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:
Why Development Initiatives Cannot Curb Rural-Urban Migration in Tanzania
The lives of many others have also been changed by the presence of the solar power. The presence of electricity has been adopted by a carpentry workshop, a Miller, the hospital, a restaurant that uses it to power its microwave and rice cooker, a new hotel and few houses. But this development has not been able to draw people back to Ukara and convince intending migrants from moving away from the community.
Their economic activities seem not to be able to sustain them. Like Kepher, not many people want to stay behind in Ukara. The reason given is lack of viable opportunities.
For decades, many households in Ukara have been troubled with insufficient amounts of cultivable land, and out-migration has acted as a safety net in controlling population pressure on land. This has culminated in the voluntary and forced resettlement of local Kara farmers to the mainland in the year 1974 as part of the Ujamaa villagization program by the socialist government.
Fear Doesn’t Live Here: Fighting Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa
“I have seen girls suffer,” Mary told me. “And I knew I had to speak for them.”
Mary was born poor and grew up a rural girl, like me. But when she got the opportunity to attend secondary school with Camfed’s support, Mary excelled, and won a government scholarship to university to study education and become a teacher. It was her first time in the city, at an institution with thousands of more privileged students who had the benefit of an education in well-resourced urban schools. Mary’s lived experience though helped her truly understand the fault lines she saw, and fearlessly campaign to fix them.
UN launches campaign to tackle land degradation
This year’s UN World Day to Combat Desertification will be celebrated on 17 June and the UN has launched a programme to combat land degradation to help create jobs and boost food security.
Africa has some of the most degraded lands in the world, and is only second to Asia in land degradation globally, experts say.
“Our land. Our home. Our Future,” is the slogan of this year’s UN World Day to Combat Desertification, according to a statement from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) released last month (9 February).
Trump’s New Executive Order Will Worsen Hunger in Africa
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump took his most concrete step thus far to unravel his predecessor’s legacy on climate change, with a wide-ranging executive order that dismantles several Obama-era policies to restrict greenhouse gas pollution. The order outraged environmentalists—Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called it “a declaration of war on American leadership on climate change”—but it wasn’t very surprising: It simply followed through on a threat contained in the budget Trump proposed two weeks ago.
“We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said then, in response to a question about climate change during a press conference. “We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”
That stance could be a big problem for the dozens of farmers I’ve met across sub-Saharan Africa as a journalist reporting on climate change impacts to food security.
Sanitary pad crowdfunding unsettles Uganda’s elite
Ugandan girls are missing school because they can’t afford hygiene products. Activists are helping out, but a crowdfunding campaign to buy millions of sanitary pads has fallen foul of the country’s authoritarian regime.