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:
Ghana’s Rural Development Policy is Geared Towards transformation
Mr Augustine Collins Ntim, a Deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development said, the new Rural Development Policy developed by Government is expected to ensure transformative change in the lives of rural people.
He said the policy is also intended to change the country’s approach to development in rural areas and seeks to provide the right perspective, direction and effective coordination for rural development. He said the policy and its action plan would provide an impetus to source funding for its implementation.
Why Merely Owning Land Isn’t Enough to Empower Africa’s Women Farmers
A 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.
The findings suggest that genuinely empowering women and girls within agriculture requires interventions that go beyond the issue of land redistribution. Instead, policymakers and development agencies should adopt a multifaceted approach that includes aspects beyond agriculture. These include issues of sexual and reproductive rights, for instance, and freeing women from the heavy and time consuming drudgery of domestic work in poor, rural settings.
“Land Reform” Distracts From Poverty Alleviation in South Africa
Much of the current conversation in South Africa around black poverty links it to the disproportionate white ownership of the commercial agricultural sector. Simply put, the narrative within the governing African National Congress (ANC), the radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), and many others, is that enduring black poverty is a result of the white domination of land ownership, itself the result of colonialism and apartheid… South African labor policy has long favored a high-skilled, high-wage work force. That approach is strongly supported by organized labor, an important part of the ANC’s electoral base. Unsurprisingly, a large percentage of the unemployed and the poor are unskilled because the economy has too few low-skilled and low-wage opportunities, and there is little space for organized labor in that respect. The bottom line is that, in order to address the drivers of poverty in a meaningful way, there should be more focus on education and labor policy and less on the distraction of land reform.
Ebola Spreads from Rural to Urban Areas in the DRC
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has spread to a city, fuelling concern the deadly virus may prove tougher to contain. The fresh outbreak, publicly declared on May 8 with 23 deaths so far, had previously been confined to a very remote, rural area in Equateur Province in the northwest of the country.
But the UN’s health agency confirmed that an Ebola case has been recorded in the city of Mbandaka, which lies roughly 150 kilometres (90 miles) from the Bikoro area where the outbreak originated. “This is a concerning development,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
Hopes of containing a growing outbreak of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo are pinned on an experimental vaccine that was tested in 2015 during a major outbreak of the disease.
The World Health Organization plans to vaccinate up to 10,000 people in the first phase of its response and so far has imported 4,000 doses of the vaccine, which is manufactured by the pharmaceutical giant Merck and appears to be highly effective in preventing infection.
AU Says Intra-Africa Trade Key For Development
Boosting intra-Africa trade is the most effective way to bring economic growth and development to the continent, says African Union Commission Deputy Chairperson, Ambassador Kwesi Quartey.
In a speech at the 51st session of the Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development in Addis Ababa, Ambassador Quartey said Africa’s ability to trade with itself, as well as with the rest of the world, will be an absolute game changer.
Commenting on the recent signing of the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AFcfta), which he said was a truly historic development, the AU Deputy Chief said the potential for intra-African trade to drive value creation and development was both palpable and real. “But in order to trade, Africa first has to produce. And not just primary commodities. We must begin to apply science and technology to production. Statistical evidence has demonstrated that intra-African trade has tended to be mainly in processed foods, that is, goods and commodities to which value has been added,” he said.
Letter from Africa: Why is no-one talking about the Zamfara conflict?
For many years, the killings, kidnappings and rapes were only occurring in rural areas of Zamfara. It was underreported as the victims live on the fringes of national consciousness: they are poor, rural folk, who eke out a living as farmers and herdsmen in an area geographically removed from the centre of governance.
The conflict doesn’t lend itself to the binary reporting that the Nigerian media finds very seductive. Christians are not pitted against Muslim, or North versus the South, or Hausa-Fulani against other groups. It can’t be reported as evidence of Nigeria’s further fracturing along ethnic and religious lines. The cultural and religious identities of both the victims and perpetrators are mostly the same. This all speaks to a wider, national problem of our failing Federal State that cannot fulfil its most fundamental role of protecting its people. And so the people of Zamfara are left mostly to their fate.
Research into new technologies to maintain rural roads in Africa ongoing
The UK government is sponsoring a research work in collaboration with various engineering research institutions across Africa to find new technologies that can bring the cost and maintenance of rural roads to a minimum.
The research is also aimed at gaining better understanding, better technologies and cost effective methods for rural road transport systems. Mr Anthony Karbo, the Deputy Minister for Roads and Highways, speaking at the African Community Access Programme bi-annual Steering Committee Meeting, said poverty was still a predominantly rural phenomenon and poor accessibility and mobility was a significant aspect of this.
Rural family lives worlds apart from Home Affairs’ hi-tech ID solutions
Deep in rural KwaZulu-Natal province lies a place called KwaMandonya, located within the uMkhanyakude Municipality. In this village, near Jozini, a family of 11 live in a ramshackle one-room dwelling with no electricity and no tap water.
The desperate situation of the Siyaya family has not been helped by not having any identity documents (ID). Without IDs it is virtually impossible to get government assistance in the form of social grants or proper housing.