Being a Rural Woman: A life of service to the community

“Nothing decisive,Nothing sustainable,can be done in our country as long as this important part of ourselves remains in the oppression imposed on them by different systems of exploitation….the true empowerment of women is that which makes the woman responsible,that includes her in productive activities, and in the fight against the different challenges faced by our people. The true emancipation of women is that which forces consideration and respect from men”

Though these words may sounds like those of a convinced women’s rights activist of the second decade of the 21^st century, they aren’t. These are words from Burkinabe revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara to women gathered to celebrate International Women’s day on March 8^th 1987 a few months before his assassination.

The above was not only an appeal for women to never lose sight of the fundamental role they play in the progress of a society, but above all, a call to men and society as a whole to support them as they selflessly invest in the nation’s future at times through acts of courage that are often taken for granted or ignored such as beautifully balancing their role as mother, caretaker of the family, and increasingly bread winner for most families in my part of the world.

Rural Women deserve more……

 The brave women of the rural areas of Cameroonlive what I call “A life of service to the community” by waking up early to prepare the children for school; prepare breakfast for the family; toil all day in farms; return home late and despite the hard day’s work prepare dinner for the family. This makes me so proud of these women and reinforces my conviction that they merit more attention than is currently being accorded them by politicians and policy makers in the far away capital cities and comfortable skyscrapers in Yaounde, Addis Ababa, and NewYork.

Women make up more than half of Cameroon’s vastly youthful population. A majority of this very “important part of ourselves” live in the most ignoble of conditions in its rural areas and are on a daily basis subjected to torture, rape, and abuses of all sorts by men who are themselves oppressed by a society in which the gap between the very rich and the very poor is ever widening.

Economic Injustice is an Effective fertilizer for the Oppression of Women

Yes, a man who is powerless in the face of  his family’s inability to eat to their fill; cannot pay  health bills for his family; and cannot afford to send his children to school,  transfers the injustice done  him by society to his wife, sister, and daughteronly  in the face of whom he feels  “a real man”.Non-inclusive redistribution of a country’s resources therefore leads not only to economic inequality among a nation’s citizens but aggravates the already existing inequality through abuses of all sorts on women and girls.

Achievement of Millennium Development Goals is impossible without women 

Thus, greater economic opportunity is to be extended to rural area dwellers if the Millennium Development Goals to which this year’s International Women’s Day is dedicated are to ever be achieved and this cannot be done without the brave women who though living in these socially challenged areas, have put their lives “at the service of the community” 

Save Our Rural Areas! Part .2

 In the first part of our reflection we saw why we need to save ruaral areas from collapse.In this second part, we look at how  save rural areas.

THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

Most young graduates and even not so educated youths migrate to towns because agriculture is portrayed by the Cameroonian educational system as being “Demeaning”.When the people who are presented to young pupils and students as successful are only those who own 50 Hummers, 20 Mansions, 10 wifes, 15 girl friends, and 20 bank accounts somewhere in Europe, and are above all civil servants, it is but normal that these youths especially those who think they are far off from being like the models presented by society to want to be civil servants, embezzle, and live like their models.The educational system must be restructured to present more favourable image of  the agro industry to young students and pupils

ENCOURAGE AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH
Cameroonians from the Cameroon Development Corporation(CDC) in the 1960s were sent to Malaysia to teach Malaysians how to plant  oil palms, today Malaysia is the first producer of palm oil in the world while Cameroon’s production of palm oil has even declined. An agricultural research policy especially as concerns the intergration of ICTs in farming will do much good to Cameroonian youths.

MAKE RURAL AREAS A PRIORITY

Rural areas are the most poverty stricken, have a high illiteracy and HIV/AIDS prevalent rate, are the most inhabited, and posses the great untapped development potentials. This is all based on my conviction that, for a successful and timely achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), many more rural area dwellers in Cameroon, Africa and the  world need to be educated on the fundamental role they can play for a participative  achievement of these goals.

Creating awareness on MDGs and advocacy for greater youth involvement in community development is the aim of one of the programs that the Education for Development Foundation of Cameroon is implementing. Knowledge of international trade mechanisms, financial (fiscal and monetary) tools, and development issues is vital if  this project and others is to have a far-reaching and long lasting impact .

The famous PDDAA of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development(NEPAD) SIGNED BY  Cameroon alongside other African countires in Maputo in 2003 requires that  atleast 10 percent of the budget of  counties be allocated to the Agricultural sector. This in a way mean that particular attention is to be given to areas in whch agriculture is the main activity. But in Cameroon less than 3 percent of its budget is allocated to agriculture. If this trend continuous, it is but eveident that the nose-dive of agricultural production will continue and rural areas will die.

MAKE YOUTHS THE BACKBONE OF DEVELOPMENT
The desire for a ore comfortable and decnt live are amongst the highest push factors for rural exodus. If this problem which has led to the abandonment of rural areas by youths to their ageing and dieing parents and weak tender ones and thus aggravating the the production of agricultural products is to be solved ,
electricity must be extended all rural areas to enable youths  enjoy the facilities that requires the availability of electricity  such as computers, phones(Chargiing of batteries), and facilitate the transformation of food crops other value adding activities
tar raods,
Precipitate the coming  of and vulgarize  the use of ICT tools like  computers, phones etc which will help young farmers to  better plan and manage their  their agricultural cycle, their harvests as concerns planting, harvesting, transformation , and distribution of its output

extend network coverage of these areas.This will facilitate training and acquisition of knowledge on:
-Mnagaement of produce
-Planting(efficient) techniques
-New inventions in the agricultural domain
-Collaboration among farmers, youths in rural areas with those in towns or even those outside the country
-The marketing of produce
-The organization of farmers,youths etc into networks to acheve a common goal.This facilitated by modern communication channels

SAVE OUR RURAL AREAS! Part 1

A desolate and long abandoned place with a health unit lacking  even the most basic of  of all drugs and equipment, a market square with the number of shades  in use on a typical market  day far outnumbering  the number in use with many in ruins –abandoned by youths for greener pastures in town and a population  living in conditions that violate their basic human rights. This is the picture  I have since returning from  a trip to my village  after more than 10 decades of absence 2 years ago. with little or no hope  of ever knowing the grandeur it had known before and slowly but surely dieing  dieing


Bafmeng( my village) might be one of the  most economically backward  and socially challenged  villages in Cameroon, it is far from  being the worst-there are communities in a worst shape compared to this village.


But things in my village have not always  been so.When I visited Bafmeng during my summer holidays in 1998, the picture of desolation, abandonment, and seeming hopelessness  described above, was far-fetched  because economic activities-mostly carried out by youths –were booming and all shades in the market occupied. Community clean-up campaigns and other socio-cultural  activities  were the order of the day.But that was then!


The effects of the economic crisis which hit Cameroon in the early 90s were surely still to be felt in Bafmeng  up to the year 2000 when the village felt a pinch of the crisis.
this is after Cameroon had implemented its austerity measures and the Structural Adjustment Plans imposed  by the world bank  and and the International Monetary fund.The neglect of rural areas led to the impoverishment  of rural areas  and their inhabitants.This is were it all began.


The neglect of rural areas and a lack of strategies  to develop and open up these areas which are of strategic importance to a country like Cameroon which still has about half its population  living in these areas greatly contributed to the declining food production,unregulated and uncontrolled urbanization, high crime wave in cities, pollution, prostitution,early marriages, unregulated births, increasing  number of school drop outs, and child child trafficking which is so rampant in Cameroon.

Our rural areas are in prolonged comma from which they must be rescued so as not to die.They are agonising and slowly dieing without anybody raising even the smallest finger and need the care attention and treatment required to bring them back to their flamboyant and vibrant youthfulness of the  pre-independence era.



But how can this be done?, one may ask. Saving rural areas from their agony requires more than just good intentions on the part of policy and citizens.It requires well thought and carefully designed policies which not only aims at improving the life of rural area dwellers but  making these areas attractive. This could be done only if the greatest cause of rural area decline is tackled-rural exodus.

51.3 percent of Cameroonian live town while 49.7 percent  of which 43.5 percent are of ages below  15 and 51 percent of rural area dwellers are women. This is the trend in most developing countries  especially since independence where youths  young men and women with dreams of  living more decent and satisfying lives than their parents, and aspirations of living in free and modern world are pushed to the move to the cities where they think all their dreams and aspirations will be met. But when this dreams are shattered by the lack of opportunities in town they  resort to drug abuse, alcohoolism,crime and prostitution.


Rural exodus, rather than cosmetic changes  made by Cameroon’s government by creating more schools and universities in town to cater for the influx of people from rural areas  is thus the problem to be solved if rural areas are to be revamped  and agricultural production increased to meet the current shortage  which  in February 2008 led to riots and unrest in the country by youths.

The solution to rural exodus is simply turning its push factors into pull factors for rural areas so that we can get an urban-exodus. These factors will be examined in the second part of this reflection.

AGRICULTURE:ULTIMATE WAY OUT OF POVERTY Part 2.

Poverty is no doubt one of those concepts  for which a description  is easier to give than a definition.This is because  poverty mean a whole lot of things to people around the world;what is poverty  to a European could be opulence  in other parts of the world for instance.

It is a truism that  a unique and universal  definition of poverty  will be very  difficult to get.But that is not my concern in this article. I am more than convinced that  if each and everyone of us  makes it his/her point of duty  to fight against what he/she perceives to be  poverty, we will end up  having  a world with poverty at its barest  minimum. In this article I present my perception of poverty and how I think this could be best tackled.

A world bank report of  2006 has noted that for any development to be sustainable, accent has to be placed primarily on ensuring that every mouth is sufficiently fed.This  report advocates that nutrition  has to be central  to all development initiatives. The views in this report had earlier been expressed by Fawzi-Al Sultan, one time president of the International Fund for gricultural Development(IFAD)  in  the following words:

A proper attack on  hunger requires  a real partnership  to deal with obstacles  the hungry  face, principally as producers, for the poor are rarely simply poor, they are poor farmers, poor fishermen, poor herders.

When I read the above words  from the proceedings  of the International Conference on overcoming Global Hunger. I jumped from the  my chair  and  said to my self, “Atlast, I have found  an approach to tackling poverty that is most suitable   for my country Cameroon and all other developing countries”

In Cameroon, One is not said to be poor until when he/she cannot  eat to their fill-the size a person’s dish is the main  indicator of status in  the rural part of Cameroon from which I hail. Hunger  in my part of the world is  highly viewed as the  starting point of a vicious cycle  that ultimately leads to death because a person who cannot eat to his/her fill will without any doubts  not have the means to pay for health bills when they are  sick, and will not even have the strength to think about  how to send  his/her children to school, talkless  of having any financial means to sponsor their education.

A person struggling to survive a famine or whose sole concern is what he will feed himself and his family with will rarely have even a passing thought on the effects his actions could have on the environment  for present and future generations as all that matters to him is to find a means to survive. Where I come from such persons are those considered to be poor and earmarked for death as it is not just hunger but also poverty that leads to the death of a person.This is because a person who has no contribution to make to society  is considered dead.

Concerning the right path to the eradication of poverty, Much has been said and so much more left unsaid; so many finger have been pointed, some in the right direction and others in the wrong direction.But this does not mean we should give up the search for a more inclusive, more sustainable, and more-people oriented approach to this fight. Going by my people’s perception of poverty, it is no doubt that the adoption of a more-agricultural and rural areas oriented approach to tackling poverty by governments and other stakeholders of developing countries like Cameroon whose rural areas plays host to more than half of its population and whose agricultural sector despite its abandonment and neglect still accounts for a very significant portion of its GDP and absorbs a great number of its working force.

In the next few weeks, I am going to outline the importance of the agricultural sector and rural areas in the fight gainst poverty in my country Cameroon and end up with concrete proposals on how this could be done.

Agriculture: Ultimate Way Out of Poverty

Malaria is the first cause of death in Cameroon and many other African countries. Reason why Combating Malaria is such a priority to governments in Africa and the rest of the international community. The international community’s concern for the fight against malaria was more explicitly made manifest at the UN millennium General Assembly during which world leaders included the fight against malaria and other diseases in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

So many initiatives have been carried out by Cameroon’s government with the support of international donors like the world fund for the fight against Malaria in the past decade. The K.O Malaria campaign launched on the 20^th of August 2011 by Cameroon’s Prime Minister and head of government in the presence of a host of national and international dignitaries and celebrities is one of such initiatives. This campaign aims to distribute 8.5 million treated mosquito nets to Cameroon’s more than 20 million inhabitants and raise the user-rate of treated mosquito nets from 15 to 80%.

The current 15% treated mosquito net user-rate compared to efforts by the government and its partners kick malaria out of Cameroon is very disappointing and makes the effectiveness and efficiency of mosquito nets distribution campaigns questionable. The already low treated mosquito net user-rate could be even lower if the effective use of these nets is measured instead. This is because in Cameroon, the need to survive has caused a good proportion of people who have received mosquito nets to use them more for other things than protecting themselves of mosquito bites. This is the case with people living in marshy areas who, pushed to the wall by poverty and the necessity to survive, have turned their treated mosquito bed nets into fishing nets. Part of the catch serves as food and the rest is sold to provide for other basic necessities of these people.

The impact of this important and laudable initiative is thus not felt with the desired the intensity and the fight against malaria is slowed down by practices like the above. But is it wrong for a person who does not have food and lack the means of paying his/her health bills to use a treated mosquito bed net to catch fish which can partly provide for his needs? How do we fight against extreme poverty, reduce hunger, eradicate illiteracy, reduce infant mortality, improve maternal health care, achieve gender equality, fight against diseases, ensure environmental sustainability in an integrated and coordinated way? This question raises the problem of the poverty alleviation strategies and other development policies.

The fight against extreme poverty and hunger, the eradication illiteracy, reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health care, achieving gender equality, fighting against diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and establishing a partnership for development  constitute what is commonly referred to as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)  which are contained in the UN’s Millennium Declaration of September 2000. This document has since its adoption by the Un General Assembly become the framework and reference document of many developing countries like Cameroon. Cameroon’s Vision 2035 and Nigeria’s Vision 202020 just to name these are examples of visions which are a contextualisation of the MDGs to local and national realities.

The 8 MDGs are intimately related and there is no doubt that the achievement of one depends on the achievement of the other. The inter relatedness of MDGs though an advantage, makes it difficult for policy makers to map out clear and sustainable strategies to effectively tackle the challenges our world faces. The interdependent nature of MDGs makes imperative the use of an integrated approach to fight extreme poverty, reduce hunger, eradicate illiteracy, reduce infant mortality, improve maternal health care, achieve gender equality, fight against diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and achieve a partnership for development at community, national, and international level. But how can this be done?

The answer to this question is attempted in next article.