“When there is no light, shine forth. When there is apathy, show caring for another. When there is a famine, be bread to the hungry soul. When there is a drought, be a well spring of hope.” - A Prayer for Help.
This has been a year like no other for us all. The coronavirus pandemic has pushed us apart, but it has also pulled us together.
Although one-to-one meetings, social, sporting, and other community gatherings have been replaced for many by Zoom calls and Skype meetings, other areas of our economy and society have motored along with only minor disruption.
Those who have been lucky enough to be able to work from home have been able perhaps to reconnect and spend time with their families and neighbours like never before, while the frontline workers of Covid-19 – our health care professionals, emergency service workers, and the multitudes who work in the retail sector to keep us supplied with life’s essentials – have become the new heroes of our communities.
In my work with Self Help Africa, I have to admit that I’ve badly missed the regular interactions I enjoyed with the many friends, supporters and volunteers who support us in our work.
I haven’t been able to arrange fundraising cycles, runs, or raffles. I haven’t been able to share laughs, visiting clubs, schools, or communities, but if coronavirus has taught me anything, it’s that we are all in this together, and I am very proud of the spirit of solidarity that has been shown by the vast majority of people across our island.
Without the many volunteers and supporters the length and breadth of our country, Self Help Africa would not be able to continue its life-saving work. We are extremely grateful to everyone for being part of our team to help some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Africa.
Poverty
Hunger and poverty are problems that have plagued humanity for thousands of years and they continue to haunt us today. For many, the coronavirus has made circumstances even worse than they were.
Indeed, global extreme poverty is expected to rise in 2020 for the first time in more than 20 years as the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic compounds the forces of conflict and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress, according to a recent World Bank report.
It says that the Covid-19 pandemic will push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021, depending on the severity of the economic contraction.
Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, is likely to affect between 9.1 per cent and 9.4 per cent of the world’s population in 2020, according to the bank’s new Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report. Had the pandemic not convulsed the globe, the poverty rate was expected to drop to 7.9 per cent in 2020.
It is difficult to accept, and for some even difficult to believe, that there are still children going hungry in our world. According to the UN, more than 10,000 children die every day because of hunger, which means more than 310,000 children will die of hunger in December alone. More than one in five children globally (22 per cent ) under the age of five are ‘stunted’ because of poor nutrition or repeated infection.
Gifts
Self Help Africa works to alleviate the extremes of this poverty crisis, and each year the Irish public support us – by buying ‘virtual’ gifts like livestock, beehives, seeds, and tools and equipment for rural poor African families.
Our Christmas Lifetime Gifts provide a great opportunity to give something thoughtful to your nearest and dearest, and at the same time give something thoughtful to someone you have never met – but who really needs it.
Imagine the impact that a new beehive – together with training, support, and a swarm of bees – could have for a rural poor mother in Kenya or Uganda. Once she has received training in how to make and properly maintain the hives and swarms, a new beekeeper can earn more than €40 per season per hive – and she very often has five or six occupied with bees at any particular time.
It is the same with gifts of chicks, pigs, or goats – they provide families with a vital source or income, and the security of having something that they can sell if they find themselves in need of income, at a particular time.
Africa
It has been almost a year since I was in Africa to visit some of our projects and meet the communities with whom we are working. While there I met some extraordinarily brave and articulate women who were experiencing harsh difficulties gaining access to food for their children. They told me what a debilitating experience it is and was. It damages their children’s growth and ability to learn. It brings the kind of anxiety and stress that can trigger mental health issues and malnutrition in their children that can also cause much loss of life. It creates an unshakeable sense of hopelessness, and it is deeply demoralising.
Families like these – who were fighting to put food on the table before Covid-19 - now find themselves in an impossible position where months of lockdowns, restrictions, and quarantines have seen millions of parents and children experience additional food insecurities.
We have all been hearing a lot about social values and moral duty recently. So why are we able to live with the fact that millions of children still go hungry every day? We all need to take responsibility and fight against the inequality which forces so many families into poverty and have mothers, like those I met in Africa, struggling to feed their children.
We in Self Help Africa believe that agriculture remains vitally important to the lives of people and to the economy of the African countries where we work, and where most people rely on small-scale farming for their survival.
I have seen at first hand how the ‘hand up, not a hand out’ approach that we have taken has had transformative effects, and that by providing farming households with the means to grow and earn more, we have given them, and the next generations, a better, and a fairer chance in life.
Kenya
In Kenya last year I talked to a 35-year-old mother, Mary, who was selling milk to the Keringet Dairy Cooperative and was earning a decent living from her efforts.
Thanks to the support she received from Self Help Africa she was growing more than an acre of elephant grass which she used as fodder for her animals, and was supplementing her income as a ‘paravet’ - visiting other livestock owners and checking their animals for parasites and disease. We had trained Mary in her supplementary career, and she was loving the experience and the opportunity to help others in her community.
The Keringet Cooperative is a dairy and horticultural cooperative that has been supported by Self Help Africa for over a decade, and is now a key processor and bulker of milk in a region where many households keep dairy cows as a source of food and income.
The cooperative has installed a chilling unit and other equipment to process and add value to raw milk, and has a network of freelance collectors who pick up small churns for transport to the plant – much the same as happened here at home in Ireland until not that many decades ago.
After visiting the coop we called to Mary at her homestead, and I had a chance to speak to her teenage son Lawrence and daughter Joan, and heard from both that they were still attending school, and were aiming to become the first generation in their family to complete high school.
Their mum was immensely proud of the pair of them, and said that she wanted to support both of them for as far as they could go with their education, and predicted that both would some day achieve their goals – to become a doctor and a surgeon, respectively.
Mary was aware that they had a steep hill to climb – not least of which was the cost of continuing education, but on top of that the cost of the accommodation and subsistence that would be necessary if they moved out of home to rental accommodation in Nakuru, the western Kenya city where the nearest university was located.
Mary wasn’t sure she could afford to send both of them to college, and although the chance would come to Lawrence sooner than it would to her daughter, because he was a grade ahead in school, she was determined not to discriminate against her oldest daughter.
“I understand the challenge and I understand that the easy thing to do is to send Lawrence to college and for Mary to get a job nearer to home,” she said. “But she’s so bright, she deserves the same chance, and I’m going to work very hard to provide it for her,” she pledged.
Self Help Africa works with hundreds of thousands of hard working families like that of Mary, and they all have similar hopes and dreams – that their children might enjoy a better life than they had themselves.
If you are interested in finding our more about Self Help Africa’s Lifetime Gifts, or want to find out any other ways you can help us in our work, just visit www.selfhelpafrica.org, or drop me a note at [email protected]. I’d be happy to chat.
