Never Be Silent

I get to share good news! From CNN, an editorial about the initiatives undertaken on the island of Zanzibar to eradicate malaria. Excerpt:

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania — I recently accompanied Margaret Chan, Director General of the WHO, and Ray Chambers, U.N. Special Envoy for Malaria, on a trip to Africa to see firsthand the region’s fight against malaria.

The single most memorable image of the trip was from a pediatric hospital ward on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar: a dozen beds and not a single patient in them. Imagine that.

I have searing memories of visiting wards much like this elsewhere in the world where there were as many as three children to a bed and more sleeping on the floor, deathly ill with malaria.

Where have all the patients gone? After all, malaria is a big killer in much of the developing world. It is probably the most prevalent disease that mankind has ever suffered.

Each year, there are over 250 million cases and almost one million deaths — most of them young children, and the vast majority in Africa.

But in many countries, malaria is also a success story. Since 2000, the number of reported malaria cases, deaths, or both has declined by at least half in 25 countries. Zanzibar — a relatively small but striking example — has virtually eliminated the disease over the past five years. These successes show what a combination of political will, technical resources, and financial commitment can do when applied to a strategy that works.

From the ONE Campaign blog, excerpt:

A couple weeks ago, the Tanzania Women’s Bank opened its doors for business in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam. According to the East African, the bank is the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, where the World Bank estimates that women own 48 percent of enterprises but have the hardest time accessing finance.

Although anyone is welcome to open accounts at the new bank, it targets women who have inadequate capital to grow their businesses. While traditional banks require title deeds or other proof of wealth to open account, the Women’s Bank only asks for an ID and $2 in savings, making it much more accessible to women in a country where a third of the population earns less than $1.25 a day. There are also no monthly fees.

The school meals distributed at Jonas Oltimbau’s school on northern Tanzania are keeping alive his dreams of becoming a lawyer one day and playing a role in helping his nation move forward.

ENGUIKE — The maize in the fields around Jonas’s village in the Masai country  of northern Tanzania stands blitzed and blighted. The rains have failed, and food is scarce. But there is hope for this 15-year-old at his school, which offers morning porridge and a lunchtime meal to all its students. Learn more about school meals

Before Enguike Primary School started doing this, not one – not a single student – graduated to secondary school. In fact it was a place where students used to go to sleep because they were so hungry.

Too hungry to learn

“If you came here in those times you would find the children fast asleep because they were so hungry and tired,” George Lowassa, the district school feeding coordinator told me. “Many of them have to walk up to 12 km just to get here – on an empty stomach! Can you imagine?”

All that has changed. In the five years since WFP started providing food to the school and its students, pass rates have steadily risen to the point where 36 of the 38 who sat their secondary exams in 2008 did so successfully.

It means that Jonas’s dream of one day being a lawyer may not be such pie in the sky from a country boy. He is well spoken and confident, with an advocate’s bearing and confidence sewn through his words.

Future as a lawyer

“I want to practice the laws of this country and maintain peace and stability in Tanzania,” he says. You can almost see him admonishing a miscreant from the bench. He tells me there is much less truancy at school now thanks to the meals, and it’s as if he’s been keeping a personal record of the trouble makers.

But for now the reality is a little more mundane. When he gets home this evening, there will be little on the table – some porridge if he is lucky. His parents are farmers and times are tough – the family is battling through to the next harvest two or three months from now.

Another New York Times article:

Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.

Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.

Eighty percent of Tanzanians live in rural areas, and the hospital in Berega — miles from paved roads and electric poles — is a typical rural hospital, struggling to deal with the same problems faced by hospitals and clinics in much of the country. Abortion is a constant worry.

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean…

…He went on, “We as medical personnel think abortion should be legal so a qualified person can do it and you can have safe abortion.” There are no plans in Tanzania to change the law.

The steady stream of cases reflects widespread ignorance about contraception. Young people in the region do not seem to know much or care much about birth control or safe sex, Dr. Mdoe said.

In most countries the rates of abortion, whether legal or illegal — and abortion-related deaths — tend to decrease when the use of birth control increases. But only about a quarter of Tanzanians use contraception. In South Africa, the rate of contraception use is 60 percent, and in Kenya 39 percent. Both have lower rates of maternal mortality than does Tanzania. South Africa also allows abortion on request.