Rural Reporters Weekly Top Pick: 5 key Issues to Note
Every week, Rural Reporters collates a report 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 ma have missed from the previous week.
How Questioning Religious Beliefs Will Benefit Africans
Skeptics and humanists are meeting in Lagos this August to discuss a very crucial topic – The Benefits of Questioning Beliefs.
This event is another indication of a growing trend in critical thinking and reasoned inquiry in the region. As the Greek philosopher, Socrates once said ‘An unexamined life is not worth living.’ Surely, many Africans are beginning to realise that an unexamined religion is not worth believing, so they are beginning to ask questions.
Dandora Slum School Moulds Future Generation of Entrepreneurs
As the Global Entrepreneurship Summit starts in Nairobi on Friday, a school in Nairobi’s Dandora Phase 2 already has its sights on moulding entrepreneurs at a tender age.
It is hoped that the training the pupils of Wangu Primary School are receiving will enable them to be creative and innovative.
The club’s members are drawn from classes four to eight. A boy and a girl are picked from each of these classes, “because we don’t want any class to be left out,” stresses teacher Gumba. Five teachers are directly involved with the club.
Children from less fortunate families are not neglected by the club. “We encourage them to know that out of their own hands and brains, they can be people to be celebrated.” Making mandazis is the most popular activity.
TAC wants free treatment for all HIV infected
South Africa’s largest HIV lobby group, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), is demanding that everyone infected with HIV in the country is offered antiretroviral therapy (ART) immediately after their diagnosis. Currently, less than half (3.1-million) of the country’s estimated 6.4-million HIV-infected citizens receive anti-HIV treatment, according to health department data.
This is partly because government guidelines specify that only those HIV-positive people with a CD4 count of 500 and below qualify for free treatment.
Ghana is world’s 7th dirtiest country and other interesting insights from sanitation update
A joint World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) sanitation report has rated Ghana as the world’s 7th worst performing country.
The new report released on Tuesday says that the challenge to access improved sanitation is starker in Ghana, ‘which has slipped even further amongst the worst performing countries, now ranked 7th worst globally.;
The Joint Monitoring Programme report dubbed ‘Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update and MDG Assessment”’, is a collaborative effort between the WHO and UNICEF.
Kenya: Obama strikes a chord with Kenyan women
Esther Nduta dreamed of finishing school and starting a business, but her parents took her out of school when she was 14 because they couldn’t afford the fees. Now she spends her days doing menial jobs such as washing clothes and dishes to pay her younger brother’s school fees.
Another of her brothers has already finished school. She would love to go to night school and finish her education, but she cannot afford to pay.
She insists that it doesn’t anger or frustrate her: That’s just the way things work in Kenya for millions of girls and young women. In Kenya, when a family is short of money to pay high school fees, they take their daughters out of school, but do their best to leave their sons in.
That sense of dull acceptance of her fate portrays as much as anything else how far Kenya has to go to achieve gender equality, particularly in rural areas.
