a sobering thought at Christmas

Most of us think of Christmas meals as a time when we give in to temptation and eat too much. But spare a thought for too many people in Africa for whom Christmas is the one day of the year when they splash out and eat meat. The rest of the year they consume cheap, tasteless, starchy foods lacking in protein. They fill their stomachs, but there isn't much more to be said in their favour/favor. That is why we are keen to give chickens to the Rwandan women in our projects. Not only can the women sell the eggs produced and use the income to feed and educate their children; but they can also feed their chidlren eggs, improving their chances of developing into strong, bright teenagers. A chicken costs about £5 or $8, and it transforms a family's life chances.

statistics that matter

Save the Children, describing their work in South Sudan, report that a girl there has more chance of dying in childbirth than finishing primary/elementary school. They also conclude that only a quarter of people have access to healthcare, which no doubt contributes to the incredibly high rate of death in childbirth.

Looking at the rate at which young women die in pregnancy and childbirth is much more useful than using the UN's 'life expectancy' rates. They give only a national average, rather than an accurate picture of when the greatest risks occur. If a child makes it to 10 years of age, they'll probably make it to old age. Those first years are when malnutrition, lack of access to healthcare and malaria take the greatest toll. The chance of surviving childhood is also massively influenced by how much education the mother has had. All the more reason to be focusing on educating girls and young women.

Good news about landmines

In 2009, fewer than 4,000 people were killed or injured by landmines and other unexploded war weapons, like submunitions or grenades – a drastic drop compared with the estimated 26,000 annual deaths in the 1990s. This is according to a report by Human Rights Watch and other members of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL).

Here is proof that campaigns to try to pressure the military-industrial complex (as President Eisenhower called it) are worth the effort. Anyone working in the developing world, or as we do, wth survivors of genocide and war, can be forgiven for having their low moments. The progress made on landmines and more recently cluster bombs is a reminder that positive change is possible. Soemtimes the good guys do win.

Women are the answer

At the annual United Nations summit in New York delegates are discussing the eight millenium development goals, set ten years ago. There will be a lot of hot air about putting women at the centre of attaining these goals.

It is undoubtedly true: none of the goals can be achieved without the involvement of women in the developing world, because women generally do most fo the work and raise the children.

However, many of the nations swapping platitudes about improving the position of women remain fundamentally opposed to genuine and meaningful female empowerment. In their societies, where men take the decisions and women labour in the fields, women continue to have very low status. They are denied the right to the money they earn in agriculture, they cannot own or inherit land, and they do not even have the right to the chidlren they have brought into the world.

Human Rights Watch found that one of the reasons HIV spreads in some countries is that infected husbands threaten to torture their own children unless their wives will have sex with them. Their wives have to stay within such abusive relationships because they have no legal rights to their own children. If they want to escape from their husbands, they have to also leave their children behind. As long as this situation persists in so many develooping countries, lip service to women's rights is hypocritical nonsense.

I AM SLAVE

Channel 4 screened an important drama recently about a young Sudanese woman taken into slavery, who ended up as a domestic servant in London. Her story reflects the vile experiences of thousands of young women. Sadly, the slave trade never went away.
Click on the link below to hear an interview with the woman on whom the drama is based. Essential listening for those interested in the continuing slave trade in Africa.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2010/09/100907_outlook_slave.shtml

Welcome Penny Marshall to N4A

Network for Africa is delighted that the distinguished journalist Penny Marshall has become our patron. She is a particular hero of mine because she uncovered the death camps run by the Serbs in Bosnia. Her reports finally prompted President Clinton to act, which in turn caused the Serbs to run away.

Penny has had an unrivalled career. She was the first woman in Britain to be appointed as a foreign correspondent based abroad for the national TV news. She has won an EMMY, a BAFTA and an RTS award for her work in Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s. For three decades she was one of the key faces of ITN’s news coverage: from the revolution in Romania to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

Her exclusive reports revealing the Serb-run detention camps of Northern Bosnia in 1992 had an impact across the world and remain one of the most important TV exclusives of this era.

Her work on the Sudan border in 2005 was the first to highlight the refugee crisis in Eastern Chad. Her reporting has been recognised by Amnesty International for its insight and courage. She has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and South Africa. Penny now works as a freelance broadcaster and reporter appearing regularly on ITN and Radio 4. She also teaches TV reporting to professional journalists in emerging democracies.

We are honoured to have her on our team.

Kudos to Moses and his team

Last week we heard that a senior member of the international diplomatic community in Kigali had been in touch with our English language centre, the Rwanda Multi Learning Centre. They told us we have the reputation of being the best placein Rwanda tp study the English language. Consequently one of our (paying)students will be an ambassador's son. All credit goes to our director Moses and his hard working team of teachers and students. They deserve this recognition.

monitoring human rights is a good investment

The UK government has announced it is to stop monitoring human rights abuses around the globe. Previously the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) produced an annual summary that was used within government and beyond, as an invaluable guide to which countries were oppressing their own citizens. Initiated by the much missed Robin Cook, it was a good investment for two reasons:

1) So long as the UK continues to preach to other nations the virtues of accountability, transparency, democracy and human rights, it needs to ensure Britain is not propping up repressive or corrupt governments by selling them things, especially weapons or torture equipment, or laundering their dirty money. Ifall the UK cares about is trade, then we should have the honest to admit as much. If, however, we continue to lecture other countries, we should keep our own exporters in order. We should also be wary of selling arms and cosying up to the kind of regimes that may one day turn against us, as we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

2) The FCO review was useful in stopping the UK government itself propping up appalling regimes through its generous foriegn aid programme, in the form of donations from the Department for International Development (DFID). In some regrettable cases DFID supports dictatorships with donations, for either geopolitical or other\reasons (too tedious to go into here - but email me if you are interested). We have a much better chance of restraining the UK's misguided generosity if we can produce its own FCO data indicating the disappointing human rights record of the kleptomaniacs we are propping up.

The cost of the FCO annual human rights review was tiny compared to the sums handed out under the guise of international development aid.

Girls and Women - A great investment

If the world's wealthy nations were serious about encouraging development in poor countries, they could achieve an excellent return on their investment by prioritising the education of girls and women. Nothing offers a greater guarantee of transforming the lives of individuals involved, their families, the economy of their countries and their society.
The UK Department for International Development recently released its 2010-15 education strategy, and it contained the following important statistics:
1) Every additional year of education for girls can cut infant mortality by 5-10%
2) Every additonal year of education can raise lifetime earnings in poor countries by 10%.
Taken with UN research on the impact of education on girls, it is clear that educated girls are more likely to have healthier children, too.
Put simply, education is the way to break the cycle of poverty into which poor families become trapped. This is hardly rocket science, but it seems we all need to be reminded that more complicated and expensive 'fixes' don't always achieve as much.
There is now extensive evidence from countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua and Cambodia that programmes that offer cash to parents who keep their children in school reaps massive benefits. This is especially helpful to girls, who are the ifrst to be kept home from school to do domestic and agricultural work or to care for unwell family members.  (World Bank, "Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty")

aid and the UN

Linda Polman's new book, War Games, is a must read for those who are not convinced that development aid is achieving all we wish. She also looks at situations where aid organisations keep people alive, without protecting them (Bosnia, Darfur) or disarming the people who are trying to kill them. Her chapters on Rwanda are devastating, describing how the international community rushed to help the people who committed the genocide, but not the victims. Polman's previous book, We Did Nothing, is about the uselessness of UN peacekeeping forces (Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, again) when there is no political will behind peacekeeping missions. She describes how most peacekeepers are recruited from bangladesh and pakistan, and aren't even soldiers. They are unemployed boys collected from villages, put in uniforms and sent off to war zones with no training. The government who supplies them gets $1000 a month from the UN. Romeo Dallaire (Rwanda) describes how the first time he issued orders to a company of these UN peacekeepers, they wet their pants in terror.

Where is the trickle down?

For those interested in Africa's economic future, and the growing influence of China on the continent, I recommend "Untapped: The scramble for Africa's oil," by John Ghazvinian. His research shows it is naive to assume that the citizens, as opposed to the ruling elite, will see any benefit whatsoever from finding oil in their country. Only five per cent of all spending on developing a local oil industry occurs within the country in question, and African governments almost always negotiate a terrible deal for themselves. Sadly the vast majority of rulers seem concerned only with their own personal slice of the revenues, and Ghazvinian's book has plenty of depressing stories about their greed, corruption and vanity. Yet more proof that the tragedy of Africa is the ghastly people holding all the power, so often propped up by Western governments for our own geo-political reasons.

Beating poverty one cupcake at a time

Our Wanda Bakery project in Kigali, Rwanda has had an order for 250 cupcakes from the Dutch Embassy. The cupcakes will be iced in orange, and they will be consumed at a party to celebrate the World Cup final. Our thanks to the Dutch Embassy, and our congratulations to the Wanda bakery team for getting such a significant order. Wanda Bakery is a project of Women Developing Rwanda, which is in turn part of our Rwanda Multi Learning Centre. It is run by genocide survivors who are rebuilding their lives. Our thanks to those who have helped make this project a reality.

Who We Are - Network4Africa.org

Welcome to Network for Africa. We're a London-based charity that helps to rebuild lives and communities destroyed by war and genocide.

• We train people with skills that will help them get a job.
• We equip poor and vulnerable people with the skills to help themselves.
• We partner with small local African projects, producing tangible results.
• We respond to what locals tell us they need to break the cycle of poverty.
• We tackle the long-term consequences of war and genocide that remain after the emergency aid agencies have moved on.

Our Approach:Network for Africa has projects in Rwanda, Northern Uganda and Eastern Chad. Our aim is to benefit all people in the communities where we work, regardless of race or religion. We work with small projects, started by local people responding to local needs.