Voices

African Voices: Elizabeth Kabach

Dec 19th, 2012 5:51 PM UTC
By Guest Blogger

Elizabeth Kabach, 37
Community Health Volunteer, Farmer and Mother, Batuisa, Builsa District, Ghana

I am a community health volunteer from Batuisa. If any accidents happen, they usually call me to see if I can help. But the road to my place is very bad. Here, we don’t have cars, we only use bicycles. If anybody is sick and you want to carry them to the health centre, especially a pregnant women—she is in pain – then you have to carry her with the bicycle. The road is not fine, there are potholes. By the time you get that person to the clinic, she is tired, and even pushing the child to come out is a problem for that woman. With a good road, it will be faster to send the person, and if there are no potholes, I don’t think she will suffer as much.

Elizabeth Kabach with her family.

One day they called me to bring a pregnant woman to the clinic. We were on the way with my bicycle, and she started to deliver on the way, but the placenta was not coming out. We called the ambulance, but unfortunately it was at Sandema Hospital (far away). And the bike broke, so I had to run to town and bring a vehicle so we could bring the woman with us to the clinic, to the midwife. The woman, she delivered very well.

Health insurance is a challenge, too. Once a woman fell sick, and after about three days, they came and told me. So I visited her to see how her condition was. It was very bad, and I decided to bring her to the hospital. But she had no health insurance, so she did not want to come, because without the health insurance, you can’t pay the bill. I had to talk to her, to bring her to the clinic, to collect her card and go to Sandema and renew it and bring it to her, so that they will attend to her. It was a long distance. I asked her why she did not have health insurance. She said it was because of the yearly renewal. Every year you have to renew, and she did not have money.

Students getting to schools on bicycles, the primary source of transportation.

And that’s what I normally do. At times I go around and ask if anybody has a card and it has expired, I have to take it. Because they do not want to go because of the bus fare. So if I am going to Sandema to do something, I collect the cards, take them there and renew them and bring them back.

If we get a small clinic in this town and if we have a nurse there, it will help. When someone is sick, we can send them there. And if the problem is serious, we can refer them to the hospital. Otherwise right now, when someone is sick they lie down saying, no, I can’t walk to the clinic in town, it’s too far away.

Featuring contributions from African citizens who are living in communities affected by extreme poverty, ONE’s African Voices series will follow their progress to give a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges they face and also to track changes that occur over time. Find out more at one.org/africanvoices.

This post was kindly provided by the Millennium Villages Project

African voices: community health in northern Ghana

Oct 12th, 2012 3:21 PM UTC
By Guest Blogger

Fatahiya Yakuba, Community Health Nurse
Kpasenkpe Health Center
West Mamprusi District, Northern Ghana

My name is Fatahiya Yakuba, and I am a community health nurse at the Kpasenkpe Health Center in West Mamprusi District in Northern Ghana. I have worked here for two years, longer than any of my colleagues, and there have been long stretches, sometimes for months, where I was the only nurse here at the clinic. During that time and the years leading up to it, many people in the community lost faith in the clinic, and preferred traveling to a hospital 40 km away.

We have more staff now, but one of our biggest challenges is the state of the facility. The building is so bad. When it’s raining, the place gets flooded. We have solar power, but it’s only enough electricity for the refrigerator and some lights.

When they built this clinic, they built a latrine, but it is not in good condition. It’s broken down. So we don’t have any toilet facilities. We have no water here, so we send the cleaner to carry water from the borehole, or we do it ourselves. We don’t have beds. When people come and we want to keep them for observation they have to lie on the floor. They spread their cloths and lie on the floor.

The main health problems in this region here are malaria and diarrhea. Hypertension is also a problem: Most of our aged, when they come, they are hypertensive.

Another big problem is transportation. This health facility covers 16 communities, and many of them are not near, and during the rains some of them are completely cut off.  The roads are very bad. It can take two hours on a motorbike to get here from some of our communities. It is especially risky for pregnant women. If a woman is in labor and she is on a motorbike to come to the health center, it’s dangerous, because the road is not good. The way the moto shakes the woman, even if she is coming for antenatal services, she can deliver prematurely.

We don’t have a midwife at the health center, and as community health nurses we only do deliveries in an emergency. Under normal circumstances, we refer them to the hospital, which is far away. So many women prefer to deliver at home, and home delivery is very risky, and can lead to excessive bleeding, eclampsia, and infections.

There was one case where a woman was in labor for two days, and instead of coming to the health center–they stayed at home. It was only on the third day they decided it best to get medical help but she was too weak and couldn’t make the trip to the clinic. Her family members had to come here to call us to go there. We were able to send an ambulance, but unfortunately the baby died during transit. It is sad but we believe that if the family had come early on during labor, the baby might have survived.

Mothers often have to ride their bicycles with sick children many kilometers to get to this place. And so you can see if the child is sick and weak, and you have to ride a bicycle with the child in this heat, you can see how he will get sicker and weaker.

This is a common problem here and throughout the region. Roads are in poor condition, there are very few clinics to serve the population, and facilities, medicine and staff are lacking. But we believe these problems are solvable and improvements, though slow, are happening each day. We hope they will continue.

African Voices: Agiroi Thomas

Sep 12th, 2012 3:17 PM UTC
By Guest Blogger

This post by Agiroi Thomas was kindly provided by Restless Development

In my culture, cattle are very important. They can be used for food, trading, as a dowry or as a status symbol. My life and that of my family is dependent on cattle. As this is the case it is common for clans to raid each other’s lands and steal cattle. I became involved in this when I was younger with a few of my friends. We were young men who wanted to get married and needed cattle to pay the dowry and we knew there were people in our village that had become rich from such raids. I took part with my friends and fellow tribesmen and ended up with 20 cows.

However, raiding is a risky business. People aren’t exactly pleased when we turn up trying to take their cattle! Lots of my friends were killed in the raids and I was lucky to survive. As you can imagine, my wife was worried. She told me to stop. “I do not want to be a widow when I am still young.” she said. I’ve told my friends that my raiding days are over.

It is sad to see it come to this. In my parents’ day there were plenty of animals, people lived in harmony, raiding was less common. More raiding has resulted in less cattle and everyone is less well off because of it. Nowadays we have turned our hand more to agriculture. Instead of relying on animals alone people can grow their own vegetables and sell enough to feed their entire family. This has meant that there is less raiding; cattle are still very important, but they are not everything. I want to be able to engage in the selling and buying of animals as well as that which I have grown. Then I will be able to support my family and send my children to school so that they might one day become better educated and better leaders.

In order for this to happen we need better investment in agricultural skill development and start up capital.

I believe certain forms of contract farming can provide important benefits to the farmers, allowing them to be supported by investments without depriving them of access to their land. At best, in such a scheme, the buyer has a reliable source of supply, the farmers have a reliable buyer for crops, and the land rights are left untouched.

I therefore encourage world leaders to do two things:

• First, to reinvest in domestic agriculture to feed the rural poor, and be less vulnerable in the future to price increases for the food security.
• Second, to diversify the economies, in order to develop skills for young people.

Increases in agricultural productivity can be key if these increases benefit small farmers, who are the poorest and are still in the rural areas.

Certain investments in public goods probably need to be done by the state, because there is no – or only a weak – incentive for the private sector to step in. For instance, Uganda should develop extension services, rural infrastructures and agricultural research. They should encourage farmer field schools and support the organisation of farmers in cooperatives.

As far as investment from the private sector is concerned, it is important and can complement public investment. But it should not take the form of large-scale acquisitions or leases or land, which can cause tremendous social and political disruption and are a step backwards in improving access to land for the poorest farmers, who are often poor in part because they have too little land to cultivate.

Background information

The Karamoja region of North-Eastern Uganda has been devastated by decades of armed conflict, cattle raiding, extreme poverty, instability, drought and weakened state authority. Poverty has brought with it extreme vulnerability to HIV and AIDS risks. In an initial study in 2009, only 7% of young people reported using condoms the last time they had sex. This is alarming considering that 6.3% of the population are living with HIV and AIDS.

Also, with 78% of Ugandans younger than 30 and 84.6% living in rural areas, rural youth are the group most affected by poverty and development issues, yet they are consistently excluded from the development and decision-making processes affecting their lives.

Lutokoi’s involvement in the youth group is a great example of how young people can and will drive the development in their own country if they are given the opportunity to do so.

Featuring contributions from African citizens who are living in communities affected by extreme poverty, ONE’s African Voices series will follow their progress to give a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges they face and also to track changes that occur over time. Find out more at one.org/africanvoices.

African Voices: Kadiatu Blango

Sep 10th, 2012 4:38 PM UTC
By Guest Blogger

This post by Kadiatu Blango was kindly provided by Restless Development

My name is Kadiatu, I am 20 and have two daughters. I had my second child when I was 18. Like every mother, I want the very best for my children and do everything I can for them, but I worry that it will be difficult for them, just like it was for me.

Kadiatu and her two daughters in their community

My father died when I was very young and I was only able to go to school up until the age of six. I left my mother’s home to go and live with my uncle, but he was hardly ever around. His wife, my aunt, did not care for me as she did her own children and we did not get on. I was forced to carry out domestic chores while her children were able to attend school.

As the war became more intense, we moved to Freetown. Upon my return to the village my mother forced me to be initiated into the bondo society, a group that practices female genital cutting. I did not want to. I wanted to go to school.

My mother told me that she couldn’t afford to pay my school fees, and yet she could afford to spend a lot of money on the initiation process. Once initiated, I was forced into marriage at the age of 12 and became pregnant the same year. The baby’s father left when I was six months pregnant. I haven’t seen him since. I suffered a lot to raise the baby with no support from my mother or any other relative. Selling wood, potato and cassava leaves were the main sources of income for myself and my child.

There was no way I could continue with schooling without parental support. Later, I met another guy who fooled around with me and made me believe he could handle my problems. He started well, but then he got me pregnant and ran away to Liberia. I got my second child at the age of 18. Life is very hard and quite challenging for us coming from a very poor family but we all do our best.

It should not be like this for me and nor for my two daughters. I want them to be free to get an education, and to not be worried about marrying too young or experiencing violence. I want them to grow up to be strong young women who can make their own choices, go to school, own land and control their own lives.

Kadiatu Blango outlines a few answers to questions from Restless Development:

What challenges do women face in your community?

The main challenges faced by women are numerous to name but a few are:

• Sexual assault and harassment
• Teenage pregnancy
• Gender Based Violence
• Parental or family support
• Finances to help support them on their day to day activities
• Access to land for farming and agricultural activities

How does your family make a living?

• Through selling local condiments like potato and cassava leaves and sometimes selling firewood to make up our living on daily basis

What opportunities would you like to see for your kids?

• To be children of substance and contribute meaningful to the development of my country
• Government, CSOs, INGO and CBOs to put modalities in place to address burning issues that are affecting young girls like us bearing children
• Provide quality information to help informed us our the dangers early marriage and teenage pregnancy

What would you like to see leaders promise to do to help communities like yours?

• To tackle issues on poverty
• Teenage pregnancy and early marriage
• HIV & AIDS
• Standardized free medical health services for all children and women not only the specified category in the free medical scheme zero to five years but even those above ten.
• Improved agricultural activities and revised land tenure systems for our community for suckling mothers to have easy access to backyard farming
• Microfinance opportunities for women

What would you like world leaders to focus on that would have impact on your life?

• To tackle issues on poverty
• Teenage pregnancy and early marriage
• HIV & AIDS
• Agriculture
• Free Education for girls at all levels
• Corruption
• Youth employment

Background information

Underlying these points are high rates of teenage pregnancy. About 34 percent of women aged 15 to 19 have either already had a baby or are pregnant. This also often leads to interrupted education, reduced earning potential, poor marital outcomes and reduced health outcomes for surviving children.

Furthermore, youth unemployment is a major problem in Sierra Leone, with an estimated one-third of urban and one-sixth of rural 20- to 24-year-olds out of work, and more than 17 percent of the urban populations aged 15 to 35 years unemployed. Work opportunities are rare (around 9 percent of the workforce are formally employed), which means that stories like Kadiatu’s are mainly the norm rather than the exception.

Featuring contributions from African citizens who are living in communities affected by extreme poverty, ONE’s African Voices series will follow their progress to give a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges they face and also to track changes that occur over time. Find out more at one.org/africanvoices.

Restless Development is an agency that places young people at the forefront of change and development. It works in Africa and Asia to empower young people to take their lives into their own hand and trains, educates and inspires young people to be part of the solution. Find out more at www.restlessdevelopment.org

African Voices: Abdulai Shefu

Sep 3rd, 2012 10:42 AM UTC
By Guest Blogger

Hello, my name is Abdulai Shefu and I am the head teacher at Duu Primary and Junior High School located in the West Mamprusi District in northern Ghana. I can say that here at school we have two major challenges: There are not enough teachers and not enough students.

Ten teachers including myself are in charge of educating 570 students from kindergarten through junior high. The staff shortage is especially acute in the lower grades: Just two teachers manage 220 kindergarteners aged 2 to 6, and a single teacher is in charge of 78 students in Class 2 (second grade). The classes are smaller in the junior high grades—just 25 in the seventh level—but that’s because so many children have left school by then.

Abdulai Shefu

In fact, in July a census counted 1,128 school-age children in the community. So about 558 are still left out there when they are supposed to be in school. But when I started teaching at Duu in 2004, enrollment was much higher. The difference? Back then, a donor-supported school feeding program drew many more students, but the program ended in 2007.

The twin problems—a teacher shortage coupled with a large out-of-school population—pose a frustrating challenge, but I am determined to make the school a success. The teacher shortage would be much worse, if we did not have the support from outside NGO partners.

But the lack of school meals affects learning as well as enrollment. Some students bring food from home, and some can buy food from vendors around the school, but many have nothing to eat. Because of the hunger, at times when you are teaching after, say, 12:30, they find it difficult to understand because there is nothing in their stomachs. You can even find some of them sleeping in class.

At the same time, the school is blessed with new kindergarten and junior high classrooms, and solar lights so the older students can study after dark, all a result of donor support. But the six primary school classrooms were built in 1987 and have had no maintenance at all in the 25 years since, not even fresh paint. The desks wobble and sometimes break because of the cracked and pitted cement floors. The floor is not good. A lot of children lose their toenails from the floor.

The cost of renovation would be around 500 cedis, or about $250, per classroom. So 500 Ghana cedis times these six classrooms would be 3,000 Ghana cedis, which is beyond our school’s capabilities.

Despite the challenges I am committed to education. I’m working on a university degree to improve my abilities for the future. For now, I earn no more than a regular teacher, and though I would prefer teaching in a classroom to running the school, I know that as head teacher I can affect many more children.

If I am a teacher, I would be teaching 45 pupils in a class. But if I’m supervising ten teachers, it means I’m supervising 45 times ten. That’s why I’m a head teacher.

Featuring contributions from African citizens who are living in communities affected by extreme poverty, ONE’s African Voices series will follow their progress to give a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges they face and also to track changes that occur over time. Find out more at one.org/africanvoices.

This post was kindly provided by the Millennium Villages Project

African Voices: Memuna Sandow

Aug 31st, 2012 3:56 PM UTC
By Guest Blogger

Before I became a district assemblywoman in 2009, I had already been working with my community for years, especially the women. But I came to realize that despite my hard work, without an official position, my ability to effect change would always be limited.

If you are not an assemblywoman, if you go to any place to say something, they will ask you, “Who are you?” But that all changed when I was elected to represent the communities of Wulugu, Silinga and Nabari at the district level. Now, any office that I want to enter, I enter, and tell them what I’ve come in for, and if they can help or they can’t, they let me know.

Memuna Sandow is an assemblywoman in West Mamprusi District, Northern Ghana.

As one of only five women in the 43-member assembly, I am especially determined to getting my voice heard. Many men in the community resist the idea of women in leadership. They believe that if a woman gets a higher position, she will not respect the husband, she will be arrogant. So because of that some men deny their women to come out and be a leader. And even though my husband supported me from the start, I endured intimidations and insults during the campaign. But the women in my community helped me to persevere.

As a member of the assembly, I meet regularly with the communities to find out what they need, and then advocates on their behalf with the government and other potential supporters. The rural communities I represents have a population of 1,700, but none of them has a health center, the schools are in poor condition and lack trained teachers, electricity is not available and water sources are inadequate, especially during the dry season.

In the next few years, I envision health facilities within easy walking distance of all, sufficient and accessible water supplies, and electricity to allow the communities to connect to the world. Nowadays, it’s computers everywhere. Without electricity, you can’t work on a computer. You use the computer to browse, to find friends, to find out what’s going on in the world, and even to find sources of support for community needs.

Education is a critical component: I want to see improved school buildings staffed by trained and committed teachers, so that all children, especially girls, can be empowered with education. Ultimately, it is women who take care of their families and communities. It is so important to empower and to educate the girl child. If a boy gets money, he goes to marry, he goes to drink. But if a girl gets money, if a girl gets good education, she will build a house for the family, she will take care of the family. She will even take care of other people that come to her.

Featuring contributions from African citizens who are living in communities affected by extreme poverty, ONE’s African Voices series will follow their progress to give a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges they face and also to track changes that occur over time. Find out more at one.org/africanvoices.

This post was kindly provided by the Millennium Villages Project

The voices I want to hear

Aug 30th, 2012 6:44 PM UTC
By Jamie Drummond

I started this year travelling across Africa with Bono visiting places we hadn’t been for nearly a decade. One of these was northern Ghana.  Ghana is often held up as a success story of development.  It has a stable democracy, fast growing economy and has already met the Millennium Development Goal to halve extreme poverty. There is a buzz about the place – they are on the road out of aid. But this success has not reached everyone and northern Ghana in particular feels left out of the countrywide progress, just as it did a decade ago.

On this visit to the North we teamed up with Jeffrey Sachs and visited the West Mamprusi District where we met Fatahiya Yakubu a 24 year old nurse working hard to help the community. She is one of only two nurses serving 30,000 people from her clinic. She plainly could do with some help, as could the whole community.

That is why I’m excited that the UK’s Department for International Development has started to work in the West-Mamprusi and Builsa Districts of northern Ghana as of this week, working through the Millennium Village method and with the regional Savvanah Accelerated Development Authority. The Millennium Village project is an important experiment. Taking one village and district at a time and working across sectors – investing in education, agriculture, health, governance – at the same time.

The approach has not been immune to criticism and many lessons have been learnt over the course of the Millennium Village projects in other parts of Africa.

Building on this work it’s also crucial that this latest program for West Mamprusi District will be rigorously independently monitored through randomized control trial, publicly available data, and the results published so British taxpayers can see how their money is being spent, and what results it is and isn’t achieving.

Aid alone is not the answer to development – policies that promote transparency, good governance, trade, investment and inclusive growth are just as important – sometimes more so. But smart aid, strategically used, can save lives in the short term and help catalyze communities and national economies to thrive in the medium to long term.

The kind of independent monitoring this Millennium Village project will be scrutinized by should become more widespread practice right across the development sector. Overall, the development community needs to become more like the corporate sector in the way we experiment, face both success and failure bravely, take risks, be entrepreneurial, learn lessons and adapt. Smart aid, the kind that we advocate for at ONE, is an investment that measures results, that holds itself accountable for delivery, that offers the best independent evaluation of what works and, more importantly, honours these citizen’s real struggles by being open about what doesn’t work.

As part of our own commitment to this we are going to follow the progress of West Mamprusi District and Fatahiye and other communities and individuals across the continent. We want to know what heroines like Fatahiya  do next, and how they will seize and own the opportunities that should come about as a result mainly of their own efforts – backed by British and other nations aid programs and other polices covering things like trade and transparency. And we want to hear their concerns and criticisms of the project too. We will publish their stories on this blog.

We want to give these vital voices a platform so we can take their views directly to leaders such as those gathering at the G8 or the annual African Union Summits, to give the poorest people a chance to tell leaders what they should be doing to help end extreme poverty and hunger.

These are the voices I want to hear. I hope you do to. So stay tuned to the ONE blog for more.