Rural Africa Weekly Report: Why Big-Game Hunting Won’t Help Africa’s Rural Poor and Other Reports

Every week, Rural Reporters collate reports on development in rural Africa and its environs. The reports include are some of our top picks of recent must-read research, interviews, reports, blogs and in-depth articles to help you keep on top of global crises. Here are some of the updates you may have missed from the previous week.

Big-Game Hunting Won’t Help Africa’s Rural Poor

In the Oct. 18 article “Zimbabwe says elephant was killed in legal hunt,” a spokesman for the Zimbabwe national parks agency — a government-run organization — and Louis Muller, president of the Professional Hunters and Guides Association, defended the killing of a huge elephant as a legal hunt that provided much-needed money for rural communities living near game reserves. By this bizarre reasoning, professional hunters (anyone who pays to kill big game) should be encouraged to do so to save rural communities from their corrupt, ruthless, incompetent, self-serving politicians.

Given the depths of corruption in government, in whose wild imaginings do ordinary people in rural areas benefit from this legally sanctioned slaughter?

Poor Women In Developing World Less Likely Than Men To Use Internet

Poor women in cities in developing countries are 50 percent less likely than poor men to use the Internet, and blame the high cost and their lack of skills for the gap, researchers said on Wednesday.

While 59 percent of such men surveyed by the Web Foundation, established by British World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, use the Internet, just 37 percent of women do so.

“Most poor urban women are confined to (a technology) ghetto that does little to help them break out of the real ghetto of poverty and gender discrimination,” said Anne Jellema, Web Foundation’s chief executive.

The Solar Entrepreneurs Emerging From Rural Kenya’s Cellphone Revolution

In a country where three-quarters of the population lives off the grid, solar power is a savior.

Solar energy is filling a much-needed gap in remote communities in Africa. Across sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 621 million people do not have access to electricity, and three-quarters of Kenya’s population lives off the power grid. For many, the easiest and most affordable way to get energy is from the beaming sun.

Power provides myriad opportunities, both large and small, to rural parts of Africa. Mtutua’s new home, for example, becomes a makeshift school after dusk, a place where children can study under a solar-powered light without having to breathe in fumes from a smoky fire or gas lamp.

While Poverty in Africa Has Declined, Number of Poor Has Increased

Poverty across the continent may be lower than what current estimates suggest, though the number of people living in extreme poverty has grown substantially since 1990, according to the latest World Bank Africa poverty report.

Poverty in a Rising Africa, the first of two upcoming reports on poverty in Africa, documents the data challenges facing the region and reviews the status of Africa’s poverty and inequality, both monetary and nonmonetary, taking these data challenges into account.

South Africa: Minister Zokwana Is Failing Rural Communities

The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) is failing rural communities by not providing the agricultural support needed to ensure that our country has food security in the future.

As the world celebrates World Food Day today, it has become very clear that the ANC-led government has no clear strategy in place to ensure that communities become food secure.