African Women Are Key To Food Security – UN World Food Programme

 

AFRICAN WOMEN KEY TO FOOD
SECURITY

Throughout the African continent,
women are crucial to food security. They grow and harvest the crops for
household consumption, they cook the family meals and they breastfeed their
babies. WFP has chosen “Putting women at the centre of food security – what are
the challenges?” as its theme for International Women’s Day on March 8. Here are
the stories of four Kenyan women living with recurring food shortages and how
WFP food aid has changed their lives.

WOMEN FARMERS PRAY FOR THE
RAIN

Living in Turkwell, Turkana, Melenea
Ayokon, knows what it is to go hungry. As a farmer dependant entirely on her
crops for her family’s survival, she faces an incessant battle against recurring
drought in the region.

Every rainy season Melenea and the other women look to the skies, praying for
rich rains to feed the fields.
However, even when rains are good, there is
often not enough water to irrigate her small plot.

And when the harvest is poor the family is left destitute, unable to store
adequate food supplies from season to season.

To survive a bad season Melenea often turns her hand to charcoal production,
but wood is scarce in Turkana and it has only ever generated a few shillings
towards the cost of feeding the family. Sometimes Melenea and her children are
forced to trek many kilometres into the forests in search of wild fruit when
nothing else is available.

The last resort is often to beg food from
relatives in the larger towns. One meal a day is often as good is things get.

When WFP started a Food for Work project in the area, Melenea’s life changed
radically for the better. Not only could she rest peacefully at night knowing
she could feed her entire family on the food rations she received in return for
her work, but she could also look forward to enjoying the benefits of the new
irrigation system she helped to build in the Food for Work project.

This
year, Melenea and the other villagers are confidently preparing their land
knowing that poor rains cannot kill their crops and jeopardise their children’s
health.

REFUGEE WOMAN’S
BAKERY WONDER

Nasro Hussein Abubakr has lived in Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenyan for
more than seven years.

Nasro had to flee the 13-year war in her home
country Somalia along with hundreds of thousands of her countrymen.In the camp
she was initially unable to make a living as refugees are not allowed to be
employed or to integrate in Kenyan society. She is also isolated from her Somali
community as she married a man from a tribe different to her own.

After a
violent attack by relatives, Nasro and her family now have to live behind the
chain-link fence that protects the most vulnerable refugees.

Nasro has,
however, managed to overcome the hostility and build a livelihood supporting her
family with more than just the basic food provided by WFP.

Thousands of
tins and sacks are delivered to the camps each year and, in 2002, WFP made the
empty containers available to the refugees to sell in order to generate income.
Nasro was one of the beneficiaries and the 10,000 kenyan shillings ($132) the
sales generated was enough to construct a mud oven and start a small production
of bread, biscuits and cakes.

The bakery has developed into a thriving
business and now Nasro and her family are also selling tea, goat meat and
vegetables. Nasro is generating 400 to 500 KSH per day. Having cash allows her
to buy extra food and soap, clothes and medicine for her children.

FOOD POWER FOR MAASAI
GIRLS

Nice Mulejo, a nine-year-old Maasai girl, came home from school one
day and found her family brewing beer – something the Maasai do for special
occasions. Her mother told her that the next day would be her last at school.
Then she would have to help prepare for the party. It was to be her party – her
wedding party!

Now, two years later, Nice Mulejo is one of 410 girls living within the
protective walls of AIC Girls’ School in Kajiado.

The school finds and
rescues young Maasai girls from traditional female circumcision and marriage to
men sometimes five times their age. WFP provides a free lunchtime meal to all
the school’s pupils.

“Some of the girls we get are seriously traumatised and often physically
damaged, as they already have been sexually abused by their so-called husbands,”
says Priscilla Nangurai, AIC Girls’ School headmistress.

She explained
that it is common practice among the Maasai not to inform the-bride-to-be that
she is getting married – let alone circumcised- until the actual day of the
event. This despite the fact that marriage without the prior knowledge of both
partners is prohibited by law in Kenya, as is marriage before the age of 18.

The school lies in the Maasai heartland. Some 85 percent of its pupils are
Maasai girls. It is generally very difficult to get the Maasai people to send
their girls to school. They regard school fees as too expensive and are
particularly reluctant to invest in girls’ education.

“For our day scholars the free lunch is very important. It motivates the
parents to send their girl children to school. At least their child is secured
that one meal, when there is no food in the family”, says Nangurai.

“Before WFP donated food the day scholars were all send to school
without lunch and the girls would hang around the boarders’ dining hall hoping
for leftovers. Teaching was difficult past midday. The girls couldn’t
concentrate.”

PROVIDING
FOR 12 GRANDCHILDREN
AT THE AGE OF 86

Selina Paulina Aponde is only one of many grandmothers that
have experienced the dreadful effects of the AIDS epidemic.

At the age
of 86, she has become a single provider for seven of her 14 orphaned grand
children. Fragile and weak, she could not work the land and was forced to send
her grandchildren begging from neighbours, in the streets and at markets.

“Mama Pauline was crippled from starvation, she was hanging heavily on two
crutches and could hardly move. Now she walks leaning lightly on a stick and her
grandchildren have gone back to school” says Mary Makokha, Director of Rural
Education and Economic Enhancement programme (REEP).

Makokha identified Mama Pauline as an HIV-affected woman eligible for food
assistance under WFP’s new HIV/AIDS programme in Busia.

HIV and AIDS
create pockets of famine in areas otherwise prosperous and fertile. Many
families suffer from lack of food because the parents who normally provide for
the family – old and young – are dying or are already dead as a result of
AIDS.

Often the family did not eat for several days in a row. Pauline and
her children were slowly withering away from hunger.

“Now, when you come
to Pauline’s house you can hear the children play outside. Before the children
were all crammed around her in the dark – weak and dizzy from hunger – and at
least one child was lying feverish on her mat,” says
Makhoka.

Unfortunately, Pauline’s eldest granddaughter has suffered the
long-term effects of their food shortages. As the eldest, she felt greatly
responsible for her grandmother and her siblings. The men in the community took
advantage of the girl’s desperate situation when she was barely 12 years old –
nobody knows exactly when it started. They offered her food in exchange for sex.

Josephine (not her real name) is now 14 and despite the free food
provided by WFP today, her life has taken a turn that is difficult to reverse.