SaanaSana’a, Yemen (IRIN) – Aid workers hope “shocking” new malnutrition figures from a survey conducted in western Yemen will help highlight the serious humanitarian situation in the country and prompt donors to act immediately.

Until now, aid workers say some donors have been unconvinced of the extent of the problem because of a perceived lack of evidence.

“It’s been a challenge,” one Yemen-based aid worker told IRIN. “Every time we sit down with donors, they say ‘Where are the figures? Where is the data?’”

Geert Cappelaere, head of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Yemen, said donors have asked him for more evidence that malnutrition was such a priority.

“That kind of question – each and every time – kills something in me. Why do you want children to die first before you’re going to give any credibility to a disaster looming here in Yemen?”

Results

Yemen’s Ministry of Public Health and Population, with the support of UNICEF, surveyed 3,104 households in Hudeidah Governorate in October and collected data on 4,668 children under five.

The survey found a global acute malnutrition (GAM) rate of 31.7 percent – meaning nearly one third of children surveyed suffered from either moderate or severe acute malnutrition – of which nearly 10 percent were severe cases. These figures are more than double the internationally recognized emergency threshold of 15 percent. The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of children were underweight and 54.5 percent stunted, meaning their height was too low for their age, a sign of longer-term malnutrition.

These results are consistent with recent surveys conducted in other parts of the country.

In the southern Abyan Governorate, a battleground in ongoing fighting between government troops and al-Qaeda affiliated militants, a UNICEF survey in September found a GAM rate of 18.6 percent, of which 3.9 percent were severe cases. In the northern Hajjah Governorate, a government survey in June found a GAM rate of 31.4 percent, of which 9.1 percent were severe cases. Nearly half of the children surveyed in Hajjah were underweight and 43.6 percent were stunted.

“Wherever we go, wherever we survey, wherever we assess, we come to the same conclusions,” Cappelaere told IRIN. “The levels of acute malnutrition in Yemen are incredibly high.”

Yemeni Minister of Health Ahmed Al-ansi says half a million children suffer from acute malnutrition across the country. Hundreds of thousands of farmers are at risk of losing their livelihoods because of floods and drought, he added. According to the NGO Oxfam, many Yemenis live off tea and bread.

The UN says some seven million people (a third of the population) are food insecure, meaning they go to bed hungry or do not know where their next meal is coming from. This number is expected to rise significantly when the World Food Programme carries out a new national Comprehensive Food Security Survey in January. Aid workers expect the humanitarian situation in Yemen to continue getting worse next year.

The mortality formula

While malnutrition rates in parts of Yemen are comparable to those in parts of Somalia, they have not yet resulted in the same mortality rates, only because – until recently – Yemen had a functioning, if imperfect, primary health care system, including vaccination.

But in the past 10 months, during which anti-government demonstrations led to a violent crackdown and a political crisis, some areas have seen up to 40 percent fewer children immunized, UNICEF’s Cappelaere said.

Combine the high rates of malnutrition, the low levels of vaccination and sporadic outbreaks of diseases like measles, and “a disaster may be around the corner.”

The Hudeidah survey found that three in every four children suffered from diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections or fever in the two weeks preceding the survey; and 2.5 percent of mothers reported symptoms of measles in their children in the past three months. The survey found measles vaccination coverage of 74 percent in Hudeidah, well below the 90 percent coverage rate needed to prevent an outbreak.

“Why is it that the international community gets mobilized primarily when it sees the dramatic outcome of a situation or a crisis that we could have seen coming for many, many years?” Cappelaere asked. “This is not a blaming and shaming [exercise], but this is a collective question we need to ask ourselves.”

The UN has appealed for US$154 million for food and agricultural programmes and $70 million for nutritional programmes, the largest sectoral demands amid an overall appeal of $447 million for Yemen in 2012.

Government capacity

Government officials admit dealing with the dramatic levels of malnutrition will be a challenge for the interim Yemeni cabinet which emerged after a peace deal signed in late November pulled the country back from the brink of civil war.

The cash-strapped government is charged with organizing presidential elections by February 2012, while trying to maintain stability. Pro-democracy protesters, and an armed opposition, had been clashing with government forces on and off since February 2011. The peace deal has brought some calm to the capital Sana’a and the second city Taiz, but rebels, separatists and al-Qaeda affiliated-militants are still opposing the government in different parts of the country.

Majid Al Jonaid, deputy minister of health, said one of the government’s priorities is to address issues affecting the daily life of Yemenis, including malnutrition. The government plans to open clinics and run education campaigns, as part of a multi-sectoral national government strategy on malnutrition approved by the cabinet last year, before the latest crisis.

But “it depends mainly on the availability of resources and the overall situation,” he told IRIN. “We will start our work with the hampered resources that we have.”

Still, Al Jonaid said he was concerned malnutrition may not get the attention it deserves amid competing government priorities and big constraints. For example, the Ministry of Health was virtually shut down for weeks because of insecurity in and around the building.

Cappelaere said it was unrealistic to expect the government to take over much of the international community’s humanitarian work in the next year.

Long-term effects

The economic situation in the country has been set back 5-10 years by the events of this year and Yemen will continue having substantial humanitarian needs for 3-5 years, according to the UN humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, Jens Toyberg-Frandzen. Cappelare said the country will probably continue needing some form of assistance for two to three decades.

Addressing malnutrition is a complex task, as the problem relates to poverty, lack of education, bad sanitation, and cultural practices, like chewing khat and resisting exclusive breastfeeding. In Hudeidah, only 9 percent of infants under six months were exclusively fed breast milk.

The Ministry of Health report from the nutrition survey recommended establishing out-patient therapeutic programmes in community health facilities and considering “radical strategies” like blanket, rather than targeted, distribution of supplementary food.

Investments in lifesaving humanitarian assistance, as well as longer-term development work, are required immediately, Cappelaere said, to prevent both high mortality rates and longer-term effects of chronic malnutrition, like retardation in cognitive development, which will affect the country’s ability to move forward.

“Yemen is entering a new phase in its history,” said Pete Manfield, deputy head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Yemen, “but it’s critical that humanitarian needs are met in 2012, not only to prevent the loss of life, but also to support the stabilization of the country.”

“We appeal not to let Yemen become another catastrophe,” Toyberg-Frandzen added.

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TA REACH, Cambodia (IRIN) – Cambodian efforts to contain the spread of malaria have been strengthened by a pilot project using text messaging and web-based technology.

“My work is definitely easier,” said Sophana Pich, 41, one of 184 village malaria workers (VMWs) now trained in three provinces (Kampot, Siem Reap and Kampong Cham) since the project launch earlier this year.

She typically diagnoses five to six cases of the often deadly virus each month during the rainy season between May and October.

“Before, it would take a month before this information was reported to the district health level. Now it’s instantaneous,” the mother-of-three said from her home in Ta Reach, a village of 200 households in Kampot Province, about 150km southwest of Phnom Penh.

There are close to 3,000 VMSs in 1,500 villages across Cambodia, described by many as the “foot soldiers” in the country’s fight against malaria.

As part of a larger US$22.5 million malaria containment effort launched by the government in 2009 and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , the volunteers receive three days of training in the early diagnosis of malaria and treatment.

In addition, they are given a bicycle, a pair of boots, a bag, a flashlight and a cooler box for medicines, as well as a small travel allowance.

Under the pilot scheme now under way, they are also given mobile phones.

Using FrontlineSMS – an open-source software enabling users to send and receive text messages with groups of people – VMSs can now report in real time all malaria cases in their villages to the Malaria Information and Alert System in Phnom Penh with a simple text message, including the patient’s name, age, location and type of virus.

That information is then disseminated to local, district and provincial health offices, with coordinates mapped on the country’s national malaria database using Google Earth.

Mobitel (Cambodia’s largest telecommunications company) provides free SIM cards and free SMSs, making the system cost-effective and easy to maintain.

“Without doubt, this is an important tool to quickly identify malaria cases and respond effectively,” explained Pengby Ngor, data manager for the Malaria Consortium , an NGO working closely with the government’s National Malaria Control Centre that helped develop the database.

“This is a pilot project which ultimately could be used throughout the country.”

That is good news for Cambodia, where malaria remains endemic; the government hopes to eliminate the disease over the next 15 years.

“We need a series of campaigns and activities so that malaria will go down towards the zero rate of malaria transmission by the year 2025,” Prime Minister Hun Sen told participants at this year’s 32nd National Health Conference in March.

Challenges

But while there is progress in that direction, including falling numbers of people getting sick or dying from malaria across much of the country, key challenges remain.

According to the Ministry of Health , the number of deaths from malaria fell by 53.8 percent in 2010 from the previous year.

At the same time, however, Cambodia has reported an increased incidence of multi-drug resistant falciparum malaria, one of four types of the disease, along parts of its 800km border with Thailand since 2009.

There health officials have expressed concern that the malaria causing parasite is becoming increasingly resistant to the most effective drug they have for treating it, Artemisinin.

“Here in Cambodia, we’ve found that the drug is less effective,” Najibullah Habib, malaria containment project manager for World Health Organization (WHO), confirmed in Phnom Penh, specifically in the area described as Zone 1.

In Cambodia, some 270,000 people live in Zone 1, comprised of Pailin Province, as well as parts of Battambang, Pursat and Kampot provinces.

Another 110,000 people live in the Thai border areas of Trat and Chanthaburi provinces.

“This is the epicentre of drug-resistant malaria,” Habib explained.

To counter that, Cambodian and international efforts are working on the ground to prevent the drug-resistant parasite from spreading elsewhere in the region, focusing on prevention, treatment and testing efforts at the village level.

“The VMWs are all over Zone 1,” the WHO official said. “They’re an essential tool.”

In 2008, prior to the distribution of more than half a million bed nets, as well as the VMW intervention, Zone 1 averaged more than 100 cases per month. Today that number is between 10 and 15.

According to WHO, in 2000, the number of treated malaria cases in Cambodia stood at 129,167 with 608 deaths. In 2010, that dropped to 56,217 and 135 deaths, down 78 percent.

About 3.3 billion people – half the world’s population – are at risk of malaria. Every year, this leads to about 250 million malaria cases and nearly one million deaths. People living in the poorest countries are the most vulnerable, the world health body says.

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BLANTYRE, Malawi (IRIN) – HIV-positive civil servants in Malawi are unhappy with the government’s announcement that it would stop providing a cash grant to help improve their diet.

In June, the government said the scheme would be stopped and replaced with food packages. According to Mary Shawa, principal secretary in the office of the President and Cabinet responsible for HIV/AIDS and nutrition programmes, the cash grant programme “was grossly abused, with hundreds of workers claiming to have HIV in order to cash in on the payment”.

Shawa said most civil servants were not using the money for its intended purpose to buy extra food and improve nutrition: “Some people used the money to buy beers and go out with prostitutes, further spreading the virus.”

The cash grant was part of the civil service workplace programme aimed at improving nutrition among people living with HIV, most of whom receive a monthly salary of less than US$100.

Aston Chirwa, an office assistant in one of the government departments in the commercial capital Blantyre, told IRIN/PlusNews that the $35 monthly allowance had been a lifeline for him and his family, as his meagre income was barely enough to pay his daughter’s high school fees. “The allowance was really making a big difference to my survival.”

Chirwa is among nearly 40,000 civil servants with HIV, out of about 170,000, who have been receiving the allowance since 2007.

“The money was not only meant to buy food, I would use it for transportation to Chiradzulu District hospital where I receive ARVs,” he added.

AIDS activists have questioned the government’s decision to introduce the food hamper, which is equivalent to the previous monthly allowance.

“It’s tricky because it’s not automatic that everyone will like the food to be given. We are human beings too and have various tastes,” said Chirwa.

Questions

The president of the Civil Servants’ Union, Elias Kamphinda Banda, described the government’s switch to food parcels as an insult to the privacy of HIV-positive civil servants.

“It’s like the government was tricking these people just to expose them to issues that were to do with confidentiality. It’s too confidential for one to declare his or her status. And for the government to come out and say that ‘we have changed our mind’ is very unfortunate.”

Last month, at least 18 people were killed during protests sparked by the country’s growing economic crisis as well as widespread dissatisfaction over the government’s handling of the problem. Malawi, dependent for 40 percent of its budget on donors, has fallen out of favour with western donors following concerns about human rights and poor governance, and funding has either been withheld or not renewed. The result has been new taxes and adjustments to existing ones. The government has also announced a freeze in the recruitment of civil servants and reduction in foreign travel by the president, ministers and civil servants.

Banda said that crates of eggs and cooking oil were nothing compared with the allowance. “I think government is coming up with some funny decisions because of a lack of consultations. We wonder about the allegations because we have never sat down with government to discuss any form of misuse of the money by HIV civil servants. That is a lie.”

In addition, there was no guarantee that the food packages would not be abused. “How sure are you that if you are giving the commodities one cannot exchange them for beer or give it to prostitutes?”

Half of Malawi’s 13 million citizens live on less than $1 a day and are unable to meet their nutritional needs. About- percent of the country’s population is HIV-positive, and the government estimates that it is now providing free ARVs to 366,000 people.

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Kinshasa, Dr Congo (IRIN) – Urban farming in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is providing a livelihood for thousands of city dwellers, with vegetables bringing in good money for small growers and helping to alleviate high levels of malnutrition nationally, agricultural officials say.

The demand for vegetables and the high prices they command in DRC cities – up to US$4 per kilo – has pushed many jobless residents into becoming small-scale growers.

Most of the green spaces along the roadsides of the capital, Kinshasa, have been transformed into small farms. City farmers now grow 122 percent more produce than they did five years ago, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO is supporting gardeners in five main DRC cities with a $10.4 million urban horticulture project to increase their productivity and improve their farming skills.

“The program, started as a response to mass urban migration following a five-year conflict in the eastern DRC, now assists local urban growers to produce 330,000 tons of vegetables annually,” FAO said in a statement. “In addition to food, the program has also helped provide employment and income for 16,000 small-scale market gardeners.”

Sebastien Mbuku, previously a school teacher in Kinshasa, said teaching only paid the bills for one week of the month. Unable to make ends meet, he turned to farming amaranth – a leaf vegetable – and spinach on 16 square meters of land.

Mbuku said he can now afford to put meat on the table to feed his wife and five children, and cover school fees. “Working as a small vegetable grower has become like any other respected job,” Mbuku said.

Reduced malnutrition?

The urban farmers sell 90 percent of what they produce in urban markets and supermarkets, according to FAO, helping to feed a swelling city population as Congolese leave the countryside in search of security.

“When production has doubled or tripled we can confidently says it’s had an impact on reducing malnutrition, as vegetables are available more cheaply on the market and people can eat them more frequently,” said Ndiaga Gueye, FAO’s country director in the DRC.

Although the project has contributed to improving nutrition in urban areas, Gueye said there was still a lot of work to be done. “No one can sell the illusion that our project has eradicated malnutrition,” he said.

A 2009 survey by Programme National de Nutrition, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) showed alarmingly high levels of wasting among urban and rural children.

According to a Multiple Indicator Survey published by agencies in September 2010, 24 percent of children in the DRC under five are underweight; 43 percent are stunted; and 9 percent are wasted.

Micro-finance

The burgeoning incomes of small vegetable growers, who sometimes earn 200 or 300 percent profits, have made them more attractive to micro-finance institutions like the DRC-based FINCA, which supports small-scale credit loans.

FINCA said 99.9 percent of the credit they have given to vegetable growers has been paid back in full and on time.

“At first I doubted the ability of vegetable growers to pay back credit,” said Dick Mabiala, a credit agent at FINCA. “But I changed my mind when a lady growing fruit and vegetables took a $300 credit and came back to deposit $1,000 worth of profits into her account. The woman was only using two hectares of land for her enterprise.”

Farmers have seen their incomes increase dramatically. In Kinshasa and in the town of Lubumbashi, the average annual income of each farmer increased from around $500 in 2004 to $2,000 in 2010. In Likasi town, it rose from $700 to $3,500. There have been similar increases in other cities, according to the FAO statement.

Mabiala knew of vegetable growers who put themselves through college with the income they got farming. But after their studies, it was back to the land.

“After ending university studies they tell you they cannot look for an office job just for the prestige of wearing a clean shirt and tie, when they could be making $600-800,” he said.

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Johannesburg, South Africa (IRIN) – The current droughts in Europe and floods in the USA threaten yet another rise in cereal prices in the next few weeks, and serve as a reminder of the changing dynamics of the global food supply system.

Aid agency Oxfam in its new report, Growing a Better Future, says the global food system is ” broken” and warns that we have entered “a new age of crisis where depletion of the earth’s natural resources and increasingly severe climate change impacts will create millions more hungry people.”

It builds on projections by US-based think-tank International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to predict that food prices of staple grains will more than double in the next two decades.

Using economic modeling based on alternative future scenarios for agricultural supply and demand that take into account the potential impact of climate change, IFPRI has been projecting crop yields, food prices, and child malnutrition up to 2050 and beyond.

“Climate change, high and volatile food and energy prices, population and income growth, changing diets, and increased urbanization will put intense pressure on land and water and challenge global food security as never before,” said Mark Rosegrant, director of environment and production technology division at IFPRI.

“If agricultural production and policymaking continues down its present course, there could be severe consequences for many poor people in developing countries.”

In another 40 years traditional suppliers of certain cereals will change and so will food preferences in Asia as economic prosperity will wean people off a grain-rich to a more diversified diet.

“For Asian countries, we expect rice consumption to continue to decline – as it has been in Vietnam – from 168 kilograms per capita in 2000 to 119 kilograms per capita in 2050,” said Rosegrant.

Asian countries could end up exporting bigger quantities of rice mostly to African countries. The demand for staples will grow in least developed countries, but demand for maize and other coarse grains to produce biofuels will grow substantially in developed countries as well, the projections show.

But growing demand and limited potential to increase supply will force Asian economies, including India and China, to become net importers of grains and meat if there are no changes in the pressures on the food supply and policies, according to Rosegrant.

The USA, Canada and Russia will be able to sustain their production and remain big exporters. Australia’s performance depends on weather conditions which have affected yields dramatically in recent years. Brazil and Argentina will become increasingly important exporters. But food prices could go up 70 percent by 2050, he says.

Global prices are already high with a lot of uncertainties even over the next few months. “During the last food price crisis in 2007-2008, many of the major suppliers of staple grains were affected by environmental factors – as we have now,” cautioned Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the Intergovernmental Group on Grains at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The last crisis pushed up the number of hungry by almost a billion.

So how do you repair the “broken” food system? Three experts give us their five top policy fixes:

Christopher Barrett, a food aid expert, who teaches development economics at Cornell University in the USA:

– More money for research: Substantial expansion of investment in agricultural research capacity, especially in low- and middle-income countries. “The food price crises of recent years are the bitter harvest of a generation’s underinvestment in agricultural research to ensure that productivity growth keeps pace with demand growth.”

– Investment in renewable energy: Spend more to power irrigation in Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America. Provide low-cost liquid fuels to reduce transport costs and food marketing margins in more remote rural areas: and reduce diversion of prime agricultural lands into fuel crop production. “The energy crisis is linked to the food crisis and will become more closely coupled in the years ahead.”

– Reduce bureaucratic red tape and investment restrictions: This will improve the flow of money in agricultural marketing systems that could reduce large post-harvest food losses. “The world produces ample food; it just cannot distribute and store it well so as to meet needs equitably and efficiently.”

– Diffusion of genetically modified crop varieties: Help low and middle-income countries enact appropriate bio-safety standards to expand the use of genetically modified (GM) varieties that have proved effective in reducing losses to pests, increasing yields, and/or reducing agro-chemicals use.

– Reform US food aid and improve coordination among donors: This will eliminate restrictions that add costs and impose delays which undermine the efficacy of the world’s emergency food assistance system.

Mark Rosegrant, IFPRI:

– Increase investments in agricultural research to improve crop and livestock productivity; promoting GM crop varieties which have proven effective and are considered safe.

– Greater spending on agricultural infrastructure, especially rural roads and irrigation.

– Improve access to diversified, nutritious food and safe drinking water with good service delivery and safety nets.

– Spending on girls’ education, which has a direct bearing on food security.

– Promote the manufacture of ethanol – biofuel from sugarcane rather than from staple grains. “This will not only reduce pressure on grain to be used as feed for biofuel but provide a cheaper and greener alternative to fossil fuel.”

Gonzalo Fanjul, Oxfam’s senior strategic adviser:

– Manage the food system better by regulating volatile commodity markets and making them more transparent; bolster regional and national food reserves; and put an end to biofuel policies which reward companies which divert food into fuel.

– Invest in small-scale producers and protect their rights to land and other natural resources. Five hundred million small-scale farms in developing countries already support one third of humanity and offer the greatest potential to sustainably boost global yields.

– Recognize the crucial role women play in feeding the world by ensuring women are in positions of leadership in institutions where agricultural, food security and climate change decisions are made.

– Deliver a global deal that will ensure the world avoids the worst impacts of climate change, and helps poor producers adapt to changes already in the system.

– Introduce national and international rules that will stop investors and corporations undertaking irresponsible large-scale land investments which undermine vulnerable people’s access to resources and food security.

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MANSA, Zambia (IRIN) – An absence of boarding facilities for high school pupils in Zambia’s northern province of Luapula is forcing children to share lodgings with their peers – unsupervised by adults – leading to teenage pregnancies and HIV/AIDS infections.

Many children live a long way from school and prefer to rent accommodation nearby. Grade 12 pupil Dorcas, 17, stopped attending the Mabumba High day school, about 20km east of provincial capital Mansa, after becoming pregnant.

“We were staying the three of us [girls], then we started sharing the house with three guys and that is how we paired ourselves. We just wanted some form of emotional support; life is really tough out there. So, the whole of last year we were living together with the guys and would have [unprotected] sex almost every night but everything was OK,” she told IRIN.

“When I missed [my periods] early this year, I decided to go to Mansa General Hospital for a [pregnancy] test and the results were positive… I left school because everyone was laughing at me. They were saying ‘this one is a married woman’ after they knew [of my pregnancy].”

Mabumba High School enrols some of its 690 pupils from as far away as the capital Lusaka and about 500 of the children are responsible for their own accommodation arrangements.

“We couldn’t find a place in a proper boarding school in Luapula. Everywhere we went, we were told ‘the places are full’, and that’s how my mother decided to bring me here. She sends money every month for rentals, food and groceries,” Margaret Chanda, 16, a Grade 12 pupil from Ndola in the Copperbelt and attending Mabumba High School, told IRIN.

She shares a two-room grass-thatched hut with her friend and pays US$5 a month.

Wamunyima Chingumbe, a Health Ministry director in Mansa District, said the absence of boarding facilities at day schools had led to teenage pregnancies and made pupils vulnerable to contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs). After malaria, STIs were the most common ailments recorded at makeshift boarding high schools.

Higher STI rates

“In terms of HIV/AIDS and other STIs, quazi-boarding schools record higher numbers of pupils with STIs compared to schools with [official] boarding facilities,” Chingumbe said.

“Mabumba High School once recorded 13 HIV-positive female cases and four HIV-positive male cases out of an enrolment population of about 600 pupils,” Chingumbe said.

“On the other hand there are very few cases of HIV-positive/STI cases recorded [at official] boarding schools, and this could be attributed to the fact that pupils are confined in one place and dormitories are out of bounds for the opposite sex,” he said.

Government investment in universal primary education has not been matched in the high school sector, and the 2008 scrapping of qualifying examinations for Grade 10 has put more pressure on school facilities, with more and more pupils continuing their education. The province has 23 high schools, six of which are day schools.

Elizabeth Mushili, coordinator of the Mansa District Women’s Development Association, a gender-based advocacy group, wants the government to equip all schools with boarding facilities.

‘Free-range lifestyles’

“These children adopt confused, free-range lifestyles. We are of the view that government should have been more considerate and constructed dormitories for both girls and boys at these high schools. Or better still, they [government] should have built more day high schools to cut down on the distances [between the schools].

“Early pregnancies are very common because of lack of parental care; no one is looking after these children and, hence, they can do anything,” Mushili told IRIN.

“We have pupils, especially girls, who get abused by male adults for sexual exploitation; we have many children around 13,- years carrying their own children and dropping out of school in Mabumba and Chembe [another day high school in Mansa where children use makeshift accommodation],” she said.

Luapula is one of Zambia’s poorest provinces: it has a poverty level of 75 percent, compared with the national average of 64 percent. According to UNAIDS the national HIV prevalence for sexually active adults aged 15-49 is-.3 percent.

“Many of us end up sending our children to these weekly-boarding schools like Mabumba because we have no money to send them to boarding schools. We are poor,” Joseph Mutale, a small farmer in Mansa, told IRIN.

“I give my son a tin of maize [for grinding into the staple maize meal] every month and 10,000 kwacha [US$2] to buy relish but he keeps on complaining about other things that I can’t afford to give him,” he said.

Pupils attending boarding high schools pay up to $300 for a three-month term, but day schools like Mabumba only charge $40 a term.

Defilement

Zambian law classifies sex with anyone under 16 as defilement, and is punishable by a prison term of up to 25 years.

“We have many children below 16 years who are very sexually active. It is defilement [of a minor] but she will not see it that way. There are many defilement cases going on here; they are contracting many diseases especially STIs; some are falling pregnant,” a teacher at Mabumba High School, who preferred anonymity, told IRIN.

Luapula’s provincial education officer Florence Kanchebele told IRIN the government had begun constructing boarding facilities at two day schools – in Ponde and Lukwesa, and acknowledged the problems associated with learners renting accommodation close to schools. She said some pupils engaged in “what may be termed as ‘marriages of convenience’ with other pupils and sometimes, community members due to economic reasons”.

The school authorities were still responsible for their children outside school hours and landlords were “instructed to protect the pupils, report to the school any bad behaviour by such pupils, and sensitize the pupils on the dangers of HIV/AIDS, STIs and early pregnancies,” she added.

Ruth Mwewa, a landlord for several pupils from Mabumba High School in the past, told IRIN: “No teacher has ever approached me to talk about these pupils’ behaviour. Two of the girls I have kept here got pregnant and stopped school. The girls are especially a big problem because they are forever found with boys or married men who come with cars.”

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CAPE TOWN, South Africa (IRIN) – Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.

By the age of eight, school children from the most affluent 20 percent of South Africa’s population are already significantly out-performing children from poorer backgrounds, according to new research by the Social Policy Research Group at Stellenbosch University.

The study, “Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap”, found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.

Using newly available data sets, including those linking information on income with numeracy skills, the report analyzed how low-quality tuition in the post-apartheid education system is perpetuating “exclusion and marginalization”.

The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.

Yet the top 20 percent of state schools – which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding – enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.

South Africa’s status as one of the wealthiest countries on the continent has not helped its educational performance – the poorest 25 percent of students ranked-th out of 15 sub-Saharan countries in reading performance, and 12th for mathematics, according to the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality surveys of 2000 and 2007.

“When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources,” the report on the study noted.

Nomusa Cembi, spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), whose nearly 250,000 members make it the country’s largest public sector union, said many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid’s “Bantu” education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in’94 when a new democratic government came into power.

There are a host of other problems besetting schools in poor areas. According to Yoliswa Dwane, spokesperson for the education advocacy group, Equal Education, over 2,000 schools had no piped water supply, 3,600 lacked electricity, and over 90 percent were without libraries or a functioning laboratory.

SADTU and other teachers’ unions have opposed national calls for education to become an essential service, which would prevent strike action. In August 2010 a teachers’ strike closed schools across the country for three weeks, contributing to a public perception that SADTU and some of its members did not have learners’ interests at heart.

“The focus needs to be on teachers’ development,” said Cembi. “We’ve had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers.”

Many teacher training colleges were closed in the late’90s after new legislation required them to merge with existing higher education institutions. Plans to transform the training colleges into university-level institutions have not materialized, leaving thousands of teachers without any specialized training.

In recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.

According to the report, insufficient teacher knowledge is a problem, with many teachers scoring poorly in basic reading and mathematics tests.

A large number of changes to the national curriculum, beginning with the’97 adoption of Outcomes Based Education, many subsequent adjustments, and the final decision -announced in 2010 – to scrap it, have further stressed an already failing system.

Equal Education’s Dwane said the debate needed to move past “blaming teachers” and towards how to achieve a “serious commitment to a national education programme that would spell out what needs to be done over the next 20-30 years”.

Such a plan would have to include an assessment of existing teacher knowledge, followed by a national teacher training programme, but Dwane stressed the need to consider factors beyond teacher knowledge, including teacher motivation, and a lack of community and parental involvement.

Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.

“For the parents to know how their child is performing, and by proxy to know how the teachers are performing, is very helpful,” said Ronelle Burger, one of the study’s lead researchers. “Very few top-down measures can be as effective as getting the people who are affected to act to correct the problems.”

The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that education.

“The labour market is at the heart of inequality, and central to labour market inequality is the quality of education,” they concluded. “Policies that address inequality by intervening in the labour market will have limited success as long as the considerable pre-labour market inequalities in the form of differential school quality persist.”

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– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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CAPE TOWN, South Africa (IRIN) – Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.

By the age of eight, school children from the most affluent 20 percent of South Africa’s population are already significantly out-performing children from poorer backgrounds, according to new research by the Social Policy Research Group at Stellenbosch University.

The study, “Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap”, found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.

Using newly available data sets, including those linking information on income with numeracy skills, the report analyzed how low-quality tuition in the post-apartheid education system is perpetuating “exclusion and marginalization”.

The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.

Yet the top 20 percent of state schools – which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding – enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.

South Africa’s status as one of the wealthiest countries on the continent has not helped its educational performance – the poorest 25 percent of students ranked-th out of 15 sub-Saharan countries in reading performance, and 12th for mathematics, according to the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality surveys of 2000 and 2007.

“When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources,” the report on the study noted.

Nomusa Cembi, spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), whose nearly 250,000 members make it the country’s largest public sector union, said many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid’s “Bantu” education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in’94 when a new democratic government came into power.

There are a host of other problems besetting schools in poor areas. According to Yoliswa Dwane, spokesperson for the education advocacy group, Equal Education, over 2,000 schools had no piped water supply, 3,600 lacked electricity, and over 90 percent were without libraries or a functioning laboratory.

SADTU and other teachers’ unions have opposed national calls for education to become an essential service, which would prevent strike action. In August 2010 a teachers’ strike closed schools across the country for three weeks, contributing to a public perception that SADTU and some of its members did not have learners’ interests at heart.

“The focus needs to be on teachers’ development,” said Cembi. “We’ve had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers.”

Many teacher training colleges were closed in the late’90s after new legislation required them to merge with existing higher education institutions. Plans to transform the training colleges into university-level institutions have not materialized, leaving thousands of teachers without any specialized training.

In recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.

According to the report, insufficient teacher knowledge is a problem, with many teachers scoring poorly in basic reading and mathematics tests.

A large number of changes to the national curriculum, beginning with the’97 adoption of Outcomes Based Education, many subsequent adjustments, and the final decision -announced in 2010 – to scrap it, have further stressed an already failing system.

Equal Education’s Dwane said the debate needed to move past “blaming teachers” and towards how to achieve a “serious commitment to a national education programme that would spell out what needs to be done over the next 20-30 years”.

Such a plan would have to include an assessment of existing teacher knowledge, followed by a national teacher training programme, but Dwane stressed the need to consider factors beyond teacher knowledge, including teacher motivation, and a lack of community and parental involvement.

Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.

“For the parents to know how their child is performing, and by proxy to know how the teachers are performing, is very helpful,” said Ronelle Burger, one of the study’s lead researchers. “Very few top-down measures can be as effective as getting the people who are affected to act to correct the problems.”

The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that education.

“The labour market is at the heart of inequality, and central to labour market inequality is the quality of education,” they concluded. “Policies that address inequality by intervening in the labour market will have limited success as long as the considerable pre-labour market inequalities in the form of differential school quality persist.”

lm/ks/he

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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Having Botox injections to smooth facial wrinkles dulls people’s ability to read emotions in others, said two US psychologists in a study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science recently. Lead author David Neal, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and his co-author Tanya Chartrand, marketing and psychology professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina, carried out the study…

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DADAAB, Kenya (IRIN) – In one of the largest and oldest refugee settlements in the world, education is a luxury denied most of the 90,739 children who live there.

Set up at the outset of Somalia’s civil war in’91 to accommodate 90,000 refugees, three camps near the northeastern Kenyan town of Dadaab – Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley – are now home to more than three times that number, and persistent conflict in Somalia, from where 95 percent of the refugees originate, means the population grows daily.

According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the primary school attendance rate is 43 percent while in secondary schools the rate is just 12 percent. Across the three camps, there are’ primary schools, funded by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). In addition there are 11 private, fee-paying primary and six secondary schools.

In 2010, some 2,500 refugee children sat for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education. Of these, barely a fifth won a place at secondary school. National statistics for Kenya are considerably higher, at 82 percent and 49 percent for primary and secondary attendance respectively. The picture is far worse in Somalia itself, , where primary school enrolment is 20 percent, with fewer than 10 percent going on to secondary school, according to UNICEF.

In Dadaab, money is the main problem. Despite being classified as a fundamental human right and recognized as providing much-needed psychological, physical and cognitive protection in emergency situations, education is the most underfunded sector in humanitarian aid. According to a recent report by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), only 2 percent of total humanitarian assistance is spent on education.

In 2010, UNHCR received only 20 percent of the US$30 million required to educate refugee children. Worldwide, according to UNICEF, approximately 75 million children are not enrolled in primary school. Half of them live in countries affected by conflict.

“The international community is failing Somali refugees by not prioritizing access to education,” Elizabeth Campbell of Refugees International (RI), an advocacy group, told IRIN. “The main reasons are lack of funding and lack of trained teachers. Even if there were more funding, there is a capacity problem that will be more challenging to address.

“Also, the Kenyan authorities have made it difficult to expand educational opportunities in Dadaab by not providing additional land required to build new structures.”

According to a 2010 report by UNICEF assessing education in Dadaab’s refugee camps, primary schools are stretched far beyond the standards for quality education, with each class accommodating 80 pupils instead of the stipulated 45. The schools also “have few Kenyan qualified teachers with nine trained and 800 untrained teachers in primary, 50 untrained and 35 trained teachers in secondary school”.

Community initiatives

Three secondary schools have been set up by refugees themselves, but they only very partially bridge the gap in educational needs and they suffer from their own resource constraints.

“It is very difficult to manage a high school on a zero budget. We ask the students to pay some money for the teachers and maintenance,” Mohamed Kasim, chairman and founder of the community-run secondary schools, told IRIN.

Another obstacle to quality education comes from a lack of materials such as laboratory apparatus and basic equipment for practical classes like science subjects. “I have never attended a laboratory class for the past three years. I am very worried about how I will handle the practical examination during the KCSE [Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education],” said Aweys, a form-four student.

The headmaster of Towfiq Community Secondary School in Ifo camp, Hassan A. Saney, said that despite the hardships, he is optimistic about his students sitting his school’s first upcoming national examination. “We are expecting to receive some laboratory equipment by mid-March and hopefully we will have done something before we sit for the final examination,” he said.

The community initiative attracted support from NGOs Windle Trust Kenya (WTK) and CARE in the form of donations toward stationery and reference books. UNHCR also brought in qualified national teachers to the community schools.

WTK said a funding crisis meant money for schooling had to go to refugee teachers serving the schools and end-of-term examination papers. In addition, each student is required to pay KSh3,300, or $38 to be fully registered for 2011 admission, which many cannot afford. “We ourselves are forced to pay this money but in reality, we cannot afford it. We have to sell the little food we are given by WFP [World Food Programme] which is not even enough,” said Farhio, a form-four student from Towfiq Community Secondary School.

Schoolteachers insist that non-payment of fees should not be a hindrance. “We never allow qualified students to leave the school because they can’t afford to pay the money but a contribution from the community is paramount for a better society,” said Abdullahi, a teacher in Dagahaley community secondary school.

A grim future

Except in the unlikely event of resettlement to a third country, even those who manage to complete secondary education in Dadaab have few opportunities for employment within the camps. But as RI’s Campbell says: “I don’t think that should be a reason to deny any child access to education. Some of the refugee graduates filter into urban areas or move elsewhere in the region and are able to start businesses and gain access to income and self-sufficiency.”

Refugee teachers are paid about $70 a month. While many refugees work for aid agencies in various capacities, they tend to receive meagre “incentive payments” rather than proper salaries, purportedly because of Kenya’s restrictive labour laws.

Lack of opportunity is a concern: “These idle youths turn to drugs and then indulge in criminal activities which in turn lead to insecurity problems. If something is not done I am afraid that these youth might even join the militia groups fighting back in their homes of origin,” said Liban Rashid, a youth spokesperson from Ifo camp.

In 2009, Human Rights Watch reported that Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government was also recruiting in the Dadaab camps and claimed that despite their denials, the Kenyan government was involved in the process.

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