Every week, RuralReporters.com collate reports on development issues in rural Africa and its environs.
This report includes some of our top picks from recent must-read research, interviews, blogs, and in-depth articles, carefully selected to help you keep up with global issues.
Here are some of the updates you may have missed from the previous week:
A recent Afrobarometer study found that “income poverty remains a chronic economic problem in Tanzania”.
Based on the Afrobarometer findings and other analyses, wellwishers of Tanzania’s welfare boldly call upon the government to redress the situation. For starters, it should earnestly do this by revisiting its lopsided and sometimes hackneyed development policies. These have tended to favour urban settlements, providing them at public expense with exotic projects like flyovers and urban farming, while rural Tanzanians continue to suffer from poor utilities like electricity, gas, water, sewerage and health/medical services, over and above other equallypoor social and economic infrastructure such as education, transport, produce markets and irrigation systems.
According to the World Bank and the UN Population Division’s World Urbanisation Prospects, some 37.61 million (67.68 per cent) of the country’s total population in 2016 lived in rural Tanzania, mostly living in chronic abject poverty.
| Feature: Lack of clean water thwarts Namibian villagers |
| It is 11:30 am on a Friday and the sun was at its peak. The 39-year-old Motjao Mbinge and other villagers from Oukongo Village in Namibia’s northern Kunene region endured a long walk under the scorching sun to fetch water from a stream.
The 10-kilometer walk to the stream has become a daily necessity if villagers are to meet their daily chores and livelihood. The stream is their main source of water. “We usually rely on rain for water. However, during the dry days like today, community members from about five villages rely on the stream for water,” said Mbinge, who is also a community leader. The water is however muddy and unfit for human consumption. “But we have no other choice but to utilize and survive on this water,” she said. Mbinge accounts for three in ten people worldwide who lack access to safe water, especially in rural areas, according to the 2017 Report on Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene by the World Health Organization and UNICEF. The report states that about 844 million have no access to basic drinking water service, including 263 million people who are likely to spend more than 30 minutes per trip collecting water from sources outside the home. |
Hidden Hunger Threatens Tanzania’s Mothers and Infants
Most of women in rural areas don’t know the importance of good nutrition in order support the rapid growth and development of babies and young children during their first 1,000 days.
This can be attributed to poverty and Tanzania’s gender gap problem which leaves many women in low income status as they are excluded from the economy, resources, land and education.
According to the 2014 Tanzania National Nutrition Survey final report; between 2010 and 2014, chronic malnutrition – stunting, or low height for age – among under five children in the country dropped from 42 per cent to 35 per cent.
However, malnutrition is more prevalent in rural areas than urban areas, while it is also presence is large in uneducated households than educated ones.
Commission creates Task Force Rural Africa
A new expert group is to be created by the European Commission to provide expertise, advice and possible recommendations on enhancing the role of the EU agri-food and agro-industrial sector in the sustainable economic development of Africa. The first step in the creation of the Task Force Rural Africa (TFRA) is the call for applications for the selection of members, which will run until 23 March 2018. The group will consist of 11 members, all of whom should be experts with high level expertise and experience in agriculture, agri-business or agroindustry, trade, development policy or migration-related issues and with first-hand knowledge of the agri-food sector in Africa. They will all be appointed in a personal capacity, and will act independently and in the public interest.
Change Is Necessary For Rural Women – ILO
The Director-General of International Labour Organisation, Guy Ryder, has urged world leaders to ensure that rural women “must not be overlooked in policy decisions”.
Ryder, in a chat with international journalist at the recent International Women’s Day said: “Rural women must not be overlooked in policy decisions that can drive empowerment and improvement: policies for productive employment with equal opportunities and treatment; policies to promote entrepreneurship; policies that support affordable child and eldercare.
“Tackling legislative, social and cultural barriers to equal access to land, finance, technology and markets will go a long way to empower rural women. Employers’ and workers’ organisations can reach out to rural women so that through organisation they gain increased voice and influence.
Ethiopian women fight fistula with determination
Surgeon Fekadu Aynachew and his colleagues have been caring for patients at a fistula hospital in Ethiopia.
Many visibly withdrawn and painfully shy young women are resting on the benches of the waiting room of the hospital, secluded from the hustle and bustle of the capital Addis Ababa. They all suffer from fistula, a disease caused during childbirth which results in the loss of bladder or rectum control.
In Ethiopia, each year about 9,000 cases of fistula occur, mostly among uneducated, poor, and rural women, and girls who have been forced into early marriages.
The Hamlin Fistula Hospital, built in 1974, is Ethiopia’s first specialized fistula hospital. The hospital is the brainchild of an Australian gynecologist, Dr. Catherine Hamlin, 94, who with her late husband Reg Hamlion co-founded the health center. Hamlin retired from active medicine due to her age but continues to live at the hospital premises. She has healed 50,000 poor rural patients and built five regional hospitals and a college for midwives.