MALNUTRITION: ETHIOPIA: Somalis living from drought to drought

BISLE (SOMALI REGION), 12 July 2011 (IRIN)
 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Shokuri Abdullai, like most mothers in Bisle, feeds her family boiled wheat in the Somali region's Shinile zone

Every day, 500g of boiled wheat is divided up between two adults, four children, a calf, a goat and a donkey in the Farah household. It is the only food they have had after rains failed for the past two seasons.
The 15kg sack of wheat is provided to about 1,200 people in the Bisle area, which has four settlements, under the government-run Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) as payment for work, such as digging water holes.
"It is boiled wheat for breakfast and for the main meal – we don't have anything else – no milk, no meat, no vegetables, no oil," says Maria Farah, the mother. Not surprisingly, two of her children are severely malnourished.
The calf and goat that share their "ari" - a collapsible egg-shaped hut made of sticks and covered with sheeting – are emaciated. It is too hot for them outside, in temperatures that soar beyond 40 degrees Celsius.
There is no water in their settlement, about 54km north of Dire Dawa town in the Somali region, one of the worst hit by drought in Ethiopia. More than a million people have been affected.
On 11 July, the Ethiopian government launched an appeal for US $398 million to help 4.5 million people, up from 3.2 million in March, who are in need of food aid due to the drought.
Launching the July-December 2011 Humanitarian Requirements Document in the capital, Addis Ababa, Agriculture Minister Ato Mitiku Kassa said of the total revised 4.5 million beneficiaries, 41 and 32 percent are in Oromiya and Somali regional states respectively.
For Farah's family in Bisle, the worsening drought continues to threaten their livelihood. Their donkey, tied to a post, used to help carry water from the nearest waterhole about four hours. But he is frail. "He is too sick to move now," Farah said.
These pastoralists have lost scores of animals in the past three months.
"What will you do – you are just taking notes, are you going to help us?" asks Ali Abdi, a 60-year-old pastoralist. This is the worst drought he has seen in his lifetime, he adds.
An unrelenting battle with failed rains over eight years has left them with no sense of a future nor any hope of a better life.
The eastern Somali region depends on two rainy seasons, known as the gu (April-May) and the deyr (October-November). The gu rains provide 60 percent of the water needs for the region, and the deyr 30 percent.
Both rains failed in 2010 because of a particularly strong La Niña. Some parts of the region received rainfall in May but not enough to replenish reservoirs. Bisle received none at all.
Shokuri Abdullai, a mother of six, sends two of her children to school, which is free in Ethiopia. But she has not given much thought to what will become of them. They moved to this settlement from their village about eight years ago when they lost all their animals to drought.
The settlement is among the most accessible in the harsh Somali region during the dry season. "So NGOs drop by with some food now and then and there is a health post," said Abdullai, explaining their choice to make their home in Bisle, which has only become drier.
Maria Guled, a mother of five, the eldest 11, lies awake at night worrying about them. "I don’t have any other family anywhere else to send them to." Her children are unable to go to school because "they are too hungry".
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is supporting Save the Children-UK in running a new community-based therapeutic programme at the health post in the settlement. Thanks to the ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), Farah's children have some additional rations.
"But all the food we provide for the malnourished children - a bottle of oil and 25kg of corn soya blend - is consumed by the entire family so the child still remains malnourished," a community health worker said.
There are others who are even less fortunate than the residents of the settlement. A woman with a severely malnourished child at the health post said she had walked two nights from her village for help. She left 10 of her children – the eldest a 15-year-old - alone at home. “I have no choice – my husband left for Djibouti two years ago because of the drought to look for work.” She is too distraught and angry and refuses to be photographed. "What will you do with all this? Are you going to help me?”
But the feeding programme is only three months old, with funding for another three. "It is not a sustainable solution – we need to address the causes,” Katy Webley, director of programmes at Save the Children-UK, said.
Daniel Maxwell, a food security expert and former aid worker in the Horn, said in an email that "underlying livelihoods crisis and threats to food security have to be dealt with in a much more systematic manner, including social protection programmes for the most vulnerable groups even in years when there is not a major humanitarian crisis, and greater emphasis on resilience and reduction of risk”.
He cited Ethiopia’s unique PSNP as the best example of an ideal social programme.

How PSNP works
The PSNP targets people facing predictable food insecurity and offers guaranteed employment for five days a month in return for transfers of either food or cash.
The PSNP has two–pronged benefits in a harsh arid zone such as Somali: cash or food builds resilience; while projects such as reforestation to stem land degradation and water harvesting would help the land recover in the long term.
"But in these conditions [cycles of drought] – there is not much we can do – there has been no room for recovery,” says Abdi Farah, manager of the PSNP in the Shinile woreda [district], where Bisle is located. “The PSNP has become a food aid operation; we need to get to at least 10,000 people in Bisle alone but we don’t have the resources.”
Shahid Haji, of the World Food Programme (WFP), which supports the PSNP with food, said: "We are stuck in the emergency mode – people need aid. They have not had the chance to build any resilience."



 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Maria Farah outside her ari

Farah Wayis Ali, an elder from the settlement, explained to Valerie Amos, the visiting UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, that they could not work in the PSNP programmes as they needed water. “To collect the water we have to walk four hours – so when do we do the work?”
The government recently started trucking in water. “It is not a lot – we have big fights over water,” says Ali Abdi.
But supplying water is an extremely expensive exercise. Amy Martin, acting head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Ethiopia, said the operation to supply water in the drought-affected parts of Ethiopia from January to March alone had cost at least US$11 million.
Amos said the government was exploring the option of tapping deeper into the water table for a sustainable supply, but this too was costly.
The PSNP also has the option of providing cash but high food prices have rendered the exercise meaningless. Ali Abdi said a 50kg bag of wheat cost 400 birr (almost $24) compared with 150 birr (about $9) for a goat. “The life of our livestock has become so cheap.”
Maxwell said it should be noted “that much of this activity [PSNP] is still donor-supported [and hence subject to the same budget-cutting]”.

Security concerns
Humanitarian access has also been restricted in parts of the Somali region. In June 2011, two WFP workers were detained in the region.
Shadrack Omol, UNICEF's chief of operations and emergency in Ethiopia, said because of “conflict and security issues a number of health posts are frequently not able to provide essential services, [let] alone nutrition programmes”. As a solution, the agency is deploying mobile health and nutrition teams.
Amos said she had met Ethiopia's deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn to discuss a plan to ensure safe access for aid workers to the country’s volatile areas.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93200

MALNUTRITION: Niger: World Bank to finance safety net for a million people

20/05/2011
The World Bank ’s Board approved today a new credit of US$70 million to implement a comprehensive social safety net system in Niger, where an estimated 60 percent of people lived below the poverty line in 2008 and over half the population lacks food security.
The funds will support about one million people over five years in a country hard hit by frequent drought and high food prices.
While Niger’s frequent food crises have so far been addressed mostly through short-term emergency assistance, the new safety net system will help poor and food-insecure people to access regular cash transfer and cash-for-work programs. It will focus on the five regions of Dosso, Maradi, Tahoua, Tillaberi and Zinder, where poverty is most concentrated and people are most vulnerable to food insecurity.
“An efficient safety net system is a solid investment for the future of Niger, where chronic malnutrition threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of children during frequent mid-year famines,” said Ousmane Diagana, World Bank Country Director for Niger. “When vulnerable households can access a system that protects them from shocks, human development indicators such as nutritional status and school enrollment are very likely to improve over time and Niger’s economy stands to gain from higher productivity.”
In 2006, chronic malnutrition as measured by stunting (low height-for-age) was estimated at 50 percent among children under five years of age, making Niger the second-worst affected country in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Through a small but regular cash transfer of about US$20 (10,000 FCFA) per month for 24 months, 80,000 households, each consisting of seven to eight people on average, will benefit from an increase in income over a period of five years. Payments will be made to women through designated payment agencies, mostly microfinance institutions and mobile phone companies, and are expected to significantly improve food consumption among registered households.
As a soft condition, those receiving cash will be required to attend training and sensitization sessions aimed at improving household health, nutrition, and sanitation practices. This dimension will be developed with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and implemented by non-governmental organizations.
Through cash-for-work programs in areas affected by temporary acute food insecurity, about 15,000 people will receive approximately 60 days of temporary work annually, for a total of 60,000 people over five years. Non-governmental organizations will be hired to supervise participants during the agricultural off-season in activities such as soil conservation, rehabilitation of small infrastructure, and sanitation projects. Wages will be set at about US$2.2 per day—slightly below the market wage—to discourage participation of better-off households and reach those who need temporary income support through cash for work.
“This project has been designed in collaboration with the government on the basis of years of World Bank -supported analysis of Niger’s particular challenges,” said Carlo del Ninno, Senior Economist with the World Bank ’s Africa Region. “This analysis suggests that cash transfers to poor people for at least 18 months have a positive impact; and that essential family practices campaigns do improve overall family health and children’s nutritional status.”
The new financing is in the form of a credit from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank ’s fund for the poorest, under standard IDA terms.
http://finchannel.com/news_flash/World/87427_World_Bank_to_finance_safety_net_for_a_million_people_in_Niger/

MALNUTRITION: NIGER: it's still a problem

 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Ayesha Yaou with her family’s evening meal

MAGARIA, 6 April 2011 (IRIN) - The evening meal will be stewed leaves tasting somewhat like spinach, which the women pick every morning, yet crops were standing tall before the leafhoppers flew into Zinder in Niger and devoured anything green. The official response to a region on the edge of survival has been slow, but then the women went to see the Prefect.
It is after 6.30 in the evening in sandy and hot Dan Gouchy Haoussa, a village about a 1,000km east of Niamey, capital of Niger, and about 20km from the border with Nigeria. Nine children - the youngest about four years old and the oldest a teenager doing his homework - sit around a pot that Salamatou, one of their two mothers, has placed on the fire.
The stewed leaves of a wild bush called leptadenia hastate will be served when the tenth child, who is queuing at the only tap in the village, returns with water. It will be the family's first meal of the day.
More than 200,000 people in the district of Magaria have been living on meals like this for almost six months, but aid agencies warn that the worst is yet to come.
The traditional lean season, when farmers run out of previously harvested stocks of staple cereals like millet and sorghum, only starts in May, said Sylvain Musafiri, humanitarian officer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
It will be some time before the rains come, new crops can be planted, then harvested, and there will be food again. Help will not be on the way anytime soon. Pleas for assistance, sent to Niamey by a variety of local authorities, have so far gone unanswered.
The national administration is in transition - a military junta-backed government makes way for an elected civilian government this week - but Musafiri said he was concerned that an adequate response by the authorities would take longer.
Mamamadou Baraze, governor of Zinder Region, where Magaria is located, told aid workers he feared the situation could get worse than the crisis in 2010 if help did not arrive in time.
How did Salamatou's family and the residents of Dan Gouchy Haoussa end up in this situation? IRIN found a chasm between the people of rural Niger and the policy-makers and implementers in Niamey, but also discovered a group of people led by women fighting enormous odds for the right to food.
There is a strong case for the incoming government to address the structural causes of food insecurity in Niger: a rapidly expanding population, lack of rural infrastructure and agricultural support to boost food production in a country increasingly affected by uncertain weather.
A recent food security conference in Niamey discussed the gap that needs to be bridged if the nation's development goals are to be achieved, but which keeps getting wider because the country constantly has to tackle emergencies.

Was it the rains?
Niger produces about four million tons of cereals, so it has to import about 20 percent of its cereal needs, 10 percent of which is brought in by traders and the remainder by aid agencies, said Prof Maxime Banoin, an agronomist.
Magaria district is a tiny green belt in the Zinder Region along Niger's border with Nigeria, where the people, mainly small-scale farmers, produce crops of millet and sorghum that account for most of the semi-arid region's cereal production when rain falls for the expected two-month period.
"In 2010, the rains were good our crops were going very well," said Abdou Gibada, the headman of Dan Gouchy Haoussa. The men in the villages constructed additional storage bins in anticipation of a bumper harvest.
When my father was alive, the produce from the land was sufficient to feed all of us [including my two wives and five children], but when he died, the small patch of land I inherited was not adequate
Banoin noted that in 2010 the country had produced five million tons of cereals, including millet, sorghum and cowpeas - more than enough for its needs until the next harvest in 2011.
Gibada holds his composure as he talks about the misfortune that struck them in August 2010, when hordes of leafhoppers (of the family cicadellidae) flew in and ate the standing crops in more than 300 villages across the district.
Nouri Habsou, the agricultural extension worker based in the neighbouring village of Dan Tchiou, had not seen crop destruction on this scale in more than 20 years of experience. "I was helpless; I had no pesticides to offer." She informed her superiors in Magaria town, who alerted Niamey.
Disbelieving authorities in the capital dismissed the calls for help. "They said this particular species of the insect, which usually attacks sorghum plants, is never known to have attacked millet," said Ahmadou Ama, head of agriculture in Magaria.
Months later, towards the end of 2010, an agriculture official turned up to make an assessment. "He was shocked by what he saw, and in subsequent investigations agriculture scientists in Niamey have offered us a possible explanation for the change in the behaviour of the insect," said Ama.
"They said the rains were unseasonably heavy, which led to a very good millet crop attracting the insects, who would have usually gone for the sorghum crops, which would normally have been standing then." The explanations made their way back to Magaria, but no aid.

 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Elders of Dan Gouchy Haussa: the villagers have struggled to be heard

Ayesha Yaou and the women
In the affected villages people had already eaten the previous harvest's reserves and started crossing the border to Nigeria in search of food. In October 2010 an assessment by local authorities found that more than 15 percent had fled with their families, and the household head of almost 50 percent of families had migrated.
By December all the able-bodied men in Dan Gouchy Haoussa had gone to Nigeria. The women, children and elderly, left behind, struggled on until February 2011.
"We just could not sit and wait to die, we had to get help," said Ayesha Yaou, 33, who has seven children. She decided to organize the women.
"Each family contributed 50 CFA [about US$0.11] towards the fare to hire a taxi to Magaria [town] to make representation to the Prefect [administrative head] of Magaria district." They warned him that mass migration might be imminent.
"We were moved by the plight - we calmed the people, tried to convince them not to leave,"´ said the Prefect, Inoussa Garba. "I then managed to get some rice, maize and millet for the people, but it was not enough."
In March 2011, Garba approached UN agencies and international and national NGOs working in the neighbouring town of Zinder for help. He said Care International, the aid NGO, would begin a cash-for-work programme in a few villages in April, and the World Food Programme (WFP) intended to start blanket feeding in the area but only in May, when the traditional lean season began.
Staple grains are readily available in the markets along the road between Magaria and Zinder, but few farmers have the money to buy. Most have eaten or sold their livestock, although some still have a few goats, chickens or ducks.
The children in Magaria village were healthy because the medical NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières-Switzerland, had been treating them, said Ayesha Yaou.
Olivier Bonnet, project manager of MSF-Switzerland in Magaria, said their organization, whose mandate was to respond to emergencies, had been forced into a developmental role because of a lack of resources at the local level and was providing some free essential medicines, and training personnel at primary healthcare centres.

Returning men
Violent flare-ups linked to the upcoming elections in Nigeria forced some of the men to return at the beginning of April 2011, but they brought little or no money.
In Nigeria many saved rice or millet from their meals, or odd bits of food they received while begging. The food was dried in the sun and sent back to their families with returning Nigeriens. At home the dried food is soaked in water and cooked with the leaves.
"There is no charge for this service [carrying food]," said Zakaria Yaou, 25, who came back to his village, Kinoma, in the last week of March. "One day the carrier might need to ask me to take food for his family." He spent three months in Nigeria ferrying water in a cart, but managed to bring home only about 3,000 CFA (almost $7) for his five children and two wives.
A big family has its drawbacks - one with 12 members would need at least 1,000 CFA (about $2) worth of millet every day. "When my father was alive, the produce from the land was sufficient to feed all of us [including my two wives and five children], but when he died, the small patch of land I inherited was not adequate," said Yaou.
Sanousi Atta, a professor of agriculture who led discussions on food supply at the conference in Niamey, identified large families, which split the limited ancestral agricultural land into plots as small as two hectares, as the biggest obstacle to achieving food insecurity in Niger.
The villagers in Kinoma do not want to talk about family planning, but IRIN met a group of women from Yaouri Kaba, a village near Magaria town, who said their local primary health centre was offering information on contraception.

Next season?
Ama, the head of agriculture in Magaria, said the rainy season was approaching and they needed a supply of seeds and fertilizer as incentives to make the demoralized men stay to plant for the next season, "otherwise we will enter a cycle of endless emergency".
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said it intended distributing seeds ahead of the rainy season, which usually starts sometime in May or June.
Fertilizers are imported into the land-locked country mainly from Nigeria. The price of a 50kg bag used for growing millet is about 13,000 CFA ($30) and the ideal amount is about 100kg per hectare, but in Niger affordability limits the average application to just 2kg per hectare.
But for now, if anyone is listening, said Garba, the Prefect of Magaria, "We need food most urgently."
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=92387

POVERTY: SRI LANKA: Does cash for work - work?

 Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN
Destroyed infrastructure in Sri Lanka's north becomes a source of jobs

COLOMBO, 11 March 2011 (IRIN) - As the Sri Lankan government launches a cash-for-work programme in areas hit by recent flooding, following similar schemes in the former conflict areas in the north, experts warn of potential pitfalls of such schemes.
The new programme will be operating in 12 northern and eastern districts devastated by flooding in January and February, which affected more than two million and displaced close to 700,000, according to the government.
Regional government officials have been instructed to employ those affected by flooding to rebuild rural roads, minor irrigation tanks and channels. Participants are to be paid about US$4 daily for up to four days a week.
More than $3 million has been allocated by the Ministry of Economic Development for the scheme, launched in early March.

Model
As residents started returning in late 2009 to areas formerly controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels in the north, the World Bank implemented a $7.5 million cash-for-work programme. Some 28,652 families benefited between December 2009 and July 2010, according to the bank.
The programme is the largest of about a dozen, which typically run for at most a year, that have operated in the north since the 2004 tsunami.
To limit the number of participants, the Bank set wages 15 percent below market rates and allowed one member per returning family to apply.
The work involves hand-dug construction and small-scale irrigation, and repairs to roads, health clinics, community drinking water facilities or schools.
"The cash-for-work programmes have been quite successful, given the lack of economic activity as the war-displaced began to move back... So far the work has been completed satisfactorily," said G.A. Chandrasiri, the Northern Province governor.
No official unemployment figures are available for the province, but some analysts estimate half the population remains unemployed or is not working enough to support their needs; when cash-for-work programmes end, permanent jobs rarely replace them.
The programme was never intended to be a long-term employment solution, stressed the World Bank office in Sri Lanka. "The priority and challenge at the end of the conflict was to create essential community infrastructure, ensure returning IDPs [internally displaced persons] have short-term income-earning opportunities... so that IDPs will resume their normal livelihood activities in agriculture, informal sector activities, etc."
But short-term cash may actually have long-term negative consequences, said local economist and principal researcher with Point Pedro Development Institute in Jaffna province (heart of the former conflict zone), Muttukrishna Sarvananthan.
"It [cash-for-work] may distort labour market wages (i.e. after the CfW [cash-for-work] ends, the beneficiaries could expect similar or higher wages than what they received under CfW), discourage labour mobility [and] self-employment initiatives. Many CfW programmes in Jaffna and Vanni run for a long time with no meaningful work done."
Major repairs are still handled by government agencies with heavy equipment or foreign workers rather than local manual labour, he added.
"I have seen Chinese workers employed in building of cantonment for army personnel stationed in [the northern district of] Kilinochchi. Local unskilled or semi-skilled labour could have been employed for this purpose."
Sarvananthan estimates unemployment to be above 20 percent in the areas controlled by the LTTE until 2009, under-employment to be at least another 30 percent, and that almost half the work force in these areas survived on occasional employment, earning less than $1 per day.
"There are very limited job opportunities available in this area right now," said Manoharan Seenathamby, the World Bank's senior rural research specialist in Sri Lanka.
This could change if the government switched from capital-intensive to labour-intensive construction, suggested Sarvananthan.
"One way to generate meaningful employment in former conflict-affected regions is to employ labour-intensive - or what the ILO [International Labour Organization] calls labour-based - technologies in rehabilitation/reconstruction of infrastructure including roads, houses, public buildings."

Insecurity
Kathiravel Krishna, a 31-year-old father of five from the northern village of Tharmapuram, said temporary work brought cash, but little stability. "Cash for work is available only for a limited time and in certain parts. Not all the people get it and it cannot replace the security of a job."
He survives on the odd day job on farms and doing construction work. Some of the returnees, especially those who live alongside the main highway, have used parts of their UN-funded government cash grants of $220, given to each returnee family, to set up tea shops.
As of end 2010, 76,000 families had registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to receive these grants, intended to help in building temporary living quarters, for a total of about $7 million.
Krishna said tea-shop owners and other small business vendors near the highway were the most secure financially. "But, for those living [in the] interior, there is no such option and the cash grant is now long gone."
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=92164