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:
Obesity Rising Faster in Rural Areas Than Cities
Obesity is increasing more rapidly in the world’s rural areas than in cities, according to a new study of global trends in body-mass index (BMI).
The research, led by Imperial College London and published in Nature, analysed the height and weight data of more than 112 million adults across urban and rural areas of 200 countries and territories between 1985 and 2017.
Height and weight can be used to calculate BMI, an internationally recognised scale which tells us whether an individual has a healthy weight for their height.
Why NGOs in Africa Must Respect Village Headmen and Hierarchies
Almost every global development body, from the World Bank to small, single-issue NGOs, claims to listen to or work with “the community”.
In many African countries, and particularly in rural villages, this community engagement involves meeting and consulting with chiefs. Yet even practitioners who go to great lengths to engage with chiefs often treat “the chieftaincy” as homogeneous. In this view, chiefs are either dedicated developers with the exactly the same interests as the (equally homogenous) community, or they are barriers to development who must be educated.
But how do these chiefs or headmen view the NGOs? And how do the NGOs’ efforts hinder or help the chiefs in consolidating their own power?
Itele Community Ravaged by Malaria in Search of Succour
“Four days ago, a 28-year- old was attacked with malaria, unfortunately, it killed him, many pregnant women have also passed away due to this disease.” This was the bitter account of Oba Mufutau Kasali of Itele Community in Ijebu East Local Government Area, Ogun State.
Recently, Nigeria joined the rest of the world to commemorate the 2019 World Malaria Day. The Malaria Society of Nigeria (MSN) in collaboration with the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) took the fight against the disease to Itele community.
Oba Kasali hinted that it was the first time such gesture would be extended to the community that boast of over 7,000 dwellers excluding those that were not eligible to vote or registered in the last general election.
Hunger in the Near East and North Africa region (NENA) continues to rise as conflicts and protracted crises have spread and worsened since 2011, threatening the region’s efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including Zero Hunger.
The Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition in the Near East and North Africa, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), indicates that 52 million people in the region are suffering from chronic undernourishment.
Conflict continues to be the main driver of hunger across the region. More than two-thirds of hungry people in NENA, approximately 34 million people, live in conflict-affected countries, compared to 18 million hungry people in countries that are not impacted directly by conflict.
10 million People Internally Displaced Across Sub-Saharan Africa in 2018 [EN/FR]
New waves of violence over scarce resources in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region combined with the ongoing insurgency of Boko Haram and other armed groups in the north-east to trigger 541,000 new displacements. The outbreak of internal conflict in the anglophone region of neighbouring Cameroon led to similar levels of displacement. New conflicts also erupted in countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso, linked to the emergence of extremist groups, intercommunal clashes and unresolved socioeconomic grievances.
Around 16.5 million people were living in internal displacement as a result of conflict or violence in SubSaharan Africa as of the end of the year. More than three million were in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where decades of unrest continues to cause new displacements. Figures for DRC are highly conservative and do not capture the whole country.