COMMUNITY LIFE IMPROVEMENT CENTER LAUNCHED TO AID CHILD HEALTH IN NYANZA

By  Dickens Wasonga.

 Procter and Gamble through its leading Pampers Baby and Family Care Brand has established a pilot program aimed at promoting healthy development of babies and children in the greater Nyanza and Western regions.

The program, embodied in a Community Life Center, was set up by Procter and Gamble in partnership with Safe Water and AIDS Project (SWAP) a local implementing NGO.

Statistics from the Kenya Health Demographic Survey (KHDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO) show that out of every 1000 at babies, 149 died from preventable diseases, a figure that is higher than Africa’s average of 38 in every 1000.
Research conducted by the implementing agent in the Nyando region of Nyanza province over the last five years showed that diarrhea and malaria are preventable yet major causes of infant and child mortality.

The new Community Life Improvement Center, dubbed the ‘Pampers Baby and Family Center’ has four components; a clean water pump station for dispensing to the general public, a model traditional kitchen, an information  resource center for the community and a baby and family care center.

Speaking at the official launch of the facility, Procter and Gamble East Africa Managing Director Adema Sangale explained that the Community Life Improvement Center was essentially a micro-franchise model with a market-based approach that
had a social agenda of improving the community’s life thereby addressing social health and entrepreneurship issues in a sustainable manner. 
There is a wide range of products sold at the Pampers Baby and Family Care Center that address the preventable diseases and promote healthy baby development.

 “One of the products is safe water. The community plant here uses a mechanical pumping process to draw raw water from the local river Nyando to a 1,000 liter header tank located three meters high from where the water is fed by gravity through a special filter into a second tank of equal capacity,” she explained noting that it had been designed to pump a similar amount in a day. 
This clean water is then distributed through piping to taps from where it is dispensed to the general public at a nominal cost. The water supply system, she said, was ideal for providing clean water for multiple uses in several households in the region.

PuR water purifier sachets are available for home treatment of the river water for individuals unable to fetch water from the center.

SWAP works with 900 groups of entrepreneurial women across the region to build capacity and link them to micro finance institutions to grow their small-scale businesses.  A case in point is the Baby and Family Center, a self-sustaining community based small business run by local entrepreneurs.

SWAP Program Director Alie Elevald said that the success of the pilot program was encouraging and would form the basis to consider the expansion of the concept of life improvement centers comprising Pampers Baby and Family Care Centers and community water purification and supply systems.

As a baby and family care brand, we believe that this initiative is in line with Pampers brand values. 

The new baby and family care center is run by 4 people; one manager, an assistant manager and a staff of two.

Ends…/

Kenya> Laws against FGM/C have driven the practice underground

KENYA: Legislation failing to curb FGM/C

Photo: IRIN

Laws against FGM/C have driven the practice underground

NYAMATARO, 2 June 2011 (IRIN) – At her grandmother’s home in the western Kenyan village of Nyamataro, 14-year-old Ruth* lies on a mat surrounded by visitors, all congratulating her on becoming a woman; the previous week, Ruth was one of 10 girls to undergo female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C).

“When people see me and I smile at them, they think I like what I went through… [but] I wish I could run away,” she told IRIN. “My grandmother said I must be cut so I can be a good girl in future.

“I was afraid to go, but they forced me and now I am feeling a lot of pain. I can’t go to school until I heal,” she added.

Ruth’s father says the pain is worth the respect she will earn from the community as a circumcised woman.

“As a man, you want to bring up your child in the way of your people and for us, being circumcised is one of them,” he said. “She will be a good woman to her husband in future. When people say we should stop what we have done all along, I just laugh.”

The Children’s Act (2001) criminalizes the subjection of children to FGM/C; people violating the law are subject to prison sentences. However, the 2008/2009 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey reported an FGM/C prevalence of 96 percent among Ruth’s Kisii ethnic community; the Kisii practise a form of FGM/C known as excision, where part of the clitoris is removed.

Overall, the 2008/2009 report logged a national drop in FGM/C prevalence to 27 percent from 38 percent in 1998 and 32 percent in 2003, but officials say the law’s main impact has been to drive the practice underground.

“With the implementation of laws such as the Children’s Act, those who do this practice have resorted to secretive ways of doing it,” said Pamela Mbuvi, district children’s officer for Kisii District. “So when you see surveys pointing to a decline, it might mean people are abandoning the custom, but it could also mean they now do it secretly and report it less lest the law catches up with them.

“We have caught a few people doing it and at least five have been jailed that I know of, but the secrecy that the perpetrators use makes it hard to effectively use the law to end the practice.”

A second piece of legislation, the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Bill (2010), seeks to close loopholes in current legislation; the new law, for instance, would remove the requirement for the police to obtain a warrant to enter premises where they suspect FGM/C is being carried out.

“Female genital mutilation puts those who undergo it through a lot of physical and psychological pain and they need support and that support must come from the government,” said Lina Jebii Kilimo, FGM/C activist and Kenyan Member of Parliament. “That is why the law seeks to make it plain that the government must provide support to victims.”

However, she noted that laws alone were not sufficient to end the practice of FGM/C.

Changing the community 

“Laws targeting specifically FGM are an important step in ending the practice but the law alone cannot do it because it is a traditional practice and it is deeply rooted; remember, people who strongly believe in culture are at times ready to die for it,” Kilimo said. “My suggestion is, let the government and anybody working for children’s rights carry out education and awareness among the community to let them know the dangers [of FGM/C]. Those campaigns have been carried out, but they must be continuous.”

Joyce Nyangito, 78, cannot remember how many girls she has cut in her 38-year career. She says she will keep doing it as long as there is a demand.

“My work is to cut these girls and to make them moral women when they get married,” she said. “I can’t stop unless parents stop bringing their girls to me, which I know they won’t do, so I will stop it when I die.”

Women in the Kisii community who disagree with the practice feel powerless to protect their daughters. Rispa Moseti, a 41-year-old mother of six, says if she had the power, she would have prevented her two daughters from going through FGM/C.

“They were cut against my will and at times they ask me why I allowed it; it is a bad thing because it puts a young child through pain for no reason,” she said. “Those who encourage it say it preserves virginity and reduces immorality – it is a lie. I cannot tell any woman to allow her child to go through this kind of thing.”

The few who have dared to defy tradition have paid a heavy price. Violet Masogo runs a rescue centre that provides protection to girls who have run way from home to escape FGM/C, but she has had to move the centre from Kisii to Kisumu city, farther west, after two attacks by men who claimed she was “spoiling” their daughters.

“I underwent female circumcision and I know the pain. Many girls wouldn’t want to go through it and that is why I thought of starting a centre where these girls could get some refuge,” she said. “It is hard because those who still believe in the practice see you as a spoiler.”

*not her real name

ko/kr/mw source www.irinnews.org

Senegal to host the First Africa Drylands Week and a global observance

Governments and international organizations to address the challenges of
desertification and biodiversity loss in the region

03 June 2011 Bonn/Rome – Over 100 scientists, and representatives of government, international and civil society organizations from around the world will converge in Dakar, Senegal, from 10-17 June 2011, to develop an integrated approach to address the Region’s abiding challenges of desertification and biodiversity loss, and the new climate change threat.
The First Africa Drylands Week will be held back-to-back with the global observance event on 17 June to mark this year’s World Day to Combat Desertification.

The speakers at the events will include Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary, representatives of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Professor Jeffery Sachs, Earth Institute of Columbia University, Dennis Garrity, ICRAF Director-General, and Godwin Kowero, Executive Secretary of the African Forest Forum and other dignitaries. Djibo Leity Ka, Senegal’s Minister of State, Ministry of Environment and Nature Protection, will preside over the World Day to Combat Desertification.

Several heads of UN agencies and international organizations have already sent messages in observance of the events. They are Jacques Diouf, Director General, FAO, Monique Barbut, Chief Executive, Global Environment Facility, Kanayo Nwanze, President, International Fund for Agricultural Development, Ahmed Djoglaf, Executive Secretary, Convention on Biological Diversity, Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christian Mersmann, Managing Director, Global Mechanism of the UNCCD, and Ambassador Kwon Byong Hyon, the SLM Champion of the UNCCD.

“Land degradation often begins with deforestation, but leads to many other ills that we then try to address independent of each other. The spirit and mindset of the first African Drylands Week shows a paradigm shift that is emblematic of what the international community, as a whole, must do to surmount the grave environmental challenges facing us. Shedding our
individual environmental blinders, will lead us to a holistic view of our environment, and a better identification of the sources, not symptoms, of such global environmental diseases,” says Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

The First Africa Drylands Weeks and this year’s World Day to Combat Desertification are also part of 2011 International Year of Forests celebrating forests for people. The arid zone forests support the livelihoods of a large proportion of its two billion people inhabitants of the drylands. Overall deforestation has declined globally, but persists in Africa and South America, according to the FAO’s 2010 Global Forests Resource Assessment. The pressure on arid zone forests and the rangelands that protect them may increase, especially in the tropical and sub-tropical regions, from two opposing forces. There is a global campaign to conserve the moist tropical forests for carbon sequestration, on the one hand, and the need open up new land for agriculture to meet a growing global demand for biofuels, food and poverty eradication on the other.
Increasingly, this pressure is being eased by reverting to the drylands.

Field visits, high-level panel discussions and workshops will provide the platform for dialoguing and sharing knowledge around these issues, and the implementation of the biodiversity, climate change and desertification conventions. A way forward and a joint plan to enhancing collaboration among different organizations and partners will be defined and next steps to upscale good practices will be discussed. An information kit on the drylands will be launched during the Week in addition to other activities.

The First Africa Drylands Week and World Day to Combat Desertification are organized by the Government of Senegal, in collaboration with the African Union Commission, the National Great Green Wall Agency of Senegal, the Earth Institute of Columbia University, African Forest Forum, FAO, the UNCCD secretariat, the Global Mechanism of the UNCCD, the World
Agroforestry Organization (ICRAF), the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS), the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS) and Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI), and co-funded by the European Commission.

——

From 10-12 June, two  media tours will be organized for members wishing to participate. Due to the timing of the two itineraries, media can choose to participate in one media tour only.

The first itinerary will take the participants to the regions of Kébemer, Louga and Linguere to visit various projects, including the dune fixation project and its management for tourism which is being implemented by the forest service, in partnership with NGOs and private sector organizations and the Acacia Operation Project which implemented by FAO with partners in Senegal (Forest Service, women local groups, the private sector, local communities). The itinerary will also include visits to various Acacia project sites, following the gum market chain from the forest to end product. The visits will also take us to the project sites of  the Millenium Villages Projects as well as to some Great Green Wall initiative sites where interventions were implemented by the Agence Nationale de la grande Muraille Verte in Senegal in collaboration with local actors.

The second itinerary will be organized in the region of Kaolak where visits will include sites showcasing desertification issues and the best practices piloted in the region for combating desertification. One of the sites for example is the site of Keur Bam, showcasing how degraded land can be restored through sustainable forest management, keeping desertification pressure away in order to aid the process of natural regeneration. Another site is the forest of Koutal which was totally
restored thanks to the commitment and hard work of a local women’s group.

UNCCD Press Office

End 

 

 

Concern over food situation in Libya

“I am concerned about the deteriorating access to food and medicines in the Gaddafi-controlled parts of Libya. This is severely affecting the civilian population, and we must stand ready to provide assistance,” said Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya Panos Moumtzis has referred to the food supply situation in Libya as a “ticking time bomb”. Rapports from western Libya indicate that stocks of essential foodstuffs, fuel and medicines are close to running out. The situation is not critical, but stocks are not being replaced as they are consumed.

“The international community must deal with this situation before it become acute. We must ensure that the aid we provide reaches all people in Libya, regardless of their location,” said the Foreign Minister.

Norway has so far provided NOK 80 million to alleviate the humanitarian situation that has arisen in connection with the events in Libya.

By The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Duty Press Officer:Date:   June 2 2011

Young women and girls are particularly vulnerable

HIV/AIDS: Young people at highest risk of HIV infection

Photo: Anthony Kaminju/IRIN

Young women and girls are particularly vulnerable

JOHANNESBURG, 2 June 2011 (PlusNews) – That young people are particularly vulnerable to HIV and AIDS is well established, but a new report reveals for the first time new data on HIV prevalence in this group, which accounts for almost half of new adult infections globally.

The Opportunity in Crisis report, released on 1 June by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UNAIDS and other UN agencies, found that an estimated 2,500 young people aged 15-24 become infected with HIV every day, with young women and girls particularly vulnerable.

“The picture is grim,” said Elhadj As Sy, UNICEF director for eastern and southern Africa, at the launch of the report in Johannesburg. “The faces of young people living with HIV are predominantly African and female… of the five million HIV-positive young people, close to four million are in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 60 percent are young women and in sub-Saharan Africa, this share jumps to 72 percent.”

Falling short

While the report suggest that prevention is working, and some progress has been made, Susan Kasedde, senior specialist in HIV Prevention with UNICEF, warned that countries were falling “far, far short” in their efforts to address HIV among young people and had not invested enough in these programmes.

“Strategies and plans are devised, but money is not allocated, or when it is, efforts are not effectively coordinated, and are not at sufficient scale or are not [of] sufficient quality to ensure the greatest impact from the investment,” the report found.

At the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on HIV/AIDS in 2001, countries agreed to cut HIV infection among young people by 25 percent by 2010, but only a 12 percent reduction has been achieved.

As Sy said the greatest barrier was stigma and discrimination, particularly in relation to young people at high risk of infection, such as young men who have sex with men, sex workers and injecting drug users, who have been driven underground by discrimination that often prevents them from accessing HIV services.

The report revealed that a young man in the suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa, or Lilongwe, Malawi, who has sex with other men has about a 20 percent chance of becoming HIV-positive by the age of 24, while the risk in the general population of either country is much lower – 4.5 percent in South Africa and 3.1 percent in Malawi.

Recommendations included providing young people with information and comprehensive sexual education; increasing the number of adolescents who know their HIV status, establishing laws and policies that respect young people’s rights, and strengthening monitoring, evaluation and data reporting on this group.

“This [report] should exhort us all to… reflect on commitments made. To prevent HIV, young people must be leadership’s priority,” urged As Sy.

kn/mw source www.irinnews.org

Children gather lost grain after a food distribution in Burundi

AID POLICY: From top-down to networks

Photo: Jean-Manuel Simoes

Children gather lost grain after a food distribution in Burundi

MEDFORD, 3 June 2011 (IRIN) – Humanitarian aid is changing: with the emergence of non-traditional donors and “non-professional” aid workers, crisis response decisions are no longer exclusively made in New York, Geneva, Washington or the West in general.

What some analysts at the Second World Conference on Humanitarian Studies at Tufts University in Medford, USA, are wrestling with is how this emerging decentralized network, which challenges the traditional top-down hierarchical donor model, can be made “more efficient and accountable”, said scholar Michael Barnett.

Other trends are afoot: Barnett, and analysts like Taylor Seybolt, director of the Ford Institute of Human Security at the University of Pittsburgh, are looking at the implications of the business management approach which is increasingly being applied to aid. Major aid organizations have begun to refer to the field as an “industry” and beneficiaries as “clients”.

Theories around “hierarchy”, “network” and “markets” are drawn from business models.

But the emergence of a corporate culture in the aid industry sits uncomfortably with the rise of a new-breed of aid worker. “People who were happy to write out cheques to aid organizations now want to hop on a plane and deliver the aid personally to the affected communities, which is not necessarily in the best interest of the beneficiary,” Barnett told IRIN.

Some of his research indicates that the number of these good samaritans acting mostly for faith-based organizations and churches going into developing countries far exceeds professional aid workers. “But there is a lack of good data to say that with greater certainty.”

Seybolt on the other hand argues that providing beneficiaries with more choice of suppliers of aid is not necessarily a bad thing. He told IRIN that some of his students doing research in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 found that people preferred to go to a camp run by the Hollywood actor Sean Penn rather than the one set up by the UN as it was cleaner and more efficiently run.

“But this business is about saving lives where you cannot make mistakes – you need accountability and a high level of professionalism,” said Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, the organizers of the four-day humanitarian studies conference.

Minimum standards

Both Barnett and Seybolt acknowledge that there is a need for all emerging players to meet a minimum standard and the humanitarian code of conduct.

Walker argued that by developing humanitarian professionalism in individuals – whether from a donor government or a random organization that responded to a crisis – the system could move towards a more accountable network approach. “Each individual is then responsible and accountable.”

The Tufts conference began on 2 June and has attracted more than 400 experts to discuss emerging trends in the humanitarian system and how best to respond to the needs of people affected by both man-made and natural crises.

jk/oa/cb source www.irinnews.org

Affordable point-of-care testing would eliminate long waits for results from distant laboratories

HIV/AIDS: The future of HIV diagnostics

Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN

Affordable point-of-care testing would eliminate long waits for results from distant laboratories

NAIROBI, 3 June 2011 (PlusNews) – As the number of people receiving HIV treatment continues to rise – 6.6 million people were taking antiretroviral drugs by December 2010 – it is important to ensure the technology to test and monitor patients on ARVs be made simpler, cheaper and more easily available to high prevalence, low-income countries, say experts.

A new report by the international HIV financing mechanism, UNITAID, charts the landscape of HIV diagnostics available and outlines tools in the pipeline, making the case that point-of-care technologies are crucial to any effective treatment strategy.

The three major diagnostic tools for HIV are the antibody test – now cheaply and widely available as a rapid test – the CD4 test, which measures immune strength, and the viral-load test. In low-income countries, CD4 and viral-load testing is often conducted in central laboratories far from rural areas, and patients sometimes wait weeks for results.

“Access to HIV testing is well developed, but beyond that, progress still needs to be made in… CD4 testing and viral-load testing,” said Maurine Murtaugh, author of the UNITAID report and diagnostics expert.

“Viral-load testing is very important because the more millions we have on treatment, the more important it becomes to be able to determine early on when treatment is failing, especially because as the viral load increases, so does the risk of infecting others,” she added.

Murtaugh noted that so far, cost had been the major issue hindering countries from providing access to their HIV-infected populations, but designers of the new technologies were working to keep costs down. She added that the first disposable CD4 test could be on the market as early as 2013.

“In Kenya, for example, there are only three centres nationally that can test infants… for HIV, viral load and CD4 count,” said Andrew Suleh, medical superintendent at Mbagathi District Hospital in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. “This is because the expensive and sophisticated technology is required that the country cannot afford and also there are not enough trained personnel to operate this kind of technology.

“Rural areas are particularly disadvantaged because of poor transport and communication networks, which make it difficult to transport test samples and communicate results, creating delays and leading to late initiation of HIV-positive infants on treatment,” he added.

Murtaugh noted that the long delays between testing and receiving results often made health centres lose patients diagnosed positive and needing treatment. “Anecdotal evidence shows that early use of new point-of-care technology has vastly improved retention of patients in treatment programmes,” she said.

Suleh said point-of-care technology would have an especially significant impact on HIV treatment programmes for children.

“If you have a simple yet effective point-of-care diagnosis of infants then poor countries would be able to scale up treatment because it means an increment in the number of infants being diagnosed and initiated on treatment,” he said. “It also gives accurate data on the number of children who need treatment, and hence, ease in planning and budgeting. As things stand today, paediatric treatment of HIV is lagging behind [adults] because of these difficulties.”

kr/ko/mw source www.irinnews.org