Category Archives: Of Note

September 10, 2009

Hopeful Signs in Malawi

by goods4good Posted In: Africa News, Of Note

The global effort to improve children’s chances for survival has reached a milestone: the number of children dying before their fifth birthday has fallen to an all-time low, according to data released by UNICEF on Thursday. Child mortality rates have declined more than a quarter in the past two decades because of more widely distributed vaccinations, anti-malarial mosquito nets, a rise in breast-feeding and philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that have donated billions of dollars towards the effort.

Malawi, though one of the world’s poorest country, has experienced one of the most extreme drops in child mortality rates. For every 1,000 Malawian babies born, 125 more survived to their fifth birthday in 2008 than in 1990. Malawi’s success in reducing child mortality is not a given, but the result of their ability to find creative preventative measures and cost-effective treatments. South Africa by contrast, the richest and most developed country on the continent, has experienced a rise in child mortality, many would say because of their flawed political leadership and health-care policy.

One powerful weapon that Malawian has against child mortality is their 10,000 high-school educated village health workers who are trained to diagnose childhood killers, dispense medicines, and give injections, tasks that only doctors and nurses can perform in other countries.

Mr. Mwaraya, a village health worker who earns $90 a month, has a box in his home containing birth control injections and treatments for the most common childhood killers: otrimoxazole, a low-cost antibiotic, against pneumonia; oral rehydration salts for diarrhea; and Coartem, medicine for malaria. “My interest was to assist my fellow Malawians who were falling sick but never had treatment at the village level,” he said.

“Malawi is changing for the better,” said Doris Hebuye, a Malawian woman who listened while her daughter Fanny, a new mother, was counseled by a health-worker on breast-feeding, the danger signs of sickness, and choices for birth control. Mrs. Hebuye had lost two of her seven children for reasons she never fully understood. “In those days, people gave birth without advice. These days, women are assisted in many ways.”

Click here to read the full NYT article.

Goods for Good matches excess from the United States with the needs of vulnerable children in the developing world.

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July 1, 2009

A New Kind of Orphan Care

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note

 

This NYT article profiles a creative program that caretakers in poor countries are using to better care for orphans’ physical and emotional needs. In an effort to care for the 50 million orphans in Africa, a result of high death rates in pregnency and child birth and the legacy of AIDS and other diseaess, some orphanages are employing a new program that differs from the traditional model of orphan care in the developed world. 

At the Berega Orphanage in Tanzania the children are not put up for adoption nor kept at the orphanage indefinitely. Rather, infants stay at the orphanage for 2 to 3 years, until they are old enough to eat regular food and strong enough to return to their villages and live with their extended family. 

The innovative part of this model is that many of these orphans have teenage girls from their extended families, often a cousin or a sister, living with them at the orphanage. These young women, known as  ”bindis,” come to love the children and will look after them when they leave the orphanage. Ms. Ute Klatt, a German missionary and nurse who founded the United German Mission Aid began recruiting relatives to move into her orphanage about five years ago and explains that the bindi system is an attempt to provide something close to a normal childhood for the children as well as an education for the young female caregivers. 

The Bindis, some of whom have never been to school, gain an education. Ms. Klatt provides schoolbooks, and the young women study and teach one another in the evenings. Many arrive illiterate and leave knowing how to read. She also teaches them the basics about health, and they learn sewing and batik, and share the cooking. 

Ms. Klatt said that before the bindi system, many children experienced attachment disorders and children were not well-integrated back into their famlies and communities. With the care of the bintis, life for these orphans becomes less institutional and the orphans get the strong emotional bonds necessary for healthy development. 

On a recent visit to the Berega Orphanage, the children seemed to be thriving.

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July 1, 2009

Blues of Learning Under Trees

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note

 

G4G Program Manager, Aaron Lewani, sent us an article in Malawian publication The Nation, about local school conditions. A desperate lack of school blocks is forcing students to drop out of school and teachers to loose dedication to their work. Rodrick Salambula, head teacher at Matsimbe Primary School, said that students who are forced to learn under trees have a hard time concentrating in class, particularly when weather conditions are extreme.

“Learning under tree shades is a challenge” Mr. Salambula said.  ”Last year, a chalk board fell on pupils after strong wind blew it off and three pupils sustained various degrees of injuries.”

At its opening, Mlodza Primary School was meant to enroll only 960 pupils with 60 pupils in each classroom, but now has 5,308 students enrolled due to a fast growing population. This means that at a single school, 4,708 students are without access to an adequate learning environment and teachers have no choice but to hold class outside. 

The article also cites a range of other issues, including flooding toilets, limited institutional housing for teachers, and a lack of transparency and accountability among the education sector, as majors problem facing Malawi’s public school system. Teachers sometimes walk up to 15 kilometers to get to work, since many can’t afford minibus fares, and therefore often show up late to work or don’t show up at all. Such teachers feel that their contribution to the education sector is not appreciated. 

Regarding government funds allocated for the public schools, Executive Director of Christian Educator’s in Malawi, Lexon Ndalama, feels that a lack of transparency in the use of government funds compromises the quality of education. 

“Every year we are told the Ministry of Education is allocated huge sums of money but how the resources are used we do not know. Only a few schools benefit from such allocations, yet the money is meant to benefit all the schools in the country. “

Others agree with Ndalama and believe that the education budget has been misused in the past without the government accounting for it.

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July 1, 2009

Malawi Needs New Approach to Fighting AIDS

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note

 

Despite a falling AIDS-related mortality rate, changes need to be made to Malawi’s health care system to make better use of the aid it receives to treat AIDS and lower HIV transmission rates, experts say. 

Some crucial problems Malawi faces in its fight against HIV include a poor health care infrastructure and inefficient health insurance schemes. Such inadequacies result in limited access to crucial ARV drugs as well as other health care services.

While Malawi has been successful in reducing the stigma associated with HIV through increased advocacy campaigns and review meetings on national policies, the country is still crippled by the epidemic.  Although deaths caused by HIV/AIDS have decreased from 240 per day in 2004 to 48 per day in 2009, an estimated 1 million (out of the country’s 13 million) people are living with HIV/AIDS and approximately 80,000 of those are children. About 104,000 HIV-positive women give birth every year with an infection rate of more than 30% of the newborns. 

Health experts attribute the high mother-to-child trasmission rate to the limited access most mothers have to PMTCT (prevent mother-to-child transmission) services during birth. Accoding to Leopold Buhendwa, the Doctors Without Borders PMTCT coordinator, the current coverage of PMTCT services are still too low to impact the epidemic among children. He also noted that approximately 50% of Malawian women do not give birth in healthcare facilities, but rather deliver in remote villages with the assistance of a traditional midwife whose skills can vary hugely.  Anthony Costello, a London pediatrician who worked in Malawi, said that traditional birth attendants and community volunteers must be equipped with antibiotics to treat infection, as well as misoprotosol to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the two biggest risks to women in childbirth.  

Since African countries are particularly reliant on foreign aid for their health care needs, one important priority for aid reform is the decentralization of the health care system to give the population better access to health care. 

Click here to read the DW-World article.

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July 1, 2009

The Double Burden

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note

 

As is the case in most poor countries, girls in Malawi are often burdened with the responsibility of becoming a wage earner in the family.  Because the Malawi government only pays for primary school, many poor families send their daughters to work as domestic workers around the age of 14 instead of sending them to secondary school. If a family is forced to choose between educating a boy or a girl, they will almost always choose to keep the boy in school.  Girls are not only expected to bring in a wage, but are also responsible for unpaid domestic work such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of younger siblings. Caroline Mbewe, a 14 year old domestic worker for an affluent family in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, spoke to IRIN. 

“My bosses treat me well but I don’t want to continue working. I want to be like their daughters; I want to go to school,” she said.

Malawi’s initial report to the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child - a universally agreed set of standards and obligations on child protection - noted that approximately 20 percent of all children under the age of 15 were in full-time employment, and a further 21 percent worked part-time. Two decades later the statistics are much the same.

Gender disparity in education limits the opportunities available for all girls and prevents them from developing to their full potential. To close this gap between boys’ and girls’ education, the UN Millennium Development Goals has set the goal of ensuring that all children complete primary school by 2015. 

Click here to read the entire article.

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July 1, 2009

Ending Famine by Ignoring the Experts

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note

 

This New York Times article explains the secret of Malawi’s recent record-breaking corn harvests. After a disastrous harvest in 2005 that forced 5 million of Malawi’s 13 million people to rely on emergency food aid, President Bingu wa Mutharika decided to reinstate fertilizer subsidies, a practice that many Western countries rely on themselves yet discourage poor countries like Malawi from doing. 

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University ofLondon. Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

This foreign advice to remove the subsidies on fertilizer failed to understand that improving Africa’s poor soil quality was essential to lifting food production. Frustrated and embarrassed by having to rely on other countries for charity to feed his people, President wu Matharika decided to take matters into his own hands by reinstating subsidies. Malawi’s successful use of fertilizer subsidies has lead to a reappraisal of the importance of agriculture in alleviating poverty. 

“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as theWorld Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can helpfarmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s staff of life.

The harvest has also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. While bank officials in Malawi generally approve of the subsidies, they criticize the government for not having a strategy to end the subsidies and say there is still room for improvement.

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July 1, 2009

Goods 4 Good Innovators Dinner

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note, Our News

Goods 4 Good’s first event of the summer was a huge success! Last night’s Innovators Dinner, an event centered around sharing creative ideas for our new media initiative, raised over $1,000 for orphans and vulnerable children in Malawi. In addition to the money raised, we met wonderful new supporters and heard some great ideas about how to further our mission.

We would like to thank everyone who came out to show their support for Goods 4 Good. Please know that by coming to last night’s event, you will make a meaningful difference in the lives of hundreds of children in need. You guys are awesome!

Click here to check out more pics from last night.

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July 1, 2009

Project Hope Donates Computers

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note, Our News, Stories From the Field

Project Hope, an international organization committed to making healthcare accessible to people around the globe, has donated two computers to Goods for Good. Goods for Good will distribute these computers to two of its partners, Luzi Orphan Care and Mchezi Community Based Organization. Goods for Good’s staff in Malawi visited both organizations to ensure that they are equipped to use the computers and to learn how they currently address their need for documentation. Luzi Executive Director Elijah Gondwe told us that it currently costs the organization a great amount of time and money every time they need a document typed and printed. It takes a Luzi staff member a full day to travel into the city of Lilongwe to access the nearest computer; the entire process ends up costing Luzi $22, an exorbitant amount for Malawian standards. “The coming of the computer is a great relief,” Mr. Gondwe told us. “We like to document our work, but Luzi has lost a lot of its money to commercial printers. Now this expense will be reduced.” The donated computers will allow Luzi to spend more of its resources on its nursery schools, youth programs, and vocational training programs that assist over 850 vulnerable youth.

Many thanks to Project Hope for helping support Goods 4 Good’s partners!

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July 1, 2009

ReBlog for A Cause, Part Deux

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note

It’s Internet Week in NY and we’re hoping that our friends on Tumblr can help us in our battle to win $3000 from Zemanta. 

The contest goes until Friday of this week, and we’re trying our best to get our reblogs together for the Goods 4 Good cause. 

If you have a moment to reblog this post, we’d greatly appreciate it. 

(And make sure to include the following text when you reblog)

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Thanks!

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July 1, 2009

Election Day in Malawi

by goods4good Posted In: Of Note

 

Guardian Weekly reader Gillian Bennett was in Malawi for the national elections last week, and it’s definitely an interesting read:

Bicycles decorated with party flags and party colours added to the fun, as did the brightly coloured T-shirts and sarongs or “chitenges” as they are called here, specially printed with photographs of the presidential hopefuls worn by supporters as they went about their daily chores. 

The usual police roadblocks were doubled and police presence was evident but unobtrusive. On my third stop during the morning before the election, I waited somewhat anxiously as my driving licence was minutely scrutinised. “1938, eh?” commented the sergeant as he handed it back to me adding wistfully: “We don’t see many around from that date anymore.” Which of course they don’t, the average life expectancy being around 38 now.

The article shows how different the experience of voting is compared to elections in America:

We woke up to eerily silent streets on election day. People had begun queuing well before the 6am opening time at the polling stations, and officials arriving at 4.30am were confronted with lines of voters, many of whom had trudged through the night to be there early. Queues were orderly and good humoured, and there was an atmosphere of seriousness about the whole affair.

The various international agencies monitoring the election, which could be seen travelling to even the remotest polling stations, declared themselves generally satisfied with the conduct of the polls. Campaigning had been banned for the day before the election, giving time for party supporters to cool down and voters seemed very aware of the importance of the occasion and the value of each and every vote. 

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