POVERTY: LIBERIA: Land grab or development opportunity?

MONROVIA, 17 February 2012 (IRIN)

 Photo: Vincent Chounze
Residents viewing the land they say was seized for foreign investors

Hundreds of villagers and town residents of Liberia’s Grand Cape Mount Country have attracted nationwide attention in their bid to recover what they say is land seized from them and turned over to a Malaysian agro-industrial concern.
A petition sent to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s office in January by the aggrieved people’s political representatives demanded the return of their land.
“This is unbearable,” Mary Freeman, 42, of Sinje Town said. “Our government must care for us and don’t allow these people to kill us silently. What have we done to go through all of these sufferings? This land belongs to us. We were born here and we give birth to our children here too. This is the only place we know.”
Malaysian company Sime Darby Plantations was granted a permit on 21 April 2010 to cultivate 10,000 hectares of palm oil in Bomi and Grand Cape Mount counties. Now, the company has applied for an additional 15,000 hectares for palm oil cultivation in Garwular and Gola Konneh districts, in the Grand Cape Mount County, and another 20,000 hectares in Gbarpolu County.
The attorney representing the aggrieved parties of Cape Mount County, Alfred Brownel, has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to reject these additional requests. He vowed his rights group, Green Advocates, would continue to support those who had lost their land.
“These things must stop,” he said. “Our people deserve the right to survive. They shouldn’t be denied their land. We will not stop until their lives are transformed and the situation changed.”
Critics say the concession is a land grab. When unresolved, land disputes could plunge the country into “serious chaos”, said Jerry Lomah, president of Lomah National Law Firm in Monrovia.
“The government must set up an active land commission to keep eyes on these issues,” Lomah added.
Liberia has a history of land conflicts, especially since the end of the civil war in 2003. In the northeastern town of Ganta there is a long-running conflict over land between the Mandingo and Mano people. Lomah said a land commission could speed up resolution of such disputes and the Sime Darby case.

Mistakes made
A seemingly receptive two-term president reacted immediately to the Grand Cape Mount County concerns by visiting the area and meeting residents of Kon Town, Garwula District. She admitted the government should have gone about the negotiations differently.
“Everybody made mistakes on this one,” she told villagers, “but the thing to do is to correct the mistakes. Now, something could have been done better when it comes to Sime Darby. More consultations and more talks with the people should have taken place.”
She told them that before the government signs an agreement, the legislature conducts public hearings so that views and objections can be raised before an agreement is concluded. However, the residents said they were unaware of any such hearings.
Johnson Sirleaf said the government would now correct this oversight and seek the views of county residents.
“I've come to start the process,” she said. “I came with the ministers of justice, internal affairs, labour, and agriculture because all of them have [a] part to play in the process.”
However, she also told residents of Grand Cape Mount County that when government, including legislators, signed documents with foreign companies or countries, these could not be changed. She said the constitution gave government the authority to sign agreements on behalf of the country, and people should not be directing their frustrations at Sime Darby.
“So, if your government made a mistake, that’s your government. You have to come back to it so we can settle it,” she said.
She said the citizens’ concerns, especially those about jobs and land-grabbing, would be addressed. She said government would ensure locals were given preference when it came to employment with Sime Darby in Grand Cape Mount County.


 Photo: Vincent Chounze
Workers on a Sime Darby plantation preparing palm tree nurseries for planting

The president has set up a committee, co-chaired by officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Justice, to look into the citizens’ complaints in an effort to resolve the dispute with Sime Darby.
Most of those who lost their land have relocated to nearby villages and towns unaffected by the concession. Most are unskilled labourers.

Sime Darby responds
Meanwhile, Sime Darby has denied seizing land. It said it paid fairly for the land and that it had not used force to evict anyone, as landholders had earlier contended.
Sime Darby Board Chairman Tun Hitam said the company had been serious about being part of the community in Grand Cape Mount County since it came to Liberia in 2010. The firm said it expected to invest US$3.1 billion in its Liberian estates by 2025.
In addition, so far, it has rebuilt and refurnished 15 primary schools, and paid teachers the government rate. Sime Darby said it had also refurbished three new school buses, bought one ambulance and expanded hospital wards in its estates.
Sime Darby plantation senior vice-president of the agribusiness division, Helmy Basha, said the firm had already established four plots of nurseries that would generate 780,000 oil palm seedlings. These would kick-start the first planting of 5,200 hectares at Grand Cape Mount County. He said that by 2025, the firm would have planted up to 170,000 hectares with oil palms in the counties of Grand Cape Mount, Bomi, Bong and Gbarpolu.
"For the next 15 years, we're scheduled to invest in infrastructure like roads, bridges, electricity and piped water. We'll also put up the mills," he said.
Basha said Sime Darby would undertake social and environmental impact assessments before the start of any development. For example, it would maintain riparian buffer zones between water bodies and planted areas.
By 2015, the group would start to put up 15 mills - one for every 10,000 hectares. They would extract crude palm oil, be fuelled by biomass, and be self-sustaining, he said.
The firm expects its business in Liberia to be fully-operational by 2035; 35,000 jobs would be created.
“There will also be spillover impacts in uplifting the livelihoods of surrounding communities of the estates," Basha said.
Liberians use palm oil to prepare meals. “If Sime Darby supplies some of the oil to the Liberian market, it will reduce the price of palm oil locally,” said Monrovia businesswoman Sarah Sando.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94882

MANUTRITION: Ivory Coast: Ivorian infighting forces UN refugee relocation

TAMBA JEAN-MATTHEW : July 14 2011
A UNHCR statement this week quoted refugees expressing fear for their lives due to fighting among armed rival gangs and which is affecting the distribution of relief aid.
An estimated 2,000 refugees are affected by the relocation from transit centres and villages along the Liberian border with Cote d’Ivoire.
The armed gangs are divided between supporters of President Alassane Ouattara and those of the ousted former leader, Laurent Gbagbo.
The fighting has prevented the regular supply of relief aid by UNHCR to hundreds of Ivorian refugees resulting in instances of starvation and malnourishment.
Mr Jerry Bahgou, a medical officer at the Yorpea Clinic in Liberia’s north-eastern Nimba County, says the rate of malnutrition among children is high and that dozens are being referred to hospitals in the area.
About half of the 100,000 Ivorian refugees reside in border towns and villages in Nimba County
http://www.africareview.com/News/Ivorian+gangs+force+UN+refugee+relocation/-/979180/1201196/-/7yfdgwz/-/

POVERTY: SENEGAL: Poorly-trained midwives pose danger

DAKAR, 30 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Tiggy Ridley/IRIN
Midwives need better training on how to cope when things go wrong (file photo)

 Poorly-regulated, privately-run training schools in Senegal are churning out midwives who do not have a solid grasp of birthing or ante- and post-natal care, causing women and babies to die needlessly, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
Other basic competencies, as defined by the World Health Organization, include referral in high-risk pregnancies or births; addressing miscarriages; and family planning.
Most women who die during labour in Senegal do so because of post-partum haemorrhaging, according to UNFPA’s joint Senegal director, Edwige Adekambi.
“We know the causes of maternal mortality; we know that if a haemorrhaging woman does not get care within two hours she is likely to die, but many private training schools don’t even include this care in their curriculum,” she told IRIN.
Some 401 women died per 100,000 live births in Senegal, according to the latest government health survey in 2005, ranking 144 out of 181 countries studied; and only 52 percent of births in 2005 were accompanied by a qualified birth attendant, though for the poorest 20 percent of women this drops to 20 percent. While performing better on maternal mortality than most of its West African neighbours, Senegal still has a lot of work to do to reach the Millennium Development Goal on maternal mortality, according to UNFPA.
These and other issues were discussed at the Senegal launch of UNFPA’s State of the World’s Midwives report on 29 June.

Unregulated
Senegal has dozens of private midwife training schools which are in theory, regulated, but with just two government inspectors to do this, many get away with low standards, said Adekambi.
Bigoué Ba, vice-president of the National Association of Midwives, told IRIN “Anyone can open a school in Senegal. There’s no monitoring.”
While there is a national test that all midwives must pass to be recruited into a public hospital or clinic - and generally those who pass have been trained in public institutions, according to UNFPA - many who fail the exam can still obtain a diploma and find a job in a private clinic, said Adekambi.
The government has tried to improve regulation of schools, but cannot be expected to do it all, Health Minister Modou Diagne Fada told journalists at the report launch. “We are committed to improving maternal mortality rates and addressing the midwife problem, but partners have to help with this too,” he said.
UNFPA is working with the government, the National Association of Midwives, and aid groups to improve the national curriculum; it calls on the government to impose stricter regulation across the sector.
The current curriculum, while thorough, excludes vital aspects of birthing support, including how to administer antibiotics, to give oxytocin to stimulate uterine contractions; and using ventouse (a vacuum device) during birth to ease delivery. UNFPA teaches these techniques in “post-training” for midwives in several regions including Kolda and Tambacounda in central Senegal.

Rural shortage
As well as better training, more midwives are needed across the country: Senegal has just two midwives per 1,000 population, which is one-third of the recommended international norm, according to WHO.
Density of midwives, nurses and doctors per 1,000 population : Mali 0.3; Niger 0.2; Nigeria 2.0;
Liberia 0.3; Senegal 0.5; Sierra Leone 0.2

Shortages are particularly acute in rural areas: Matam, on the eastern border, has just 14 state-trained midwives and requires 389; Tambacounda has 38 (only one of whom is trained in family planning) and requires 515; while Dakar has 445 but requires a further 1,566, according to 2008 statistics from the Ministry of Health and Prevention’s human resource unit.
There is no gynaecologist or obstetrician at all in Kolda, so for complicated births women have to travel to Tambacounda, which takes more than the precious two-hour window, if something goes wrong.
To reach Millennium Development Goals four and five to improve child and women’s mortality and health, Senegal needs to recruit 250 additional midwives per year, according to UNFPA.

Recruitment drive
In 2010 the government did a countrywide recruitment push, hiring hundreds of additional midwives to work in rural areas.
While partially successful, half of all midwives recruited to rural areas “found a reason why they had to return to Dakar within the year,” said Health Minister Fada.
He puts the onus on them to stay. “It is their duty if they accepted this profession, to work where the needs are,” he told journalists at the report launch in Dakar, and he also called on the Midwives’ Association to encourage midwives to stay.
But the government also needs to think of more creative ways to encourage midwives to work in rural areas, said Ba of the National Midwives Association. Incentives have been discussed but few yet put into practice. These include providing midwives with lodging, a vehicle, health insurance for their families, or career development training.
The Health Ministry should also consider training up the hundreds of traditional birthing attendants, known as “matrones”, who work in villages throughout the country, said Ba.
More also needs to be done to make midwifery an “attractive” career, according to Ba. Midwives are paid on average US$200-300 per month at first but, given that there is very little career development, this could rise by just $100 over two decades of work. Career development training would also incentivize women to commit over the long term, she said.
All recognized the progress the Health Ministry has made since 2010: trying to regulate training more carefully; requiring the minimum of a baccalaureate certificate to enter midwife training; and delegating more medical tasks to midwives.
Most significantly, the government made all births, including Caesarean sections, free of charge in all regions of the country, except Dakar.
Further improvements will cost more than recent additions to the health budget will allow, said Fada. New income sources for the health sector, such as additional taxes on cigarettes and other goods, are being considered.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93111

POVERTY: LIBERIA: Food stocks low for hosts and refugees

DAKAR, 3 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN
Liberians and Ivoirians are resorting to eating rice seeds (file photo)

Liberian host families and the Ivoirian refugees staying with them are resorting to eating rice seeds intended for this year’s crop as food stocks dwindle in eastern Liberia, according to aid agencies.
Some 182,000 refugees who fled the violence in Côte d’Ivoire, are registered in Liberia, 90 percent of them staying with host families, rather than in refugee camps, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
Liberians and Ivoirians are also having to resort to buying imported rice - a coping mechanism usually exhibited far later in the lean season, according to a recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) assessment.
Rice prices are 20-25 percent higher than in April 2010, according to the US Agency for International Development’s FEWSNET, further straining budgets in this chronically food-insecure region.
In the first few months of the refugee influx, food distributions were “patchy or nonexistent”, Susan Sandars, Oxfam’s communications and advocacy officer in Liberia, told IRIN; and now, “considerable gaps in the response remain,” she said.
Supply chain problems early on led to cereal shortages, meaning the World Food Programme (WFP) had to lower ration size per family, its emergency coordinator, Jerry Bailey, told IRIN.
Aid agencies have not come up with effective ways to deliver to refugees who are so spread out - sheltering across an estimated 90 villages, said Oxfam’s food security and livelihoods adviser, Nanthilde Kamara.

Challenges
Poor roads, broken bridges, and few available trucks on the commercial market continue to pose problems, said WFP’s Bailey, but response has improved. WFP has bought 10 additional trucks that can navigate difficult terrain, and is making emergency repairs to strategic roads. The organization is also setting up mobile storage units to try to ease distributions.
WFP is distributing regular seed-protection rations to 15,000 Liberians to prevent them from eating their rice seeds, and is delivering general food rations to 100,000 people in Nimba, Maryland and Grand Geddeh counties. Cereal stocks are up - to 2,000 tons - though some say this will not last beyond one month or so.
The government, alongside a number of agencies, including FAO and Oxfam, is distributing seeds and tools to thousands of host families so they can boost their harvest in three months time; Oxfam is also figuring out how best to distribute cash.
Refugees and hosts will need support for a long time to come, estimate aid agencies, as many Ivoirians are still too scared to return home for fear of attacks due to their ethnicity or perceived political affiliation. Many thousands could still be in-country in 2012, according to Bailey.
Given this, they need to shift their responses so they are more appropriate to the context - increasing the number of distribution teams, and setting up more food distribution points in host communities, said Oxfam’s Kamara.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=92889

POVERTY: Evidence is piling up against acquisitions of farmland in poor countries

May 5 2011
THE farmers of Makeni, in central Sierra Leone, signed the contract with their thumbs. In exchange for promises of 2,000 jobs, and reassurances that the bolis (swamps where rice is grown) would not be drained, they approved a deal granting a Swiss company a 50-year lease on 40,000 hectares of land to grow biofuels for Europe. Three years later 50 new jobs exist, irrigation has damaged the bolis and such development as there has been has come “at the social, environmental and economic expense of local communities”, says Elisa Da Vià of Cornell University.

When deals like this first came to international attention in 2009, it was unclear whether they were “land grabs or development opportunities”, to quote a study published that year. Supporters claimed they would bring seeds, technology and capital to some of the world’s poorest lands. Critics, such as the director of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, dubbed them “neo-colonialist”. But no one had hard evidence to back up their claims. Now they do. Two years on, a conference at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) of the University of Sussex, the biggest of its kind so far, examined over 100 land deals. Most judgments are damning.*

Land grabs have been strikingly popular. Preliminary research by the International Land Coalition, a non-governmental organisation, reckons almost 80m hectares have been subject to some sort of negotiation with a foreign investor, more than half in Africa (see chart). This estimate is far higher than a previous one, by the World Bank, which last year said that foreign investors had expressed interest in 57m hectares. It is higher still than one by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) which put the figure in a 2009 study at 15m-20m hectares. It would be wrong to draw a line between these numbers so as to conclude that land deals have grown fourfold. Since most are secret, knowing what to count is difficult, and the figures refer to different periods.



Yet each time someone has looked at the phenomenon, the result has been a figure roughly twice the earlier estimate. It is also clear that the overall scope is vast: 80m hectares is more than the area of farmland of Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined. And land deals are continuing, possibly even speeding up. Over a tenth of the farmland of South Sudan has been leased this year—even before the country has formally got its independence. GRAIN, an advocacy group, says it has seen proposals that would allow Saudi business groups to take control of 70% of the rice-growing area of Senegal.
It is not just the size of land deals that remains uncertain. Their contractual basis often is, too. Few contracts have been made public, so details are sketchy. But an investigation of 12 that have been, by Lorenzo Cotula of the International Institute for Environment and Development, declares many “not to be fit for purpose”. The rights and obligations of each side, Mr Cotula says, are usually extremely vague, while traditional land-use rights are frequently ignored. As one farmer asked when a British company acquired forestry rights in Tanzania: “How come others are selling our land?”
Even after the contract is signed, there is no guarantee a land deal will go ahead in accordance with it. A survey by the World Bank† showed that in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, only 16 of 46 projects were working as intended (the rest lay fallow or had been rented back to smallholders). In Mozambique only half the projects were working as planned.
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.”
So why are land deals popular? That is surprisingly easy to answer: strong demand and willing suppliers. The big investors tend to be capital-exporting countries with large worries about feeding their own people. Their confidence in world markets has been shaken by two food-price spikes in four years. So they have sought to guarantee food supplies by buying farmland abroad. China is by far the largest investor, buying or leasing twice as much as anyone else.
Local elites have also played a vital role in spreading land deals. In a Tanzanian project described by Martina Locher of the University of Zurich, “local people who refer to customary law have a very low level of knowledge [and cannot] defend their land rights.” In contrast, she writes, “state law is mainly represented by district officials, who…enjoy a high level of respect by local people.”
Then there is corruption. Many of the west African “land grabbers” described by Ms Hilhorst are local politicians, civil servants and other urban elites who bribe local chiefs with gifts of motorbikes. Madeleine Fairbairn of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, argues that in Mozambique, an informal division of the spoils has emerged. Local bigwigs use their influence to get “facilitation fees”, while national leaders manipulate the law and promote (or obstruct) projects to their own and their supporters’ advantage.
Many development projects work this way. What makes land grabs unusual is their combination of high levels of corruption with low levels of benefit. Ruth Meinzen-Dick, one of the authors of the IFPRI study, says that in 2009 the balance of costs and benefits was genuinely unclear. Now, she argues, the burden of evidence has shifted and it is up to the proponents of land deals to show that they work. At the moment, they have precious few examples to point to.
http://www.economist.com/node/18648855?story_id=18648855

POVERTY: Ghana shares cocoa know-how with Liberia

Samuel Hinneh : 21 March 2011
 Ghana will help Liberian farmers plant crops more effectively: Flickr/Nestlé

[ACCRA] Liberia's cocoa industry, destroyed by its recent civil war, could be revitalised by a collaboration with Ghana, one of the world's major cocoa producers.
Representatives from both countries signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) 4 March, with the aim of boosting each other's agricultural research activities. The Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana and Liberia's Central Agricultural Research Institute will set up reciprocal arrangements for visiting scientists and implement mutually agreed projects.
"Liberia used to produce cocoa — it was a member of the old West Africa Cocoa Research Institute," Yaw Adu-Ampomah, deputy chief executive of the Ghana Cocoa Board — which facilitated the MoU with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture's Sustainable Tree Crops Program (STCP) — told SciDev.Net.
Adu-Ampomah said that the United States, through the STCP, is keen to help Liberia but the country lacks cocoa-producing capacity — which is where Ghana comes in.
Ghana will provide expertise to Liberian farmers on planting crops in the most effective way. "We will send some technicians to Liberia, and Liberia will send some to Ghana to receive training in nursery activities and providing agricultural services," he said.
Adu-Ampomah added that the United States will partly fund seedling production, transport of materials to Liberia, access to credit facilities to enable planting, and costs of technical intervention. The Liberian government is funding its farmers — mostly technicians — and technology transfer.
The first step will involve gathering together Liberia's farmers, producing the seedlings and harvesting and processing them into a form that can be flown to Liberia and transported to the farmers.
The collaboration, Adu-Ampomah said, is driven by the aims of the Economic Community of West African States, which seeks to promote economic integration within West Africa.
Although the collaboration is primarily focusing on cocoa, it can involve other important crops, he added.
"Liberia has a slight advantage in coffee production, which Ghana can learn from. It also has a diverse range of coffee varieties and Ghana could obtain some seeds from Liberia to revitalise its coffee industry."
Derrick Mills, programme officer at the Ghana Agricultural Associations Business and Information Centre, said that the collaboration will improve the agricultural sectors of both countries through technology transfer.
"The capacity building of the research institutions will be enhanced and Ghana will also be able rejuvenate its coffee industry. Liberian and Ghanaian farmers will also be able to share knowledge and so improve productivity," he said.

COMMENT:
Viktor Bengtsson ( www.viktorbengtsson.com Liberia )
Let's attempt to straighten out a few things:
1) Liberia produces and exports cocoa. In fact, several Liberian companies are aggressively expanding cocoa production (LCC, Lofa county, is the biggest one)
2) To say that Liberia has an "advantage" in coffee is stretching the truth a might too far. Coffee plantations in Liberia are in a deplorable state (the cocoa farms have received far more attention) and the export network haven't really cared about coffee up until the 2010/2011 season when some buying activities started.
3) In reading between the lines it seems that the underlying reason for this article is the fact that CRIG and CARI have signed an MOU to get hybrid cocoa planting material to Liberia and train technicians in planting and seed multiplication. This is a worthy topic for an article in and of itself. No need to make it appear that cocoa-rich Ghana is riding in to save cocoa-destitute Liberia.
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/ghana-shares-cocoa-know-how-with-liberia.html

POVERTY: China's economic invasion of Africa

Xan Rice guardian.co.uk,  6 February 2011

A million Chinese people, from engineers to chefs, have moved to work in Africa in the past decade. How has the trade boom changed their lives?


 Photograph: Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures

Chinese civil engineer Liu Hui, who is overseeing the construction of a highway between Nairobi and Thika.
In December 1999, a 24-year-old Chinese man called Zhang Hao left behind the freezing winter of his native Shenyang city to fly to Uganda. Zhang was nervous. He spoke no English. The journey was not even his idea, but that of his father, who had worked in Uganda a few years before on a fishing project involving the Chinese government.
"If you want to start something – and be the boss – Africa is the place to do it," Zhang's father had told him when he asked for business advice.
Zhang had quit university to travel to east Africa, but he did not need a degree to spot easy money-making opportunities as soon as he set foot in Kampala: goods that were available cheaply in every city in China were either expensive here, or unavailable. He started by importing shoes. Then schoolbags. Then fishing nets, nails and bicycles.
"I imported everything. At that time they needed everything!" recalls Zhang, an affable man with rimless glasses.
His business grew quickly; he made money and local friends. But after a few years he grew weary of the long buying trips to China. So he and his wife bought a large plot of land in Kampala. On it they constructed a spectacular Chinese-Korean restaurant, with private dining areas, karaoke rooms and a giant 500-seat dining hall. To the side of the restaurant they built a bedroom, which became their home. The business prospered, and soon he started additional enterprises including a bakery, a firm selling flat-screen televisions and a security company.
"Chinese don't think, they just try without studying the market too much. Otherwise, the chance is gone," he says.
At the site of each new enterprise, Zhang built a room for his family – he had a son in 2007 – to sleep in. They literally live at work. It has paid off. Zhang says he is now the biggest Chinese employer in the country, with 1,200 local staff. He has even been offered a Ugandan passport, but has refused, just as he has declined to take an English first name.
"I am Chinese, and we need to build a Chinese name here – to let people know that our country is not like before. We are richer, catching up the world."
Few Ugandans need reminding of that. When Zhang arrived in 1999 there were only a few hundred Chinese in the country, including embassy staff. Today, the most conservative estimate is 7,000, from the petty traders who have taken over whole blocks of the central business district to the construction engineers changing Kampala's skyline and the sharp-suited oil executives who frequent Zhang's restaurant. It is a similar story across the continent. Figures are hard to come by, but a decade ago there were probably no more than 100,000 Chinese people working in Africa. Today, there are around a million.
The first Chinese reached Africa nearly 600 years ago during the Ming dynasty, when the armada of admiral Zheng He landed on the Kenyan coast. The next significant arrival was in the early 1900s, when 60,000 Chinese miners worked on the South African goldfields. Half a century on, Chairman Mao Zedong sent tens of thousands of agricultural and construction workers to Africa to enhance ties with countries emerging from colonialism.
But post-cold war migration concerns economics rather than politics. China-Africa trade grew from $6bn in 1999 to more than $90bn (£56bn) in 2009, roughly split equally between imports and exports: Africa's natural resources – oil, iron, platinum, copper, and timber – flowing east to feed China's factories, and finished goods, from flip-flops to trucks, travelling the other way. Last year, the trade is estimated to have topped $100bn. Chinese state involvement in the trade is crucial. Each year Beijing provides billions of pounds in grants and loans to African governments as a sweetener to secure raw material deals or to finance infrastructure projects that could benefit its companies.

That is what brought Liu Hui to Kenya. A slight, 41-year-old civil engineer, he was working for China Wuyi, a state-owned construction firm, in Fujian province in 2006 when he was called into his "leader's" office, and told he was needed on a project to upgrade Nairobi's main airport. Liu had never set foot outside China. He was reluctant to leave his wife and seven-year-old son. He knew as little about Kenya as Zheng He's sailors. "My image was: very poor, dry and hot," says Liu. "But if my company wanted to send me somewhere, what could I have done? You have to show your capacity for work."
On arrival, Liu found that Nairobi was neither dry nor too hot. When the airport contract finished, he was assigned to oversee the construction of a highway between Nairobi and Thika, a pineapple-growing district to the north-east.
Liu lives at China Wuyi's main site office, a four-storey building alongside the highway. Though the commute to work consists of a flight of stairs, the day is long – from 7.15am to 6pm. The pace of work is often frustrating, and can be complicated by language difficulties; Liu speaks in halting English, and knows a few phrases of Swahili. "Chinese work very hard, very quickly," he says. "But here we are training local people to do the work, and if someone does not understand, he works slowly. You have to watch."
Most evenings Liu and his Chinese colleagues – there are about 100 on the road project – watch DVDs on their laptops or chat to family and friends over the internet. But they do get out occasionally, for coffee or dinner in nearby malls. Liu says he intends to return to China for good – his bosses permitting – when the road project finishes, in order to spend more time with his family.
But for Wang Lina, seated in her shop in downtown Nairobi, a few miles away, family is the reason she is here. The child of "normal worker" parents, Wang grew up with few thoughts of leaving Benxi, an industrial town nearly 600 miles north-east of Beijing. But in 2003, when she was 21 and newly married, her husband's uncle approached them with a proposition. A few years before he had travelled to Kenya to set up a home furnishings company. Now his business was expanding fast, and he was looking for family members to help run it. Wang and her husband agreed to join him.
But she missed her friends. In Kenya she could not find any clothes to fit her. She was too shy to talk to local people. So, after a year, she and her husband quit and returned to Benxi. But soon his uncle came calling again, begging them to give it another try.
This time Wang found herself appreciating the upside of living in Nairobi. In Benxi, she had lived in a flat, but was now sharing a large house and garden with two other couples from the extended family. Instead of simply being a cashier in the store, Wang moved into design and sales. She works hard, often seven days a week, but has also found time to enjoy some of east Africa's best tourist attractions – a safari near Mount Kenya, a beach holiday in Zanzibar. She and her husband have saved enough to buy an apartment back home, which is the goal of many young Chinese who take jobs abroad, even though she has no intention of returning soon.
"My friends who now work in Beijing and Shanghai are so tired," she says. "There's no time to relax, it's always faster, faster! Things are slower here, and I like that. No hurry in Africa, that's what they say."
China's move into Africa has not all been driven from the east. Countries such as Uganda have actively courted Chinese companies, to good effect: in 2010 China replaced the UK as the biggest source of foreign direct investment. One of the largest firms to have set up in Uganda is ZTE, China's second-biggest telecommunications equipment company. Zhu Zhenxing, 32, is its MD in Uganda. Growing up in Jiangsu, along China's east coast, Zhu was certain about two things: he wanted to learn English, and wanted to be an international businessman. He was recruited by ZTE at a job fair, with the promise of a job abroad.
"I did not want to stay in my home area, or even in China," he says, puffing on a Dunhill cigarette. "I wanted to experience things, to grow. The further away the better."
So when he was asked to go to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, Zhu did not hesitate. "Other people said: Africa is like this and like that. But I thought if other humans lived there, I could too."
He learned a lot. The corruption dismayed him. But Zhu liked Nigerians' optimism, "always talking and smiling, not worrying about tomorrow". He was so desperate to prove himself that he nearly burned out. He developed vitiligo, a disorder that causes loss of pigmentation. His face turned white "like Michael Jackson" and he was forced to return to China to recover.
He returned to Africa via Vietnam. In Uganda, he has grown ZTE's business exponentially – the company sold more than 500,000 handsets this year. Zhu looks the modern high-flyer – smart shoes, trousers with a Mont Blanc belt, a dress shirt and trendy black glasses. At weekends he plays golf with clients and Chinese embassy staff. But beyond that his lifestyle is far more modest than that of most expats. He and his staff all live in the same apartment block. A company vehicle takes them to and from work each day. His salary is good by Chinese standards but not comparable with those of his western competitors. Still, he has no complaints.
"We are still working towards being a world-class company," he says. "Our core competency is our low costs, so we must keep expenses down."
If there is one home comfort Chinese migrants in Africa can't do without it is their food. Most companies, including ZTE, bring over their own chefs. Xu Jianwen, 34, is one of them. Raised and trained in Sanhe, in northern China, he was working in a restaurant in Beijing when he heard that the China Road and Bridge Corporation, a state-owned construction giant, was hiring cooks. When he was offered a job in Uganda, his wife, with whom he has a young daughter, protested vehemently. But he won her over when he told her the salary – two and half times what he was earning in China. "Salaries in China are not enough," he says. "I had to come for the money."
His first job was to cook for 20 Chinese workers in Soroti, a small town in eastern Uganda. He had two local assistants but, lacking English, no way to communicate with them. At least the cooking was uncomplicated. Only five vegetables were available locally – aubergine, cabbage, potatoes, green peppers and tomatoes. "And there was no spicy sauce," he says. "I work every day, because people need to eat every day. I wake up at six in the morning and finish at seven. Every day is like that. I rest on Chinese public holidays."
Currently based at head office in Kampala, Xu plans to spend another two or three years overseas, saving all the while for "housing, education and food" for his family. He won't miss the mosquitoes, he says, but he will miss the people. "They are very nice. Friendly to Chinese."
That is not always the case. In parts of southern Africa there has been strong resentment towards Chinese traders, many of whom arrive on tourist visas and stay on illegally. In Zambia, the Chinese managers of a coal mine recently shot two Zambian employees who were protesting over pay, causing anger across the country. And in Sudan and Ethiopia, rebel groups have killed Chinese workers because they view them as proxies of the local government.
In Kenya, home to up to 15,000 Chinese, the main problem for some of the early migrants was a mistrust of their goods. Xu Hui gave up an editing position at the state news agency Xinhua to start a toy-import business in the mid-90s. But when he moved into computers, people did not trust the quality. He resorted to showing potential clients the labels on the computers they already owned that said: "Made in China".
Today Xu runs a successful business importing Great Wall-brand televisions and giant rolls of toilet paper that are repackaged locally. He regards Kenya as his home – he enjoys the "simple, healthy lifestyle", playing badminton at a sports club every week – and only reluctantly sent his family back to China for educational reasons. But though the attitude to Xu's products may have changed, he is aware that western attitudes to China's push into Africa remain largely negative – something he struggles to understand.
"Western countries also buy oil, and have mines around the world. People don't talk about 'grabbing', or 'new colonialism' there. So why is it different for Chinese? We are not sending our armies to places and saying: 'Now sell us this!'" Xu says. "If you can't compete with us, you find an excuse. It's like two children fighting, and the losing one crying to his parent about funny tricks."
In fact, there is competition now on lots of levels. Every month thousands of African merchants travel to cities such as Guangzhou and Yiwu to buy wholesale goods. And other Chinese firms, including state-owned companies, battle for local tenders.
This can be stressful for company managers. Just ask Dong Junxia, an earnest, smartly dressed woman. Since 2008 she has been in charge of the small Ugandan office of the China Railway Seventh Group Corporation, a subsidiary of CREC, one of the world's largest construction companies. She worked on road-building projects in difficult environments in Tanzania and Liberia, with some success. But in Uganda her company had yet to win a large tender. Dong seemed ashamed, and insisted that her name and that of her company stay out of this story.
"I have progressed professionally [in Africa], but suffered loss in being away from my family. In western culture it's different. Being with the family is the priority. Chinese sacrifice themselves for the family. It is hard to decide which is more important."
But a week later she called to say that her name could be used. She sounded exuberant: her company has been awarded a large contract to build a road. "After two years of hard work! You must understand how good that feels."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/06/chinas-economic-invasion-of-africa

POVERTY: Diamonds in the Central African Republic

Diamonds are feeding cycles of poverty and conflict in the CAR in much the same way as they did in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s and early 2000s. The scale of the problem is smaller, because the CAR has fewer diamonds, and its armed groups are less organised, but the dynamics are identical and the human suffering just as real. Misguided governance of the mining sector, in part a legacy of decades of misrule and state fragility, rewards the lucky few, leaves thousands of artisanal miners and their families fighting for their livelihoods and encourages smuggling.

Widespread poverty and well-oiled illicit trading networks enable armed groups to profit from diamonds, and weak security forces can do little to stop them. It is high time the government and international partners paid
more attention to these interlinked issues and committed to genuine reform of the mining sector. The first step is to prise control of the sector from the regime’s grip and open it to national and international scrutiny
http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/africa/central-africa/central-african-republic/167%20Dangerous%20Little%20Stones%20-%20Diamonds%20in%20the%20Central%20African%20Republic.ashx

POVERTY: WHO: Spiraling Health Costs Push 100 Million People Into Poverty

Geneva 22 November 2010



Photo: WHO UN HABITAT / Anna Kari Share This

The World Health Organization says spiraling health costs push 100 million people into poverty every year. Now, a WHO report provides practical guidelines on how governments can strengthen their health financing systems, and make services available to more people.
Rich and poor governments alike are struggling to pay for health care. Some people have good health plans that cover most of their expenses. But, they are in the minority.
The World Health Organization reports about one billion people in the world do not get the health services they need, because they are not available or are not affordable.
WHO Health Systems Financing director, David Evans, says these people have a difficult choice to make. Either they pay directly for health services they cannot afford, or delay care and run the risk of getting a more serious disease.
"Probably 100 million people make the choice to use their services each year, pay for them, and they suffer the financial consequences. They are pushed down the poverty line simply because they pay for health services," Evans said.
He adds that although this is unacceptable, there is an alternative.
"But, what the report says, it is not just acceptable, but it is not necessary. Something could be done about it, and something can be done about it now," Evans stressed.
The report highlights three key areas of change.
It says governments can raise and allocate more money for health. For example, WHO notes, in 2000, African heads of state committed to spend 15 percent of government funds on health. So far, three countries, Liberia, Rwanda and Tanzania have achieved this.
The report says governments also could raise money more fairly and spend it more efficiently. Evans says a number of countries are adopting these options with some success.
"Gabon is a low income country. It has introduced a tax on financial transactions, and that is going to help. If Gabon can do something like that, other countries can do it," Evans said. "In terms of financial risk protection, Thailand has introduced health insurance for everyone, and that health insurance is tax-funded, particularly for the poor. So, that what happens is, the insurance now pays the cost that the people would have paid previously out of their own pockets."
The report says smarter spending could increase global health coverage between 20 and 40 percent. It identifies 10 areas where greater efficiencies are possible.
One is in the purchase of medicines.
France is an example of this. It uses generic drugs wherever possible, a policy that saved the country almost $2 billion in 2008. The report says more efficient spending on hospitals could boost productivity by 15 percent.
WHO acknowledges impoverishment and financial catastrophe are more prevalent in low-income countries because people there rely more on out of pocket payments for health care. Therefore, it says, poor countries will need more help from the international community.
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/health/WHO-Spiraling-Health-Costs-Push-100-Million-People-Into-Poverty--109880574.html

MALARIA: An Outbreak of Plasmodium falciparum Malaria in U.S. Marines Deployed to Liberia

In 2003, 44 U.S. Marines were evacuated from Liberia with either confirmed or presumed Plasmodium falciparum malaria. An outbreak investigation showed that only 19 (45%) used insect repellent, 5 (12%) used permethrin-treated clothing, and none used bed netting. Adherence with weekly mefloquine (MQ) was reported by 23 (55%). However, only 4 (10%) had serum MQ levels high enough to correlate with protection (> 794 ng/mL), and 9 (22%) had evidence of steady-state kinetics (MQ carboxy metabolite/MQ > 3.79). Tablets collected from Marines met USP identity and dissolution specifications for MQ. Testing failed to identify P. falciparum isolates with MQ resistance. This outbreak resulted from under use of personal protective measures and inadequate adherence with chemophrophylaxis. It is essential that all international travelers make malaria prevention measures a priority, especially when embarking to regions of the world with high transmission intensity such as west Africa.

"Good doctors are of no use without good discipline. More than half the battle against disease is not fought by doctors, but by regimental officers. It is they who see that the daily dose of mepacrine (anti-malarial chemoprophylactic drug used in WW II) is taken...if mepacrine was not taken, I sacked the commander. I only had to sack three; by then the rest had got my meaning."
—Lieutenant General William Slim (1891–1970), Burma Campaign, 1943
http://www.ajtmh.org/cgi/content/abstract/83/2/258?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=malaria&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT

MALARIA: Liberia: community co-operation

EQUIP Liberia, a Malaria Communities Program grantee, played a major role in the implementation of a free long-lasting ITN distribution campaign in Nimba County, Liberia, conducted in May-June 2009. EQUIP worked closely with PMI, the Nimba County Health Team, the Ministry of Health, and the national malaria control program to conduct the campaign. The long-lasting ITNs for the campaign were procured and transported to the county level by PMI, while EQUIP assisted the County Health team to oversee the distribution of nets from the county level down to communities.
Over a period of two weeks, 530 community health volunteers trained by EQUIP Liberia distributed more than 180,000 free ITNs in all six districts of Nimba County, often transporting the bales of nets by foot or even canoe when roads were impassable. Volunteers went from house to house to ensure that each household received three nets and to share information about the importance of using a net to prevent malaria. Because ownership of an ITN does not ensure that it is properly used, the volunteers were equipped with nails and cords to help families hang their nets properly.
http://www.pmi.gov/news/voices/liberia_itn.html

POVERTY: Liberia rain forest

JALAY TOWN, Liberia — Six months pregnant and with two toddlers to feed, saving the rainforest isn't top of Marita Worjiloh's list of priorities right now.
A log lies smoking amid burned, jagged tree stumps as Marita tosses seeds into the fertile soil gouged out of Liberia's jungle.
She knows this traditional method of slash-and-burn farming is decimating woodlands, but "if I had something to do to make money I won't cut the forest down, because I know it is important."
"Without a forest we would not live a good life."
So while conservationists worry about preserving rainforests -- a powerful aid against climate change -- and the biodiversity they offer, it is poverty that drives this 23-year-old.
Liberia's forest makes up 42 percent of what is left of the Upper Guinean Rainforest -- just part of a fragmented system that once covered most of West Africa but has been reduced to 12 percent of its original reach.
The people of this west African nation have relied on the forest for food, medicine and even as a refuge during two successive civil conflicts from 1989 to 2003.
Villagers also have been razing large patches for farmland and hunting the wildlife for meat.
The threat of deforestation is real with about 70 percent of the population involved in slash-and-burn farming, said Johansen Voker, the acting executive director of Liberia's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
A traditional method used worldwide, slash-and-burn involves felling trees, burning their remains for nutrient-rich ash, and planting fast-growing crops such as rice and cassava.
The land should then be allowed to regenerate but pressure from burgeoning populations often decreases this fallow period and can lead to permanent loss of forest cover.
Despite efforts to introduce more sustainable ways to live off the forest, poverty is the biggest threat to biodiversity, said Voker, leading to illegal logging, mining and burning charcoal as fuel.
"It is poverty that drives people into burning charcoal as a source of fuel and it is poverty that drives people into the kind of unsustainable farming we are talking about," he said.
"What they think about is how they can cut down a tree to produce charcoal and that charcoal will put a bowl of rice on their table."
According to a 2010 report on deforestation by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Africa lost 3.4 million hectares of forest over the last decade, the second largest net loss after South America which includes the Amazon.
Africa's forest cover is concentrated in its western and central parts, but often in countries ravaged by war that has damaged their fragile environment through abuse of natural resources and massive population displacement.
In West Africa, wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone sent more than a million refugees fleeing across their borders into forested regions of Guinea and the Ivory Coast, one of the planet's most diverse biological regions.
For Richard Sambolah, technical adviser for the British-based organisation Fauna and Flora International, Liberia's conflict led to further exploitation of the forest.
"It just intensified poverty in the country," he added, "there are no jobs and so almost 80-90 percent of the population depends on the forest."
According to Voker, Liberia's agriculture ministry is trying to aid farmers to adapt to sustainable methods such as lowland or swamp farming which can be more profitable and increase yield.
"But the farmers have to make drastic changes... to adapt to this so-called new technology," he cautioned, and might be reluctant to ditch the familiarity of traditional upland farming.
Voker said Liberia was losing up to two percent of its forest cover every year. "If it is not checked you can imagine what happens 20 years from now... the forest will be gone."
As part of the persuasion process, in a nearby village Fiona Pamplin from Fauna and Flora International has trained a troupe to dance and act out a play explaining the devastating effects of cutting down the forests.
The message is clear, if not attractive.
"I am actually quite relieved to see that people do actually understand my message but they are always asking the question: So what are we supposed to do instead?" says Pamplin.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i2PWSR2tKIHvWASBGi-VAvECBrag

MALNUTRITION: Liberia; the issue of ignorance

International organisations and the government must look at the problem of malnutrition in Liberia as an educational challenge rather than just a health issue in order to save children's lives.The United Nations estimates that 44 percent of childhood deaths in the country are due to malnutrition, making it the most common cause of child mortality.U.N. agencies have warned that if efforts to address key nutritional problems such as children being underweight, stunted growth or micronutrient deficiencies are not accelerated, some 78,000 Liberian women and children will die and 87,000 babies will be born mentally retarded."The problem is that people do not know that the problem is occurring and only learn that their children are malnourished after the child is brought sick to hospital and nurses diagnose malnutrition," said Samson Azorquoi, the acting medical director of Phebe Hospital in Bong county, central Liberia."The war has ended but the nutritional crisis has not ended," he added.Phebe Hospital runs a major nutrition recovery centre supported by the United Nations Children's agency (UNICEF) that serves thousands of people, including those from neighbouring countries like Guinea and the Ivory Coast.On a recent visit there, two of its patients, Josiah and Josephine, 17-month-old twins were being treated in a ward for severe acute malnutrition cases. They were tired and in tears with rising temperatures. Their mother - who did not want to be named and said she did not know her own age - looked overwhelmed by the circumstances at times."They just fell sick and when I brought them here the nurse told me they had to be admitted," said the mother of four.Her eldest son, who is 4 years old, had also suffered from wasting and had been brought in for treatment. But now she knows what she needs to give her children to keep them healthy.
http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/58388/2010/04/18-162547-1.htm

US Sailor dies with cerebral malaria

The Seabee was unconscious, with a tube stuck down his throat to help him breathe. His kidneys, liver and lungs were failing, and he was in shock, with his blood pressure falling.
Carrell, 23, was suffering from severe falciparum malaria, an infection of red blood cells acquired from mosquito bites that had sent parasites coursing through his bloodstream, sticking to capillaries, obstructing blood flow, damaging organs and, worst of all, causing his brain to swell.
It was three days before last Christmas. Carrell had been infected during a deployment to Liberia. He and 24 other Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3 were in the fourth month of a goodwill mission to renovate a hospital.
Joshua Dae Ho Carrell
At Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, with the best care military medicine could provide, Carrell’s vital signs improved at first. But the day after Christmas, the petty officer third class from Port Angeles, Wash., was declared brain dead. His devastated mother couldn’t watch when they took him off the respirator. A friend stayed and recorded the time of his final heartbeat: exactly 10:28 a.m.
Cause of death: cerebral malaria.
Although scores of U.S. troops are infected every year by malaria — 60 were diagnosed last year, and about 150 were diagnosed in 2003 — Carrell is just the second to die of the disease in more than a decade, according to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. About 40 percent of the cases involved the falciparum strain.
Numerous measures that might have prevented Carrell’s death — including the sailor’s own failure to follow the prescribed antibiotic anti-malarial regimen — went seriously awry, a Navy command investigation showed.
The investigation, conducted by U.S. Naval Forces Africa, revealed "multiple shortfalls with the [Seabee battalion’s] planning, training, execution and enforcement of preventive measures for malaria," according to a copy of the investigation report provided to Stars and Stripes by U.S. Naval Forces Africa.
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69448