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:
Revitalise the world’s countryside
Rural decline is a global issue (see ‘World rural populations’). From the United States and Sweden to sub-Saharan Africa, the rural–urban divide is widening. Cities attract the lion’s share of government funding, private investment and even research. For instance, since 1980, cities have received more than 70% of China’s total public and private investments in fixed assets. The consequences are especially dire in poor nations, where migration is driven by survival rather than by opportunity. Slums in cities such as Port Harcourt in Nigeria, Mumbai in India and Mexico City are expanding as poor and uneducated rural workers move in to seek their fortunes.
For the past decade, we have been studying how land issues can be harnessed to improve rural lives and economies in China (see ‘China’s challenge’). For example, projects to enhance soil fertility and manage flooding have boosted agricultural yields and incomes in the western Loess Plateau areas. Our research and work by others suggest that it is possible to rebuild rural villages and towns by improving infrastructure, developing local resources and cultivating tourism, special products and crafts. Lessons can be learnt from some countries’ policies that have bucked the trend.
Liberian Legislature Must Ensure Lands Rights Act Protects Rural Landowners
Global Witness calls upon the Liberian legislature to pass a Land Rights Act (LRA) that protects the land rights of rural Liberians and reject any versions of the LRA that strip rights from these communities.
Jonathan Gant, Global Witness campaigner said: “The LRA, if passed, should recognise that communities own their land and ensure local communities – and only local communities – have the power to say where their lands are and how they should be managed.”
Global Witness believes that any Act that does not protect the ownership and management rights of rural landowners should be rejected by the legislature. If the legislature passes a law that does not protect these rights, the law should be vetoed by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Female Teachers In Rural Ghana Trading Sex For Survival
Some female teachers who accept posting to rural Ghana after undergoing training have to be in amorous relationships with some opinion leaders and some village chiefs in the communities to survive.
Teachers who refuse these sexual advances have no option than to possibly starve or lose the passion for the job for which they are posted into the community. The teachers, it has been revealed are enticed with foodstuffs and bush meat into accepting to be in amorous relationship with the village champions due largely to the failure of government to provide the needs of the teachers when posted.
This situation has caused many young female teachers to refuse postings to rural Ghana after school, a situation which calls for urgent attention.
First National Trustee of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) Madam Victoria Affram confirmed on Adom FM’s Morning Show, ‘Dwaso Nsem’ that the teachers become vulnerable because government fail to take care of them after they have been posted.
Bad Association Turning Rural Male Teachers into Drunkards – GNAT
Bad association involving newly posted male teachers to rural communities in the country has resulted in some of them turning into drunkards and unwilling to further their education.
“When they get into the village, they associate themselves with palm wine tappers and akpetishie distillers and eventually turn into drunkards. Some of them are eventually are given tracks of lands to go into farming and no longer have interest in returning to the cities to further their education”, First National Trustee of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) Madam Victoria Affram shockingly revealed on Accra-based Adom Fm on Thursday.
She stated that these challenges are borne out of the fact that there are no adequate facilities in the rural communities to house newly posted teachers to rural Ghana who are supposed to serve as role models to those in the hinterland.
Irony: Nigeria Lacks Enough Honey but Set for Bees Export
An official of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development says the country cannot export honey because it produces less than three per cent of its current needs. Dr Gideon Mshelbwala, a Director in the Department of Veterinary and Pest Control Services of the ministry, made the statement in Abuja on Friday on the occasion of the 2017 National Honey Bee Day.
“Nigeria currently produces about 15,000 tonnes of honey and 2,500 tonnes of bee wax annually, less than three per cent of her potential 800,000 and 70,000 tonnes respectively.