Prayers for rain
I crave sunshine. I think it comes from being born just after Midsummer. I feel at my happiest when sitting in dappled sunlight, underneath the promise of a cloudless blue sky.
So the last three weeks of constant rain, and the forecast of the wettest and coldest May for many years, fill me with melancholy.
Yet in spite of the current weather, we are in a time of drought, and counties up and down the UK face hosepipe bans until the end of this year at least.
It’s strange to be in drought during a time of so much rain. I was in Kenya during the drought in the Horn of Africa last summer. It was the worst that the region had witnessed for 60 years. The red flesh of the earth was barren, the empty river beds like bloodless veins. Cattle carcasses littered the horizon, and the wind carried the pungent smell of death.
One woman I met told me that she prayed for rain every single day, a prayer for rain to comfort the earth, to bring food and hope and life.
So today – even though the rain makes me crave tea and hobnobs and an old film and bed – I am remembering that woman, and her prayers for rain. I am reminding myself to be grateful for it.
There’s another drought this year in the African Sahel, which comprises Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and northern Senegal. A toxic combination of low rainfall, high food prices, entrenched poverty and regional conflict means that 13 million people are at risk of malnutrition and starvation.
Those 13 million mums, dads, children and grandparents are probably praying for rain too.
We are so lucky we don’t have to.
Unlike some larger NGOS, Practical Action is not an aid agency, and we do not deliver emergency relief. Instead, we believe passionately that it is only through long-term development work using appropriate technology that poor and vulnerable communities can become more resilient, and the desperate tragedy of drought and famine can be avoided. You can support our work here.
No Comments » | Add your commentJustice for the have nots
When I am not working at Practical Action’s headquarters in rural Warwickshire, I spend my time with my friends in Notting Hill in London. Yesterday, after a yoga class and a cup of coffee, I walked home, along Ledbury Road, one of Notting Hill’s most famous thoroughfares. It was a glorious springy sunshiney morning, much longed for after two weeks of seemingly endless rain. Towards one end of the road are huge white Victorian villas, with spring blossoms veiling the balconies and graceful Greek columns framing impressive porches. As the road progresses, the white elegance fades into brown dinginess. The other end of the road is home to council estate flats: small and drab. I smile at two little girls hopscotching in a yard that’s around 10 foot by 10 foot.
One of London’s greatest qualities is its diversity, yet all I could see during my walk along Ledbury Road was the injustice of the ‘haves and the have nots’. This phrase – ‘the haves and the have nots’ was one I heard lots during my trip to Practical Action’s work in Kenya in August 2011.
While travelling to a project in the informal settlements outside Kisumu city in western Kenya, my colleagues pointed out the narrow road which divided the ‘have nots’ from the ‘haves’. All that separated the people without life’s essentials: food, water, sanitation, shelter, energy, health care, education, a livelihood, from the people who had them, was a mere dirt track.
Walking along Ledbury Road yesterday was a useful reminder that sometimes the physical distance between those who have enough and those who don’t is negligible. But bridging that gap can seem an insurmountable task.
Technology Justice is one movement that is needed to help with this challenge. At Practical Action, we envisage a world where there is a balance between meeting the practical needs of people with less, while satiating the technological appetites of those with more. A world where all people, regardless of geography or wealth, can choose and use the technologies that will help them to live the life they value, without compromising the ability of others and future generations to do the same. A just, fair and equitable world, with a smaller gap between the people who have lots and those who have less. Technology Justice isn’t really about technology, it’s about people – and doing what is right.
No Comments » | Add your commentWhat is water worth?
It rained all day here in Warwickshire yesterday, but one of the top stories on the news was the hosepipe ban in the south and east of England. We take an instant supply of clean water for granted, because most of the time we have more than enough rain in the UK. How would we feel if we had to carry every drop into our homes ourselves? I for one would think twice before taking a bath!
In the Mukuru settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, residents pay more than 5 times as much for water as we do in the UK – and they don’t have the luxury of a piped supply into the home. Water has to be collected in containers from a communal tap – often some distance away. And, in times of scarcity, water prices inevitably rocket. In many rural areas of Africa, women and children walk for miles to collect water from wells.
In the UK we struggle to reduce our use of water and government water saving advice mainly covers non essential activity such as washing the car and watering the garden.
In contrast, according to this article, Kashmiri children resort to shaving their heads when water is short so that their hair doesn’t appear unkempt. I can’t see this being a popular piece of government advice here!
Practical Action has innovative ways of helping people gain access to clean water. By developing a partnership between local people and the utility company, improved access to clean water has been achieved for many thousands in the Mukuru settlement. Restricting our supply may help us to appreciate just how good (and comparatively cheap) our water is and encourage us to do a bit more to help the 1.3 billion people who lack access to safe water.
3 Comments » | Add your commentChallenges of urban sanitation
Practical Action has launched a project to improve sanitation situation in the slum areas of Ronda and Kiptembwo in Nakuru, Kenya, which will benefit 190,000 women and men.
Both the slums have very poor status of sanitation, with no toilets available and where they are available, they are used by at least 50 people.
Both the slums have areas where open defecation is common. This creates serious health risks. The project will be pioneering the approach of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), in an urban context.
Practical Action will be working with Umande Trust on this project and supported by the Municipal Council of Nakuru. The project will use participatory approaches through community health workers to enable tenants and landlords to improve their sanitation system.
This process of demand creation will then be supported by introducing affordable technologies and financial systems. A commercial bank has already shown interest to support the project through soft loans. Currently the project is carrying out baseline surveys and developing monitoring indicators. The project is well supported by the local water company, the Ministry of Health and other NGOs working in Nakuru.
3 Comments » | Add your commentWalking for water made its mark
I’ve never entertained the idea of getting a tattoo…until last year, at the age of 33, when I went to Mandera in north east Kenya during the height of the drought.
What I saw there shocked me.
People walking an average of 20 miles a day in 40°C just to go and fetch water. And this journey is one fraught with danger. Water is in such short supply that violence regularly breaks out at the few remaining wells – with many innocent women and children wounded or killed.
Most of the time, the water they get isn’t even clean. It’s water like this from a polluted, dirty, hand-dug well that’s infested with all kinds of visible things…worms, tadpoles, bugs:
Unsafe water like this kills 4,000 children every day…and it will continue. With climate change, the incidence of drought is increasing. People will continue to take desperate measures to get water – any water.
Practical Action is reducing the trek that people have to make to fetch water by rehabilitating shallow wells dug into seasonal river beds and building sand filters to purify the water further.
I spoke to Nadifa at one of the rehabilitated shallow wells who said she now only has to walk two kilometres to fetch water and feels much safer.
“The well helps my family so much. The water is good because it is fresh. I can drink it and use it for my cooking”.
This month, the UN announced that the international target to halve the number of people who do not have access to safe drinking water has been met, five years before the 2015 deadline.
Yet 783 million people still live without safe water.
Today, Thursday 22 March, is World Water Day – a day of the year when we spotlight the global safe water and sanitation issue and the collective efforts underway to get solutions to those struggling and in need.
The issue has made a permanent impression on me. So, here it is:
It’s my own way of honouring a cause that is close to my heart. Any nervousness or reasons to not get it done are easily overcome by the reminder that at the end of the day, I have clean water to drink.
What has made a permanent impression on you?
5 Comments » | Add your commentSarkozy, Merkel and a happier Christmas
The news surrounds my day. I wake up to the Today programme and start to think about going to bed after Newsnight. In between I will glance at the BBC to see if there are reports relevant to Practical Action’s work.
Last night I switched off the news. That’s a big thing for me. The much repeated reports on the economy, Euro, Greece, Sarkozy and Merkel meetings, etc. All depressing and unnecessarily gloomy.
I wanted to shout ‘get a life’. ‘Remember how blessed we are’ or ‘stop talking us all into depression’.
This time last year I was in Kenya hearing about our work in some of the world’s most terrible slums. I remembered a time when I spent weeks working alongside women there. They had hard lives, lived in shacks, many had HIV/AIDs, they worried about their kids, about their education and safety, and they were desperate for clean water, for decent food for their families. The Church run textile factory where I worked provided us all with lunch and the women were grateful. Sitting together eating, I enjoyed being with them, they weren’t gloomy, they were curious and took every chance to laugh, they worked to try and make the business a success. In terrible circumstances they were striving to make things better.
We have so much – for many of us – I totally accept not all, to have less would take some adjusting but really make little difference in our lives. What would make a difference is if we could savour what we have and if our news stories could help us rejoice in life not feel down.
I’ve just seen Practical Actions December letter to supporters. And I want to join in saying – thanks for helping us provide clay pot fridges, thanks for helping us teach people how to make reduced smoke stoves (so that thousands of lives have been saved and ill health reduced), thank you for gravity ropeways, for helping people get decent loos, clean water to drink, thank you for helping us help people grow more food so that they can feed their families.
Thank you for being positive about life. For knowing you can make a difference.
Thank you for helping the world have a happier Christmas!
As its December I hope it’s not too early to wish you a ‘Happy Christmas’
1 Comment » | Add your commentInvesting in agriculture to alleviate hunger
2011 Blog Action Day on 16 October – World Food Day – is, naturally, themed around food
Food is a basic human need. Yet for many people across the world, this basic human need is not that easy to come by.
Putting food on the table is a struggle for small scale farmers and pastoralists with little income or natural resources. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it, that the very people who grow food or rear livestock for food are those that go hungry? Why? Lack of agricultural knowledge and investment, little access to credit, little access to markets, growing competition for land and price volatility.
What is more, where the climate is changing year on year, there are no spare resources to adjust or adapt practices in order to reduce the impacts of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.
Mothers queue for hours at Mandera District Hospital to get food
I was recently in Mandera, north western Kenya, where I came face-to-face with the terrible reality of drought, and the devastating impact it’s having on families and children.
People hadn’t eaten for days, yet when asked what they needed, not one person said they needed food. In fact, any food aid they received went to their livestock. What they needed was rain so they could grow their crops and feed their livestock.
So it was good to see Practical Action working with agricultural communities to cope with drought by helping to develop drought resistant crops, protect livestock and conserve precious water.
High up in the Andes in Peru, the temperature can drop to as low as -35 degrees centigrade and there is practically no vegetation. Practical Action works with communities to grow food that will survive these harsh conditions.
And in flood prone places like Bangladesh where it’s impossible to grow crops, Practical Action has developed a technology to allow farmers to grow food on flooded land.
We work with entire market systems, often focusing on helping poor farmers and producers to build their abilities to engage with people they do business with and get better deals for themselves and their communities.
Investing in farmers and pastoralists like this ensures not only can they put food on the table but they can also earn more money – working themselves out of poverty.
4 Comments » | Add your comment
Time to Address Energy Poverty
There is an emerging stream of discourse on access to energy today. One discourse is the failure to recognise and act on the fact that energy and development are intricately linked. It is also true that in as much as development and progress are collective responsibilities, they are also personal ones.
These discussions emerging around the possibilities and potentials of equitable access to energy sources now, more than ever, give cause to pause and examine the assumptions that surround this, among them, that society is a homogeneous collective constituency waiting to be mobilised to take action to address the challenge with support from government with development agencies and communities as conduits and agencies to effect it. This notion is something I wish will be kept in mind in discussions about the impact of energy poverty especially among the poor in remote areas as well as those in urban informal settlements on national development policies and strategies.
Our visit to poor rural households in Kisumu, western Kenya; Kerugoya, Central Kenya and Nairobi this week, organised by Practical Action Eastern Africa, put the discussion into focus. The delegation comprising of three Members of the European Parliament (MEP), local partners and colleagues from Practical Action UK observed the magnitude of the problem. Apart from joining women on their tough mission to collect firewood, the MEPs also had a chance to interact with energy entrepreneurs, especially women groups producing improved cook stoves in Kisumu. The reality on the ground and selected interventions being implemented in the area spoke volumes of what needs to be done by different stakeholders to address the issue at hand. Summarily, the visit underlined that fact that increased access to energy is essential for growth and human well-being.
I hope the visit has provided the MEPs an opportunity to reflect on some of the assumptions, presumptions and misconceptions they had on the subject and its extent that is the challenge of the new era. The challenge should be presented as parts of, not separate from, the collective aim for all-inclusive long-term development.
Access to Energy is Essential for Development
Energy is a critical development issue. Just like access to water and other basic services, access to energy is a condition for social and economic development. But as the country’s population grows and energy demand rises, the obstacles to its availability and use loom larger today than ever.
According to the United Nations Development Programme, 1.6 billion people in the world lack access to electricity and over 2 billion people depend on biomass fuels for cooking and heating. This has been worsened by the rising demand for energy that has exploded since the beginning of the 20th century, in tandem with the world’s rising population and economic growth. Energy issues are particularly challenging for rural communities and the urban poor where high energy costs are putting a tremendous amount of pressure on families a majority of whom depend on natural resources for their livelihood. The challenge at present is to supply clean and safe energy in sufficient quantity to everyone while limiting the environmental effects.
Our visit to selected energy actors in Kisumu, Nairobi and Mai Mahiu with a visiting delegation of three Members of Parliament from the European Parliament revealed the energy poverty levels among poor communities living in the areas. The case stories observed made clear the fact that development targets such as the Millennium Development Goals which, though they do not explicitly include energy, are reliant upon energy for their fulfilment.
This is not to say there is no future in attaining the goals. The reality is more needs to be done to realise the required change. Numerous initiatives have been piloted and are being scaled up by different agencies in the energy sector. Practical Action’s energy projects over the last two decades are good examples. Working with communities in rural and informal settlements in urban centres, the organisation has not only pioneered initiatives to light up villages from small micro-hydro and pico-hydro schemes in Central Kenya but also provided alternative and efficient energy saving technologies used for cooking in western Kenya. These initiatives have accentuated the fact that the poor have a legitimate right to and need for increased energy services which are affordable, healthier, more reliable and more sustainable.
One on one learning how to make fireless cookers
They have also highlighted the skewed distribution of energy – with the richest people consuming the largest percentage of energy supply and the poorest using the least – that must change if significant change is to be realised in the sector. Developing and implementing sound national energy development policies together with the right use of technology are areas that have been emphasised over the years. They are areas that require transparent processes that provide for equitable participation from all stakeholders.
One in 3,917 – MEP delegation to Kenya – Energy for All 2030
Naomi is one in a million. Well, to be more specific, one in 3,917.
That’s how many families that have improved their lives (and homes) through a Practical Action energy access project in Western Kenya.
Specifically, we are working with women across Kisumu to introduce ‘fuel-efficient stoves’ (which require 50% less wood), ‘smoke hoods’ (which remove toxic smoke from the kitchen – which more often than not doubles as a bedroom) and ‘fireless cookers’ (which, as the name suggests, cook food without fuel).
… and one of these women is Naomi. I could tell her story as one of sorrow and struggle – widowed young, 6 children (3 adopted), a basic existence. But that wouldn’t be true. Naomi is a tenacious, self-made, magnificent woman working as a local mobiliser with Practical Action.
Under Naomi’s watch, 200 local women have been trained to make and install simple and effective technologies to reduce wood useage and remove smoke from the home.
I guess that doesn’t sound so dramatic if you’re reading this back in the UK. But, I promise you, having spent time today in a home cooking on an open fire (which brought tears to my eyes, in both senses), it’s life-changing.
But more than that, it’s life-saving.
With 1.4 million lives lost to indoor smoke each year, no wonder Naomi and the Practical Action team are so passionate. If you had a solution to such needless loss of life, wouldn’t you be too?
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