Guest Voices: The Enemy is Hunger: Women Fight Back in Malawi

Next up in our series guest posts from Concern Worldwide, we read about a farming irrigation program in Malawi that is helping women to provide enough food for their families. Country Director Anita McCabe says the program not only provides food year round, but the women can also sell the surplus for income.

As the hot, dry breeze wafts through the lakeside district of Nkhotakota, Malawi, a group of women sing as they take turns to water their near-ripe crop of maize. Further downstream, another group is busy making seed beds in preparation for another crop.

Like many women in developing countries, these women face a particular set of responsibilities and vulnerabilities when it comes to providing food for their families. Not only are they the primary caregivers, they are also the producers of food and the income earners. Women farmers in rural areas of Malawi grow, buy, sell, and cook food in order to feed their children. In fact, in all the countries in which I’ve worked during my time with Concern Worldwide, I’ve seen how very hard women must work to ensure the survival of their families, and the burdens they bear.

Women produce between 60 and 80 percent of food in developing countries, and they hold the key to tackling hunger and malnutrition. A woman’s nutritional status is critical not only to her own health but also to her ability to work, and her ability to ensure that her children are properly nourished and healthy.

Nkhotakota has suffered from recurring drought and flooding, and the people here know the consequences. “As a woman, it hurts to see my children cry with hunger” says Grace Kalowa from Thondo village. “It’s more painful as a mother to tell them that I don’t have any food to give them. In their eyes I am supposed to provide for them but knowing that I can’t do anything is heartbreaking. That feeling of desperation is what brought us together as women to drive hunger away from our families.”

Grace is the chairperson of the twenty-member Kathyothyo Women Irrigation Club. They are part of a program run by Concern Worldwide to help poor farmers to tackle hunger by improving their agricultural practices, including irrigation. Having seen the potential of the Kathyothyo Women Irrigation Club to increase the food and nutrition situation in the area, Concern offered to help them find their feet by giving them both the start-up resources, and the necessary training on irrigation.

“We spend most of our time here in the field” Grace told us. “Every member of the group now knows that to defeat hunger, we should be at the forefront of fighting it. Begging for food when we have the resources is degrading. No one would like a repeat of the past hunger experience, and that’s what keeps us going.”

For the first time in many years, Biacha Jefuri, a member of the group, has managed to harvest twice in one year. She believes that hunger is no longer a problem in her home: “I got five bags of maize after the group shared the harvest. I no longer have sleepless nights thinking about what to eat the next day.”

The group, which now has about 19.7 acres under cultivation, feels they have defeated hunger once and for all.

“I can now see a big change in our lives. Currently, we are harvesting some of our maize and the other crop will be ready in a few weeks time. We have already sold part of the crop and the money has been deposited in our village savings and loan account. Concern taught us how to save money after selling our surplus crop. We use part of the money to lend each other as capital for small businesses. As women, we know that in the household, so many things are needed.”

The Kathyothyo Women Irrigation Club has helped to transform the food situation for families in the region. Tackling hunger requires more than just increasing farm output. But empowering women to take control of their own food production is a vital step. There are many challenges ahead, but Grace now has aspirations for a better future: “Our experience has also taught us that our enemy is hunger and this is what keeps us going.”

Grace’s is not just an isolated story of change. In the past few years, Malawi has made great progress in improving food and nutrition security. This is due to political commitment to prioritize nutrition, including the government’s engagement in the international Scaling up Nutrition movement. It is also due to initiatives such as the Women’s Irrigation Club that integrate nutrition and agriculture. Sustaining this progress will of course require huge commitment and continued effort over the long haul. I know this from my work with Concern in many other extremely poor countries such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger and Sudan. I have seen the effects of acute and widespread child hunger, and I know there are no quick fixes. But I’ve also seen the courage of mothers like Grace who sacrifice to feed their children.

As Grace said, “Hunger is our enemy.” We know we can defeat this enemy by investing in interventions that improve nutrition for mothers and children, and that empower women to produce food and earn an income.

Guest Voices: Empowering Communities to Rebuild Their Lives in Chad

For our next installment, in our series guest posts from Concern Worldwide, we read an eyewitness account on the state of poverty in Chad. Overseas Director Paul O'Brien tells why women are in great need of jobs to earn money.

I arrived in Chad last week to meet with our country team, and to assess our programs and the ongoing humanitarian needs in our program areas. Chad is one of the world’s seven least developed countries: it ranks at 163 out of 169 countries in the 20

10 United Nations Human Development Index. The goal of our programs here is to target the poorest communities in the poorest parts of Chad—and I was curious to see how successfully we were doing that.

Capital cities in Africa can be extremely deceptive. Lush boulevards and well-paved roads from the airport to the capital city often mask the ugly truth that just steps away from these roads, people are living in abject poverty. Upon arrival in N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, the city is at first impressive. The promising hum of the city’s generators drowns out the sound of the car’s engine on my journey to the city center—a welcome sign of progress. However, I soon discover there is no running water where I am staying, despite the presence of a generator. In fact, most of the city has no electricity, which is a telling sign of the shortage of basic resources, even here in the capital.

Concern works in two regions in Chad: Goré in the south, which borders the Central African Republic (CAR), and Goz Beida in the east, which borders the Darfur region of Sudan. Both of these areas host refugees from their neighbouring countries, and both are challenging environments in which to live or work. Water is scarce, and the logistics of transporting relief items is difficult because roads and infrastructure are in poor condition.

As I leave the city to begin the 600-kilometer journey to Goré, I witness the unmistakeable signs of poverty in roadside dwellings. People live in small mud huts with no windows, electricity or running water. Most of these dwellings have no latrines, and all cooking is done on an open fire. The luxury of a grinding mill is beyond reach. Women pound grain with heavy pieces of timber—the way they have been doing it for centuries.

The biggest challenge facing mothers in Chad is to feed their children and keep them healthy. The country has one of the highest rates of child deaths in the world. In the villages in which Concern is working in Goré, I interviewed members of a mothers’ self-help group. One mother tells me that she had nine children, but only four survived. Another, a widow, originally a mother of four, says just two of her children are alive today.

It is difficult not to be moved by their stories. I am dumbfounded by their resilience, but I am also ashamed that our world full of wealth and expertise in health and nutrition can continue to let such silent emergencies exist.

Concern is helping women in Goré earn an independent income for the first time and manage their resources, by providing training in producing shea butter for sale at market, and in other trades such as tailoring. The members of these collectives and livelihoods programs are making strong progress, and their confidence is growing. Development takes time, there are no quick-fix solutions, but we must do everything in our power to ensure that these women, their children and their families are not forgotten.

Concern Worldwide’s livelihoods program in Goré, Chad has trained 350 women in the processing of Shea butter and production of soap, food stuffs, and cosmetics. Concern works with refugees and host villages to help them become self-sufficient and improve their safety nets. An estimated 75,000 refugees from the Central African Republic have fled to southern Chad since 2003, while host villages also battle extreme poverty and isolation.

Guest Voices: White Gold in southern Chad

Next up in our series of guest posts from Concern Worldwide, we look at a great program that helps to provide income to women in Chad. Program Support Officer Francesca Reinhardt describes a cooperative that helps turn the local Shea nut into white butter for the women to sell to market.

I’m based in a small town called Goz Beida in eastern Chad. It’s a dusty corner of the Sahel, where the bulk of the traffic comes in the form of slow-moving donkeys and camels. It’s an unforgiving environment, but I’m learning things here that I don’t think I could learn anywhere else.

Chad is a vast landlocked country, covering several eco-zones, and some of the highest rates of poverty on the planet. The challenges are enormous. Chad has the world’s highest child infant mortality rate, and is in the bottom five countries ranked by the United Nations Human Development Index. Chad has experienced not only natural disasters, but also civil conflict, the internal displacement of populations, refugees fleeing violence in neighboring Central African Republic (C.A.R.) and Sudan, the Sahel food crisis, drought, flooding, and cholera outbreaks.

This is a country of extremes. Forbidding deserts stretch to the north. People scratch out a living in small villages across the Sahel, fed by transient rivers called wadis that sink into the sand. As you move south, the cattle get fatter, the mud-brick houses get sturdier, and the savannah gives way to flood plains and rice paddies. Keep going and you reach the humid, tropical south. That’s where you’ll find the town of Goré, about 30 kilometres from the border with C.A.R.

With its heavy soils and massive trees, the area looks like it should be rich and fertile, but the struggling villages tell a different story. Goré now hosts 35,000 refugees from C.A.R., and the soil is exhausted. The harvest feeds most families for just seven months of the year. After that, they are reduced to foraging, debt, and hunger. Raw materials are scarce, and few goods are produced locally. Everything from farm tools to cooking oil comes from hundreds of miles away, shipped in on treacherous roads, at exorbitant cost. Plastic goods come on overloaded trucks from Nigeria, trundling along the wrong side of the road to their final destinations; soap and plastic shoes make the trek here from as far away as China.

“MINING” LOCAL RESOURCES GIVES WOMEN INDEPENDENT INCOME

Ask the women in Goré what they want and they’ll tell you simply that they want their own source of income: “We have to spend so much on so many things, why not make something we can keep ourselves?” says Lydie Nadjilem, a member of Mekasna. Mekasna is Goré’s biggest Shea butter collective, and it also wants to be the richest. “We are looking at land to plant an orchard; this would make it faster to collect the Shea nuts. So far, we have saved 50,000 Cefa [about 100 USD]. That’s already a third of the way there,” says Mekasna’s President, Maris Mokodji.

Shea nuts are indigenous to southern Chad, and have been traditionally pressed into a black oil to add to foods. While nutritious, it has an odor that many find unpleasant. Processing the Shea nuts into a white butter gives it all kinds of household and commercial applications, opening up new income streams for local women. This is southern Chad’s “white gold.” “Soap is the best,” says Maris “because everyone has to buy it. Cooking oil is good too. Otherwise we wait for it to come from Cameroon, and the money goes back to them.” Concern supports Mekasna, along with 21 other collectives, with training and management of equipment for Shea butter production. Concern also provides the collectives with vital training, guidance, and support on financial management and running cooperatives.

“With the white Shea butter, we can do so many more things,” says Maris. “But above all we want the money. We want our own money. You can’t just wait for the boss [the husband] to come up with school fees. You can’t just fold your arms and wait for him to give you money.” She laughs, “You know the day you come to him for money he will say he has none.”

With 50 members, Mekasna can produce 10-15 litres of Shea butter a week—weather and resources permitting. Hauling the water, nuts and fuel, and pounding the nuts is a long and laborious process. Ask the members though, and they’ll tell you it’s worth it. Shea butter sells for around $6 per pound, and it saves women buying costly commercial soaps and oils. While it’s normally hard to compete with industrially produced goods on price, not having to pay transport overheads makes Mekasna’s prices more competitive. With Concern’s help, Mekasna has plans to invest in a motorized mill to raise productivity.

After several years of bad harvests, it’s hard to know what each year holds. Now these women have a backup plan. “I feel better knowing there will be a little money if things go wrong,” says Lydie. “We have money in our savings box and we all take our share so nobody can cheat us. If I have to borrow money in the market, I might not be able to pay it back. I like to know that my money is safe.”

Guest Voices: Putting Food First to Avert a Crisis for the Poor

Next up for our series of guest posts from Concern Worldwide, we have a commentary written by Chief Executive Officer Tom Arnold. After the G-20 finance minister meetings both the World Bank and the IMF made statements about escalating food prices. With prices now at record highs, Arnold warns that time to act is now to prevent another crisis.

Last Friday April 15—as part of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington, DC—I was a panelist in a groundbreaking global conversation, the Open Forum. It was a unique opportunity for a small group of experts to engage not only with each other, but with 3,000 participants in a concurrent 24-hour chat, and people from 91 countries who had submitted comments and ideas online before the event. The topic was the food crisis—crippling market volatility whose net effect has been a sustained increase in food prices, wreaking havoc on the world’s poor.

This was no staid academic exercise. It was an invaluable part of a larger conversation that grows more urgent by the day because each day, more lives hang in the balance. As World Bank President Robert Zoellick starkly put it, “we’re one event away from a very serious crisis.”

Some might argue that we’re at that point already: according to the World Bank, since June 2010 another 44 million people have fallen into poverty because of the spike in food costs; every minute another 170 people join the ranks of the extremely poor—those who spend on average 85 cents of their daily budget of $1.25 on food. The Open Forum provided an excellent opportunity to draw the world’s attention to how terribly vulnerable the world’s poor are.

It’s high time for decisive action in rolling out the short-term and longer-term measures called for by the Forum’s panel and online participants.

Right away, we must launch targeted nutrition interventions for the most vulnerable. In this context, both the international Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Framework for Action and Roadmap and the “1,000 Days: Change a Life, Change the Future Call to Action” (a joint US-Irish initiative) can point the way. Research shows that proper nutrition in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life—from conception to two-years-old—is crucial in ensuring proper physiological development.

In addition, more social protection schemes must be put in place in those countries and settings with the financial means and technological capacity to do so. Putting cash in the hands of poor families can help keep local food markets alive and avert serious food security crises. Such was our experience last year in Niger, where we used mobile phones to distribute emergency cash after crops fell short in the wake of a prolonged drought.

Long term, there has to be significant investment in agriculture and the entire food process, from harvesting and processing farm products to sale in the marketplace. This means making sure that farmers have the seeds and tools to get ready for the next planting season; and to repair and build roads and bridges so that crops can be brought to market. Along the way, small farmers also need tutoring in the fundamentals of sales practices.

We also need to invest in agricultural research to find ways to boost crop yields—more food has to be grown on the same amount of land. This will require scientific breakthroughs.

At the same time, we must do something to curb the wild fluctuation in food prices, an issue the G20 has agreed to take on in November. Perhaps there needs to be more regulation at the international level with regard to commodity speculation. A number of mechanisms will be considered. Nothing has been decided at this point, but at least we are taking a hard look at the harsh reality of food price volatility.

The G20 will also discuss the fact that many developing countries put a food export ban in place in the wake of the 2008 food price crisis. Such measures were taken to ensure that local populations would have access to food—but it has turned that such protection had an adverse effect on the international market, narrowing the field and actually contributing to rising food prices. Food trading must be kept reasonably open, so it seems, but specifics will come out later in the year.

There won’t be a simple solution. What’s called for is a combination of carefully chosen and calibrated measures. What has become crystal clear, however, is the importance of the participation of civil society—NGOs included—in developing solutions and putting them into practice. These are not issues governments can or should handle on their own. In the run-up to the World Bank’s spring meetings, Mr. Zoellick had said that “our message to our clients, whatever their political system, is that you cannot have successful development without good governance and without the participation of your citizens.”

The World Bank president was speaking in the context of political developments in the Middle East and North Africa, but his words apply across the board. Already back in 2009, coming out of the meeting at L’Aquila, Italy, the G8 launched the Global Partnership for Agriculture and Food Security, which affords civil society a critical role in designing development programs alongside responsibilities in matters of governance.

Now is the time to give this fresh approach concrete shape. Civil society must have a real voice at the table because it represents the very practical needs of ordinary people, especially the very poorest. It is for their sake—and ultimately for the common good of all—that all the stakeholders must genuinely work together.

We must act now, collectively and urgently. If the food riots of 2008 are any indication, failure to do so could have very dire consequences.

Guest Voices: Protecting the World’s Poorest from the Rising Price of Food

For the next installment in our series of posts from Concern Worldwide, we have another essay written by Chief Executive Officer Tom Arnold. With food prices again at record highs, the world must take action to make sure the poor are fed. Arnold talks about some of the causes of the high food prices and steps that Concern is taking to help those who now have trouble buying food.

After seven straight months of growth, global food prices are now at their highest levels since records began.

The UN Food and Agriculture Association (FAO) Food Price Index, which measures monthly price changes for a food basket which includes cereals, oilseeds, dairy, meat and sugar was higher in January than the last previous high in June 2008. That peak sparked riots across the world, as people who lived on the margin and relied on the market to purchase food were plunged further into poverty.

In 2009, as a result of this, the number of people in the world suffering from hunger topped one billion for the first time in history.

The signs now are ominous for us all with the FAO expecting the price of agricultural commodities to rise further throughout this year. This will put enormous pressure on the world’s poorest who have had to cope relentlessly with the consequences of higher prices for the past two years. The World Bank has estimated that 44 million people have been pushed into poverty since last summer.

Of course, not everyone loses when prices rise. Irish farmers have seen incomes rise as their output prices have exceeded their input prices while the value of their exports has increased. Even poor countries that export commodities such as sugar or rubber can benefit, as long as they are not reliant on importing food.

But while changes in prices happen, it is the volatility that is causing alarm, with price fluctuations becoming greater and, perhaps more worryingly, less predictable. In this turbulent scenario, it is those who are least able to cope who will fare worst when the seas get rough.

Many things contribute to higher prices and increasing volatility. As markets are increasingly integrated in the world economy, shocks in the international arena can now affect domestic markets much quicker than before. Extreme weather in productive areas, such as droughts in Russia and Argentina, floods in Australia, and extended periods of snow and freezing conditions across the USA can negatively impact global supplies. Changing demographic and consumption patterns, especially in middle-income countries, are increasing demand for food in the long-term. Bio-fuels, which become viable once oil hits $60 per barrel, will continue to compete with food for productive land.

Non-traditional investors, such as banks and hedge funds, have entered the food commodities market, taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets. Contracts to buy and sell foods have been turned into ‘derivatives’ that can be bought and sold among traders who have no connection to agriculture. The EU has recently acknowledged the link between speculation and price volatility, stating that there is a strong correlation between positions on derivative markets and prices of goods in local markets.

While there is much debate about the relative impact of these causes, there is no debating the consequences. For the world’s poorest, particularly those who rely on local markets to get food, rising prices and increased volatility are unambiguously negative. This group includes extremely poor people in urban slums, landless labourers in rural areas and subsistence farmers who cannot grow enough food to last the year. These groups already live on the edge. Many of them spend up to 80 percent of their income on basic foods, so even a slight increase in price will have devastating effects.

We know from experience in 2008 what these effects will be. People will have to buy more staple foods at the expense of vegetables and other “luxuries”. A diet of carbohydrate might quell hunger pangs. But a lack of nutrients will have a significant impact on long-term cognitive and physical development, especially for children under two. Because of this, mothers will often forego meals to ensure their children can eat. With less money available, families on the margin will do things they know will have long-term consequences. Many will feel they do not have a choice. For example, farmers may sell seeds and tools so they can buy food now, even though it will affect their ability to grow food for next year. Children may be taken from school to work or scavenge, with many finding it very difficult to go back.

Policy responses can determine whether high food prices turn into a crisis or not. At international level, the forthcoming meetings of the leaders from the G8 and G20 countries must directly address the crisis and must deliver on the promises made at the 2009 G8 Summit in l’Aquila to provide €15 billion ($21 million) for food security programs.

At a regional level, greater integration and cooperation can sustain confidence and mitigate market panic. Harmonization and pooling of data on production, consumption and stocks of food, will help market transparency and guide policy choices.

At a local level, social assistance program run by governments and NGOs can play a vital role in mitigating the worst effects of price increases. India, for example, guarantees 100 days work per year for extremely poor people in rural areas to ensure they have some income in difficult times. NGOs such as Concern Worldwide play their part, ensuring that people are aware of their entitlements and how to access them.

In the longer term, however, investment in agriculture, not just in increased production, but all along the ‘value chain’ can ensure that farmers are able to grow enough food for their families and are protected from fluctuations in local market prices. This is the responsibility of both governments and international donors. When farmers can grow a surplus and are able to access a market, they gain from higher prices and are likely to spend this income on local goods and services, leading to strong multipliers in local income.

Given that rising prices have a direct effect on how much food families have available, we also need holistic and integrated solutions to the problem of hunger. Concern Worldwide and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFRPI) have recently embarked on a project that targets mothers and children during the critical period from conception to 24 months of age, roughly equivalent to the first 1,000 days of life. Its focus is on ensuring that health and agriculture projects work together to achieve improvements in nutrition.

These are just some of the ways in which the world’s poor can be shielded from the worst effects of global food price rises. As the world becomes smaller and more integrated, the poor are now more exposed than ever to the dangers of volatile markets. It is of critical importance that we address this problem with a range of solutions to calm the waters, before this storm truly breaks.

In this context, I am looking forward to participating the World Bank’s “Open Forum on Food” at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. this week. I’m excited at the prospect of sharing a panel with the World Bank Managing Director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Rwanda’s Agricultural Minister, Dr Agnes Matilda Kalibata, World Food Program Executive Director, Josette Sheeran; Abdolreza Abbassian of FAO; Gavin Maguire, from Reuters, and Professor Calestous Juma of Harvard University and the Gates Foundation.

What is especially intriguing is that we will be presented with solutions submitted by people all over the world, which we will discuss and debate. It promises to be lively and informative, and is being transmitted online at http://live.worldbank.org/open-forum-food-crisis next Friday, 15th April from 10am to 12 noon.

Guest Voices: Floods in Pakistan Expose Poverty and Malnutrition

Next up for our series of posts from Concern Worldwide is a story about Pakistan and their recovery from last summer's flooding. Writer Mubashir Ahmed serves as Concern's Assistant Country Director for Pakistan. He says that once Concern arrived to help out after the flooding they found deeper ongoing conditions of poverty that is fueled by a tenant farming system.

Last summer’s massive floods swept through and destroyed lives, houses, crop lands and road infrastructure, causing enormous suffering and damages across an area the size of Italy. The disaster has drawn a significant emergency and recovery response on the part of numerous International NGOs, taking them to often remote areas where any kind of aid had been sparse for many years.

What Concern Worldwide and its fellow aid organizations discovered—aside, of course, from communities’ grave needs in the wake of the floods—were chronic conditions of poverty, malnutrition, poor health, as well as—especially in Sindh Province—inequitable conditions for tenant farmers and laborers. Most of the flood affected areas where we are working today were already very poor and vulnerable before the floods, and ranked low on the United Nations Human Development Index.

Tenant farmers work very hard for very little and are trapped in an archaic feudal system. The landlords benefit much more from the land than their tenants. Seasonal tenants are paid only a third of the profit gained from the harvest, and they have no rights or formal relationship with the landowner—who is often an absentee landlord—once the harvest is over. Attempts have been made at land reform on several occasions since the foundation of the state, but a lack of political will made these efforts ineffective.

There have been widespread accusations of diversion of flood water by influential figures during the 2010 floods, as reported widely in the national and international media[1]. Pakistan’s Supreme Court has constituted a judicial commission to investigate the breaching of dykes in Sindh by influential landowners to save their farms.

Children are the major victims in all this. That becomes evident when you examine malnutrition rates. Lack of proper nutrition has been a problem in Sindh for some time and the situation was exacerbated by the floods—stored food, standing crops and agricultural inputs like seed and fertilizer were destroyed in the deluge.

A UNICEF report, entitled “Children in Pakistan: Six Months After the Floods,” quoting the data by the Sindh De­partment of Health, indicates malnutrition at or beyond emergency threshold levels, with a Global Acute Mal­nutrition (GAM) rate of 23.1% in Northern Sindh and 21.2% in Southern Sindh. The WHO gives 15 per cent as the emergen­cy threshold level to trigger a humanitarian response. The same report referring to records from Northern Sindh has revealed a Se­vere Acute Malnutrition (SAM) rate of 6.1 per cent. These figures are on a par with what NGOs have been confronted with during the most severe nutrition crisis in Africa.

I am cautiously optimistic that the spotlight put upon the country’s very poorest people will have long-term beneficial effects. But the task at hand is staggering.

[1] Daily Express Tribune, Islamabad (Jan 16, 2011); BBC News, South Asia (Sep 2, 2010); The Telegraph Pakistan (March 19, 2011)

Guest Voices: Women In Liberia Mobilize For Peace

Continuing our series of posts from Concern Worldwide is a story about the Peace Women coalition who are fasting and praying for the refugees of Côte D’Ivoire. Writer Jenny Hobbs says the Peace Women understand what the refugees are going thru because Liberia recently survived through armed conflict.

Few people are aware that a group of women – calling themselves the Peace Women, dressed in colourful lappas (Liberian cloth), bright white t-shirts and white headscarves, were instrumental in bringing peace to Liberia. Their story, which begins with the simple act of sitting along the streets for months under the hot sun or torrential rains of Liberia, led to the exile of alleged warlord Charles Taylor in 2003, now awaiting his verdict in The Hague.

In 1998, women from all tribes and religions in Liberia united in their common goal for an end to violence, and played an essential role in the decommissioning of young rebels to install peace and democracy in a war-torn country. The movement took place under the auspices of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP). Today the work of these Peace Women continues. Here in Liberia, 75 women gather on a dusty football pitch to hold a 40-day fast and prayer meeting in solidarity for the women and children in neighbouring Côte D’Ivoire, where over 7,700 refugees have fled to Liberia.

The conflict in Côte D’Ivoire is escalating rapidly – official figures from UNHCR predict that 150,000 refugees are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, although the scale and uncertainty of the conflict indicate that these figures will rise significantly.

As Mama Kolubah Johnson, a member of the Peace Women group explained to me, the dangers for women in Côte D’Ivoire are well known to her group: “We have passed through the same problem here. Women and children suffer during war, women are raped, sometimes with their husband there. When men have guns they can say: ‘My man! This woman not for you, yeah?’ If the person has a gun your husband can’t say anything.”

Mama experienced the horrors of war when she was trapped in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, as the rebel factions surrounded the city. Her husband was brutally killed during the war – oil was poured over him and he was burned alive while his wife was forced to watch. She was then left alone to care for her six-year-old daughter. It was then, that Mama Johnson decided to join the Peace Women’s movement.

Throughout the conflict in Liberia, women were subjected to rape—often gang rape—in brutal acts where objects such as bananas, pieces of wood and metal, guns, hot water, mud, dried batteries and hot peppers were used. A post-war WHO survey reported that 90 percent of interviewees, irrespective of age, marital status and religion, said they were ‘subjected to one or multiple acts of sexual abuse during the war or subsequently’. 75 percent of the 90 percent were ‘raped or otherwise badly abused, many by gangs of men’.

Throughout Liberia women joined together – Christians and Muslims from all tribes – and united in their call for an immediate end to violence.

As I spoke Mama, a Christian, was sitting next to her friend Miatta Sah, a Muslim. Miatta also lost her husband during the war, but due to the fighting it was not possible to make a grave or conduct a proper burial, a memory that still disturbs her today. Miatta talks of how proud her daughter is of her involvement with the Peace Women and her role in bringing peace to Liberia.

“We joined the group because during Taylor’s time the war was closing in on us. Our sisters, mothers and daughters were behind the fighters and in front of the fighters. We knew what would happen if the soldiers continued. We stood up on the street and cried for peace. We begged them. We went to them and physically begged for peace.”

The Accra Peace Accord was signed in 2003 and resulted in the exile of Charles Taylor. Liberia held peaceful and democratic elections in 2005, and Africa’s first female head of state was elected, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The day after the President’s inauguration she passed a new rape law, which provides harsher penalties for the rape of women, boys and children under the age of 18 years. Mama Kolubah and her colleagues in WANEP travelled throughout Liberia to support the disarmament process. Mama described her ability to forgive the perpetrators of violence:

“Those who did it, I forgive them. They didn’t know what they were doing, they were under drugs – heavy drugs – and they didn’t know. I had a burning desire to talk to them. I was assigned to Kakata to convince them to disarm, I went there. They cursed us, they cursed us and we begged them. It was when I touched his arm and asked him to leave the gun, I told him it was finished and it was time to leave the gun, and he put it down. They all cursed us but we kept begging.”

Unfortunately, gender-based violence did not end with the war. The Minister for Gender and Development highlights this in her preface to the National Plan of Action on Gender Based Violence, stating that although the conflict has ended, Liberian women and girls are still experiencing violence in all of its manifestations. Rape is the second most reported violent crime in Liberia and it is expected that actual incidence is much higher than reported.

“Rape is happening one-on-one now. They are raping little children aged 8 or 9 years. When their mothers are out getting food or finding means to pay for their education, the older men feel that the mother is not around so they catch the little girls.”

In over half (55 percent) of gender based violence cases reported between January 2009 and September 2010, the survivors were fourteen years old or younger. The Ministry of Gender and Development is working closely with women’s groups, such as WANEP and the Rural Women’s Association, to address violence against women and children, and to engage men and boys in social change.

Concern has been working in Liberia for fifteen years and has prioritized addressing Gender Based Violence through its livelihoods, HIV and AIDS, Water, Sanitation and Health (WaSH) and Education programs. Children are in danger of sexual exploitation and abuse on the way to and from school, and more shockingly, when they are attending school. Our work supports 30 rural primary schools in Grand Bassa County, south of Monrovia where only 28 percent of primary school-aged children were enrolled in school in 2009.

Our education program draws on the strength the Peace Women demonstrate in challenging violence in Liberia. We work with the Ministry of Gender and Development to provide leadership training for women in rural communities, and educate community members on child rights, women’s rights and the importance of protecting children from gender-based violence at school and in their communities.

To mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day Concern is working in collaboration with WIPNET (Women in Peace-Building Network), the Liberian branch of WANEP, to provide training to 120 rural women in Grand Bassa County on gender equality and gender-based violence.

The training and awareness-raising campaign will take place on March 7 and 8 in six rural communities, bringing together young women who have children of school-going age.

As Mama Kolubah Johnson explains, it is essential that girls are educated to become the future leaders of Liberia.

“In the rural areas as soon as someone reaches 16 years the community will encourage them to get married. As soon as they are old enough to cut palm and make oil to sell they are needed to feed their families. The parents have a role to play. I took care of my own grandchild so my daughter could continue with her education. Now she is in college studying to become an accountant.”

Haiti: Resettlement Continues Despite the Challenges P

Next up in our series of posts from Concern Worldwide is a story on rebuilding efforts in Haiti. Concern US board member Kevin Fortuna reminds us to not forget about the need in Haiti.

We met at JFK airport just after sunrise, the six of us: two staffers from Concern Worldwide (a large international charity), three supporters, and me. We were all a little anxious, having digested both the recommended dosage of anti-malaria drugs as well as the federal security warnings that basically told us not to do what we were about to do.

The flight took less than three hours, about the length of time it takes to get from New York City to Miami. But instead of a first-world American city on the other side of that flight, we stepped off into a place the world has forgotten, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

When we deplaned in Port-au-Prince, we were greeted by an incongruous welcome: a band six-piece band performing a festive tune that sounded like a cross between calypso and salsa music. Though the music was enchanting and, in many ways, a fitting beginning to our trip, reality hit us when we left the airport. We were rushed into a waiting SUV and through the ruins of Haiti’s capital city to the first of many “camps” managed by Concern Worldwide.

This and all but one of the other camps we visited are what development workers call “spontaneous,” meaning they sprang up after the earthquakes in any open space where tents and makeshift structures could be erected on open land—including a private golf course, a soccer field and the grounds of a warehouse and trucking compound. At one camp we saw a medical tent that housed malnourished children and provided a safe space for their mothers to care for them under nurses’ supervision.
At another camp, we spent time in a child-friendly tent where kids were singing songs and learning about hygiene and safe drinking water. At the camp built on a soccer field, all four of the goal posts were incorporated as tent poles by residents of the camp.

This particular camp had seen some unrest and violence and the managing NGO had recruited camp residents to run security patrols near the water station. The threat of violence still hung in the air, and we could see it in the looks the security men exchanged with some adolescents nearby.

What’s remarkable is that there has not been far more violence. Haiti’s population is estimated to be a little more than 10 million people, and almost ten percent of them are jammed into the wreckage of its capital city. The country’s official unemployment rate is 80 percent, but we were told that it’s probably closer to 90 percent.

Haiti’s history has been cursed by unstable and often corrupt governments and an almost total lack of economic progress. Port-au-Prince is not so much a city anymore, but a demolition site. Structures are marked with serial numbers underneath a red, yellow or green dot. Green means that the structure is habitable, yellow means that it’s questionable and red means that it’s marked for demolition. We saw red dots everywhere.

Haiti had precious little hope prior to the earthquake, but now the people of Port-au-Prince face almost unimaginable hardship. No reliable sources of food and water, no permanent places to live, no jobs, and a government that has been slow to respond to a growing crisis. The NGO staffers we met in Haiti are some of the most unselfish and committed people I’ve ever met. The humility and generosity of spirit with which they approach their work is inspiring. But they admit that the main work of their operation is relief, sanitation, healthcare and education. They cannot solve Haiti’s more fundamental problems.

Our trip ended with a tour of Tabare Issa, a camp run by Concern which has quickly become a model for Haiti and the rest of the developing world. The beating heart of the camp is a sophisticated carpentry operation which assembles “transitional shelters” at a breakneck pace under the watchful eye of Concern staffer and civil engineer, Tom Dobbins.

Dobbins and his team recruited and trained a small staff of camp residents who now work efficiently enough to build up to fifteen shelters per day. These attractive wooden structures replace fragile tents, and Dobbins can’t build them fast enough. In stark contrast to the other camps we visited, Tabare Issa is teeming with life and hope. Children played on an adjacent soccer field (instead of using the goal posts as tent poles). Many shelters had private gardens and porches. The camp apparently has a long waiting list of applicants. In Tabare Issa, I saw proof positive of what I’d heard many times from Concern staffers: Haitians want to work, be productive, care for their families and achieve a measure of order and stability.

In America, we don’t hear much about Haiti anymore. Outside of occasional headlines about celebrity involvement from the likes of Sean Penn and Wyclef Jean, America has forgotten our next door neighbor. As we move further along into the New Year it’s a good time to think about our neighbors and reassess our priorities. Why is it that we hear so much about crises in the Middle East and other distant regions, and so little about our neighbor to the south? Children are dying preventable deaths in Haiti every day.

While it’s true that we don’t have an immediate national security interest at stake, surely we have a moral and humanitarian obligation to do more, to make Haiti a bigger part of our national dialog, get involved, to care more, to give more. I’m no exception: I learned about Haiti and traveled there only because I serve as a member of Concern’s U.S. Board of Directors.

Dominic MacSorley, Operations Director of Concern, recently said in a blog post that “Haiti is music.” And music was a hallmark of our trip, whether it was the musical greeting we got at the airport, or church hymns being belted out by an impromptu congregation in front of the ruins of a grand cathedral, or the songs of welcome sung in unison by the children packed into one of our host charity’s child-friendly tents. Music is transcendent; it’s about life and hope and dreams. MacSorley is correct: Haiti is Music. America—and the world—should listen to it.

Guest Voices: Promoting Grassroots Recovery in Pakistan

Next up in our series of posts from Concern Worldwide is a story on the continued need in Pakistan. Even though the flooding in Pakistan took place over the summer, there is still a great need for recovery. Concern's Press Officer Joop Koopman visited Pakistan to describe a program that gets the citizens involved in the recovery.

Seen from the air, the greenness and neat outlines of the farm fields of Punjab stand in sharp contrast with Sindh Province, its much poorer and more desert-like neighbor to the south.

My colleague Susan Finucane and I are flying from Karachi on Pakistan’s southern coast into the Punjabi city of Multan, an historically significant garrison town in the heart of the country that is today a well-kept, clean-swept bustling city. The relative privilege of the place and the orderliness of local traffic are a far cry from the chaos of urban streets we have just left behind in Sindh.

The ordered lushness observed from altitude makes sense. Punjab is literally the ‘land of five rivers’, fertile, relatively affluent and crucial to Pakistan as a grower of wheat and other crops. A kind of cognitive dissonance takes hold.

Though it is not immediately evident from above, we know that the devastating floods of summer 2010 destroyed more than 1.7 million acres of crops. Punjab is still fertile but the planting and harvest cycle has been violently interrupted, and though the flood waters have mostly receded, the ravages of the disaster will be manifest in drastically reduced crop yields, and the threats of food shortage and disease.

Hundreds of villages were severely affected, leaving up to 6 million people in need of various forms of assistance. The picture gets clearer during a drive into the countryside, where many destroyed fields are in evidence. Far and wide the crops—cotton, wheat, corn—lay abandoned, grey and wilted.

We’re travelling through the largely rural district of Muzaffargah, whose entire population of more than 2.6 million people had to be evacuated in the wake of the flooding. It took the majority up to eight weeks or more to be able to return to their villages, finding most of their homes destroyed, their property washed away, their livestock killed.

A limited effort by the government as well as emergency response initiatives by international aid organizations relied on roadside distributions, which left families vulnerable to attacks and fraudulent behavior by what locals refer to as “professional” beneficiaries. Predatory practices also included the purchase of surviving livestock at cut rates, taking advantage of families’ urgent need to raise emergency cash.

For its part, Concern, banking on relationships with local NGOs, built up and formalized in the past five years or more, was able to distribute emergency supplies in the villages, in the heart of the communities themselves. “Our local partners are our ambassadors in the villages,” said Nauman Shahzad, a Concern program officer based in Multan.

Working through these partner organizations, whose leadership often has family ties in the very villages they serve, Concern also insists on the engagement of the communities themselves in determining the eligibility of beneficiaries. As a result, communities take ownership of the aid efforts, keeping an eye on the most vulnerable families in their midst.

Such is the case for the hamlet of Abas Khan, which is part of the 150 household village of Basti Daryai, where, after distributing emergency shelter materials in the early going, Concern is currently overseeing a comprehensive water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) program. Administered by the Doaba Foundation, the program is part of a comprehensive approach that aims to safeguard health in the immediate term, while phasing in longer term recovery programs that will address damage done to infrastructure and crops.

Susan and I were honored guests at a community meeting, at which several local leaders gave a low-tech but very thorough and impressive overview of the program —hand-drawn charts and all.

The WASH program consists of latrines connected to septic tanks, hand-wash stations and hand-pumps replacing older pumps, some of which could not tap water deep enough to bypass polluted levels, while others were stolen after the 30-family hamlet’s initial evacuation. Strategically-placed brightly illustrated posters instruct locals about the benefits of hygiene, while a community-based WASH committee organizes regular refresher courses in the improvised village square.

The program has dramatically changed the lives of the local families, even as, naturally, their priorities are the reconstruction of their homes and the resumption of agriculture. “Before we had given little thought to hygiene in the home and in our environment,” says Imam Bakish (50), who is in charge of an extended household of 14, including his wife Pathanimai and nine children. “Our lives are much changed today,” he says; “we keep our bodies and our clothes clean and children are less frequently ill and adults are doing better as well.”In years past diseases caused by unsafe water prompted costly and burdensome journeys to obtain health care.

“There has been such a great change,” says Naseem, a 30-year-old mother of six; “we have gone to more than four [hygiene] sessions and are learning so much.” The program “has helped us a lot and made the village very happy,” she smiled.

Naseem and Imam, whose farming tools were destroyed by the floods that also made his customary plots inaccessible, long to return to work the land—Imam as a farmer and Naseem picking cotton. Only then will their families have a shot at building a new home.

For now, their prospects are good. The land now being reclaimed from the water will actually be more fertile than before. The flood waters deposited another layer of soil richly endowed with minerals that had been carried along as the flooding made its way down along the north-south axis of the country. Concern and its local partners are accordingly shifting focus and massive resources to livelihoods recovery and reviving agriculture across the district.

Guest Voices: Haiti One Year On: What is Needed Now

Our series of posts from Concern Worldwide continue with this reflection on the one year anniversary of Haiti's earthquake. Jennifer Jalovec talks about the transitional shelters and planned settlement housing that Concern has installed in the past year. Jalovec works as the Haiti Emergency Program Coordinator for Concern.

My journey to Haiti really began with 9/11. I had been working in marketing and promotions for broadcast and print media in New York at the time, a job I had held for nine years. In the days following the attack, I started to question what I was doing with my life and if I were making any kind of positive impact in the lives of others.

Fast forward to 2005: I joined the Peace Corps at age 35, and my humanitarian career was off and running. Today, I am the Emergency Coordinator for Concern Worldwide in Haiti, overseeing a recovery program for the poorest country in western hemisphere, which is still reeling from the devastating earthquake that struck it a year ago.

Sure, there are days when I miss my comfortable corporate life in Manhattan— having lunch at a cafe on Madison Avenue, walking through Central Park, or being able to catch the latest movie at an air-conditioned multiplex. But I have gladly traded all of that to contribute to the positive impact the international aid community is making in the lives of the Haitian people. The story of Haiti is best told through an individual’s concrete experience.

There is a young woman living in the planned settlement of Tabarre Issa, a Concern-designed and Concern-managed planned settlement—the country’s first, in fact—just outside Port-au-Prince. Sarah (not her real name) had a stroke years ago that caused partial paralysis, which forced her to stop attending school. Her condition worsened after the trauma of the earthquake.

On the afternoon of the earthquake, a friend had invited her to come over for a visit. If Sarah had been at home, she would likely have been killed under the weight of her collapsed house. As is true for so many of the 1.3 million displaced, her family lost everything: loved ones, their home, livelihoods, and all their possessions.

At Tabarre Issa, Sarah’s family was one of the first to receive a transitional shelter built by Concern. These are durable, hurricane-proof structures meant to last up to five years. Until just some weeks ago, Sarah and her family lived in a tent. She recently told me: “I was so, so happy when we moved into the new house. I was laughing and jumping all over the place. I was saying, ‘That’s my house! That’s my house from Concern! Look at my house!’” The look of happiness and hope in her face is indisputable evidence that the aid community is making a difference: Sarah’s family of seven has a place to call home; her mother was able to restart her petty trading business; and the young woman herself is selling socks and women’s items—and dreaming of the day when she can pick up her studies in information sciences.

By mid-year, Concern will have built 1,500 of these transitional shelters, in Tabarre as well as in the surrounding communities, serving the various populations with a full range of services (water, sanitation, cash-for-work opportunities). All this work is turning the area into a promising microcosm of the country’s immediate future.

The biggest challenge for aid organizations in providing transitional and permanent shelter similar to those at Concern’s site in Tabarre has been accessing land to build the structures. Land tenure was a problem prior to the earthquake and has gotten worse—coupled with the fact that 80 percent of camp residents were renters prior to the earthquake and now have nowhere to go. This cannot be solved by the international community alone; we need a workable resettlement strategy that all stakeholders are involved with and that is led by the Haitian government.

Those that are criticizing the aid effort in Haiti need to be here day in and day out to see all that has been accomplished in an extremely difficult context. We are working against a multitude of obstacles in an environment of complex emergencies, political instability, and insecurity. Given these many challenges, we can be proud of the work that has been accomplished. We cannot let the negative press get to us: we are doing the best we can do under uniquely challenging circumstances.

I cannot even begin to compare Haiti to anywhere I have worked before, the situation here is so unique, given the sheer magnitude of the disaster and the fact that agencies that were already operating in Haiti prior to the earthquake were affected immensely by the disaster. NGOs suffered losses themselves—staff members died and staff lost family members and friends, which also impacted the emergency response. Yet I am constantly amazed at the resilience of the Haitian people, through all their loss and suffering they have an upbeat outlook on life, which is an absolute inspiration.

There is currently a great deal of uncertainty as to what will happen next in the election process. But we cannot let that stop our earthquake recovery and cholera response operations. The most important thing for everyone is to continue moving forward on a day-by-day basis. Still, the recent violence slowed down our work, and there is a real concern that we will not have access to camps and neighborhoods if the security situation worsens again.

To prevent further cases, Concern’s Cholera Response Team must be able to transport and distribute vital cholera response materials—soap, Oral Rehydration Salts and Aquatabs—and have access to our water and sanitation program areas to provide potable water and maintain latrines. Safe passage to Cholera Treatment Centers is the difference between life and death. Concern, together with other NGOs, has appealed to the international community for a guarantee of humanitarian access and free movement of staff and emergency supplies so that we can continue our work no matter what happens.

Yes, this is the one-year anniversary of the horrible earthquake of January 12, 2010. And we must observe the occasion in various ways. There is an unfounded expectation that the one-year mark must go hand-in-hand with a record of super accomplishments by NGOs—like finding homes for more than 1 million displaced people; and rebuilding the city’s water and sanitation infrastructure from scratch.

The entire recovery and rebuilding process will take years. Concern has been saying this from the beginning. As Sarah’s story powerfully illustrates, progress is being made on a daily basis—and unrealistic expectations for Haiti must be kept in check. In the meantime, we—and I speak for all of my colleagues at Concern—aren’t going anywhere.

Guest Voices: Local Partners are Key to Recovery in Pakistan

Next up in our continuing series of guest posts from Concern Worldwide, is this look at recovery efforts in Pakistan. Press Officer Joop Koopman says that relationships with other NGOs and community members have helped to look to speed recovery efforts from the summer flooding.

Susan Finucane, program officer at Concern Worldwide US, and I have come to Pakistan to report on the progress of Concern’s large-scale emergency program in response to the megadisaster caused by summer’s unprecedented heavy rains and massive flooding that left an area the size of Italy underwater.

Upon our arrival, Dorothy Blane, Concern Worldwide Country Director in Pakistan, briefs us on Concern’s immediate priorities and our approach to this particular disaster, which is informed by a long track record in both long-term development and emergencies in Pakistan.

LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS SECURE VITAL REACH

What gives Concern vital reach and flexibility, says Dorothy, is our network of local partners and our long-term relationships with community members in the poorest parts of Pakistan. Dorothy tells us that working with local organizations is “a powerful way to build up civil society.” Concern offers capacity building and technical expertise that benefits and strengthens local NGOs so that work can be sustained in the long term without Concern. The local NGOs Concern partners with in Pakistan closely involve the communities they serve through Community-Based Organizations, an approach strongly encouraged by Concern in its programs throughout the world.

The purpose of Susan’s and my field visit is to see firsthand the impact of the disaster on communities in Pakistan and document the ongoing humanitarian needs, as well as to document the emergency response programs that Concern is overseeing in Sindh and Punjab provinces. Compared to KPK, where the recovery and reconstruction process has begun in earnest, people in Sindh and Punjab still face enormous needs and challenges.

In Sindh, only 30 percent of people displaced by the flooding have been able to return to their homes, with significant parts of the province still underwater, and silted soil has ruined the first post-flood harvest. Many of those who have returned to their villages are still living in makeshift dwellings pending the construction of more permanent dwellings. In Punjab, where most of the water has receded, the big challenge is to make the destroyed crop lands productive again. In KPK, in the north, the advent of winter and cold weather are making the construction of solid housing an urgent matter.

For example, Concern gave 900 farming families from the village of Basti Noon Wada, in District Muzaffargah in South Punjab, 50kg bags of wheat and basic farming tools just before wheat planting season ended in early December. The orderly distribution process managed to serve 500 people a day.

SAFEGUARDING COMMUNITIES AGAINST DISEASE

In the spontaneous settlement of Sonda Eid Gab, in District Thatta in Sindh, 128 families are living in tents and make-shift shelters just up a hillside from where their community once stood at the river’s edge. The remains of a wall are among the few reminders of the existence of a once thriving village, the majority of whose men made their living fishing. Concern built latrines in this settlement to reduce health threats from poor sanitation, and has also been providing clean drinking water to meet the population’s daily needs, along with hygiene education programs. All of these are safeguarding an extremely vulnerable community against waterborne diseases and other health risks.

For the nearly 200 families in the village of Abora Jakhro, a few hours’ drive from the camp, Concern is also building new latrines—complete with permanent plumbing—and the new hand pumps are the pride of the community. “Before we simply never thought about hygiene,” said Nooran Merbahar, a mother of five children. “We were plagued by mosquitoes, and we had to rely on dirty water. All of us got sick.” Those days are now behind her.

Nearly 20 million people have been affected by this disaster, with 7 million in urgent need of shelter, food, water, seeds and tools, livelihood opportunities and repairs to infrastructure such as roads, bridges and, especially, permanent housing.

Through its commitment to local partners, Concern empowers local groups that would otherwise not have the capacity to jump into action or be eligible for significant funding. And once projects get underway, Concern’s monitoring mechanism also ensures ongoing support and training for such local organizations.

BUILDING PAKISTAN BACK BETTER THROUGH LOCAL PARTNERSHIPS

“It often makes no sense for us or other international NGOs to set up and staff local offices when so many committed and capable civil society organizations are already in place,” Blane insists. Local and community organizations have a wisdom and experience that INGOs need in order to ensure local sensitivity, appropriate solutions, and sustainability.

In fact, though Concern began working in Paksitan in 2001, the history of INGOs in Pakistan is a relatively short one, explains Mubashir Ahmed, Concern’s Assistant Country Director. It wasn’t until the 2005 earthquake that INGOs built up a significant and lasting presence in Pakistan, as the crisis highlighted Pakistan’s widespread poverty.

Similarly, the long-term needs of Sindh and Punjab—both suffering from extreme poverty—were not really on the radar until the devastating floods. There was momentum after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake to help build the affected areas back better. That call to action applies even more powerfully today, as Concern is helping lay the groundwork for long-term recovery for millions whose assets and homes were literally washed away by the floodwaters.

Guest Voices: All Sweet for Honey Producers in Malawi

Next up in our series of posts from Concern Worldwide, we learn more about beekeeping in Africa. Joseph Scott Communications Officer of Concern's efforts in Malawi, talks about the Ngala club of beekeepers. This group has used Concern's service and support to help make their beekeeping profitable.

A few months ago, Siverio Kamera, 42, a member of Ngala Club in Dowa, Malawi, was getting disillusioned by the lack of progress in his newly found source of livelihood, beekeeping.

Having joined Ngala Club in 2006, Siverio was finding the going tough as the project was failing to make any meaningful head start.

“The bees were not producing enough honey to make any profitable business. And worse still, the harvesting was proving to be a risky business: We were being stung every day due to lack of protective clothing,” recalls Siverio.

The Ngala club started on a humble note with only four beehives. However, they realized that on their own, the project would crumble. So they approached Concern for support and guidance.

“After seeing our perseverance and determination, Concern helped us with 50 beehives. They also trained us in honey processing,” recalls Siverio, adding, “Besides the beehives and training, Concern also gave us bee suits. This was a great boost as previously we were harvesting without any protective clothing, which was dangerous.”

The relationship with Concern changed the fortunes of the group’s members. When they were starting, Ngala members could only manage about 10-18kg from four hives. The quantities were so low that it made little difference to their lives.

Since then, the group’s production has grown tremendously and a single beehive now produces between 8-10 kilograms, close to double the production.

“We were selling unprocessed honey, which meant more quantity for a less amount. The training by Concern equipped us with processing skills and now we are bottling our produce. This has greatly boosted our sales. Before we were selling the same amount at MK150 but now the price has improved to MK500,” says a proud Siverio.

He adds: “We harvest twice per year and I am able to get MK10,000 on each harvest. This money has helped me pay school fees for my children and also buy basic necessities for my family. I also use part of the money to buy fertilizer for my field.”

Another beneficiary from Ngala whose life has changed for the better is Theresa Makanjira. Theresa says before joining the group, she used to sorely rely on her husband for support.

“I used the profits from the honey I harvested last year to buy food and a goat, which now has one kid. Our life has changed because there are now two of us providing income in the family,” says Theresa.

In an effort to secure the long-term success of the project, Concern has initiated a process of linking Ngala Club to other markets to boost their sales. The move is aimed to ensure that the group will become entirely self reliant in the future, and that stories of success like this one will multiply in the community.

Guest Voices: World Food Day, October 16th

For the next installment of guest posts from Concern Worldwide, we read about World Food Day. October 16th is a day to raise public awareness of hunger and to strengthen the resolve of those already fighting it.

The writer on this post is Allyson Brown, the Operations Director for Concern Worldwide. Allyson says that female farmers need to be empowered, as they already grow a majority of the food in the under-developed world.

Did you know that women produce more than half of the world’s food but earn only 10% of the world’s income? And although women produce up to 80% of food in the developing world, they often aren’t able to grow enough to feed themselves and their families. Despite global commitments to improve gender equity, we know that poverty and hunger still have a woman’s face. Why? Because when times are hard, they eat last and least.

Tomorrow, October 16th will mark World Food Day, a day designated to heighten public awareness of the world food problem and strengthen unity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty. If we are serious about fighting hunger and beating global poverty, the empowerment of women farmers must be prioritized.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) almost a billion people go hungry every day, and 60% are women. This is not just today, this week or this month—it’s every day. Hunger continues to be the single biggest risk to health worldwide and poses a greater threat than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Concern Worldwide passionately believes that we can and should give this crisis the attention it deserves, and that women play a vital, yet unrecognized, role in the fight against global hunger.

Agatha Akandelwa is one of these women. These days, she takes care of 21 people in her Zambian village, including her grandchildren and several children of sick and deceased relatives. But sometimes it’s hard to find food for her large extended family.

“Our food situation becomes very difficult every year, starting in about September and lasting right through until January. During that period we only get about one meal per day. I really don’t feel good during that time. As an adult, I can go all day without food and then get up and go to the field the next day, but I get really concerned for the children during the hungry times.”

Concern Worldwide works daily with women farmers like Agatha. We help provide them with tools, training and a little money to invest in seeds—and the women farmers have seen a significant impact. They’ve not only been able to grow enough to feed their families, but they’ve also been able to use the income from their surplus crops to send their children to school and keep their families healthy.

Concern is empowering women marginal farmers in Uganda, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere to:
• help build community networks
• promote alliances and external links to markets
• organize needs-based training and workshops
• develop flexible and innovative approaches tailored to specific needs
• become a recognized voice and force for fighting hunger

Women farmers are responsible for growing, harvesting, preparing and selling the majority of food in poor countries. They are on the front lines of the fight against hunger, but far too often they do not have a seat at the table with policy makers or aid organizations. Until recently, policies designed to address hunger have failed to adequately value the role of women farmers as crucial players in providing their families and communities with food for both consumption and sale. There must be a reform of land tenure rights, as well as property and inheritance laws as measures to help women farmers succeed.

The US, with its new Feed the Future Initiative—a $3.5B commitment to improving the global food supply—has already made investment in women and girls a key part of the program. Unless world leaders focus on women farmers, the target they set to halve poverty and hunger by 2015—one of eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) originally set in 2000—will not be reached. It’s that simple.

Concern Worldwide’s Women Can’t Wait campaign urges the international community to listen to women like Agatha and to increase support for women in the fight against global hunger. On September 21st during the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals, Mr. Tom Arnold, Concern’s Chief Executive, delivered 10,336 “Women Can’t Wait” petition signatures to the UN where they were received by Dr David Nabarro, UN Special Representative on Food Security and Nutrition. Dr Nabarro received the petition very positively, saying:

“I welcome Concern’s Women Can’t Wait campaign, which has the support of over 10,000 signatories worldwide. Hunger is one of the most important challenges facing our world today, and it is essential that we acknowledge the central role women play as farmers, mothers, and providers of food to their families. All of us have a responsibility to make sure that by 2015, significant progress has been made in ending hunger for good.”

Guest Voices: Afghanistan: Two Trips, Two Viewpoints … 33 Years Apart

Next up in our series of guest posts from Concern Worldwide, Aoife Gleeson tells the story of Kathy Cicerale. Kathy has an unique perspective on Afghanistan after returning to the country 33 years after her first visit.

In September 1977, Kathy Cicerale, who now works as the Donor Care Assistant for Concern Worldwide in New York, entered Kabul for the first time. The journey marked the latest leg of her backpacking adventure around South East Asia.

The bus trip from Pakistan had taken over 12 hours – but it was a spectacular journey that had taken her through the Kybher pass. The sheer drops, windy roads and snow-capped peaks were both terrifying and exciting all at once. It was a fantastic way to start a trip that was to leave a lasting impression on Kathy.

“As we approached Kabul, we drove by the president’s house, where a policeman took out his rifle and threatened to fire if we didn’t go back. Buses were not allowed in this location because the noise would disturb the president. That was the first time that I was exposed to guns in Afghanistan.”

Thirty three years later I too entered Kabul, by air.

During the years that separated our trips, Afghanistan has experienced a continuous state of civil war punctuated only by foreign occupations including the 1979 Soviet invasion and the October 2001 US-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban government.

Nowadays the Kypher pass is a route considered far too daunting for most travelers, and the numbers of people bearing rifles has risen significantly. Nonetheless, travelling to Afghanistan can still be a quite spectacular trip.

From my window seat on the plane I sat mesmerized by the seemingly endless rolling hills that unfolded below as the passenger to my right spoke: “These were all green when I was a child. The years of civil war have destroyed the trees that covered these hills and so now they are brown and lifeless.”

Indeed, this is not the small bustling city of 33 years ago, that Kathy remembers: “Somehow I immediately felt comfortable with the Afghan people even though it was my first exposure to a very strict and predominantly Islamic culture. You could feel the importance of the Islamic traditions that were deeply ingrained in its people.

“Travelers did not deal with or even encounter Afghan women who were completely covered from head to toe with only a small opening for their eyes. Only on a few occasions did I see a few women on the inner city buses. Initially, the male presence was overwhelming. I was careful to dress appropriately and wore long pants or skirts and long sleeves. Afghanistan was a country where I felt it important to respect the culture, particularly as a woman.” For me, at least on this count, her experience rang true.

Upon landing I was met by the Country Director for Concern Afghanistan and taken to the Concern Worldwide office in Kabul, where I was welcomed like an old friend. Concern has been working in Afghanistan since 1998 and a lot of the staff have been with Concern for years. Many asked after old friends that have since moved on to work in other Concern country programs. While I felt very safe, I did notice a lot fewer people walking around the streets compared with cities in other developing countries.

Kathy explains:”The scene here was very different when I was there. All the western travelers would congregate around Chicken Street where there was lots of bazaars that sold all kinds of stuff. Chicken Street attracted a lot of foreigners because of the cheap hotels, interesting stores, tea shops and crafts and clothing markets for western travelers. Most of the shops were small and had lots of hand crafted items. You could stop for tea, stroll through the bazaars, take photos, and not be pressured to buy or be bothered by people. ”

From Kabul I headed north to Taloqan to the head office of Concern Afghanistan, while Kathy’s trip took her south to Khanadar.

“Khandahar was much more laid back, the bazaars and stores catered more to the locals than to travelers. We were constantly followed by groups of children who would trail us and say heeeeelo- the only English word they knew. They were fascinated by westerners. We also had the opportunity travel with a number of other tourists on a local bus that took us out to the more isolated countryside where people were living very basically in makeshift tents.

“Hospitality is an essential part of the Afghan culture. I truly enjoyed visiting all the tea shops and meals are always started with drinking tea. People had so little but were so willing to share what they had – it really was humbling,” Kathy remembers.

With an estimated 42 percent of the Afghan population living below the poverty line, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. The poverty experienced by Kathy in 1977 is still all too visible in many places today. Concern has been responding to the needs of the local communities through a variety of programs that are predominately livelihood focused. I was able to visit one of the Concern nurseries in Faisabad which was set up in 2002 as an agricultural training center for the local community.

The entire operation was really impressive and it was great to see so many people walking around the gardens and enjoying the peaceful atmosphere. Made Ferguson the head of programs for Concern Afghanistan, talked about some of the other programs as we walked around the gardens:

“In Takar North one of our programs is focusing on watershed management through the development and repair of irrigation canals. Our approach is very holistic – we aim to help people improve their crop yields, access markets while planting trees to improve soil quality and resistance to drought.”

Afghanistan has been nothing like I expected. The countless images projected by the media had forearmed me about a barren and difficult country in which to travel. Instead I found it to be beautiful. The local Afghani Concern staff were extremely respectful, friendly and passionate about helping the communities that we work with.

While the purpose of our trips was entirely different, I feel in many ways that I got to experience the Afghanistan that Kathy fell in love with 33 years ago:

“I often think about Afghanistan – what it was like then and what it must be like now. At that time Afghanistan appeared to be untouched by the West. I can still see the people and smiling faces I met along the way. I wonder how much they have endured and if they are still alive. I’m glad I had the opportunity to visit and I will always cherish those memories.”

Guest Voices: The Human Cost of Pakistan’s Disaster

Concern Worldwide continues to report from Pakistan as the people fight for their lives following the widespread flooding. Mubashir Ahmed, Assistant Country Director for Concern, visited a school that has turned into a distribution center.

Single mother of three Mina Gul was working as a maid before the floodwaters raged through her village of Sanamgari in the Charsadda district of Pakistan’s northwest. She was thankful, she told me, that the waters came in the night because otherwise she may not have been with her family to take them to safety.

Having scrambled to a high road near their home, she and her three sons watched in horror as the waters inundated her village until not even one house was left standing. Her eldest, Mahanoor, aged eight, recalled to me how he was moved to terror by the deafening sounds of houses collapsing in every direction around them.

I visited the local school that he and his brothers attend which has been repurposed as a Concern distribution point since day two of this disaster. So far, in this district, Concern has distributed basic household items and hygiene kits to 19,880 people. Mina is just one of a number of the extremely poor people that we are targeting.

She and others tell us that so far nobody but Concern has come here to help. Certainly I saw little sign of other assistance. Such is the scale of this calamity, the Government capacity is simply not able to cope, and KPK provincial authorities have been making regular appeals for more aid.

With meagre earnings of just $35 a month, her job as a maid has never allowed Mina to provide much for her children, but when all three of them fell ill with diarrhea, scabies and fever, she tells me that she grew desperate. Not long after her youngest, Akhtar Ali aged 5, was hospitalized in Peshawar for three days, she went to her employers to beg for help. And when they refused, she abandoned her job to care for her children full time.

Now she and her three sons live in the overcrowded two-bedroom home of her father-in-law, Faiz Mohammed. At night, they share the floor with 13 other family members. Mina is hopeful that she will find a new job, but so far the signs are not good. Faiz, a farm labourer, says he has also been out of work since the floods came. Not surprising, considering that the water completely submerged this land-dependent rural community drowning 70 percent of the livestock.

Sadly, Mina Gul’s case isn’t isolated. I met with several other people at the school, each one with their own story of devastation to tell. There was Imran Ullah (21), whose house was destroyed and was now living with 17 family members in one small house; Mohammad Jamil (35), a police officer, now volunteering with us at the school and sheltering eight family members in his home; Hasan Ferozshah (8), who had not received treatment for a serious eye infection that he developed after the floods; Nishtabahan (65), who was living with four of her sons, their wives and nine children and whose grandchildren were suffering from scabies and rashes; Shaqila Arshad (60) whose 20-member family were now living in tents; and Khushbna Bibi (70) whose two room house collapsed and who was now living with her children in a graveyard-turned-campsite along with 70 other families. The stories are endless and they are echoed across Pakistan for the estimated 20 million people who have been affected by this disaster.

For now, Concern is working with community partners to ensure there is access to clean water, daily household items and medical camps for the sick. More than 2 million people in this province of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (KPK) have been directly affected by the flooding. Concern’s partners estimate that at least 50,000 houses were completely destroyed and tens of thousands more were damaged. The immediate short-term needs are great and already we are in a race against time to rehabilitate water supply schemes to stem further outbreaks of disease.

But in the longer term, the support must pivot around the redevelopment of infrastructure so that communities like this one can regain a foothold on their livelihoods. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that approximately 500,000 pounds of wheat stock was washed away in Pakistan. Couple that with the fact that the main food source for the rural poor is wheat-based flat bread, and the true impact of this catastrophe becomes apparent.

The people of Pakistan are perilously close to an unimaginable food crisis. The mammoth 20 million affected and the lack of funding has meant that the emergency response has had to spread itself wide and thin. Water, sanitation and hygiene schemes will be essential in the coming months to prevent people, especially children, from dying from preventable waterborne diseases. But in the longer term, leveling and reclaiming land, rebuilding infrastructure and providing seed—necessary for the upcoming planting season—and livestock support will make the difference in minimizing the suffering which has already tested and plagued millions of families since the end of July.