Ebola vaccinations, Rural Transformation and Other Reports

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:

Ebola vaccinations begin in rural Congo on Monday [Today]

Ebola vaccinations will begin Monday in the two rural areas of Congo where the latest deadly outbreak was declared this month, the health ministry said Saturday, as the number of confirmed Ebola cases rose to 35, including 10 deaths.

A vaccination campaign is already under way in Mbandaka, the city of 1.2 million on the Congo River where four Ebola cases have been confirmed. About 100 health workers have been vaccinated there as front-line workers face high risk from the virus, which is spread via contact with the bodily fluids of those infected, including the dead.

The vaccination campaign will begin Monday in the rural areas of Bikoro and Iboko in the country’s northwest.

Invest in poor rural areas to curb exclusion, quash extremism: UNDP

Remote areas in poor nations need far more investment to undercut recruitment by militant armed groups, in a shift from development policies focused most on cities, the head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said.

Achim Steiner says there was no purely military way to defeat groups such as Islamic State (IS), Boko Haram or Al Qaeda.

UNDP, a U.N. agency with about $5 billion in donor contributions a year, was seeking to boost investments in remote rural areas to help end poverty and marginalization, for instance in the Sahel region in Africa.

Owning land isn’t enough to empower Africa’s women farmers

The argument is that increasing women’s access, control and ownership of land will lead to stronger bargaining power and higher incomes. It is also posited as a way to strengthen women’s “voice” within households and communities.

But the reality in communities is very different. Our recent book, Agriculture, Diversification and Gender in Rural Africa, drew on a unique, longitudinal data set covering around 2000 households in 15 regions in six countries: Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

This data, coupled with more detailed qualitative research carried out in three villages in Malawi, highlights the limitations of approaches that rely on gender based redistribution of land from men to women.

Rural, township economies ‘vehicles for radical economic transformation’

The face of this transformation is ‘the creation of employment for the youth, empowerment of local businesses and inclusive growth’.

The government has identified rural and township economies as vehicles for achieving radical economic transformation, trade and industry deputy minister Bulelani Magwanishe said today.

Magwanishe was speaking at a industrial dialogue breakfast session and provincial seminar on the rural and township industrial economy hosted by the department of trade and industry (the dti), in partnership with the provincial department of finance, economic development and tourism in Kabokweni, Mpumalanga.

‘We don’t need men’: Widows and rebel wives rebuild war-scarred Uganda

At the entrance to a round mud and elephant-grass hut in rural northern Uganda, Rose Lamwaka, 58, pauses and looks up at the ceiling of her new dwelling as if she cannot quite believe it is really there. After her old home was burned down in a fire, a group of 15 local women built Lamwaka a new house on land lent to her by an uncle – a feat almost unheard of a generation ago before the conflict here, when men were the undisputed household heads.

“This hut was thatched with dry grass by my children, while the rest was done by women members in the group,” Lamwaka, a single mother, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The female master builders who made Lamwaka’s home – and gave her food, cooking utensils and bed sheets when her old one was destroyed – started working together about a decade ago as they struggled to recover from almost 20 years of war.

Unintended pregnancies heaviest among poor rural girls, survey shows

The burden of unintended pregnancies in Kenya is heaviest among poor rural girls aged 16 years old compared to their 18-year old well off urban counterparts, a new survey has revealed.

Rural girls according to the survey conducted in 11 counties between November and December 2017 engages in first sex, 6 years before they start using any form of contraceptive, while their urban counterparts, do it 3.5 years before interaction with contraceptives.

“The median age at which women in rural Kenya begin having sex is 16.7 years old, about six years before they first use contraception and fours years before they are married. Whereas, women in Kenya’s urban setups, begin having sex at age 18.4 years old, about three years before they first use contraception and about fours years before they are married,” the Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2017 survey shows.