Last year, international humanitarian organisation Concern Worldwide admitted 2,839 children with severe malnutrition into its therapeutic feeding programme, which covered six out of nine districts in Nairobi. Of those children, 64 died.
Another 3,400 children were diagnosed with moderate malnutrition, though lack of funding meant they were not given treatment. In the first three months of 2011, Concern admitted 1,021 severely malnourished children from eight Nairobi districts and identified moderate malnutrition in another 800.
Poor families spend most of their income on food. The price of potatoes has jumped 87 percent in the last year, while cooking fat and kerosene – which poor families use for cooking and lighting – is up 53 percent, according to the Kenyan government.
“There is no doubt that people in the urban slums are going to be the first to be affected (by) any small increase in food prices,” said Noreen Prendiville, head of the nutrition section at UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency.
“This is an issue of extreme poverty.”
URBAN POOR OVERLOOKED
Odhiambo, 36, is a carpenter who earns 700 Kenya shillings ($8) a day when work is available. His family eat two small meals a day.
“Being that I have little money, I try to get what the children are required to eat but sometimes it is not enough,” said Odhiambo.
“If you don't have money, back at home is hell,” he said. “You don't feel comfortable coming home because you want to feed them but you can't.”
There are no comprehensive statistics on the number of malnourished children in Kenya's urban areas.
The World Health Organisation defines the nutritional situation as "critical" when 15 percent of children are malnourished, triggering a humanitarian response. With malnourishment in urban settings often overlooked, critics argue this definition needs to be revised.
Last year, 3,294 malnourished children living in rural Kajiado District were given emergency treatment because the rate of malnutrition was 11.5 percent, and drought had killed large numbers of livestock. But children living in Nairobi slums received no assistance as the malnutrition rate was an "acceptable" 3.5 percent.
Yet the total number of children at risk in the city was much higher. In Mathare, just one of Nairobi's 200-odd slums, a malnutrition rate of 3.5 percent translates into 2,961 children.
Peace dividends have yet to reach thousands of unemployed graduates returning to Sri Lanka's northernmost, conflict-affected Jaffna District.
In Jaffna, the impact of graduate unemployment is significant and more pronounced compared with other areas of Sri Lanka's Northern Province, with limited state employment opportunities and few alternatives, local graduates and professors say.
According to Muthukrishna Sarvananda, principal researcher at the Jaffna-based Point Pedro Institute of Development, a private social science research institution, the dearth of opportunities in an area once ravaged by war is taking its toll.
"It is an important aspect of developmental planning and the [unemployment] numbers are presumed to be large," Sarvananda said.
Addressing this problem is important to prevent the disenfranchisement of youth, a contributing factor to the country's 26-year civil war in the north that ended in May 2009, experts say, and will prove key to the country's future peace and stability.
Some say the Sinhalese majority, mostly in central and south Sri Lanka, had long enjoyed better access to education and jobs than the Tamil minority, in the north.
Despite the war coming to an end and a consequent increase in the country's economy and decrease in overall unemployment, graduates claim the divide continues, with rising unemployment and poverty in the Northern Province.
In Jaffna alone, 6,000 graduates are finding that state jobs are not available.
Post-war economic boom
According to the Department of Census and Statistics, the national unemployment rate was 4.5 percent in 2010. The government attributed this decrease, from 5.8 percent in 2009, to the post-war economic drive attracting foreign direct investment.
Yet, there is little reflection of this emerging prosperity in Jaffna, said the president of the Unemployed Graduates Committee, Thyagaraja Dhanam. "Nobody pays attention to our plight," he said.
Unemployment statistics do not include Northern and Eastern provinces and a district breakdown is not available for the entire Northern Province. "The rate [in Jaffna] is expected to be more than double the national rate of unemployment," Sarvananda said.
Sunil Navaratna, the Higher Education Ministry Secretary, told IRIN more than 400,000 students sit for university entrance each year, with only about 20,000 succeeding.
He said every year at least 6,000 graduate and more than half join the unemployed, with 42,500 jobless graduates nationwide.
"This is despite schemes to absorb them. Of course the Northeast is worst affected as job creation is still low despite many initiatives," he said.
Private sector doors closed
Jaffna's graduates say they see a number of industries - private companies and banks - moving to their province, creating jobs that elude them.
"There aren't many opportunities in the private sector. The practice is to bring employees from the south, excluding locals," Muhunthan Sivayohanathan, an unemployed graduate, said.
However, according to one private business operator in Jaffna interviewed by IRIN, such graduates are "unemployable", because they have no information technology skills and lack English proficiency.
Sarvananda agreed, saying universities needed to increase the calibre of both their staff and graduates. But he said perhaps a boom in private sector opportunities was imagined.
"There are small private companies coming in, but there are no strong corporate sector investments. The centralized system does not encourage it. The ongoing projects generating employment are all government-driven," he said.
Government jobs, please
The young graduates feel it is the government's role to absorb the unemployed into the public sector, but high expectations of government jobs will likely not be the answer.
Jaffna Government Agent Imelda Sukumar said young graduates fixated on public sector employment had to seek alternatives. "They demand government jobs. They should be open-minded about the private and non-governmental sectors that generate significant employment," she said.
Be it public or private sector, graduate or not, there is a need to consider the whole picture, insists Saroja Sivachandran of the Jaffna-based Centre for Women's Development.
"The Jaffna youth did not have opportunities to develop skills and pursued higher education despite serious difficulties. The state has a responsibility to devise special programmes post-war, to ensure they have opportunities for growth and suitable employment," she said. Adding a new, inclusive recruitment policy should require a percentage of jobs go to local youth.
According to the Deputy Minister of Youth Affairs, Duminda Dissanayake, the government was mindful of the unique situation in the north.
"Through different divisions, skills development, vocational training and youth development we try to cater to this need," he said.
Abdel Moneim Ahmed was finally able to buy 10 loaves of subsidized bread after queuing for one-and-a-half hours with 30 people outside a bakery in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. Another woman, known only as Zeinab, said she had waited two hours. "You can see the problem for yourself,” she told IRIN.
The scene playing out in this El Sayeda Zeinab neighbourhood symbolizes a much wider problem. For the past few weeks, Egypt, which imports half its food and subsidizes bread prices, has experienced severe shortages of this key staple.
Egyptians call it "aish", literally meaning life. The price is fixed at five piasters (less than one US cent per loaf), against 50 piasters per unsubsidized loaf. Economists say Egyptian families spend about 40 percent of their monthly income on food.
"The real reason for the current inflation is that governments, even the existing one, do not protect consumers from merchants’ abuse,” said Ahmed El-Naggar, head economist at Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, and editor in chief of its annual publication, Strategic Economic Directions.
The Egyptian economy took a bashing from protests that swept across the country earlier this year, hurting tourism revenues and affecting trade. "This led to a six percent decrease in exports in January and February," said El-Naggar.
According to the Finance Ministry, urban consumer inflation rose to 11.5 percent in the 12 months to March, its highest level since April 2010, from 10.7 percent in February.
"We no longer buy beef and chicken," Samira Abuzaid, a 45-year-old housewife, said. "I tell my children that we need to adapt to a diet without these two items."
Gas scarce
Another vital commodity that has become scarce and more expensive is cooking gas.
"Gas cylinders have suddenly disappeared," Emad Abul A'as said as he waited to buy a cylinder in the southern industrial city of Helwan. "If I do not get the cylinder from this centre, I will have to pay a lot for a cylinder outside."
Abul A'as, a 37-year-old cement factory worker and father of two, would have to pay six times the price of a subsidized gas cylinder elsewhere.
The government blames the situation in Libya and Gaza. Recently, Social Solidarity Minister Gouda Abdel Khaliq cited smuggling to Libya and Gaza as a reason for cylinder scarcity in Egypt, which imports 60 percent of its solid gas from Saudi Arabia and Algeria.
"Smugglers benefit from the difference in the price of the cylinders in Egypt," said Hossam Arafat, chairman of the petroleum section at the Federation of Commerce Chambers. "What makes this possible is that the government subsidizes the cylinders to the tune of 90 percent here."
Prices of other commodities have also risen dramatically in recent weeks. The prices of tomatoes, onions, green peppers, lemons, eggplants, potatoes, zucchini and beans have trebled, while items such as lentils are out of the reach of many.
"The future might be worse," said Rashad Abdou, an economics professor from Cairo University. "The prices might increase even more."
Consumer protection?
On 14 April, the World Bank said global food prices were 36 percent above their levels a year ago and remained volatile, driven in part by higher fuel costs connected to events in the Middle East and North Africa.
Another 10 percent increase in global prices could drive an additional 10 million people below the $1.25 poverty line, it added.
“More poor people are suffering and more people could become poor because of high and volatile food prices,” said World Bank President Robert Zoellick. “We have to put food first and protect the poor and vulnerable who spend most of their money on food.”
The government says it will try to bring down prices, according to Prime Minister Essam Sharaf in an address last week.
The deputy director at the at Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, Abdel Fatah Al-Gibali, called for consumer protection, saying the supply of certain commodities had been monopolized by a small number of merchants, which affected the dynamics of the market.
“During the last period, or specifically since the start of the [protests] that toppled Mubarak, the society was not producing at all and the supply was less than the demand, [hence] an increase in prices,” he added.
Still, some conclusions seem warranted. When land deals were first proposed, they were said to offer the host countries four main benefits: more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. None of these promises has been fulfilled.
Locals usually regard jobs as the most important of these. But so far they have been scarce, and only partly because many projects are not yet up and running. In Mozambique, the World Bank found, one project had promised 2,650 jobs and created a mere 35-40 full-time positions. A survey by Thea Hilhorst of 99 smaller projects in Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger reported “hardly any” rural job creation. Only one of the publicly available contracts studied by Mr Cotula even specifies a number of new jobs to be created. And when there are jobs, foreign investors often bring in outsiders to staff them, leading to “conflict or accusations of cheating”, according to the World Bank. The manager of one project was killed during an argument about jobs.
Evidence of the transfer of technology and skills is mixed. Ms Hilhorst found almost no impetus towards greater professionalism in farming, although she concedes that closer links with food processors and distributors might improve matters. The World Bank’s study argued that technological improvements in Ukraine and Mexico had helped reduce rural out-migration (though this was surprising: you might have expected new labour-saving technologies to encourage underemployed farmers to leave the land). Mr Cotula’s study of land-deal contracts found few examples in which the foreign investor was obliged to exchange materials or ideas with local farmers. At the moment, land-grabbing foreigners seem to be creating islands for themselves, cut off from the poverty-stricken countryside.
Grabbing sans giving
Some projects’ operators have done better in building new schools, clinics and other “social infrastructure”. Madagascar may be a surprising example as it witnessed what is perhaps the most notorious land grab of all: a South Korean company was offered half the country’s arable land—a proposal that fuelled protests which eventually toppled the government who approved the deal. Two years later Perrine Burnod of CIRAD, a French research organisation, found that the number of land deals on the island had fallen by two-thirds. And those that remained had begun to look more like aid projects, with investors committing themselves to building schools and clinics. Local mayors were welcoming them in to help finance projects no longer supported by the cash-strapped central government.
Yet this is atypical. Most land deals contribute little or nothing to the public purse. Because markets for land are so ill-developed in Africa and governments so weak, rents are piffling: $2 per hectare per year in Ethiopia; $5 in Liberia. Tax and rent holidays are common. Indeed, it is not unusual for foreign investors to pay less tax than local smallholders. And upfront compensation to local farmers for use of their land is derisory: often just a few months of income for agreeing to a 100-year lease.
“The risks associated with such investments are immense,” concludes the World Bank. “In many cases public institutions were unable to cope with the surge in demand…Land acquisitions often deprived local people, in particular the vulnerable, of their rights…Consultations, if conducted at all, were superficial…and environmental and social safeguards were widely neglected.”
Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.
By the age of eight, school children from the most affluent 20 percent of South Africa’s population are already significantly out-performing children from poorer backgrounds, according to new research by the Social Policy Research Group at Stellenbosch University.
The study, "Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap", found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.
Using newly available data sets, including those linking information on income with numeracy skills, the report analyzed how low-quality tuition in the post-apartheid education system is perpetuating "exclusion and marginalization".
Money not enough
The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.
Yet the top 20 percent of state schools - which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding - enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.
South Africa's status as one of the wealthiest countries on the continent has not helped its educational performance - the poorest 25 percent of students ranked 14th out of 15 sub-Saharan countries in reading performance, and 12th for mathematics, according to the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality surveys of 2000 and 2007.
"When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources," the report on the study noted.
Nomusa Cembi, spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU), whose nearly 250,000 members make it the country's largest public sector union, said many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid's "Bantu" education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in 1994 when a new democratic government came into power.
There are a host of other problems besetting schools in poor areas. According to Yoliswa Dwane, spokesperson for the education advocacy group, Equal Education, over 2,000 schools had no piped water supply, 3,600 lacked electricity, and over 90 percent were without libraries or a functioning laboratory.
Poorly trained teachers
SADTU and other teachers’ unions have opposed national calls for education to become an essential service, which would prevent strike action. In August 2010 a teachers' strike closed schools across the country for three weeks, contributing to a public perception that SADTU and some of its members did not have learners' interests at heart.
"The focus needs to be on teachers' development," said Cembi. "We've had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers."
Many teacher training colleges were closed in the late 1990s after new legislation required them to merge with existing higher education institutions. Plans to transform the training colleges into university-level institutions have not materialized, leaving thousands of teachers without any specialized training.
In recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.
According to the report, insufficient teacher knowledge is a problem, with many teachers scoring poorly in basic reading and mathematics tests.
A large number of changes to the national curriculum, beginning with the 1997 adoption of Outcomes Based Education, many subsequent adjustments, and the final decision -announced in 2010 - to scrap it, have further stressed an already failing system.
The way forward
Equal Education's Dwane said the debate needed to move past "blaming teachers" and towards how to achieve a "serious commitment to a national education programme that would spell out what needs to be done over the next 20-30 years".
Such a plan would have to include an assessment of existing teacher knowledge, followed by a national teacher training programme, but Dwane stressed the need to consider factors beyond teacher knowledge, including teacher motivation, and a lack of community and parental involvement.
Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.
"For the parents to know how their child is performing, and by proxy to know how the teachers are performing, is very helpful," said Ronelle Burger, one of the study's lead researchers. "Very few top-down measures can be as effective as getting the people who are affected to act to correct the problems."
The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that education.
“The labour market is at the heart of inequality, and central to labour market inequality is the quality of education,” they concluded.
“Policies that address inequality by intervening in the labour market will have limited success as long as the considerable pre-labour market inequalities in the form of differential school quality persist.”
SKS, whose investors include the Silicon Valley financiers Sequoia Capital and Vinod Khosla, reported that it had lost 697 million rupees ($15.6 million) in its fourth quarter, which ended in March. That compared to a profit of 629 million rupees a year earlier. Analysts say SKS will probably have to recognize losses on a big portion of its $312 million loan portfolio in Andhra Pradesh.
Vikram Akula, the American who is chairman of SKS, said it was hard to say exactly how much money the company would lose in Andhra Pradesh. Loan repayments could go up significantly if the state restricts new lending there, he said, because it would give borrowers confidence in the company’s viability in the state. “If we are able to restart lending, we think there could be a dramatic improvement,” he said. “If we can’t restart lending, we will have a painful couple of quarters.”
Other large Indian microlenders, like Basix, Share and Spandana, also face big losses in Andhra Pradesh, but those firms do not trade on the stock exchange.
Samit Ghosh, managing director of Ujjivan Financial Services, a microlender based in Bangalore, said it would take up to two years for the industry to overcome the crisis in Andhra Pradesh, which has also made it hard for lenders to raise money from banks to make loans elsewhere in India.
“In many ways, microfinance will have to reinvent itself,” Mr. Ghosh said.
Mr. Akula said SKS would not grow as aggressively as it had initially projected. Instead it will seek to make bigger loans to qualified borrowers outside Andhra Pradesh, who he said might have fewer options because of the trouble microfinance firms are facing.
He also said SKS would expand into other businesses like loans made with gold as collateral, a popular form of personal and business finance in southern India. The firm plans to open as many as 50 offices to make such loans this year.
The suit was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Montana by two Democratic state legislators, Michele Reinhart of Missoula and Jean Price of Great Falls. They said they were moved to buy Mortenson's book and donate to his institute because they believed the published accounts, which included being kidnapped by the Taliban, were true.
The 2006 book sold more than 4 million copies. Author Jon Krakauer and the CBS news program "60 Minutes" said their research showed that some of the central anecdotes recounted in the book — including Mortenson's story of recuperating from a failed ascent of Pakistan's K2 in the small village where he went on to build his first school — did not happen as he described them in the book and in numerous public appearances around the world.
"The law says you cannot make misrepresentations, you cannot tell somebody something's true and have them buy your book and make donations to your institute, when in fact it's not true. That's covered by fraud, deceit, unjust enrichment, many parts of the law," said the legislators' attorney, Alexander Blewitt III.
Mortenson has said that the book is substantially true but that some of the incidents were rearranged.
Despite raising five children, four grandchildren, and now accommodating up to six people in one small bedroom, Angela fills as many hats as her head can hold to make ends meet and improve her community. Among her several positions in community committees and local NGO projects, she actively serves as a Community Health Promoter, is a member of the Riverside Silanga Garbage Collection group, tends to a small garden on the fringe of the village, sells bags of charcoal on the street to make a small income. And, since the end of last year, she earns 50-60 Kenyans shillings per day performing a task few would care to discuss let alone do: collecting poo.
That's right. Feces. Little, specially treated, white and green bags of human excreta, to be exact. Angelina is one of a few locals empowered by Peepoople AB, a Swedish social enterprise that launched a pilot project in Silanga in October. She's marketing and selling The Peepoo, a personal, single use toilet which sanitizes human excreta shortly after defecation, preventing the feces from contaminating the surrounding environment. After just a few weeks, the bags turn the waste into a nutrient rich fertilizer.
The Peepoo bags, which sell at a subsidized (by Peepoople) cost of 3 Kenyan Shillings each, are used at home, then returned to one of two "drop off" points where customers get a 1 Ksh refund for returning the bags.
It's in this simple, 1 Ksh refund, that Angelina saw an opportunity to develop a little venture for herself. Some residents either feel uncomfortable, or don't have the time, to drop off the bags, which are designed to both eliminate odors and ensure the safety of the handler. Angelina collects bags from her neighbors, and returns them in bulk, pocketing the 1 Ksh refund.
On a good day, Angelina told me, she'll collect and return 60-70 bags during her morning rounds (people leave them outside their houses for collection), making close to $0.85 for an hour's work.
Mthuli Ncube, the bank's chief economist, said the findings should challenge long-held perceptions of Africa as a continent of famine, poverty and hopelessness.
"Hey you know what, the world please wake up, this is a phenomenon in Africa that we've not spent a lot of time thinking about," Ncube said. "There is a middle class that is driven by specific factors such as education and we should change our view and work with this group to create a new Africa and make sure Africa realises its full potential."
Ncube said the study used an absolute definition of middle class, meaning people who spend between $2 and $20 a day, which he believed was appropriate given the cost of living for Africa's nearly 1 billion people.
The study found that, by last year, Africa's middle class had risen to about 34% of the continent's population, or about 313m people – up from around 111m (26%) in 1980 and 196m (27%) in 2000.
The growth rate of the middle class over the past 30 years was about 3.1%, slightly faster than that of the total population. Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt had proportionately the biggest middle classes in Africa, while Liberia, Burundi and Rwanda had the smallest.
The Africa middle classes are more likely to have salaried jobs or own small businesses. They tend not to rely entirely on public health services, seeking more expensive medical care. The middle classes tend to have fewer children and spend more on their nutrition and schooling.
Sales of fridges, TVs and mobile phones have surged in virtually every African country in recent years, the report said. Possession of cars and motorcycles in Ghana, for example, has gone up by 81% in the past five years.
In its report published Wednesday, the U.N.-appointed panel said the outbreak was caused by "bacteria introduced into Haiti as a result of human activity; more specifically by the contamination of the Meye Tributary System of the Artibonite River with a pathogenic strain of the current South Asian type Vibrio cholerae."
Declaring this cholera strain was introduced "as a result of environmental contamination with feces," the report faulted sanitation conditions at the Mirebalais MINUSTAH camp, saying they "were not sufficient to prevent fecal contamination of the Meye Tributary System of the Artibonite River."
'EXPLOSIVE SPREAD'
Explaining the epidemic's "explosive spread" along the Artibonite River and throughout Haiti, the report said "simultaneous water and sanitation and healthcare system deficiencies" contributed to the spread. It noted Haitians used river water for washing, bathing, drinking and recreation.
Despite pointing an apparent finger at the U.N. peacekeepers' camp, the U.N.-appointed panel did not directly blame them for starting the epidemic.
"The Independent Panel concludes that the Haiti cholera outbreak was caused by the confluence of circumstances as described above, and was not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual," it said.
Repeating a longstanding U.N. position over the cholera in Haiti, a U.N. spokesman in New York said the report "does not present any conclusive scientific evidence linking the outbreak to the MINUSTAH peacekeepers or the Mirebalais camp"
"Anyone carrying the relevant strain of the disease in the area could have introduced the bacteria into the river," Michel Bonnardeaux, a spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping department, told Reuters.
"The lack of good toilets as well as sanitation is still a problem in Asia," said Babar Kibir of Bangladesh-based Brac, one of the world's biggest non-government organisations.
Sanitation has an "immense effect" on poverty reduction, Kibir said.
"It has linkages with poverty, child mortality, combating disease and environmental sustainability," the director of Brac's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Programme, or Wash, told Agence France-Presse.
People living in poor sanitary conditions are vulnerable to illness which often prevents them from finding regular employment, Kibir said, adding that much of the meagre income they earn would be spent on medical treatment.
Diarrhoea, malnutrition, arrested physical growth, loss of eyesight, typhoid, dysentery and hepatitis are diseases commonly associated with poor sanitation.
"Poor people, particularly women and children, can enjoy protection from diseases, malnutrition and death by using safe water and sanitation facilities including improved hygiene practices," said Kibir.
...
In Bangladesh, one of Asia's poorest countries, Brac's Wash programme provides micro-loans to the poor to build toilet facilities, charging only a minimum service charge. Grants are given only to the very poor.
But the programme goes beyond just providing latrines -- it comes as an entire package, which includes designing and building eco-friendly toilets and raising awareness in the community about the need for good sanitation.
A non-profit organisation looks out for empty homes and refurbishes them to accommodate refugees. While they wait for the grants given to asylum-seekers, which are subject to long delays, the migrants can use a local currency in Riace, with vouchers bearing portraits of Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Che Guevara. When funds arrive, the shops send the vouchers to the local council for payment.
While they wait for formalities to be completed, the refugees are gainfully occupied. The silence of the streets is broken by the hum of workshops helping them to acquire skills in dressmaking, joinery, pottery or glass-blowing, set up as part of an integration scheme funded by the regional government.
Lubaba, who works at the glass factory, arrived here from Ethiopia three years ago after a long journey. From Libya she travelled to Lampedusa, then started another long trail through various Italian reception centres. Her journey ended in Riace, where she decided to stay. "I have a home, enough to live on, I'm learning a trade, and my daughter was born here," she says.
Around 6,000 refugees have passed through the village over the years. Many move on, but some of them stay and try to start their own craft or retail business.
It is not easy, as we heard from an Afghan woman from Herat who left home with her two children when her husband died, finally opening a shop selling knitwear in the village. "We make a living. In the winter it's OK, but selling woolly jumpers in the summer is a struggle," she explains, knitting as her daughter Faeze looks on.
Faeze is in no doubt about her future here in Italy. Speaking Italian with a powerful Calabrian accent, she says she feels "like the others at school". More than 200 refugees like herself and her family have chosen to settle permanently in Riace.
