Inflation in South Sudan makes life harder for female farmers

Inflation has been rising rapidly in South Sudan throughout the year. The cause of the inflation is blamed on an oil production shutdown. South Sudan stopped producing oil because of their ongoing conflict with "North" Sudan. This inflation has crippled the ability of South Sudan's poor to earn a decent wage. Pile this on top of floods and drought for the poor farmer.

From this Sudan Tribune article that we found at All Africa, writer Bonifacio Toban Kuich profiles some women trying to earn a wage at a farmers market.   

Rebecca Nyamuoka Kuay a 25-year-old vegetable seller in Kalibalek market says that her small business is helping her family survive, despite high levels of inflation.

Kuay says she and her fellow women often have to sit in the sun, waiting for customers to buy their vegetables.

"Before the prices increase, women use to get 50 SSP per day in the process of selling vegetables. But due to recent inflation women find it hard for 50 SSP to buy 5Kg of sorghum in the market as the market price increase every day", said Kuay.

Kuay called on the government to control the high increases in food prices in the market by limiting taxes on traders so that citizens can afford to eat.

Nyakuoth Kuol walked 20 miles each day to Bentiu town to sell milk in Kalibalek market in order to afford health care for her sick 5-year-old daughter who is in hospital. However, she told Sudan Tribune that thieves stole 200 SSP (approx. $65) while she was selling her milk.

Kuol says she is giving up selling milk in the town after she lost her money.

"I came here yesterday upon my arrive, some guys came and steal my money, I got discourage with the business, my present here was to rise up money, this is really making me very shame as I thought my coming was to solve my problem with my children", Kuol added.

Re-creating the education system in South Sudan

During the Sudan civil war, many children from the south did not go to school. Children had to bravely leave their homeland to receive an education from the people that were fighting against them. Once there, the students would be discriminated against for their color and would even have their lives threatened. Now that the south is independent, a push is on to make education a priority for the new country.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Protus Onyango talks about the need to re-create an education system in South Sudan.

South Sudan has three generations of children who have never seen the inside of a classroom. According to Dr. Michael Hussein, the minister for general education, the education sector suffered most during the civil war.

"Teachers were neglected, salaries were not regular, there was no training and many fled the war-torn areas. As a result, three generations lost the opportunity to go to school," says the minister.

The issue of education in South Sudan is so critical that most leaders are calling on the youth to go back to school.

Lieutenant General Daniel Akot, the Deputy Speaker of the national assembly is calling on his colleagues to pass relevant laws that will make it possible for all South Sudanese children to access education. "We have won the war with our enemy. Now the real war of fighting poverty, ignorance and hunger has started. We can’t achieve this when our children don’t go to school," he says.

Hussein is urging the government to dedicate at least 20 percent of its national budget to his ministry. He said his ministry wants to build 6,000 primary and 3,000 secondary schools respectively.

"We have some areas that have 120 pupils per teacher, making learning impossible. One textbook is being shared among five pupils. We want to recruit many teachers, train more of them. We welcome those of our citizens who fled the country and (were educated) around the world to come back and bridge the big gap of a lack of personnel," says Hussein.

Hussein says that by the end of 2010, South Sudan had 169 pre-primary schools with 47,266 pupils and 1,249 teachers. There are 3,195 primary schools with 1.3 million pupils and 2,912 teachers. And there are 168 secondary schools with 34,487 students and three functional teacher-training colleges with 2,310 trainees.

But there remains about two million young South Sudanese who have not attended school, against an acute shortage of teachers. The government is working with its neighbours, like Kenya, to provide it with teachers. Kenya has over 70,000 unemployed trained teachers.

South Sudan's first female car mechanics

The culture of Sudan makes women subject to men in many ways. Women even have to kneel at the feet of their husbands when then they bring water to them.

Three young women are trying to break through the barriers of their culture by training to become mechanics. Once they graduate they will be the first women to work in this trade in Sudan's history.

From the Guardian, writer Laura Powell introduces us to the barrier breakers.

Nura Koleji rubs her toe in the ochre dust, hugs her knees to her stomach, and keeps her eyes firmly downcast – until we hit on the one topic she is bubbling to talk about. It is not how she fled her village of Lanya when AK47-wielding soldiers arrived from the north during the Sudanese civil war. Nor how they kidnapped her brother to train him as a child soldier; how she watched as they picked out victims and shot them; or how her two uncles were among those butchered in front of her.

It is not even the topic I am here to speak to her about – why she decided to train as a mechanic. What really riles Nura is men's dominance in the workplace. Last week South Sudan, became an independent country following a 22-year war that ended in 2005. And in this brand new country, women such as Nura are keen to see changes.

"We have a saying that one hand is not enough to clap. It's true," she tells me. "We need both sexes, not just one. There's an hereditary attitude in my village that women are weaker. I ignore those words and despise the people who say them because I have louder words in my heart telling me I am strong."

Nura is not an activist; she has never heard the word "feminist". She is a 20-year-old, softly spoken Sudanese girl, wearing oil-slicked blue mechanic's overalls. When she graduates next year she, along with three other female classmates, will have defied the odds to become the first women mechanics in South Sudan.

By the time we meet at 9am, I've dressed, had breakfast and negotiated the potholed roads of Juba, Southern Sudan's de facto capital, to reach the technical college, a secondary school where the 470 students (85% of whom are boys) train to become electricians, bricklayers, carpenters or mechanics. Nura, meanwhile, has collected water from a borehole, swept her family's compound, poured tea for her six younger siblings, revised, and picked mangoes before her two-hour walk to school. After classes finish at 3pm, she will sell the fruit at Juba market and put the earnings towards her £41-a-year school fees.

As her 16-year-old classmate Pamela Daniel says: "If you live here, everything is a struggle. But if you don't struggle, you may as well spend your life asleep because nothing will come to you."

Nura chose this profession partly because she loves cars, partly because she would love to drive (but has neither the money nor facilities to learn), and partly because she wanted technical skills and a trade, rather than a traditional academic education. One motive, however, supersedes the rest; Nura believes there are no female role models in Southern Sudan and her ambition is to become the first.

A difficult start for South Sudan

South Sudan becomes their own independent country today. There is sure to be celebrations throughout the new country today, but South Sudan will have a very troubling start. There is still uncertainty over where the broader between north and south will lie, an important water and grazing area is sure to be fought over by the two sides. It also appears that the North has taken up ethnic cleansing again.

From the magazine Guernica, writer Jina Moore interviews Rebecca Hamilton who has had a long history of involvement in Sudan. Hamilton worked for the International Crimes Tribunal while the court convicted country’s president, Omar al-Bashir convicted of war crimes. She currently reports on Sudan for the Washington Post.

Guernica: South Sudan voted in January to secede from the country. The formal division is scheduled for July 9, but there’s been new violence the last few weeks in Abyei.

Rebecca Hamilton: And now in a place called South Kordofan.

Guernica: What has been happening there, and will it jeopardize the split?

Rebecca Hamilton: It’s best to think of these as two things—they’re related, but there’s different dynamics going on with each of them. A key difference is Abyei is contested territory. We still do not know whether Abyei is going to belong to the new country of South Sudan or effectively the new country of Sudan, the northern part. That was supposed to be decided by a referendum in January; that referendum never happened, so it was being dealt with through political negotiations. All of that went out of the window when government seized the territory on May 21.

Guernica: Why is Abyei so sought after?

Rebecca Hamilton: There’s a huge misconception that it’s all about the oil, and the truth is there’s actually not much oil left in Abyei. The misperception arose because when the peace agreement was signed in 2005, Abyei accounted for a quarter of Sudan’s oil production. Since then, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague defined major oil fields to lie outside Abyei. They’re in the north now, not even up for grabs, and they account for one percent of the oil in Sudan. The idea that it’s “oil-rich Abyei” is out of date.

The area is incredibly fertile and really important in terms of water. The permanent residents are the Ngok Dinka, who think Abyei should be southern. They’re more likely to be farmers. The Misseriya are a nomadic group that travels down from the north each year. There’s a river—the Ngok Dinka call it the Kiir, the Misseriya call it Bahr al-Arab—that’s a consistent source of water through the dry season. That river in Abyei is pretty crucial for their livelihoods. They feel if Abyei goes to the south, that they won’t be able to graze their livestock.

There have been promises by the south for grazing rights, but there is still so much mistrust between the two sides. During the civil war, the Sudanese government armed the Misseriya nomads as proxy. Even though both groups had coexisted quite well prior to the conflict, it all become much more difficult as a consequence.

The south really wants Abyei; they have a core constituency who reside in the area who believe that Abyei belongs to the south. There are a number of those sons of Abyei in high positions of government in South Sudan, so it’s pretty hard for South Sudan to just walk away. What’s been amazing over last few weeks is that the southern government hasn’t retaliated over Abyei, not because it hasn’t been debated fiercely, but because it seems like the greater good to hold on until July 9, get independence, be a sovereign state, and then be on more solid ground.

Guernica: That strategy implies the division will go forward no matter what?

Rebecca Hamilton: Absolutely. If South Sudan will become the world’s newest nation on July 9, for me, is not the question. The question is whether the fighting and the insecurity along the border areas is going to be so severe that it makes both the north and the south ultimately impossible to govern.

Guernica: Where does the violence in South Korodfan, which neighbors Abyei, fit into all this?

Rebecca Hamilton: Southern Kordofan is not a disputed territory. It is, and will remain, in the north, where the Nuba Mountains are. People believe there was a genocide there in 1990s. The Nuba, who are northerners, fought with the south in the north-south war. But they have their own individual interests, and they will remain in the north after the south splits. [Sudanese President Omar Hassan] Bashir said he wanted all of these former southern fighters to be disarmed by June, and when that didn’t happen, or when there was an effort at forced disarmament, we got into this situation.

There have been bombs dropping for ten days, humanitarian access has been barred, journalists who tried to get in [to Southern Kordofan] were beaten and turned away at checkpoints. In all the interviews I’ve been doing, the phone calls I’ve gotten at three in the morning, people are saying the Nuba are being systematically hunted down.

Guernica: Ethnic cleansing?

Rebecca Hamilton: Right.