtaking testament to what can be done with advice, provision of quality seed and cookery lessons. “This is the first year of the seed programme,” says Najiba. “I grow lettuces, radishes,

onions, tomatoes, leeks, and squash – all sorts of things. There is so much – already I have sold some vegetables and given some away to my neighbours.”

Her struggle isn’t against insurgents.

‘Conflict’ for her doesn’t mean rocketpropelled grenades raining down on her village. But like so many Afghan women she is still engaged in a daily battle for survival. In a country left vulnerable by war and underinvestment, access to clean water and healthy seeds is as important as ambitious building projects. It’s a slow process, but this is an area where change does not come quickly and all progress is significant.

Changed for good DFID in Afghanistan

Despite the daily struggle of life in Afghanistan, real strides have been made since the Taliban regime ended in 2001.

Under the Taliban only 1 million children went to school, all of them boys, but now 6 million benefit from regular schooling – including 2 million girls.

Today over 80% of districts have access to basic levels of health care compared with 9% in 2002. As a result infant mortality for children under five has fallen from 25% to 19% in five years. Improved health care and cleaner water and sanitation has also saved thousands of lives. Also, improvements in maternity care mean that figures for death in childbirth have been drastically cut.

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building from rock bottom After a prolonged civil war, Cambodia needed more than roads clinics and schools.

It needed local government that worked. Charlie Pye-Smith reports.

B

efore the commune council built an all-weather road linking Chambak village to the outside world, farmers only got rock-bottom prices for their crops. It was hard for them to get to market and merchants seldom ventured down the rough track that meandered towards the village through old minefields.

“I was nearly always in debt and I had trouble finding enough food to feed my family,” recalls Kong Chhork.

Since the new road was built, farmers’ incomes have significantly improved.

Now they can sell fresh cassava instead of the dried variety and net three times the price. “I’m no longer in debt,” says Chhork proudly, “and I can even afford to send my children to school”. He’s also been able to buy a two-wheeled tractor and more land.

Almost everywhere you go in rural Cambodia, you’ll meet villagers who’ll tell you how a new project – a road or a well, a community fishery or a health clinic, a scholarship scheme for poor children or an eco-tourism venture – is making a difference to their lives. All this in a country where the civil war didn’t end till the late 1990s. Nobody’s claiming that Cambodia has been transformed from a conflict-ridden state into an Asian tiger; it’s still much poorer than most of its neighbours.

But there has been real progress, and much of the credit must go to local government reforms.

When Western donors began to return to the country in 1991 – a decade and a half after the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal rule had been ended – they found a country in ruins. Their first task was to help rebuild the shattered infrastructure. But it soon became clear that

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it was more than just roads, clinics, and schools that were needed – it was vital to create government structures which would support long-term development and ‘win the peace’.

Local government reforms, supported by DFID, the United Nations Development Programme and the Swedish International Development Agency, created incentives which encouraged once warring factions to work together. They also established the administrative systems – the nuts and bolts of good governance – which have enabled the government and foreign donors to channel aid to the rural poor. “Every pound we’ve spent has mobilised a further £2 of aid from other donors,” explains DFID’s Tom Wingfield. “Between 2001 and 2006, around £100 million of foreign aid, from 10 different donors, was channeled through the systems we helped to establish.”

One of the greatest achievements of the local government reforms has been the creation of directly elected Commune councils. People who were powerless for decades, and ignored by the political and military élites, can now articulate their needs and make real choices about their future. Each Commune has an annual budget which Communes can spend as they see fit.

Most opt for basic infrastructure, such as roads, canals, classrooms, bridges and wells.

Such relatively modest projects can transform people’s lives. Take, for example, Krang Svay commune’s decision to restore an old canal.

Restoration work began in 2006. Two years later around 160 families were benefiting from a year-round supply of irrigation water. Before the canal was restored, Kao Ly used to get just one crop of rice a year, not enough to feed her large family. Now she and her husband have tripled that yield. “We no longer have to buy rice,” says Ly, “and we’re getting a surplus of vegetables to sell in the market.” They now have enough money to send all their children to school, and they can pay for medical treatment when anyone falls sick. None of this would have happened without the local government reforms.

Does this mean that the reforms have been an unqualified success? “No”, says Wingfield. Although some donors, such as the World Bank, have worked closely with central and local government, others continue to operate independently, financing projects of their own choosing, which bypass the systems set up by local government reforms.

Often these activities fail to engage legitimate elected

representatives, explains Wingfield.

Coordination between donors and the government departments responsible for overseeing the management of fisheries, forestry and land is key to making aid work effectively in Cambodia. This is why DFID and Danish Development Assistance (Danida) set up the Multi-Donor Livelihoods Facility in 2006. It means that government departments only have to deal with one donor and it significantly reduces admin costs.

The Multi-Donor Livelihoods Facility is the largest programme of its kind in Cambodia and its support to commune councils has given rise to an extraordinary range of projects and activities which reflect local priorities, and frequently involve the participation of entire communities. Nowhere have the benefits of community action been more obvious than in the coastal fishing village of Thmey. When Ham Tun arrived here in the mid-1990s he began fishing for crabs. Soon afterwards, mechanised trawlers invaded the fishing grounds and his yield of crabmeat collapsed from 15 to three kilos a day.

He couldn’t make enough money to feed his family and he fell into debt.

But in 2003, the villagers set up a community fishery and excluded the trawlers. Fish and crab stocks recovered and so did Tun’s income. The small shack where he used to live now houses his pigs, and his family has moved into a larger dwelling. “We have enough food and I am no longer in debt,” says Tun.

Far left. The construction of all-weather roads means farmers can demand higher prices.

Centre. Planting community forests on degraded land – another commune activity bringing long-term benefit.

Above. With replenished stocks, fisherman Ham Tun (centre) has crabs to shell.

All photos © Charlie Pye-Smith

MORE INFORMATION For a fuller account of Cambodia’s resurgence, read: Emerging from the shadows: Improving governance and rural livelihoods in rural Cambodia, by Charlie Pye-Smith. free copies available from DFID, email: dfidincambodia@dfid.gov.uk

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In the wake of catastrophe, food and shelter is not all that children need argues Danny Boyle director of the award winning film Slumdog Millionaire – they also need the creative means to express what has happened in their lives.

“‘Art for arts sake’ is another piece of deoderised dog ****”, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe famously fulminated.

W

hilst Achebe went too far in my view – art for art’s sake can be great fun, I’m in the movie business after all – it’s lamentable that art in the West is too often straight-jacketed into purposelessness. As a result, the arts can be dismissed as a decorative frill or a recreational distraction – an escapist and ultimately impotent indulgence to transport us from the doldrums of our comfortable Western existence.

But not in Africa, where ravaged by war, famine, disease and domestic violence, the arts are being invoked to help child victims of rape, AIDS and war to cope with and confront conditions no human was designed to endure.

Of course, as aid agencies struggle to help people caught up in rebel-held areas of the Republic of Congo, it’s impossible to deny that what’s needed most in crisis-stricken Southern Africa is hardly film, music and theatre but water, food and medicine.

But in the wake of a catastrophe, these essential staples of life are not enough to fully restore it. Through

the arts, the humanities, young children living in catastrophic circumstances need to be given something to live for and something to express their lives through.

For the past three years, I’ve helped to nurture a new arts-led voluntary initiative called Dramatic Need, which works with children living in abysmal conditions in sub-Sarahan Africa.

Last year, the organisation encountered four year-old Bongani, an orphan whose mum had died of AIDS when he was three. In some ways, he was typical, as more than a third of all young South African mothers are HIV positive. This little boy, along with 30 others, was being cared for in a crèche in a squatter camp in the North West Province of South Africa. With pitiful resources, their teacher and carer struggled to provide these kids with anything that engaged their attention. They were not learning, or behaving. The teacher told of four year olds violently attacking each other, and on one occasion, her.

Because these kids were so young, volunteers focused on basic things like helping them to make coloured playdough and paint murals on the corrugated iron walls outside their school. One day, they helped the

children to make papier-mache masks.

“Make your mask as scary as possible” was the brief. At the end of the day, as the teacher began to collect thirtyfour Cubist masterpieces – eyes askew, noses where the ears should be – Bongani, this small, typically placid four year old, went beserk, screaming, shouting, lashing out, repeating the same sentence in Tswana over and over again. His teacher translated: “He’s saying ‘Don’t take her away, don’t take my mum away again’.”

Bongani had shaped his grief into a mask of newspaper, paint and wallpaper paste. I am neither

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Main photo: Seboko Phillemon Morobi: his instinctive talents and determination transcend his background and disability. © Dramatic Need

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dramatic need

3 clairvoyant nor therapist, but I was told about the effect it had on him when he was allowed to take it home.

They said the kid practically flew.

For children – and for many adults – art plays a vital role in helping them to express feelings and difficulties that they aren’t otherwise able to articulate.

Its importance is never greater than in post-conflict conditions. Of course, water, food, and first aid are essential to deliver during a crisis, but in recovering from conflict, none of these things can restore human dignity to a person dying from disease or help a rape victim to cope with their outrage.

To suggest that the only things that maintain our humanity are those that serve our biological needs, our basic needs, seems to me palpably incorrect.

We are not just what we eat. We are also what we feel, what we fear, what we love and what we hate. Unexpressed tensions find their strength in violence.

I look at the Congo now; if there is not a means to move beyond the hatreds and resentments of the past, then we will never move past violence.

I am not suggesting that a bunch of paint-brushes dropped in Goma will help anyone. But I am suggesting that post-conflict relief should look to means of coping with and expressing individual trauma, and that the arts

– used for millennia as a method of self-expression – can play a vital role.

Whether visual or performance-based, they can be psychotherapeutic. They allow people to participate in their own recovery, help them to relocate and resuscitate their sense of self. It’s not for nothing that the arts are called the humanities; they humanise us.

Dramatic Need dance workshop for troubled teenagers in Viljoenskroon, Free State, South Africa – hosted by Oumaki Lekgetho (foreground). © Dramatic Need

Often the arts can help children to confront – as well as comprehend – deep-seated, community-held taboos, such as HIV and domestic violence, which, in some rural areas where Dramatic Need works, affect around 80% of women. In May this year, we ran a drama workshop with a group of teenagers in South Africa, encouraging them to pick a challenging topic, an issue that mattered to them. One of the girls chose domestic violence, or “anger at home” as she called it. Not unusual given its prevalence, but what was striking to the Dramatic Need volunteers was the fact that emerged later: this 14 year-old girl had chosen to use her play to dramatise her own rape, a secret she confided in a volunteer afterwards.

It was clear that she’d invested a huge part of herself emotionally, and despite breaking down several times during rehearsals, she was determined to carry on. After performing the

We are not just what we eat. We are also what we feel, fear, love and hate.

play to her unsuspecting peers, she thanked the volunteer for giving her the chance to “make people know” the horrific things to which she’d been subjected. Whilst she’d not revealed its autobiographical dimension, her drama had helped to exorcise a demon that had thrived on silence.

But the escape that artistic selfexpression provides African children is not only imaginary or psychological.

For the extremely talented, it provides a way of getting out of the ghetto, of fulfilling unimagined ambitions, and unlocking unknown creative potential.

Seboko Phillemon Morobi (see main picture on page 35), an 18-year-old boy from Viljoenskroon, Northen Free Sate, South Africa lost his right hand in an accident and his parents to HIV when he was very young. Despite being highly intelligent and having taught himself to speak English, in a dominant agricultural community with high unemployment, being disabled would mean he had little chance of finding work and would be destined to lead a life in abject poverty. When they found Seboko, he was sleeping in a neighbour’s barn, and walking six miles each day to school.

He showed an extraordinary interest to get involved in a film-making workshop Dramatic Need was running, using mobile phones to capture and cut mini documentaries about things the children cared about. This young guy – who’d never seen, let alone edited a film before – displayed an instinctive genius for shaping narrative. Dramatic Need has now secured him an internship at Design Republic, Johannesburg’s leading media agency. We are currently fundraising to help him get there.

For these African children, then, art is not an adjunct to life but truly capable of transforming it. It has an educative, enhancing, restorative, reorienting power, not despite – but precisely because – of the desperate circumstances in which its practitioners find themselves.

My film Slumdog Millionaire, tells the story of a child who escapes the slums of Mumbai. During the filming I saw plenty of what the world’s poorest children endure and, frankly, anything that lightens their load or brightens their day is important. In these rural and township parts of Southern Africa – where tragedy is the rule, not the exception – the essential, humanitarian relevance of the arts is unequivocal.

Danny Boyle is the director of the film Slumdog Millionaire, and a trustee of Dramatic Need.

MORE INFORMATION www.dramaticneed.org

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“My dream is to find a job and go back home to build my house next to my dad’s grave” “I feel like a drunk because people always look at me as if I’m stupid and I can’t think fo myself”

“I see myself as a pig, because on the street I eat anything to survive hunger but still I don’t die”

Every picture tells a story Mxolisi Sithole (left), a community artist working with street children in Durban, South Africa says you can’t put too great a value on art.

Art can be a very powerful tool, a way of connecting and communicating with people, allowing them to express their feelings, articulate difficulties and voice their concerns. Working with Umthombo (a Durban-based organisation that helps and educates street children and the public) has taught me that art can also move people, motivate them and add value to their lives. I use art to build relationships with the children, gain their trust and enable them to make positive choices in life.

Take Siyabonga, for example. Like many street children he had internalised society’s poor opinion of him as a street child. He believed he was stupid, and incapable of doing anything good. In group art activities, he refused to participate but would stay to one side and watch the rest. But one day he decided to join in, and produced a very beautiful art piece. The following day, everybody wanted to be friends with Siyabonga so he could help them with their work. Siyabonga had gained respect, and suddenly his attitude towards himself had changed.

That’s what art can do.

Some of the street children in Durban are involved in gangs. Everyone says you can’t have the ‘26’ gang and ‘28’ gang under one roof because they don’t get along. Yet, with the art programme I have managed to get both groups to work alongside each other. The animosity between them is not over, but for some children the workshops have been a tool for renewal and reflection, motivating them to take a step further. They have left the anger and hate aside: they have made peace with each other.

Whenever a child I work with makes any kind of art piece it has meaning for that child – and it is relevant either to their current situation or their past. That piece becomes their voice, expressing how they feel and sometimes their longing for help. That’s why art is essential for human development.

MORE INFORMATION http://umthomboarts.blogspot.com

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If we’re to overcome the food crisis, we need to grow more food. But how much will that cost?

Shenggen Fan and Mark Rosegrant of the the International Food Policy Research Institute make the calculations.

it all adds up

B

efore the current global food crisis, around 800 million people were hungry. Rising food prices make the problem worse, increasing the number of undernourished people by 75 million. Poor people have been particularly affected, as their limited food budgets have forced on them poorer diets.

There has rightly been a lot of attention on providing emergency relief but the crisis demands long-term strategies to guarantee sustainable food security, especially an increase in agricultural growth. We can accomplish this goal with sound government spending, but up to this point public investment in agriculture has been too low, and led to productivity growth levels which are too weak to keep pace with rising food demand.

Many developing countries have been unable to ease food shortages by increasing their own food production. This underscores the importance of developing long-term strategies so that countries can be more resilient.

We need significant, new investment in agriculture if we are to both overcome the food crisis and meet the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1) – eradicating extreme hunger and poverty by 2015.

Unfortunately, critical investments have stagnated in the places where they are most needed. This is particularly true in agricultural research and development, where a divide is occurring between developed and developing countries. As of 2000, they made up only 11% of global public agricultural research spending.

As well as spending on research, governments need to boost investments in rural roads and irrigation infrastructure, otherwise the benefits of agricultural improvements will go to waste.

Two approaches to new investment New research by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) outlines two approaches for estimating how much public investment will be needed.

1

This calculates the extra investment in agricultural growth, across all developing countries, if policy reform and agriculture-led economic growth continue. Meeting MDG1 would need $28.5 billion a year – that’s up $14 billion a year. In other words, spending on agricultural research, rural roads, and irrigation will need to double. We also need to invest in other, complementary areas like secondary education for girls, and access to clean water to help the push towards reaching MDG1. In total, that means spending an extra $21 billion.

2

This approach focuses only on sub-Saharan Africa. It calculates agricultural growth rates needed to meet MDG1, and how much investment this will need. It also factors in the effects that the non-agricultural sector will have on poverty reduction.

Our research has found that the region will need to boost annual agricultural growth to 7.5% which means government agricultural spending will have to increase to $13.7 billion a year. If sub-Saharan African countries fulfill their commitments (under the Maputo Declaration) to allocate 10% of their budgets to agriculture, the MDG1 target would require an extra $4.8 billion a year, not to mention the additional fertilizer and improved seed varieties that will be needed to reach 7.5% growth target. This will require another $6.8 billion a year, much of it subsidised by the public sector.

FOOD BILL If we are to meet MDG1 across all developing countries, we need to invest an extra $21 billion a year. In Sub-Saharan Africa, governments and development partners will need to increase their agricultural spending by between $3.8 billion and $4.8 billion a year.

Many studies have attempted to project the cost of achieving MDG1, but these estimates are the first to include agricultural growth requirements and the public resources needed to support that growth. These figures put into stark perspective the financial commitment necessary for developing countries to meet their most basic needs.

Investments like these will not only help meet MDG1, but also reduce the risk of another food crisis.

We need long-term strategic change and broad consensus to make these investments work. Unless we spend enough and improve production, there will be imbalances in world supply and demand. That could make high food prices a permanent reality.

Shenggen Fan is Director of IFPRI’s Development Strategy and Governance Division and Mark Rosegrant is Director of IFPRI’s Environment and Production Technology Division.

MORE INFORMATION www.ifpri.org

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Order one of our easy-to-use resource packs to conduct your own professional training in-house.

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Packages available: ▪ Bronze Try out our service with a one-off session (50 mins).

▪ Silver Six sessions to help you achieve a particular goal.

▪ Gold 24 sessions to share amongst up to 6 staff in your organisation for comprehensive, all-round progress.

▪ Platinum Personalised coaching by the session for senior CEOs and decision makers.

Fact sheet online at www.imainternational.com/coaching.php

Save time — no complicated planning needed High-quality — proven learning methods Great value — train your group from only £110 per pack.

Packs contain trainer notes so you can easily facilitate your session, participant handouts for full explanations, powerpoint slides to illustrate your topics, everything on CD and a FREE copy of IMA’s Icebreakers and Energisers pack to get your team communicating freely. Available by e-mail or post.

Current titles include: Teambuilding, Facilitation, Leadership, Stakeholder Analysis, Evaluating your Training, and Managing Change Successfully.

Preview online at www.imainternational.com/TrainingPacks.php

Participatory Training in People Skills and Project Management Spring 2009 Courses in Brighton, UK Apply now at www.imainternational.com/training_courses.php ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪

People Skills for Development Managers, 23-27 March Organisational Leadership, 30 March-3 April Working with Logframes, 15-17 April Results-based M&E Systems, 20-24 April Monitoring & Evaluation in Development, 20 April-1 May

‘The quality of the trainers, the course content and the overall organisation of the training...was just awesome’ Engr Muktar Usman, National Planning Commission, Nigeria ‘I have shared the tools with my team, who have greatly appreciated their practicality and relevance. The course is actually helping us in our quest to be effective managers.’

Binai Lama, SNV Bhutan ‘The knowledge and skills I gained in the course have started showing results in my performance in the areas we tackled—I did a lively presentation which was really appreciated by the audience’ Thomas Lupai, United Nations Mission in Sudan

International Ltd, Drummond House, High Street, Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, BN6 9RE, UK IMA International Ltd, IMA Drummond House, High Street, Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, BN6 9RE, UK Tel +44 (0)1273 833030 Fax +44 (0)1273 833230 Tel +44 (0)1273 833030 Fax +44 (0)1273 833230 www.imainternational.com www.imainternational.com

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