lesothoJOHANNESBURG, 6 January 2009 (IRIN) – Urban families in Lesotho, a small landlocked southern African country, are struggling to cope with rising food prices, according to a recent survey.

Practically every household interviewed in a vulnerability assessment reported being affected by escalating food costs; more than half of urban households admitted borrowing food to get by, and more than 40 percent said they had been forced to cut down on meals.

People living with HIV, pensioners and Basotho living off remittances and grants on the outskirts of urban centres were the worst affected, the Lesotho Urban Vulnerability Assessment Survey discovered.

“Food security is a chronic problem in Lesotho, but high food prices have hit people living in the peri-urban areas particularly hard,” said Bhim Udas, country representative of the World Food Programme (WFP), which was involved in the survey. “Most of the people with low incomes spend 75 to 80 percent of their money only to buy food.”

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‘We don’t know if it’s good to eat moles… ‘ – January 03 2009 at 12:23PM

Hunting for moles and other small animals to eat has become something of an art for the poor residents of White House Village informal settlement in Belhar, especially among the young boys.

When a Weekend Argus team visited the settlement this week, most of the young boys in the area were out hunting animals for their next meal. They use a combination of sticks with nails, knives, traps and fast reflexes to catch moles, pigeons and even snakes.

And the younger residents of the Belhar informal settlement are not alone in this – residents in many other Cape Flats informal settlements also hunt for food.

‘… as long as there is something in the stomach’
Jonathan Jacobs, 32, of White House Village, said hunting for animals, especially moles, was “normal” to him as he had often eaten them. He is unemployed and collects copper from old radios, television sets and microwaves for cash. But hunting is an easier option for food.

Jacobs said he and his girlfriend and four children all ate moles and were not worried about whether they would make them sick. “We don’t know if it is good to eat moles but as long as there is something in the stomach. It tastes like chicken, it just takes time to prepare.”

According to Jacobs, his children have never been sick from eating moles.

Jerome van der Westhuizen, a leader in the informal settlement, said life was very hard at White House Village. He added that they did not have a problem with the young boys hunting and actually encouraged them to hunt instead of turning to crime.

Another resident, George du Preez, described moles as “very clean animals” because they ate plants. He said he often caught them in his little garden.

‘… who knows what could happen to them?’
Dr Rafiq Khan, a well known Cape Town paediatrician, called the shortage of food and the need to hunt to survive a “social emergency”. “I am extremely shocked to hear that this is the kind of thing these kids have to resort to.

“It is not part of the human diet and the consequences of protein from the wild in the diet are dangerous – who knows what could happen to them?”

“If they are being exposed to this kind of food we will end up with casualties of all kinds from weird diseases because we don’t know what these animals eat.”

Khan said because children were the most vulnerable to diseases such as malnutrition, eating wild animals could have a negative impact on their growth and development. He added that the government needed to step in urgently.

Allan Perrins, CEO of the SPCA in the Western Cape, said they had not heard of this kind of “survival crime”. “We need to remind the public that they could find themselves on the wrong side of the law by hunting wildlife without proper permission and by means of cruel methods, especially in protected wild areas.

“The law does not differentiate between species and we will react to any acts of cruelty towards any animal, even a mole or a snake, some of which are in fact a protected and threatened species.

“We would also caution against ‘eating anything that moves’ for a variety of reasons, not least the spread of disease.”

He said they would now investigate the matter and embark on a preventative educational campaign.

Perrins said they had heard of a similar matter a few months ago when builders working on a construction site near the airport were braaiing what looked like a wild animal. They discovered that the men had eaten road kill.

Meanwhile, Anneke Brits, spokeswoman for the organisation Cat Pals in Gauteng, has reported a noticeable increase in the number of cats caught in traps set by homeless people who slaughter and eat them.

Source – IOL

National Urban Health Mission to be launched next month

Health will be made a mandatory subject in school curriculum and will cover topics relating to nutrition, hygiene, environment, sanitation and HIV

Bangalore: Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss today said the National Urban Health Mission covering over 400 cities will be launched by next month.

The mission will cover cities with a population of more than 1,00,000 and will be implemented by various cadres of health workers and personnel including urban social health activists (USHA), he said at a function organised to mark the upgradation of the Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute here.

“We hope to launch the programme by end of the month or next month”, he said.

Also on the cards was the National School Health Programme whereby school students would be screened for ENT problems, skin diseases, diabetes, cardiac health problems among others, he said, adding the programme will be implemented in all private and public schools.

Health will be made a mandatory subject in school curriculum and will cover topics relating to nutrition, hygiene, environment, sanitation and HIV, he said.

Yoga will also be made mandatory in all schools, he said while lauding Karnataka for taking steps in this direction.

Stressing the need for augmenting the number of health workers, he said currently the country has 7,00,000 doctors but as many as 8,00,000 more are needed. As for nurses, there are one million at present although another 1.5 million more are still required, he said.

Source – Livemint

In spite of the current hiccups in economic growth, India is urbanising at an unprecedented pace. The metros are growing at 12 per cent on average, the large towns at 10 per cent. This uncontrolled growth is the result of lopsided policies promoting economic prosperity around population clusters. People flock to these already populated centres to engage in economic activities like the services, construction and urban transport.

Sadly, our cities are just not able to cope with these levels of growth. The result is the chaos we increasingly experience every day: traffic, transport woes, rising crime rates, corruption, lack of basic sanitation, pollution, slum and pavement dwellers. This chaos is ironically acting as a leveller for the middle class, the poor and women, young and aged alike. Never before have so many felt so insecure and so excluded.

It is easy to apportion blame on city authorities and politicians without really understanding the underlying causes. There are structural flaws like the inequitable allocation of resources, lack of planning, and absence of able governance. Combine these with the inherent societal flaws of caste, community, religious intolerance and greed and the result is a cauldron of chaos.

So what are the solutions to this massive urban chaos?

Let’s start with underlying solutions: sharing and allocating resources, mainstreaming migrant populations and the urban poor, skilling city managers, and participation in urban governance.

Fifty per cent of the urban population is poor. These are the people who keep our cities going; the street-vendors, household help, rickshaw drivers, construction workers, garbage waste removers are amongst these unrecognised stakeholders. Yet they occupy less than 5 per cent of the land and are allocated less than 10 per cent of the city’s budget for housing, basic sanitation and transport. No small wonder these vital stakeholders are turning increasingly resentful and sometimes hostile.

If these basic needs are met, this critical mass of people will no longer be part of the problem, but the solution. Understanding the aspirations of these migrant populations then is at the core of resolving the crisis of a burgeoning urban India.

I have often heard the former collector of Ahmedabad city K. Srinivas, who is now the Managing Director of Gujarat Urban Development Company, make a case for creating dedicated cadre for urban management on the lines of the administrative services. I cannot agree more. Our city managers are inadequately trained for the job. Most learn through experience, which often becomes obsolete in the face of the complex growth of our urban centres.

Urban management today goes beyond basic engineering tasks and involves clear strategies and multiple skills across sectors like public health, transport, security and housing. The work may be unglamorous but those who have succeeded have really been our unsung heroes.

Take, for instance, Devuben Parmar, a feisty woman living in the Guptanagar slums of Ahmedabad. The 2002 riots saw her galvanise people to rehabilitate and reintegrate women and children in relief camps. She turned that into a scalable model of 190 Anganwadis under the Integrated Child Development Scheme with an annual budget of Rs 1 crore. Devuben now runs an Urban Resource Centre, which links slum residents to government, NGOs and the private sector.

Yaqoob Pathan from the ghettoised Juhapura area of Ahmedabad built on his experience in the relief camps to promote a local NGO called Sankalp Mitra Mandal. The NGO convinced the Ahmedabad Electricity Company to lower connection charges for local slum residents and facilitated transparent connection and payment procedures. The public utility scale has now applied slum electrification programmes across the city.

Many of us leave managing our cities to authorities. Yet, there are these people willing to get their hands dirty. Often they go unnoticed but create the groundswell for a nationwide movement for change.

Source – Hindu Business Line

Shamiso Mushonga, eight months’ pregnant with her third child, feels like a prisoner in her two-room shack. She’s terrified that she or her children could be exposed to cholera if they walk the streets of their neighborhood in Budiriro, a densely populated slum on the outskirts of Harare.
She has good reason to worry. The disease has already killed her husband, along with more than 1,100 others. And the current epidemic shows no signs of abating.

Budiriro, a vast, squalid wasteland of shacks amid piles of refuse, is home to hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans. It has neither a sewage system nor a fresh water supply. With the rainy season now in full swing, pools of human waste, along with the runoff from the mounds of trash, collect in the streets, creating a virtual Petri dish for disease.

“It’s raining cholera, literally,” Mushonga said.

International aid agencies say conditions appears to be getting worse despite their best efforts to stop the spread of the water-borne disease.

“People are living in extremely bad conditions here,” said a water and sanitation expert with Doctors without Borders who declined to allow his name to be used out of concern for his security. “As you can see, there are mountains of rubbish everywhere. So, when the rains started coming, it washed all this rubbish and excrement through the area.”

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urbanhungerHigh Food Prices Spur World Food Program, Usually Employed in Rural Crises, to Find Tactics That Work in Crowded Cities

MONROVIA, Liberia — Escalating hunger in African cities is forcing aid agencies accustomed to tackling food shortages in rural areas to scramble for strategies to address the more complex hunger problems in sprawling slums.

The United Nations World Food Program, the world’s largest food-aid group, has plenty of experience trucking food into rural Africa, responding to shortages sparked by drought, famine and war. But in urban areas — where, despite widespread poverty, hunger wasn’t a significant issue until recently — the hurdles are different.

A market in Dakar, Senegal; price increases have begun to put food out of reach of the urban poor in western African cities.

In the vast and crowded slums, with many unnamed streets and dwellings without running water or electricity, it is difficult to identify who’s most in need of help. Simply handing out food can disrupt cities’ informal markets, cutting into the livelihoods of those who earn a few dollars each day selling peanuts or fresh fish, or of small farmers who haul their produce to the city.

The WFP, which usually takes the lead on aid in coordination with smaller organizations, began considering new tactics last year when it saw an urban hunger crisis developing in Africa.

Though food prices have recently declined sharply along those of a host of other commodities, and 2008 brought bumper cereal harvests in much of the world, prices in Africa on the whole remain significantly higher than they were a year ago, according to a December report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

“The problem has just started here,” says Louis Imbleau, the WFP’s representative in Monrovia, the Liberian capital.

In Monrovia, home to around one million people, market stalls are stocked with fish, vegetables and rice. But Liberia, still rebuilding five years after the end of a civil war, imports more than 70% of its food and the urban poor have been increasingly strapped by rising prices.

The cost of a cup of rice has risen to nearly 50 cents from 20 cents, a huge leap for many families who live on less than $1 per day. Alice Joseph, 39 years old, who lives in a small settlement beneath an overpass in Monrovia, says she makes about $2 on a good day selling fish bought from local fishermen, and uses the income to buy rice and cooking oil to feed her husband, children and her aging mother. Often, she makes nothing; then, she says, “We drink water.”

Earlier this year, the WFP intensified its efforts to put together a program for African cities. In June, with a $500 million grant from Saudi Arabia, the aid group asked its directors in countries with high food prices, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, to experiment with cash and voucher systems that would avoid upsetting local economies.

The WFP is working with governments and local aid groups to create programs in the West African cities of Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, and Monrovia.

“We’re learning this as we go at the moment,” says Valerie Guarnieri, director of the WFP’s program-design division in Rome.

Similar programs have been tried before, but on a smaller scale, and in rural areas. The U.N.’s division for children, Unicef, started a successful pilot program in rural Malawi in April 2006 to help what it called the “ultra-poor” — often children whose parents have died of HIV/AIDS. Sometimes the oldest child cares for the younger siblings alone. Local leaders helped to single out such families to receive a small amount of cash each month.

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From: Purchase of drinking water is associated with increased child morbidity and mortality among urban slum-dwelling families in Indonesia, International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, Article in Press.

Richard D. Sembaa, et al.

In developing countries, poor families in urban slums often do not receive municipal services including water. The objectives of our study were to characterize families who purchased drinking water and to examine the relation between purchasing drinking water and child morbidity and mortality in urban slums of Indonesia, using data collected between 1999 and 2003. Of 143,126 families, 46.8% purchased inexpensive drinking water from street vendors, 47.4% did not purchase water, i.e., had running or spring/well water within household, and 5.8% purchased more expensive water in the previous 7 days.

Families that purchased inexpensive drinking water had less educated parents, a more crowded household, a father who smoked, and lower socioeconomic level compared with the other families. Among children of families that purchased inexpensive drinking water, did not purchase drinking water, or purchased more expensive water, the prevalence was, respectively, for diarrhea in last 7 days (11.2%, 8.1%, 7.7%), underweight (28.9%, 24.1%, 24.1%), stunting (35.6%, 30.5%, 30.5%), wasting (12.0%, 10.5%, 10.9%), family history of infant mortality (8.0%, 5.6%, 5.1%), and of under-five child mortality (10.4%, 7.1%, 6.4%) (all P<0.0001).

Use of inexpensive drinking water was associated with under-five child mortality (Odds Ratio [O.R.] 1.32, 95% Confidence Interval [C.I.] 1.20–1.45, P<0.0001) and diarrhea (O.R. 1.43, 95% C.I. 1.29–1.60, P<0.0001) in multivariate logistic regression models, adjusting for potential confounders. Purchase of inexpensive drinking water was common and associated with greater child malnutrition, diarrhea, and infant and under-five child mortality in the family. Greater efforts must be made to ensure access to safe drinking water, a basic human right and target of the Millennium Development Goals, in urban slums.

Towards pro-poor adaptation to climate change in the urban centres of low- and middle-income countries, November 2008. (pdf, 22KB) by Caroline Moser, David Satterthwaite. IIED.

This paper outlines a framework for adaptation to climate change for urban areas in low- and middle-income nations that is pro-poor and that enhances the capacity of low-income households and community organizations to contribute to such adaptation. It begins by describing how urban centres in low and middle income countries concentrate a large proportion of those most at risk from the effects of climate change as people‘s lives, assets, environmental quality and future prosperity are threatened by the increasing risk of storms, flooding, landslides, heatwaves and drought that climate change is likely to bring. It also points to the weaknesses in the local institutions with responsibility for addressing this and the very large deficiencies in the infrastructure and services needed for protection. It also discusses the lack of attention given to supporting adaptation in urban areas by scientists, governments and international agencies, and considers why this is so.

Spatial dependency of V. cholera prevalence on open space refuse dumps in Kumasi, Ghana: a spatial statistical modelling. Author: Frank B Osei and Alfred A Duker. International Journal of Health Geographics 2008, 7:62.

Cholera has persisted in Ghana since its introduction in the early 70′s. From 1999 to 2005, the Ghana Ministry of Health officially reported a total of 26,924 cases and 620 deaths to the WHO.

Etiological studies suggest that the natural habitat of V. cholera is the aquatic environment.

Its ability to survive within and outside the aquatic environment makes cholera a complex health problem to manage. Once the disease is introduced in a population, several environmental factors may lead to prolonged transmission and secondary cases.

An important environmental factor that predisposes individuals to cholera infection is sanitation. In this study, we exploit the importance of two main spatial measures of sanitation in cholera transmission in an urban city, Kumasi.

These are proximity and density of refuse dumps within a community.

Results: A spatial statistical modelling carried out to determine the spatial dependency of cholera prevalence on refuse dumps show that, there is a direct spatial relationship between cholera prevalence and density of refuse dumps, and an inverse spatial relationship between cholera prevalence and distance to refuse dumps. A spatial scan statistics also identified four significant spatial clusters of cholera; a primary cluster with greater than expected cholera prevalence, and three secondary clusters with lower than expected cholera prevalence.

A GIS based buffer analysis and a quantitative assessment of distance discrimination of the buffer zones around refuse dumps show that the optimum spatial discrimination of cholera occurs at 500m from refuse dumps. This indicates that the minimum distance within which refuse dumps should not be sited within community centres is 500m.

Conclusion: The results suggest that proximity and density of open space refuse dumps play a contributory role in cholera infection in Kumasi.

Source – 7th Space Interactive

In sharp contrast to her questioner, who tip-toes around the delicate subject, Akhi Sultana belts out a full-throated response that is audible to everyone in a room full of strangers.

“Before, when I had my period, I could not change my rags or wash properly,” the 16-year-old says, referring to the strips of old saris that poor Bangladeshi women use to manage menstruation because they cannot afford tampons or sanitary pads. “I always felt shaky and afraid because there was no privacy in the latrines and no water nearby to wash with,” Ms Sultana says. “Now there is a water pump adjacent to the latrine and it is private.”

She lives in the Zakirer slum in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, one of dozens of cramped settlements where a third of the city’s 10m people reside. The pump and latrine she refers to were installed thanks to Water­Aid, the charity the Financial Times is supporting this year in its seasonal appeal. But equally significant – in a society where women are often treated as second or third-class citizens – is the way she is talking: forthright, matter-of-fact, unabashed.

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