Kenyan businessmen and women, and political friends of the new power-sharing coalition government, filled the large ballroom of Nairobi’s Grand Regency Hotel. Reporters and camera crews bustled about, fighting over position. Black, gold, and brown drapes adorned the edges of the room, along with signs and banners of organizations taking part in the announcement.
This was the launch of the first major national partnership to provide small-scale Kenyan farmers with $50 million USD in low-interest loans. But the excitement in the room was over something else: the attendance of President Mwai Kibaki and the new Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The two leaders were attending the event as a show of unity and commitment to the country and its farmers–the backbone of the Kenyan economy.
Everyone in the room was in support of this program for farmers, but what people were really waiting to see was the interaction between Kibaki and Odinga, following the violent outcome of the December 2007 elections. The two men had run against each other for president, and the disputed results led to weeks of turmoil that killed more than 1,100 people and laid bare the country’s deep divisions.
Loud “presidential” music blared through the public announcement system, announcing the arrival of both men and their entourages, followed by an elaborate musical program with songs and dances for the royal audience. Then Odinga took the podium first. [Read more →]
NAIROBI – The pace of life here is as it always has been–lots of traffic jams, crowded downtown sidewalks, tens of thousands of people selling things by the roadside. Tourists also have returned in high numbers this summer. It is easy to forget that just seven months ago the waves of post-election violence raised serious questions about the country’s future.
But the impacts linger, just out of view. This morning, I was interviewing Machira Gichohi, managing director of the Kenya Dairy Board, and he brought up how the violence affected the dairy industry.
Much of the violence, he noted, was concentrated in the Rift Valley, which produces roughly half of the country’s milk. During the month-long upheaval, “farmers’ animals were stolen, infrastructure was destroyed, and people just scattered.”
In December 2007, just before the violent outbreak, the country was producing 1.2 million liters of milk per day. But during the violence–January and February–output dropped by half, to 600,000 liters per day. Now, Gichohi said, it had rebounded to 850,000 liters daily.
It is the cold season here, and dairy cows are producing less milk than during warmer times. So it seemed that the dairy industry was making a fairly swift rebound, and that in a few months it was conceivable to approach the pre-violence numbers.
But Gichohi said it wouldn’t be so easy.
“It will take us one to two years to get back to where it was,” he said. “As our prime minister said in London, ‘Kenyans have gone to hell and we don’t want to go back.’ That’s how we feel. We hope those crazy days don’t come back.”
ACCRA, Ghana – Over the last decade, support groups for HIV-positive people have flourished around Africa. The best of these groups offer so much: a safe place to talk about the range of issues they face; endless empathy; even connections that can lead to jobs. But rarely have I seen such a need for a group as during a recent visit here, with the Yaddah Dah Allah Muslim Women Association, whose members are HIV positive.
The 35 women share a secret — their HIV status — almost entirely just among themselves. Husbands don’t know. Families haven’t heard. Friends haven’t been told. The reason is simple: Many fear that if they revealed their status, husbands and members of the extended family would kick them out of their homes or worse — even though in almost all cases husbands infected them.
“In the Muslim community, we don’t want to disclose our status to each other,” said Mariam Yussif, the founder of the group. “People would rather kill themselves than bring it out.”
So their escape valve opens only when they meet — the third Thursday of every month. [Read more →]
About an hour drive from Kampala, in a place called Namulonge, you’ll find Hadji Wanonda, a Ugandan farmer, who grows locally adapted and resilient varieties of rice on his one-acre plot of land.
For years, Hadji planted cassava, maize and a few other crops for his family to eat. Now with improved rice varieties provided to him by local agricultural research institute, Hadji can make up to US$800 in a three month period selling his harvest in the local markets. This represents a massive increase in income for him and, more recently, Hadji has been able to employ men and women in his community to help out with farm work.
Hadji’s story is part of a larger effort to boost African rice production and ensure self-sufficiency for the sake of Africa’s food security. The demand for rice in sub-Saharan Africa is double the rate of population growth; consumption is growing faster than that of any other major food staple. But instead of finding ways to substantially increase local production, countries have depended on more costly imports.
Hadji uses rice varieties called “Nerica,” a resilient, high-yielding cross of African and Asian rice. Breeders of Nerica rice won the World Food Prize in 2004. Nerica is not restricted to growing in paddies, thus enabling African farmers to grow rice in places that no one before thought possible with no irrigation. If this kind of public research and development could be applied more widely, Africa could be more self-sufficient and depend a little less on others for its food supply.
I have traveled around the developing world since I was barely out of my teens. I’ve been in more places forgotten than remembered. But people often stay with me. Rosa does.
I met her last fall in a rundown quarter of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She was 16, with black unruly hair that ran in all directions, and she wore a pout –- partly because a man I was writing about was telling her how disappointed she had made him. The man, Nasir al-Amin, had been spending his vacations for the past five years helping put children through school in Addis. I am in the process of writing a book on how Americans are trying to help children in Africa, and Nasir is a key person in the book.
For Nasir, Rosa was special. He had known her for four years. She had lost both her parents to AIDS. And Nasir was putting Rosa through school, along with 57 other Ethiopian kids. But the other 57 were doing well in school; Rosa was not. She had dropped out of a photography school, and for two days last fall Nasir tried to get her back on track.
Rosa had health problems — an irregular heart beat, and depression, it seemed — and Nasir gave her money to see a doctor and enroll in school. But after seeing her in late September, Rosa never showed for a meeting to give him receipts and a report on how it went. For several months afterward, Nasir thought all was lost. He sent out emissaries to find her, but he heard nothing. Nasir feared she had turned to sex work.
Six months later, I returned to Addis, and went looking for Rosa. [Read more →]
It is the rainy season, and there is no rain. We take the road toward Monkey Bay, and pass a pick-up truck, people wave wildly. The driver stops the car; it is Justice and Eddie who have jumped out of the pick-up, and who run toward us. “Forgive me if I am tired today,” Justice says as he settles into the back seat. “I returned this morning at 3:00 a.m. from a funeral in my home village.” His cousin’s daughter, four years old, dead of malaria.
We drive. Through Mangochi, past the Hotchkiss gun, across the Shire River bridge, and wind up the hills west of Lake Malawi, long and dusty. Dustier still the dirt road that branches off, abandoning thoughts of trade with Mozambique to cross a plateau crisp with brown dry leaves and shriveled ears of maize.
It is nearing harvest time, the hungry season, when last year’s stores of food are running out, cash is short, and it is not yet time to bring in the harvest. It is like being on an ocean with nothing to drink, these endless fields of drought-plagued maize.
According to recent newspaper reports, people are beginning to eat seed processed for planting—fumigated with chemicals to protect it from insects. And they are selling the fertilizer purchased with vouchers to raise cash to buy food.
“I bought my mother a sack of maize for 2000 kwacha,” a man tells me. “It is a 100 percent increase in price.”
Greetings from Burness Communications’ Global Health and Science Team. You can also learn a little bit about us from, surprise, the “About” page of this site. It includes an important disclaimer.
In essence, our company goal is to advance social change for nonprofits worldwide through a variety of communications activities. Our personal goal with this blog is to share our own stories, ones experienced during the course of our work.
Below is a map of locations around the world at which we’ve conducted media activities, whether organizing and staffing desk-side media tours, news conferences, background press briefings, media trainings, and media relations operations for major international conferences. Be sure to drag the map down so you can see how far north we’ve gone for our work. (Note, that action will take you to our map at the Wayfaring website. Just hit the back button to return.)
I imagine many of our stories will be linked to these locations. Please stay tuned!
Also, here’s a moment of levity during boarding of the flight to Svalbard in late February.
