USAID Impact Photo Credit: Nancy Leahy/USAID

Archives for Sub-Saharan Africa

Zimbabwe’s Great Leap Toward Preventing HIV in Children

Posted by  on Friday, June 1st 2012     

Photo Caption: Josephat was born HIV-negative because of PMTCT in Zimbabwe, and recently celebrated his fifth birthday. Photo Credit: EGPAF/James Pursey

As featured on the Huffington Post

This week, I witnessed a milestone in the fight to end HIV/AIDS in children — and it happened in Zimbabwe.

Much of the news from Zimbabwe over the past decade has been around political and economic challenges, overshadowing a resounding public health success story.

Zimbabwe is one of the key countries to watch in the drive to eliminate pediatric AIDS in Africa.

On Monday, I attended a ceremony at Harare Central Hospital to launch Zimbabwe’s national strategy to prevent new pediatric HIV infections. I joined representatives from government, international partners, donors, health workers and people living with HIV.

It was a diverse group, but all dedicated to a common cause — that no child should be born with HIV — not in Zimbabwe, nor in any other country.

In June 2011 at the United Nations, a Global Plan was introduced to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV by 2015. Zimbabwe was among the first of many countries to answer the call, but its commitment on this issue was evident long before that.

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Photo of the Week

Posted by  on Tuesday, May 29th 2012     

Maamohelang Hlaha tenderly kisses her young son Rebone. An HIV-positive mother of four, Hlaha’s village is inaccessible by vehicles, and is a three-hour hike from the nearest health clinic. She receives HIV treatment through the Riders for Health program, which is funded by USAID and run by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. As part of the program, pony riders and motorcyclists transport blood tests, drugs, and supplies to Lesotho’s remote mountain health clinics. The system allows people to receive HIV test results sooner, access life-saving drugs, and ensure an uninterrupted supply of medication. Rebone, whose name means “we have witnessed,” was born HIV-free in August 2008. Photo Credit: Reverie Zurba, USAID, South Africa

Video of the Week: Empowering Maasai Women in Tanzania

Posted by  on Friday, May 25th 2012     

USAID is helping Maasai women in Tanzania gain literacy and numeracy skills so that they can obtain land rights, start businesses, and become involved in local government. By 2011, more than 2,000 women had completed the program. Their new communication skills allow them to conduct business activities more easily and empower them to assert their rights. For the first time in their lives, these women are earning incomes independently through small enterprises and farming. One graduate of the program says, “It has helped me to mobilize other women because the program saw potential in us.”

 

Reliable Family Planning Supply Chain Delivers Better Health and Prosperity to Ethiopian Families

Posted by  on Tuesday, May 22nd 2012     

“I started using contraceptives after I gave birth to my second child,” said Birtukan Bezabih, a 25-year-old married mother of three in southern Ethiopia. “I did not know that I was pregnant with my second child until [he] started moving inside my womb.  It was just a few months after I gave birth to my first child…so my first child didn’t get proper care and he was not well breast fed.”

Nurse Haileshet Bekele at Tulla Health Center counsels Birtukan Bezabih, a mother of three. Photo Credit: USAID

Access to family planning empowers couples, like Birtukan and her husband, to plan and maintain healthier families. After the challenge of breastfeeding her first child and carrying her second at the same time, Birtukan turned to family planning methods to choose the right time to bring a third child into her life.

In Ethiopia, the Ministry of Health is committed to improving access to family planning through programs that have benefitted countless women and families to date. During the past six years, Ethiopia has seen a rapid increase in contraceptive use and a decline in the average number of births per woman. From 2005 to 2011, the percent of reproductive-age women using contraceptives in Ethiopia nearly doubled, from 15 to 29 percent. In the same period, the average number of children born to Ethiopian women declined from 5.4 to 4.8. By having fewer children by choice and ensuring children are spaced a healthy distance apart, mothers in Ethiopia are able to care better for the children they have, helping more children reach their fifth birthdays.

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USAID’s FrontLines – June/July 2012

Posted by  on Monday, May 21st 2012     
frontlines banner graphic

Esther Ouma with her son, Barrack, in the Busia district of western Kenya. After losing her first two babies, Ouma successfully delivered Barrack after a visit from a community health worker who provided a link to health services and support groups available to expectant mothers in some Kenyan communities. “I will forever be grateful,” says Ouma, who attributes her good health and that of her child to the health worker’s intervention. Photo credit: Bibianne Situma, AMREF

Read the latest edition of USAID’s premier publication, FrontLines, to learn more about the Agency’s work on issues surrounding child survival and its portfolio of projects in Ethiopia. Some highlights:

  • Efforts to end preventable child deaths are in their last lap and on a sure path to victory, says USAID’s top doc in the Bureau for Global Health.
  • The Swaziland parents who decide to have their newborn baby boys circumcised are part of a worldwide effort to achieve an HIV-free generation sooner rather than later.
  • UNICEF Chief Anthony Lake has seen firsthand the resourcefulness of this planet’s youngest citizens in the midst some of its worst disasters.
  • Find out why, despite one of the region’s worst droughts last year, the perpetually battered country of Ethiopia escaped the season with no famine.
  • A truce between four groups of people from Ethiopia’s Somali and Oromiya regional states who held longstanding grievances appears to have ushered in an unprecedented period of peace and an end to violent – and sometimes deadly – clashes.
  • Though Earth Day celebrations ended in April, USAID’s work to protect the environment continues 365 days a year. See that work through photos that won the 2012 environment photo contest put on by FrontLines and the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment as well as those that came in as runners-up.

Subscribe to FrontLines for an email reminder when the latest issue is posted online.

New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition

Posted by  on Friday, May 18th 2012     

Gayle Smith is Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director at the National Security Council and Dr. Rajiv Shah is USAID Administrator.  This item was originally posted on the White House Blog.

This weekend, the leaders of the world’s largest economies and four African heads of state will come together at the 2012 G8 Summit at Camp David for a very different kind of discussion on Africa. Joined by private sector leaders for the first time, the President will host a dynamic discussion on global efforts to fight food insecurity and improve nutrition. In 2009 at the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy, President Obama and G8 leaders responded to the spike in world food prices and focused attention on strengthening food security to help countries end hunger. Reversing decades of decline in global agricultural development, L’Aquila committed leaders to supporting comprehensive plans designed by the developing countries themselves and built around smarter, more focused investments.

This weekend, the G-8 and African partners will launch the next phase of these efforts: theNew Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. The New Alliance is a commitment by G8 nations, African countries and private sector partners to lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years through inclusive and sustained agricultural growth.

A boy and a woman struggle with dusty wind looking for water in Wajir, Kenya (by Jervis Sundays, Kenya Red Cross Society)

Across history, the private sector has served as an engine of growth and transformation in nearly every country in the world. But although foreign direct investment flows to Africa now hover around $80 billion and trade has tripled over the last decade, this private sector boom has largely missed Africa’s agricultural economy.

This transformation – from aid alone to aid AND private investment; from just providing assistance to combining assistance and investment – is at the heart of our approach to the next steps of food security and why we’re placing such an emphasis on bringing in private capital and expanding access to markets.

More than 45 private sector firms—from large multinational companies like Yara International to small local businesses like Ethiopia’s Omega Farms—have stepped forward to invest more than $3 billion in African agriculture. And building on a decade of strong leadership, African countries are committing to specific policy reforms that shape a better environment for business.

Alongside them, donor countries are seeking to maintain their investments and accelerate implementation of country-owned plans. We are also supporting new advances in science and technology, like highly nutritious seeds that can withstand droughts and thrive in floods, and new tools to help poor farmers manage risk.  And the New Alliance is elevating an emphasis on undernutrition, which robs children of their lifelong potential and undermines investments in education, health and economic growth.

With this smart approach, working together, we can deliver real results for millions of families and help build a safer, more prosperous future for us all.

The Path to Peace Starts with Embracing Diversity for Sudan’s Youth

Posted by  on Thursday, May 17th 2012     

Sudan is often described as a country rich with many different ethnic groups, languages, religions, and tribal affiliations.  I recently witnessed how true this is when I attended a USAID-sponsored session for young women from different areas of Sudan, held at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum.

The students visiting the temple at Naqa, a ruined ancient city of the Kush Kingdom, north of Khartoum. The exchange included field trips to great Sudanese historical sites to teach the students about their common identity and culture. Photo Credit: USAID/Sudan

The session focused on the options available for graduate study in the United States, but I took a different message away.  As I listened to where these women came from and what they were studying, I realized how different they all were in background, and yet how similar they were in their aspirations, hopes, and desires.

These young women are students at several Khartoum universities, as well as Assalam University in Babanusa, Southern Kordofan state.  They were brought together as part of a USAID program that is enabling Sudanese to tackle issues of identity, history, and culture in their country.  The exchange was designed to help these young women leaders explore and better understand the rich cultural plurality in Sudan and to engender a sense of strength from the diversity in Sudanese culture.  Issues of identity and ethnicity have proved highly divisive in Sudan over the last two decades, and still pervade Sudanese society in the post-war era.

Over the course of the week-long exchange, students began to grow a greater appreciation for the many cultures present in Sudan.  They discussed common history and identity across different groups and got to touch their history first-hand through trips to local historical sites and museums.

Throughout the exchange, the students became increasingly aware of their own tendencies to stereotype certain groups.  One young woman stated that she and others once “unconsciously, practice[ed] social exclusion,” but after the 5-day training, she now “knows what it is and will stop.” Another participant commented, “I used to hate history. After visiting the historical sites and knowing how great my history is, I now love it.”

The students concluded the workshop determined to carry what they learned back to their communities. Several participants stated that they would hold discussions with their peers at their universities on both the commonalities that exist between cultures in Sudan and the rich diversity that they represent. By the last day of training, the participants, most of whom met only five short days earlier, were referring to one another as friends.  The students from Babanusa even hope to host the Khartoum students at their university for future events to foster further understanding.

Some of the most important work that USAID does in Sudan, in my opinion, works to address intolerance and exclusion in a country with such strength through diversity.  I hope that many more Sudanese will get to experience the diverse cultures within their own society, as these young women did.  Such experiences will very likely be the foundation of healing in a country that has had a painful past.

 

Video Workshops and Toolkit Offer Crash Course to Agriculture Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa

Posted by  on Tuesday, May 15th 2012     

Inexpensive video production has become a viable way for agricultural organizations to communicate with beneficiaries, donors, and the public. And it’s not just posting on YouTube. Devices such as handheld projectors and tablet computers have come down in price, enabling practitioners to disseminate to farmers in rural areas with minimal technology. Social networks – just a few years ago only the purview of wealthy countries – are now truly global. In regions with electricity, a well-executed video can now go viral – and become more impactful than the slickest behavior change campaigns of decades past.

It is exciting, but that doesn’t make it simple. Organizations continue to make low quality videos that fail to engage their audience or reflect the core objectives of their project.

To help users learn the ropes, the Fostering Agriculture Competitiveness Employing Information Communication Technologies (FACET) project has developed an online toolkit that can help one through every stage of planning, producing, and disseminating agricultural videos. It is called “Integrating Low-Cost Video into Agricultural Development Projects: A Toolkit for Practitioners,” and is available for free download.

The toolkit is also the basis for a series of four workshops offered this month to USAID implementing partners by toolkit author Josh Woodard and myself, in Kenya, Mozambique, and Ghana. The first of the trainings was completed last week in Nairobi.

The workshop focuses on implementing your low-cost video vision, which requires skills beyond playing Spielberg: strategically thinking about message, storyboarding narrative concepts, planning dissemination, troubleshooting inevitably buggy software, and personal perseverance, all play a role in a video’s success or failure.

One participant, Victor Nzai, program assistant for USAID-funded Agricultural Market Development Trust of Kenya (AGMARK) project focused on agro-pastoral development, felt the training would improve his project’s ability to encourage farmers to efficiently integrate grazing range land and food production in Kenya.

“We have been doing dissemination via field days quite successfully, but with video, we can reach many more farmers than before,” said Nzai. “We shall shoot the videos ourselves, and edit them into comprehensive tools that can be presented by a facilitator.”

Agricultural development practitioners are looking for new ways to leverage video to circulate information and engage local farmers. Video can help them do it – but it is the holistic consideration of concept, design, and execution that will maximize chances for success.

“Not everyone will adopt our ideas,” said Nzai.  “But when we multiply the number of farmers we reach, we are able to tune our message with video to encourage farmers and pastoralists to consider better ways.”

Learn more about using information and communication technology in agriculture.

Something to Celebrate in Ghana

Posted by  on Friday, April 27th 2012     

Jeffrey Rowland is the Director of Media and Communications at GAVI alliance. This piece originally appeared in the GAVI Alliance blog.

Under the sweltering sun in Accra’s immense Independence Square, hundreds of Ghanaian mothers and their newborn babies gathered this morning with the country’s First Lady, Ministry of Health officials, my boss GAVI Alliance CEO Seth Berkley and international partners and donors to celebrate the nationwide introduction of vaccines that protect against the biggest causes of pneumonia and severe diarrhoea.

A sea breeze from the Bay of Guinea and brightly festooned tents provided respite to the crowd, which included tribal chiefs and queens colourfully clad in traditional dress.

After the playing of the national anthem and a purposeful pause, a prayer served as a poignant moment of reflection for all those in attendance who have worked so hard to make today a reality.

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Remembering my 5th Birthday

Posted by  on Thursday, April 26th 2012     
The author Carolyn Worthge on her fifth birthday. Photo Credit: Carolyn Worthge

The author Carolyn Worthge on her fifth birthday. Photo provided by: Carolyn Worthge

On my 5th birthday, I was surrounded by the love of my family, and of course, enjoyed a delicious home-made birthday cake made by my mother.  Everyone came to celebrate my day, showering me with gifts (I’m told a Barbie play set was involved), to show me how important I was in their lives.  While it was a big milestone for me, luckily I was a healthy child, and it was expected that I would reach the age of five.  In my first five years of life, I was up to date on my vaccinations, always had access to clean water, and although mosquitoes loved to bite me, my parents did not have to fear that those mosquitoes would infect me with malaria.

For much of the world though, and particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, mosquitoes pose an ever-present threat to children’s lives, especially in those first five years.  In the last year alone, we lost about 7 million children under the age of five, many from malaria.

When I traveled to Ghana in the summer of 2010, I had the misfortune of experiencing malaria firsthand.  I met children who were full of joy one day, but lying in bed sick the next- their energy and health devastated by the disease.  When I contracted the disease, I understood the extent of their sickness, falling into an extreme fatigue.  Thankfully, I had easy access to treatment and recovered quickly, but I know this is not the case for many children and families.  I can’t imagine the pain and difficulty so many mothers must experience on a daily basis, unable to provide their children with the life-saving resources needed to prevent and treat malaria.

In my work as a Faiths Act Fellow, I’ve seen the great value that the world’s major religions place on caring for those who are suffering, and ensuring a hope and a future for children everywhere.  In my own tradition, the Bible tells a story of Jesus welcoming children when others pushed them away.  As he says, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Mark 10:14b).  We are told that children are a reflection of God, and it is our faithful duty to nurture and care for them.  Whether rich or poor, each child’s life has immense worth, and we must seize the opportunity now to end preventable child deaths.

We have the tools to prevent deaths from malaria, and together we can save half a million children’s lives each year.  Through insecticide treated bednets, education programs, and other resources, we can make sure more children are able to live healthy, malaria-free lives.  And that means more 5th birthdays.

Together we can support effective strategies to prevent childhood deaths and ensure that more children have the opportunity to survive beyond their 5th birthday.  Upload a picture of your 5th birthday today, and share why you believe that Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday!

Carolyn Worthge is a Faiths Act Fellow working at the ONE Campaign.

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