YAMBIO, South Sudan (PAMACC News) - Since 2013, South Sudan has never known peace, and the country has been a beehive of foreign media reporting all manners of stories that depict a desperate, helpless and a bleeding nation.
However, a recent Job Fair, and event organized by the State Government of Gbudue in Yambio, some 430 kilometers west of the capital Juba depicted a totally different spectacle. It was a picture of thousands of enthusiastic women and youth – most of them ex-rebel fighters, but have a lot of hope for their future, a picture of a resilient society, and a community that is eager to produce own food to become self reliant.
“Gbudue is a peaceful state, and its citizens are mediators of peace. They come up with homegrown solutions to their own problems,” Governor of Gbudue State Hon. Daniel Badagbu told a UN mission at the Job Fair, who had come to interact with local partners and beneficiaries of UNDP’s multi-dimensional support to recovery and resilience in the State.
The mission, which consisted of UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director, UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa Ms. Ahunna Eziakonwa Onochie and UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director, UNDP Crisis Bureau Ms. Asako Okai was also joined by the Kingdom of the Netherlands Director-General for International Cooperation H.E. Reina Buijs, and high-level delegations from the Embassies of Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
“Now that peace is here in South Sudan, we need to create jobs, especially for the youth, we need to empower the women and the youth, and include these groups in decision-making,” added the governor.
AGRA is already on the ground planting the seed of hope by introducing smallholder farmers – most of them women and the youth to profitable agriculture to make them food secure and have a source of livelihood.
At the Job Fair, Global Agriculture Innovation and Solutions (GAIS), a local seed company working with AGRA in South Sudan showcased different types of improved seeds for drought tolerant crops, fast maturing and crops that cope well with climatic conditions in Gbudue State.
The company is working closely with local smallholder farmers to multiply the seeds so that they can be planted by thousands of women and youth who have returned home from the battlefields.
The event which was hosted with support from the Kingdom of Netherlands brought together women entrepreneurs of Masia Market and is supported by the Government of Japan, youth benefitting from economic empowerment projects to boost re-integration, and peace committees.
“If you see the energy among the youth and women here, you will realize that they all yearn for development in their communities. Their hard work shows that they are ready to join entrepreneurships and fend for themselves,” said Pia Philip Michael, the Gbudue State Minister for Education, Gender and Social Welfare.
Previously “the government could apprehend and imprison all the ex-fighters returning from the bush,” added Michael.
According to the minister, the government learned that nearly all the returnees had joined the rebel groups because they were promised a constant salary of 200 dollars every month, and “this points to a livelihood issue,” he said.
And now, AGRA is determined to offer them sources of livelihoods they all yearn for, through agri-entrepreneurship.
“It all begins with seed,” said AGRA’s Dr Jane Ininda, who is a plant breeding expert. “If we have to make a difference, then we need to avail certifiable seed to all famers, and it should be compatible with the prevailing climatic conditions,” she said.
With support from AGRA, GAIS has trained 7,200 smallholder farmers in Gbudue and Lakes States on seed multiplication.
“In the two states, we concentrate on improved seeds of fast-maturing maize varieties, groundnuts, sorghum and cowpeas, which are the most appreciated food crops in these two states,” said Rahul Saharan, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for GAIS
In Gbudue State alone, over 1,900 ex-fighters have been taken through rehabilitation programs, and have been released to join vocational training and engage in agribusiness, with others being integrated into organized forces.
“Guns cannot be used to win the war,” said Governor Badagbu. “All we need is to create jobs, especially for the youth by introducing them to agribusiness and giving them livelihood skills through vocational trainings,” he told thousands of residents and the UN delegation at the Yambio Job Fair.
According to Reina Buijs, it is only by taking action that peace will prevail in South Sudan. “It is good to see the government, the private sector, the civil society, the clergy, and the people come together for the sake of peace,” said Buijs. “There can be many nice words on paper, or spoken, but if it does not translate in concrete actions, people cannot believe any more.”
“It feels great to see the donor support being translated into future hope for the people and in implementing the peace agreement,” she said, adding that the Netherlands would be proud to continue supporting such initiatives in South Sudan.
NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - She is a grower and exporter of fresh produce, but Elizabeth Thande is also a champion of an often ignored variety of greens: indigenous vegetables.
Even when she is invited to international meetings like the Agriculture for Food Security, her presentation hardly ends without convincing scientists that switching to traditional greens is the way to go for Kenya to achieve smart food security.
It is for a good reason. As Kenyans grow richer, they are demanding healthier foods from the farm. But the pressures of climate change like prolonged droughts and floods are depleting soils forcing farmers to use fertilizers to increase productivity at their farms.
However, the use of fertilizers at the farm is leading to increased pollution of rivers, lakes, oceans, and even the land itself, warns the Frontiers 2018/19 report, released March, at the United Nations Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi.
“Humans have massively scaled up the manufacture of fertilizers to sustain a growing world population. However, these are leading to pollution, contributing significantly to declines in air quality, deterioration of terrestrial and aquatic environments, exacerbation of climate change and depletion of the ozone layer,” warns the report.
And this is why Thande is doing things differently. At her P.J Flowers farm in Limuru, central Kenya, rows of flowers fruits and exotic vegetables dot a large section of her land.
But she is more attracted to another section, albeit smaller, where a mix of indigenous greens like amaranth, nightshade and spider plant are thriving.
“I grow indigenous vegetables which I sell locally. I am passionate about them because studies have shown these greens are medicinal,” says Thande.
According to her, they also use less water at the farm compared to exotic vegetables, hence they can flourish on land whose soils are facing nutrient and moisture decline.
Thande says exotic vegetables like cabbage require a lot of chemicals to keep off pests and enrich the soil, but they still score low in terms of nutrition when compared to indigenous ones.
However, she says, she does not use chemicals at her farm but uses natural ways to keep off pests while applying organic manure enriches the soil.
“The beauty about indigenous vegetables is that they are short term. Most of them take one month to grow then one can harvest,” says Thande, who is also a member of the African Women in Agribusiness Network (AWAN).
Thande may be trying to feed her community in a small but smart way, but such efforts by farmers are a big subject of discussion at the 2019 UNEA meeting.
According to Mark Sutton, an Environmental Physicist at the Center for Ecology and Hydrology in the UK, her decision not to use chemicals can also feed humanity thousands of kilometers away from her farm.
For instance, Sutton says, when chemicals are washed away from farms, they drain into lakes, rivers, oceans and other aquatic bodies.
In the case of ocean pollution, more nitrogen and phosphorous would make algae to thrive. This, he says, is good for some fish species, but not the wider variety.
“To some degree some fish will like high algae levels. So more nitrogen and phosphorous gives you more algae and more food for the fish. So in a certain way some fish will increase,” he says.
However, after a while the algae will die. And when they do, they start decomposing consuming all the oxygen in the water. When the oxygen levels are depleted, the fish cannot breathe.
“That is when you get dead zones when the fish suddenly die. Very high nutrient loading tends to reduce diversity because of a nutrient invasive system,” says Sutton.
He warns that if Africa were to double farm inputs, the result would be massive increase in pollution in terms of air and water quality deterioration.
“We need a careful approach on how to increase inputs while reducing pollution that seeps into the environment. This is a big challenge for the science of the future because I do not think anybody yet can tell us how we would achieve that,” he says.
BUEA, Cameroon (PAMACC News) - A government programme to provide both private and public radio and TV media houses with up-date meteorology information is seeing a rise in awareness and change of attitude by local farmers as climate change in Cameroon becomes increasingly unpredictable.
Mary Ngule, 44 and farmer normally grows maize, beans and potatoes on her 30-hectare farm Ndop, northwest region of Cameroon. But for the past three years, worsening droughts and early rains destroyed much of her harvest.
"As usual we plant with the first rain signal. But for the past three years planting at the first rain signal has been disastrous. No sooner do we plant than the sun comes drying up everything" she said.
Usually the local farmers could predict rightly the planting season with early rains and appearance of some insects experts say and their early harvest fetched them much income. But that in the past three years has disappeared as climate change brings harsher and unpredictable weather causing great loss to farmers and food supply shortages to the population.
In riposte the ministry of agriculture organized seminars and field trips to caution farmers on the dangers of planting just after the first rain signals but this approach failed as farmers will not heed.
“We tried severally to caution farmers but the failed to heed,” said Ekungwe Christopher regional delegate for agriculture for the Southwest region.
So last year, for the first time, the government in collaboration with some telecommunications enterprises in the country started a meteorology information safety net programme that provides daily weather information for broadcast to better sensitize farmers.
Over 200 community radios, 60 commercial radios and 15 television enterprises across the country now receive daily meteorological content in the form of SMS from the National Meteorological Centre for broadcast.
"We now broadcast early morning weather programmes and farmer related information from the ministry of agriculture,” say Koum Leonard, station manager of Royal FM radio station in Yaounde.
Farmers attest the climate information has been of great help to them.
“Last year thanks to daily information from the state television channel CRTV I waited till the rains were consistent before planting and my harvest was far better that the last two years,” said Helen Njume a maize farmer in Yaounde
As harsher droughts and hotter weather linked to climate change ruin crops more frequently in Cameroon, the country is facing a new challenge: growing demand for climate information programmes.
Cameroon just like many African countries today suffer from the effects of climate change with many economic and social sectors increasingly vulnerable to floods, droughts, heavy winds among other calamities.
Environment experts say the dissemination of climate information services by the media for the benefit of specific users remains essential to support Africa's response to climate change.
It is against this backdrop that the African Policy Centre (ACPC ) at UNECA has hooked up with media partner networks to assist with continental dissemination of Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) key messages and knowledge products to help farmers and other stakeholders cope with climate change challenges.
According to Charles Muraya of UNECA,the Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) was conceived in 2015 to stimulate the uptake of climate information by policy makers and vulnerable groups including the youth , women and especially farmers feeding the population in the continent.
« There is need for the media to play a great role in informing the population about climate change challenges, » he said at a media training workshop in Yaounde in 2018.
Accordingly, Africa’s increasingly variable weather and climate threatens development. So too has agriculture and food security, water, energy, infrastructure, and health are already sensitive to weather related shocks.
Rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and climate-related disasters (especially floods and droughts) will erode gains in poverty reduction and set back economic development it not checked experts say.
According to Cameroon’s minister of environment Hélé Pierre,the government created the National climate Observatory, a body that is hoped to provide unprecedented data and information for more improved climate change mitigation and adaptation action.
The country has been faced with rising temperatures and advancing desert in the north and disastrous flooding in the south, wrecking havoc on persons and property.
OPINION
NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - When you move into gender people ask you what’s the business case, why does it matter? The truth is, for a long time gender equality has been viewed as just a human rights imperative, but latterly women’s contribution to the global economy has been under scrutiny.
In 2015 the McKinsey Global Institute came out with a report that looked at what would happen if we started to close the gender gap and gave women the same opportunities as men. They used a ‘best in region’ scenario, where all countries match the rate of improvement of the fastest improving country in their region. They found that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025.
Nowhere is the gender gap more striking than in African agriculture. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) did some analysis that showed because women have lower access to land, seed, fertiliser and mechanisation: married women receive 2% of extension services and as head of households this figure rises to 5%. Just from closing these input gaps productivity in women’s fields could be increased by 20 to 30%. That would immediately lift 180 million people out of hunger.
So now there are numbers next to it, there is a compelling business case for female focussed programmes. But directing that focus is important. AGRA’s women in agriculture strategy aims to unlock farming as a business for women. In the run-up to World Women’s Day on 8 March I want to look at how that differs from how we do it for men.
The end goal is the same – lift people out of poverty and give them a better life– but the pathway to doing it for women and men can be very different.Because we live in a gendered society a woman faces a different set of challenges as she goes about her daily business: she may not have the same mobility, sometimes a woman might not even be able to leave her home without permission from a man;she has huge time constraints, performing as much as four to six hours of extra work every day cooking, cleaning and looking after the children;she doesn’t have access to assets, she doesn’t own the land that she farms, so she can’t get credit and she doesn’t want to invest in the land because she doesn’t own it -why add nutrients to the soil when it’s not her land and could be taken off her at any time? These are a whole different set of challenges often not faced by men.
Women account for about 5-10% of business owners in cash value chains, mainly their participation is limited to working in the fields and they are often absent when the family’s farming produce is sold. More female-owned land may counter this, but land ownership is a complex issue to tackle.Concentrating on agri-businesses, higher up the value chain,is one pathway to women’s empowerment; if the business is off farm we avoid many of the gendered barriers at the household level. We’re trying to impact 30 million farmers and it is resource intensive to change the gender dynamics of millions of households,but if we can build agribusinesses owned by women, who in turn buy from other woman, we are going to see the benefits and opportunities. For this reason, AGRA’s women in agriculture strategy focusses on off-farm agribusinesses, as well as farming, interventions.
Of course, many of AGRA’s non female-focussed projects benefit women. Ghana’s TROTRO Tractor is a powerful platform that connects smallholder farmers and tractor operators. A bit like a tractor Uber service, when a smallholder farmer needs to plough they can summon a local tractor owner to come and do the job. The farmer gets the mechanisation when needed and the tractor owner makes full use of their asset. The interesting thing about this programme is that in a country where rural female land ownership is rare, nearly 25% of TROTRO Tractor users are women – a significantly higher uptake than would be expected considering the gender gap not just in land ownership, but also mobile phone access.
Policy also needs to play a role; almost all policy dialogue is between men. So, it’s important to get women into apex organisations who can represent the voice of women. But for them to be able to do that they need to be taught how. You can’t just drag any women off the farm and put her in a policy dialogue, she needs coaching; taught how to be an advocate, how to use evidence-based lobbying, how to be persuasive, and the confidence to conduct policy dialogue. It doesn’t happen overnight, but once you have her and she can say “I represent 500,000 women smallholder farmers”, or “I represent most of the women doing cross-border trade in East Africa”, then they’ll give her a seat at the table.
So back to the McKinsey report and closing the gender gap. Using their ‘best in region’ scenario the uplift in GDP for sub-Saharan Africa is $300 billion by 2025. If you still need a reason for women inclusive projects, it’s right there.
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Amanda Satterly, is the Head of Gender at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)
