Chai Brady
Sakra Mohamed and Maryan Abilah draw water from an
underground water tank near Shirwac in western Somaliland. The tank harvests and stores rain water and can hold 310,000 litres The Irish Catholic Spring Legacy 2021
A Last Act of Mercy
Through legacy donations Concern helps families in Africa and Asia move towards self-sufficiency and education, preparing them for shocks like the pandemic, Chai Brady hears
Levels of extreme poverty have increased by 7% for the first time in 20 years due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic according to Concern, who are continuing to prepare people to “absorb a shock” by offering sustainable livelihood methods which help them through difficult times.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Concern Worldwide’s Regional Director for the Horn of Africa, Carol Morgan, said although inequality has been an issue in developing countries prior to Covid, since the pandemic “it’s the first time that we see that we’re not progressing in reducing or eliminating extreme poverty”.
In order for countries to get past and recover from the effects of the pandemic, a comprehensive vaccine programme is needed but this is difficult for developing countries who don’t have the same financial clout to make this happen compared with the western world. Despite charitable efforts to get vaccines to poorer parts of Africa, the rollout is still slow.
“Across African countries it’s about one or two people per 100 of the population that are vaccinated. If everyone is not vaccinated, then no one is safe. Where’s the equality in rolling out vaccines? We really have to look at that. There’s a lot of discussions going on around the control of patents, and maybe more local production, it really is a challenge,” says Ms Morgan.
“I think the first country in Africa maybe got vaccines in February, and again, it was very much a drip, drip – very small amounts. The capacity in these countries to roll out the vaccine, and the uptake too, is quite a challenge because they don’t have the same level of education programmes that we’ve had around the vaccines. They don’t have access to the information in a format that they can understand it because again you have very high levels of illiteracy in these countries.”
Patents
Hailing Pope Francis’ call to remove patents for vaccines, Ms Morgan said: “I’m glad to see Pope Francis taking that initiative. Of course, it is about money for these companies. A lot of investments have been made in producing these vaccines, and they want the return on this. I suppose they’re afraid of losing that and the impact of that if the patent goes out but it happened in the case of HIV and AIDS, with the antiretrovirals eventually the patent was released.”
Two of the major issues faced by people in Africa due to the pandemic are education and economics. Both are essential for people to be lifted out of poverty, with Concern focusing particularly on the schooling of young girls.
Ms Morgan says: “About seven million primary and secondary school students have dropped out of school. In these contexts, it’s quite a challenge, especially for girls. Sometimes we see very low levels of enrolment for girls, partly because of early marriage, or else they have household chores – there’s things that they have to do at the household level that prevent them from going to school.
“Also because of a lack of hygiene facilities in the schools, a lot of girls drop out for those reasons as well,” she explains, “With the lockdown in many of the countries we work in, the schools are closed, it’s going to be really challenging to get those girls back into school. And of course, that’s going to impact their long-term prospects.”
There are several positive knock-on effects when girls are educated says Ms Morgan, one of them being that when women are educated they are less likely to have a malnourished child and they’re more likely to have children and get married when they are a bit older.
She says: “There’s so many positive things for a community when children are educated. It will be a challenge working with the families and the community leaders to help influence the communities so that the children can return to school. A big part of that is if the girls have been involved in some aspects of livelihoods, or have been contributing in a way financially to households, how we can support that and how we can increase the household income so those children can go back to school?
“So it’s not just saying that children must go to school, you really have to work with the family in a holistic way because in most cases, it’s not that families don’t want to send their children to school, but sometimes it’s a necessity. But if you’re able to somehow enable that family to keep the children in school, especially the girls, it’s really important, because the genuine, positive impacts of girls receiving education; they just can’t be underestimated.”
Health
Health systems have been “totally overwhelmed” in developing countries, with poorly developed infrastructure which is unable to deal with the Covid-19 crisis. On top of this at household level, when poor countries in Africa went into lockdown, many people were left without means of income.
“That’s more challenging in their context because they don’t have social welfare. It’s not as though the government are going to give them any money to survive on, so they still have to make a living,” says Ms Morgan.
“Many people are dependent on what we call the informal sector, such as day labour, or selling some excess produce in the market. So when they shut down, it meant many people no longer have access to food.”
This has led to a reduction in the amount impoverished people are eating as well as the quality of food, which has led to children who are “very vulnerable” becoming malnourished, according to Ms Morgan.
To tackle this, Concern is involved in livelihood programmes aimed at educating people how to sustainably farm, which is part of their ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’.
For the charity, there are three elements to successfully implementing Climate Smart Agriculture. Ms Morgan says: “It’s about really looking at sustainable productivity. We’re working in a context where people are reliant on rainfall. And of course, we know that with climate change that’s very unpredictable. We have very erratic rains; you can have extended dry spells and we also then have heavier than usual rainfall. They are key challenges that we face.
“It’s about helping the household to ensure they have enough to support their food needs, but also maybe that they can sell excess in the market. We do crop diversification, that’s where they have mixed cropping or sow different crops at different times, so maybe they get to two crops instead of one during one rainfall season.
“Then you have drought tolerant seeds, maybe early maturing ones, so seeds that maybe take three months instead of six months, then you have seeds that are fortified with vitamins and minerals, that helps with the nutrition levels in the household, and in particular for children.
“We have rainwater harvesting, so they can use the rainwater for irrigating the crops, and then small irrigation schemes as well that will help people to produce crops outside the traditional growing seasons. We’ve continued to do this work, because the long-term work will help the family to absorb a shock. So when there is shortage of rain or some crisis, they have enough food saved that they can get through that period.”
An example of the charity’s efforts on the ground is in Northern Ethiopia, where they have been operating for 48 years. The country is particularly vulnerable to weather-related shocks, such as droughts and floods, with over 80% of the rural population dependent on rain-fed agriculture. It faces the added challenge of hosting almost 750,000 refugees from other countries.
Ms Morgan says due to a large amount of poor soil and soil erosion in northern Ethiopia they use an approach known as ‘watershed management’. It is aimed at land and water resources, and is applied to an area of land that drains to a defined location along a stream or river. Watershed management aims to care for natural resources in a way that supports human needs for water, food, fibre, energy, and habitation, while supporting other agreed attributes linked to recreation and/or ecologic function.
“We look at the water, whether rainfall, rivers in that area, and we track that and then we work with the communities to prevent soil erosion,” she says.
Grow
“Once the soil is eroded then the families are not really going to be able to grow anything, the fertility of the soil will be will be very low. What we do is work with the communities to protect the areas that have been degraded, so we prevent the animals from grazing on these areas. The communities do this, they cut off this land and they leave it for a season or two and then we see that the land regenerates, we see trees start to grow, crops, the grasses. That’s really important because it prevents the soil from eroding.
“At the household level we use what we call garden sacks. Soil is put into sacks and vegetables are grown in these. This is really good for household nutrition level. It’s not labour intensive, which is really handy in particular for the women in the household who are able to do this and they also have access to vegetables all year round. The amount of water needed is minimised using this approach. That has been really quite successful in reducing the levels of malnutrition in the community.”
Often during drought people turn to selling charcoal. Mass charcoal burning is catastrophic to the delicate eco-system, the trees are essential for the land but desperation leaves no other option. This negative coping mechanism is among several that humanitarian agencies are working to tackle.
Mechanisms
Ms Morgan said in order to tackle negative coping mechanisms such as these, there needs to be a holistic approach because “there’s no point in saying to extremely poor people: ‘don’t chop down trees for charcoal’, because maybe that’s their livelihood, and that’s all they have”.
“Concern has quite a good approach – what we would call the graduation model,” says Ms Morgan. “We work with extremely poor households, and we provide stipends, we provide an amount of money that they can live off, it’s like a social welfare scheme.
“At the same time, we work with them on ensuring they have a sustainable livelihood. So whether that’s around your crop diversification, whether there’s some off-land work that they can do, and again, it’s very much an approach which protects the environment.
She adds that Concern is involved with a lot of tree planting, with fruit trees being part of this as while they assist in anchoring and protecting the soil, they also provide sustenance for families, while forested areas can be used for building houses.
Regarding mitigating the harmful effects of charcoal burning, she says: “We do try to work to prevent or minimise the use of charcoal. A way we do that is promoting the use of fuel-efficient stoves. In communities lots of people still cook on open fires, the amount of firewood or charcoal you need for that is quite large, but if you have a stove you can minimise the amount of fuel needed. We also promote the use of cowpats. So, if you dry out cowpats, they can be also be used for burning and for cooking. So, it’s looking at alternatives to charcoal, because charcoal is so damaging for the environment.”
Legacy donations play a huge role in the myriad of programmes Concern is involved with, as 10% of all donations from the public are legacy.
Ms Morgan explains: “That fund is there so that when there is a crisis, or a problem in a country, the funds can be allocated immediately. We can do that in 24 hours. The flexibility that gives us is key.”
In the Horn of Africa there has been an outbreak of locusts. They have destroyed at least three seasons of crops in areas around Northern Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. Ms Morgan said legacy donations allowed the charity the flexibility to replace the seeds they had distributed which were lost.
“Without legacy donations we wouldn’t be able to do the work that we do, they’re really key to helping us with the long-term work and also, with those funds, we can plan those longer-term programmes as well, which are key to help people get out of poverty,” she adds.
Those with questions or queries about gifts in wills can contact siobhan.oconnor@concern.net or call 01-4178020.