(l – r) Josiah Kavuma, Simon Lubambo, Joshua Businge and Brian Gitta, otherwise known as team Code 8, have developed a mobile phone app to diagnose malaria. Courtesy: Microsoft.

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA
, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

In his 21 years Brian Gitta has had malaria too many times to count. And over the years, because of the numerous times he has had to have his blood drawn to test for the disease, he has developed a fear of needles. It is little wonder then that he and three of his fellow computer science students worked hard to develop a mobile phone app that detects malaria – without the use of needles.

“I was two or three years old when I first contracted it,” says Gitta, who is studying computer science at Makerere University in Kampala.

“It’s very unusual to meet people in Uganda who haven’t had malaria. If you go to a clinic, you might find that 90 percent of patients have it.”

Annually an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Ugandans die from the tropical disease, which is transmitted to humans by mosquitos carrying the malaria parasite. That makes it the country’s biggest killer, according to the NGO Malaria Consortium Uganda. Experts say nearly half (about 42 percent) of Uganda’s 34.5 million people are host to the malaria parasite, although they do not display any signs of being ill.“With this test people may be able to avoid a doctor’s consultation and treat malaria in its early stages before it causes anaemia and brain damage. Once this app comes out, the impact’s going to be great.” -- Moses Kizito, director of SAS Clinic

Gitta’s most recent bout of malaria, just before Christmas in 2012, was severe. He contracted brucellosis, an infectious disease contracted by the consumption of unsterilised milk or meat, and typhoid at the same time and had to be hospitalised for a month.

“I had to undergo lots of blood tests. I was in lots of pain and the doctor’s queue was long,” he says.

Gitta was bedridden during his convalescence, and during that time he had a light bulb moment. He imagined a “mobile medical centre” that offered a quicker and pain-free diagnosis without needles and pricks. Gitta envisaged using a small device for this – but it was a big vision.

But as soon as he recovered he set to work on realising it.

And this July in St Petersburg, Russia, Gitta, Joshua Businge, Simon Lubambo and Josiah Kavuma, known as team Code 8, were announced the winners of the inaugural Women’s Empowerment Award at Microsoft’s global student software competition, Imagine Cup. The all-male group was recognised for their development of an application that they call Matibabu, Swahili for medical centre.

In Uganda, malaria is diagnosed via either the microscopic examination of blood films or a rapid diagnostic test.

The microscopic diagnosis usually takes about 30 minutes or longer and requires a lab technologist. It is considered the “gold standard” of testing, as it is the most reliable method. It reveals the presence or absence of the parasite in the blood, the parasite species and the extent to which they have multiplied in the body.

However, a rapid diagnostic test can be done anywhere and without a qualified microscopist. It usually takes about 15 minutes to get the results, though it cannot show the number of parasites as a microscopic diagnosis does.

Matibabu uses a custom-made portable device called a matiscope, which is connected to a smartphone, to do a rapid diagnostic test. The user’s finger is inserted into the matiscope, and the application uses a red light to penetrate the skin and detect the red blood cells.

“It’s been shown that infected red blood cells have a different physical, chemical and biomedical structure from a normal red blood cell, hence [we] used light-scattering technology to determine the scatter patterns of both normal and infected cells,” Kavuma tells IPS.

“Through the difference in the patterns, the app is able to diagnose for malaria without a blood sample.”

The hardware has a light-emitting diode and a light sensor, and it transmits the test results to the user’s phone for processing.

Matibabu then sends the results to the Microsoft file hosting service, Skydrive, and these can be shared with the patient’s doctor almost immediately, preventing the long delay in getting results.

Code 8 says that Matibabu, which can currently only be used with the Windows phone operating system, will help pregnant women in particular. According to the World Health Organisation, half the world’s population is susceptible to malaria. Pregnant women, young children and people living with HIV/AIDS are especially vulnerable.

“When a pregnant woman gets malaria it affects the baby,” Lubambo tells IPS. “But if it’s able to be detected very early it could reduce miscarriages.”

However, the team hopes to have Android and other OS versions by mid-2014. They say when they begin introducing other versions for different platforms, they may start using file hosting services, like Dropbox, to store the results.

The students hope their device will be on the market within two years and say the application will be free to download. The hardware may cost between 20 and 35 dollars. The young developers concede that this is a lot of money for many Ugandans.

Currently, in Uganda’s private health sector both the microscopic diagnosis and the rapid diagnostic test cost under five dollars, Dr Jane Achan, professor at the department of paediatrics and child health at the Makerere University College of Health Sciences tells IPS.

Malaria affects mostly rural dwellers, she says, adding that in Apach district, northern Uganda, a patient receives over 1,500 infected mosquito bites a year. These people may not have access to smartphones.

“The urban settings are already a little more advantaged in that their health facilities are more accessible, they have more doctors and they have more accessible diagnostic facilities,” Achan explains. “At the end of the day this app has to be compared with what is existing and available.”

Moses Kizito is the director of private SAS Clinic in Kampala, where they test no less than 50 patients a day for malaria and receive eight to 10 positive results.

He says at the moment Matibabu seemed “quite expensive” but in the long run it may prove economical.

“Once people are forced to go to the clinic [with malaria] it’s expensive to manage the disease,” Kizito tells IPS.

“With this test people may be able to avoid a doctor’s consultation and treat malaria in its early stages before it causes anaemia and brain damage. Once this app comes out, the impact’s going to be great.”

Kavuma says that Microsoft has offered the group mentoring and business training, but they are considering other options to market and manufacture the product.

“We are planning on contacting Chinese companies for this,” he says.

Gitta hopes other diseases can be diagnosed in a similar way. “The future is bright and anything can happen…,” he says. “Let’s watch out for the next great thing.”

Banana vendors in Chennai, South India. Credit: McKay Savage/CC-BY-2.0

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

India’s environmental and food security activists who have so far succeeded in stalling attempts to introduce genetically modified (GM) food crops into this largely farming country now find themselves up against a bill in parliament that could criminalise such opposition.

"If the new bill is passed...it will only be a matter of time before India becomes a GM banana republic." -- Devinder Sharma
The Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) bill, introduced into parliament in April, provides for ‘single window clearance’ for projects by  biotechnology and agribusiness companies including those to bring GM food crops into this country, 70 percent of whose 1.1 billion people are involved in agricultural activities.

“Popular opposition to the introduction of GM crops is the result of a campaign launched by civil society groups to create awareness among consumers,” said Devinder Sharma, food security expert and leader of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. “Right now we are opposing a plan to introduce GM bananas from Australia.”

Sharma told IPS that if the BRAI bill becomes law such awareness campaigns will attract stiff penalties. The bill provides for jail terms and fines for “whoever, without any evidence or scientific record misleads the public about the safety of organisms and products…”

Suman Sahai, who leads ‘Gene Campaign’, an organisation dedicated to the conservation of genetic resources and indigenous knowledge, told IPS that “this draconian bill has been introduced in parliament without taking into account evidence constantly streaming in from around the world about the safety risks posed by GM food crops.”

She said that Indian activists are now studying a new report published in the peer-reviewed Organic Systems Journal by Judy Carmen at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, showing evidence that pigs fed on GM corn and soy are likely to develop severe stomach inflammation.

“The new bill is not about regulation, but the promotion of the interests of food giants trying to introduce risky technologies into India, ignoring the rights of farmers and consumers,” Sahai said. “It is alarming because it gives administrators the power to quell opposition to GM technology and criminalise those who speak up against it.”

The past month has seen stiff opposition to plans to introduce GM bananas into India by a group of leading NGOs that includes the Initiative for Health & Equity in Society, Guild of Services, Azadi Bachao Andolan, Save Honey Bees Campaign, Navdanya and Gene Ethics in Australia.

These groups are seeking cancellation of a deal between the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and India’s biotechnology department to grow GM bananas here.

Vandana Shiva, who leads the biodiversity conservation organisation Navdanya, and is among India’s top campaigners against GM crops, told IPS that such food crop experiments pose a “direct threat to India’s biodiversity, seed sovereignty, indigenous knowledge and public health by gradually replacing diverse crop varieties with a few patented monocultures.”

She fears that an attempt is being made to control the cultivation of bananas in India through patents by “powerful men in distant places, who are totally ignorant of the biodiversity in our fields.”

India produces and consumes 30 million tonnes of bananas annually, followed by Uganda which produces 12 million tonnes and consumes the fruit as a staple.

India’s National Research Centre for Banana (NRCB), which has preserved more than 200 varieties of the fruit, is a partner in the GM banana project. Others include the Indian Institute of Horticulture Research, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.

With so much official involvement there are fears that GM bananas may eventually find their way into nutrition programmes run by the government. “There is a danger that GM bananas will be introduced into such programmes as the integrated child development scheme and the midday meals for children,” Shiva said.

India’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), the world’s largest integrated early childhood programme, began in 1975 and now covers 4.8 million expectant and nursing mothers and over 23 million children under the age of six. Bananas are included as part of the meals served in many of the 40,000 feeding centres.

QUT’s Prof. James Dale, who leads the project, has, in interviews given to Australian media, justified the GM experiment by saying that it will “save Indian women from childbirth death due to iron deficiency.”

According to studies conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, more than 50 percent of Indian women and more than 55 percent of  pregnant women in India are anaemic. It is estimated that 25 percent of maternal deaths are due to complications arising out of anemia.

In a Mar. 9, 2012 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dale said, “One of the major reasons around iron is that a large proportion of the Indian population are vegetarians and it’s very difficult in a vegetarian diet to have intake of sufficient iron, particularly for subsistence farming populations.

“India is the largest producer of bananas in the world but they don’t export any; all of them are consumed locally. So it’s a very good target to be able to increase the amount of iron in bananas that can then be distributed to…the poor and subsistence farmers.”

Dale denied in the interview that there were risks to existing Indian banana strains and said because bananas were sterile there is no danger that the genes being introduced will enter and destroy other varieties.

But experts like Shiva have challenged Dale’s claim. She said Australian scientists are using a virus that infects the banana as a promoter and that this could spread through horizontal gene transfer.

“All genetic modification uses genes from bacteria and viruses and various studies have shown that there are serious health risks associated with GM foods,” she stressed, adding that there are safer, cheaper and more natural ways to add iron to diets.

India is the world’s biggest grower of fruits and vegetables with many varieties naturally rich in iron. “Good sources of dietary iron in India included turmeric, lotus stem, coconut, mango (and) amaranth…there is no need to genetically modify banana, a sacred plant in India,” she said.

Attempts by IPS to contact Dale directly and separately through QUT’s press relations department on the risks from horizontal gene transfer and the possible danger to public health failed to elicit any response.

According to Shiva there is a concerted move by food corporations to control important food crops and staples in their centres of origin. “We have seen GM corn introduced into Mexico and there was a determined attempt to introduce GM brinjal in India.”

In February 2010, the then minister for environment, Jairam Ramesh, ordered a moratorium on the brinjal project and his action was seen as a major blow to the introduction of GM food crops in India.

“If the new bill is passed, we could have a reversed situation and projects like GM bananas will be quickly cleared with the backing of the government – and it will only be a matter of time before India becomes a GM banana republic,” Sharma said.

The Supreme Court found naturally occurring segments of DNA "not patent eligible" on Thursday. Credit: Phil Roeder/CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

The nine judges of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that naturally occurring DNA, including component parts of that genetic material, cannot be patented.

The decision overturns three decades of practise to the contrary by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Health and civil liberties groups are celebrating the unusual unanimous ruling, as are consumer protection advocates.

Although the case dealt specifically with questions regarding the “isolating” of genes within the human genome, the judges did not limit their decision to human genetics, meaning the case will have an effect throughout the biotechnology industry.

“A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the court’s final opinion.

He noted that U.S. patent legislation “permits patents to be issued to ‘[w]hoever invents or discovers any new and useful…composition of matter,’ but ‘laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas’ ‘are basic tools of scientific and technological work’ that lie beyond the domain of patent protection”.

The court did, however, leave open the possibility of patenting synthetic or “complementary” DNA, artificial copies of DNA that are either separated or constructed in a lab and allowed to evolve on their own.

The biotech industry has long argued that stringent patent protection is needed for companies to feel comfortable spending the significant capital required to fund related research and development.

Others have suggested that allowing such patenting actually quashes innovation by limiting competition, while also pointing to the significant federal money that is often available for such research."A product of nature cannot be patented."
-- Sandra Park

Still, the ruling will likely affect and potentially void thousands of patents on “isolated” genetic material taken out over the past decade or more, though experts say the legal process will now be required to move through each patent on a case-by-case basis. Isolated DNA is genetic material excised from chromosomes but not otherwise altered.

According to current estimates, about 40 percent of the human genome is currently covered in some way by patents.

Product of nature

“The court’s decision today represents a straightforward application of the ‘product of nature’ doctrine, which holds that a product of nature cannot be patented,” Sandra Park, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a watchdog group, told reporters after the ruling.

“Maybe a product required great ingenuity to discover, but a product of nature needs to remain as part of the storehouse of knowledge.…This is a simple question but with profound consequences, and from our perspective this ruling is a victory.”

The ACLU has been involved in this case since 2009, when it helped bring a lawsuit on behalf of plaintiffs suffering from breast cancer who found themselves at the mercy of a U.S. company that had patented two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. Researchers working for that company, Myriad Genetics, isolated those genes and then developed tests for mutations based on the research.

“These patents here tied up all uses of those particular genes, so if you found a better way to do this testing, you couldn’t do it,” Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst at the Centre for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“In that way, this is a revolutionary change, and makes clear that the U.S. Patent Office has not understood what the Constitution says as relating to the patenting of naturally occurring things. This is very important, and we will be working hard to disallow Congress from trying to pass any new law suggesting that you can indeed patent DNA.”

In the initial lawsuits, plaintiffs argued that Myriad was able to charge exorbitant prices for the tests and that its patents disallowed competing labs from working with those genes in any way.

“Genes are not being held hostage by private corporations any longer,” Lisbeth Ceriani, a breast cancer survivor and original plaintiff in the case, told reporters Thursday.

“If you’ve been adopted or don’t know your medical history – say, if your parents are from other countries – up until today Myriad had been able to design the criteria for who should take their test, as opposed to doctor or patients. So I’m incredibly relieved, as something that’s been going wrong for more than a decade has finally been corrected.”

Moral obviousness

Medical experts are suggesting that the court’s decision will now have an immediate impact on public health, given that Myriad’s methods – and similar research based on isolated DNA – will be able to be put into broad clinical practice and subjected to further study.

Yet the implications of the ruling will almost certainly be felt beyond the confines of human health.

“Part of the significance of this ruling is that the judges did not specify that the decision applies only to human DNA, so this will now cover the whole range of DNA,” the Centre for Food Safety’s Hanson says.

“Many of the patents out there today are of other mammals, animals, plants and microorganisms. In fact, we’ve recently seen some decline in the number of human patents being issued, but large numbers of other patents are still being issued.”

He also notes that the decision has brought the United States somewhat more in line with legal precedent on this issue elsewhere, particularly in Europe.

“European patent law has set morality as a standard, so some countries have made restrictions on what is patentable gene sequence because it might be immoral to exclude people from being able to engage in certain testing or research,” he says. “In effect, the court has come down on the side of both the U.S. Constitution and moral obviousness.”

Still, those on the losing side of Thursday’s decision are suggesting that they are relieved the ruling did not go farther.

“I’m not fully happy with opinion, but it could have been much worse,” Greg Dolin, a co-director at the University of Baltimore School of Law’s Center for Medicine and Law who formally supported Myriad Genetics in the case, said in a press conference hosted by the Federalist Society, an association of right-wing attorneys.

“Luckily, the court did not undercut the biotechnology industry,” Dolin said. “It took a cautious step, but ultimately didn’t do too much damage – though that remains to be seen, in how the decision is applied to future cases.”

Jordi Muñoz began building drones as a hobby in 2007 and is now a founding partner of a fast-growing company in the field. Credit: Courtesy of Jordi Muñoz

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 11 2013 (IPS)

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, have earned a bad reputation due to their controversial use by the United States in its “war on terrorism”, yet they have almost unlimited potential as tools for scientific research.

The word “drone” is most commonly associated with the remotely piloted and heavily armed aircraft that are used by the United States to strike down suspected terrorists, but have also caused a great many civilian deaths in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

However, more than 40 countries around the world either deploy or manufacture drones, according to reports consulted for an article published by IPS.

These unmanned airplanes and helicopters are used for such diverse purposes as drawing maps, exploring the ocean floor, measuring temperature or pollution levels, monitoring weather phenomena, and the surveillance of high-risk areas or archaeological sites.

Last month, the U.S. space agency NASA sent drones into the plume of the Turrialba volcano in Costa Rica to study its chemical composition.

“The technology is emerging, the first applications have just barely begun. Society itself has learned to accept drones beyond their military uses, because they have seen the different ways they can be used. It’s just a matter of time” until they become more widely developed and used, said young Mexican entrepreneur Jordi Muñoz, co-founder of 3D Robotics, a pioneer in the manufacture of drones in Mexico.

His story mirrors the evolution of drones, which he began to build in 2007 with the help of 500 dollars provided by U.S. physicist Chris Anderson.

“He gave me the money purely on trust. It was the best 500 dollars I ever invested. I decided to build a drone. I was developing the automatic pilot and I went on Google to look for information when I came across a forum. I went in, registered, and saw that they were posting things about homemade drones,” recalled Muñoz, who is currently finishing a degree in computer engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States.

The forum was DIY (“Do It Yourself”) Drones, an online community created by Anderson in 2007 as a space for hobbyists who build their own UAVs to share experiences, electronic codes and component maps.

“I started to post videos, write code, and document and publish what I was doing,” Muñoz told Tierramérica*. His work caught the attention of Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine until this past January and now the young Mexican’s partner in 3D Robotics.

The company does not sell UAVs for military use. The vehicles are designed in the southwest U.S. city of San Diego and assembled across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. They receive between 100 and 150 orders daily from clients in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Israel and Japan.

3D Robotics currently employs 60 people and hopes to expand its staff to 100 by the end of the year. Since its founding in 2009, the company has earned around 10 million dollars through sales and received another five million from three U.S. funds that provide financing for tech firms.

“In 2013 we want to professionalise all of our products. There have been huge advances, everything has now been greatly simplified, and we want to make drones easy to use. But we need engineers to write code, for manufacturing,” said Muñoz.

Working on the basis of open licensing, a network of engineers around the world work together to improve codes and develop more advanced products.

In 2012, Muñoz was chosen as one of the top ten innovators under 35 in Mexico by Technology Review, which is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A drone is equipped with a high-speed processor, battery, GPS receiver, compass and sensors like an accelerometer and gyroscope. Unmanned planes can fly for up to three hours, and helicopters for half an hour. Connected to a modem, they can transmit real-time data in a range of up to 60 kilometres.

In Mexico there are no regulations on the use of drones, although the government uses them to fight drug trafficking, some companies use them to supervise construction, and universities use them for scientific research.

At the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV), three researchers are building prototypes for surveillance and security, with an eye towards commercial production.

“We lost a bit of time. If we had done it five years ago, we would be on a par with other countries. It wasn’t given much importance, so there was no research. We have a great deal of potential, above all because the students we are training start out with a more advanced awareness,” Hugo Rodríguez, a mechatronics researcher at CINVESTAV, told Tierramérica.

“The models will continue to improve, and we will gain experience by solving new problems. We could have a marketable prototype within a short time, with trained human resources,” said Rodríguez, who has a doctorate in automation and signal treatment from the University of Paris XI.

Since 2007, the centre’s specialists have designed a four-engine plane, two fixed-wing aircraft and two helicopters, and have experimented with their automatic controls.

“As this work continues to develop, a marketable technological application could emerge. We’ve been approached by companies, but we didn’t have a prototype ready yet,” said Rodríguez.

Seven students have graduated with Master’s degrees in mechatronics since 2007, and two Master’s degree candidates and two doctoral candidates are now working on this initiative.

Although the commercial use of drones is currently prohibited in the United States – they are only permitted for scientific or recreational uses – the government is preparing to integrate them into the national airspace in 2015. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that as many as 30,000 non-military UAVs will be in the sky by the end of the decade, for a range of different purposes.

A recent study, “The Economic Impact of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the United States”, predicts that in the first three years of integration, more than 70,000 jobs will be created.

The study, published in March by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), an industry group, estimates that between 2015 and 2017, the economic impact of drone integration will be greater than 13 billion dollars and could reach 82 billion by 2025, in terms of revenues earned by manufacturers and suppliers from the sale of new products as well as “the taxes and monies that flow into communities and support the local businesses.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

HIV-positive children in Muhanga, a village in Rwanda. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 4 2013 (IPS)

A first-time ranking of 54 top research universities in the United States and Canada has found that a miniscule percentage of funding goes to neglected diseases, despite the outsized influence that public universities play in developing medicines for illnesses often ignored by the private sector.

According to the University Global Health Impact Report Card, released Thursday, less than three percent of research funding at these 54 universities went to neglected diseases in 2010. This includes not only the tropical illnesses, such as Chagas disease and sleeping sickness, but also paediatric HIV/AIDS, malaria and multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis.Universities have a big role in making sure their research is translated into affordable medications for people in developing countries.

Altogether, more than a billion people globally suffer from these diseases, primarily in poor communities, according to data provided by the Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), an international student coalition that carried out the research for the report card. Further, around 10 million people a year are said to die because they are unable to access required medicines, many of which are simply too expensive for them to purchase.

“We often hear from students in university labs who really want to focus on these issues but find that the same resources aren’t available to them as in more traditional areas of study,” Bryan Collinsworth, UAEM executive director, told IPS.

“This is not just about bringing in more grant funding – though that’s huge – but also about universities taking more concrete steps to say they’ll support this area of focus. For instance, hiring more faculty in these areas, making sure students have more fellowships in both the field and lab on these issues, and perhaps officially establishing a centre to ensure a specific focus.”

Indeed, 15 of the universities studied had created such a centre, and 10 of those succeeded in offering higher funding for neglected diseases, Alex Lankowski, a BostonUniversity student that participated in the UAEM research, told IPS.

Over the past three decades, some 1,556 new drugs were created, UAEM reports, but only 21 – less than two percent – were for neglected diseases.

“Universities are non-profit institutions operating in the public interest, heavily funded by government grants – meaning taxpayer-funded sources – so students know this means they have a special responsibility to serve the public good,” Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, president of the UAEM board, said Thursday at the report card’s unveiling.

“Universities regularly position themselves as places of learning, operating for the good of the world. Unfortunately, leading research institutions are not living up to their missions … So, students are demanding that these schools start taking concrete steps.”

The UAEM ranking does not focus solely on neglected diseases. Rather, it uses some 14 metrics to look more broadly at whether academic institutions are investing in research that addresses the health of poor communities worldwide.

This includes how those schools are licensing any research discoveries for commercial development, particularly whether they are doing so in socially responsible ways that ensure that related products will be affordable in developing countries. It also includes looking at university programming aimed at creating a subsequent generation of global health practitioners, as well as analysing the extent to which those attempts include a focus on low-income countries and quality of health worldwide.

Under these parametres – the data for which comes only from self-reported, publicly available sources – some of the world’s highest-profile universities fare poorly. Out of 54 schools listed, for instance, 15 are given “D” ratings, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (at 39th), New YorkUniversity (40) and ColumbiaUniversity (45).

By deadline, none of these schools had responded to request for comment for this story.

Clear challenge

Kiddell-Monroe notes that global health is no longer the sole prerogative of the United Nations or private foundations. Rather, universities are “increasingly a site of key research and development in medicine – a role that is only set to increase,” she says. “For this reason, we need to examine the impact they’re having and hold them to account.”

Researchers have estimated that up to a third of new medicines are developed within the university system, including at least a quarter of current HIV/AIDS treatments.

“Universities play a huge role, yet we really need to consider this role a bit more carefully,” Dr. Unni Karunakara, international president of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a humanitarian group, told reporters Thursday.

“It is a problem not only when universities are failing to conduct research on diseases that afflict the developing world. But further, when a university discovers a lifesaving new medicine and licenses it to a drug company in such a way that developing world patients can’t afford – that impedes global health.”

Karunakara notes that Glivec, the anti-cancer drug whose renewed patent was recently denied by the Supreme Court of India, was developed largely through research done in universities. It was subsequently priced out of the market in developing countries, however, when the drug was licensed to the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis.

“If universities make commitments to prioritise low-income communities, we can go a long way towards improving global public health,” Karunakara says. “Universities have a big role in making sure their research is translated into affordable medications for people in developing countries.”

The study does turn up some mixed data in this regard. For instance, 21 of the universities reported having come up with standards for socially responsible licensing, while more than half of research licenses are “non-exclusive” – though that figure drops to around a third for medical technologies.

Further, “Self-reporting universities rarely seek to patent their technologies in developing countries, at least within the first year of disclosure, meaning that generic drug manufacturers could develop affordable developing-world medical products from these discoveries without fear of patent restrictions,” a report accompanying the report card states.

“Even in the emerging BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), universities sought patents on new technologies less than 9% of the time, and less than 2% for all other low- and middle-income countries.”

Still, “provisions to promote global affordability in exclusive licenses” were found to be “exceedingly rare”, being included less than 11 percent of the time.

Together, these statistics present a “clear challenge” to universities, MSF’s Karunakara says: “As institutions dedicated to the public good, now is the time for them to step up and play a major role in improving health worldwide.”

In Chile, not only do all people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS receive treatment, but the country also has advanced mechanisms for monitoring outcomes of the antiretroviral therapy.

“Treatment is available in many other parts of the world, but no one knows whether or not it is working,” Marcelo Wolff, an infectologist who studies HIV/AIDS at the University of Chile, told IPS.

In this South American country, “coverage extends to nearly everyone living with HIV,” added Wolff, who won a Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award this year, which recognises innovative research that has made a notable contribution to improved clinical care in the field of internal medicine.

A red ribbon, the global symbol of the fight against AIDS. Credit: Gary van der Merwe CC BY-SA 3.0

Officially, some 22,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS in Chile, although the real number could be between 40,000 and 70,000, Wolff said.

“It is estimated that there are two to three undiagnosed people for every diagnosed person,” he said, “which means the total would be between 0.3 and 0.4 percent of the population over the age of 15” in this country of 16.5 million people.

The approach involves a monitoring system in 32 public healthcare centres around the country, which makes it possible to take timely measures addressing the specific needs of each case.

The monitoring is carried out by the Chilean AIDS Cohort (ChiAC), established by a team of professionals like Wolff, who joined a multidisciplinary and non-governmental network, SIDA Chile (AIDS Chile), founded in 2003.

“Knowing about what is happening to the people being treated is the main novelty,” Wolff said. “And the Chilean AIDS Cohort has been able to study that: the survival, morbidity and hospitalisation rates, and labour and social reinsertion.”

The same monitoring system is used for all patients taking the life-extending antiretroviral drugs, to evaluate the results of the therapy.

The data generated is used to inform policy-making. And specific measures can be taken to adapt the therapy to local conditions, based on the results. The information gathered also contributes to global assessments of the spread of HIV/AIDS.

“Results from developed countries and poor nations have traditionally been published, but there were few evaluations from the large group of middle-income nations, and the Chilean AIDS Cohort has provided that,” Wolff said.

Law 19,779, approved in December 2001, guarantees the rights of all Chileans to prevention, diagnosis, control and treatment, and safeguards the free and equal exercise of other rights and freedoms of those living with HIV/AIDS, expressly prohibiting discrimination in access to education, work and healthcare.

In addition, the “universal access of explicit guarantees plan”, which guarantees the right to treatment, with specific guidelines, was expanded to those living with HIV/AIDS.

And the “national programme of expanded access to antretroviral therapy”, in effect since 2001, ensures access to the latest treatment options for all patients.

As a result of the alliance between the government’s national programme and the Chilean AIDS Cohort, “mortality has been reduced by more than 80 percent, and the rate of hospitalisation has gone down, which has made it possible for people to take up their day-to-day lives again.

“Among our patients, we have achieved results comparable to those of developed countries,” he said.

Based on this joint effort, the social and economic conditions of those living with HIV/AIDS have improved, said Manuel Jorquera, the coordinator of the AIDS advocacy group Vivo Positivo. “There is more timely treatment, and it is guaranteed, along with the free monitoring,” he told IPS.

These benefits are tangible for Martín (not his real name), a 36-year-old journalist who was diagnosed with HIV four years ago.

“It was difficult to digest at first, but I had the support of several of my friends who are also living with HIV and who have managed to deal with the disease really well,” he told IPS.

Although HIV/AIDS remains underreported, a higher proportion of cases are now documented. Since the first cases were detected in this country in 1984, the highest AIDS (six out of 100,000 people) and HIV (9.6 out of 100,000) notification rates were recorded in 2011, according to the Health Ministry’s Epidemiology Department.

The evolution of HIV/AIDS in Chile is in line with global trends that reflect a 20 percent reduction in the number of new infections worldwide and a 17 percent increase in the number of people living with HIV in 2011, compared to 2001, when the AIDS epidemic was at its height.

There are 34 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, according to the latest global report, published by UNAIDS Tuesday Nov. 22.

But not every aspect involving HIV/AIDS has been solved in Chile.

Martín said that in his company people do not “officially” know he is gay, although “many suspect it.” What they definitely do not know, he said, is that he is HIV-positive and receives antiretroviral treatment at a public hospital.

“I have a totally normal lifestyle,” he said. “I go to work, I go out with my friends. But not even my mother knows I am infected. It would just destroy her.”

His fears are not unfounded. Despite the advances made at the level of public policies in Chile, deep-rooted discrimination persists, which exacerbates the fear of having an AIDS test.

“People feel the real fear of suffering from discrimination once it is known that they are infected,” Wolff said.

In his view, the most important challenge “is to keep people from being infected,” and to do that, “prevention campaigns must be much more direct than they have been.”

In addition, he said, “we have to try and diagnose everyone who is living with HIV/AIDS, and extend treatment to them.”

But to do that, the stigma surrounding the disease must be fought, he added.

Dengue patients at Cambodia's National Paediatric hospital. Credit: Erika Pineros/IPS

By Vincent MacIsaac
PHNOM PENH, Sep 13 2012 (IPS)

Public health experts in Cambodia are unenthused by reports of trials for a dengue vaccine conducted in neighbouring Thailand, saying it will be too costly for those who need it most – children in the least developed and developing countries.

“Of course, they cannot come out with a vaccine that costs 20 cents,” Dr. Philip Buchy, head of the virology unit at the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia, told IPS.

Buchy was referring to the Paris-based pharmaceutical company Sanofi SA’s dengue vaccine efficacy trials, the results of which were published in the British medical journal Lancet, this month.

Dr. Stephen Bjorges, leader of the vector-borne disease team at the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Cambodia, agrees. Even if Sanofi succeeds “funds would need to be mobilised” to cover the cost of inoculating children in Cambodia, he said.

A dengue epidemic that raged through Cambodia during the first eight months of the year landed more than 30,000 people in hospital, the majority of them children.

According to the Lancet report, Sanofi’s vaccine offers some protection against three of the four serotypes of the dengue virus – about 30 percent against serotype one and from 80 to 90 percent against serotypes three and four.

However, Sanofi’s vaccine does not protect against serotype two, which was circulating in the study area during the trial, giving the vaccine an overall efficacy rate of 30.2 percent, the report said.

Large-scale phase-3 trials are underway on 31,000 children and adolescents in Latin America and Southeast Asia, Sanofi said in a press statement timed with the release of the Lancet report.

According to the Reuters news agency, the company has already invested more than 430 million dollars in a new factory in France to produce the vaccine.

WHO’s Bjorges said that if the phase 3 trials proved the vaccine was effective, its initial market likley would be tourists from wealthy nations and the military, a view Buchy agrees with.

Buchy doubted, however, that an effective vaccine was around the corner. “The vaccine is not for tomorrow,” he said. “Dengue epidemics still have good days ahead of them.”

Still, both doctors expect increasing investment in vaccines and vaccine-related research as global warming expands the range of the mosquito that transmits dengue into southern Europe and the United States.

Developed countries are beginning to factor the costs of dengue treatment into their long-range healthcare budgets, while pharmaceutical companies have identified a potentially lucrative, emerging market, Buchy said. “Global warming is providing a shortcut for vaccine research.”

“Interest in vaccines is going to grow exponentially now that there is some success with a vaccine,” Bjorges said.

The European Union provided more than 10 million dollars for three dengue-related research projects in Southeast Asia earlier this year, including one in Cambodia to investigate the role that asymptomatic carriers play in transmission, Buchy said.

“If we can identify a gene that is protective this may allow us to develop drugs for treatment and vaccination,” he added.

Funding for prevention and control of epidemics in poor countries remains scant, however. The budget for Cambodia’s national dengue control programme is about 500,000 dollars, most of it provided by the Asian Development Bank.

Bjorges says one reason for the lack of funding for prevention and control is that it has shown little success. “Dengue control is 50 years old and everything that has been thought of has been tried.”

Breeding sites have to be eradicated weekly in order to prevent the mosquito that transmits the virus from emerging from its larvae, and this requires changes in human behaviour that have proven difficult to sustain on a weekly basis, Bjorges explained.

Another problem may be that those who allocate global health funds rely on short-term cost-benefit models, Bjorges said. They are under pressure to produce quick, quantifiable results for the funds they allocate, and dengue prevention and control projects do not fit these models, he explained.

Buchy was less pessimistic about the possibility of changing human behaviour. “Behaviour change is possible, but it requires more investment in education.”

Buchy’s view is echoed by Prof. Duch Moniboth of Cambodia’s National Pediatric Hospital that treated 1,673 children for dengue in the first seven months of this year. “There is not enough education about dengue – how to prevent infection and how to eradicate breeding sites.”

New research, however, suggests that dengue is far more prevalent in Cambodia than previously calculated, underscoring the need for increased investment in prevention.

The disease is underreported partly because Cambodia’s dengue surveillance system relies on data from state-run hospitals and charitable children’s hospitals. Cases treated at private hospitals and clinics are not reported to the health ministry.

Charitable hospitals treating dengue patients in Cambodia have been pleading for donations after being inundated with patients in May. The National Paediatric Hospital has been relying on nursing students to treat children who spill into the hallways and the foyer around the main stairwell.

The hospital receives a mere 20 dollars per patient, regardless of how long the child stays, Moniboth said. On average, doctors receive monthly salaries of about 125 dollars, while nurses are paid about 75 dollars, he said.

With such meager funding for healthcare what is needed is a cheap vaccine, Moniboth said.

Pakistan needs affordable solutions to reducing maternal deaths. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Sep 12 2012 (IPS)

“I can’t imagine life without misoprostol,” says Dr. Azra Ahsan, a gynaecologist and obstetrician who has, for more than a decade, been using the controversial drug to stop women from bleeding to death after delivery.

Originally intended for treating gastric ulcers misoprostol has since 2000 been gaining in popularity for its ability to induce labour and stop post partum haemorrhage (PPH).

“I knew that it can save women from dying long before 2009 when it was registered for use in Pakistan,” said Ahsan, a member of the government’s National Commission on Maternal and Neonatal Health.

WHO guidelines advocate the use of misoprostol against PPH, while the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) suggests using the drug in situations where regular ‘uterotonic’ drugs like oxytocin and ergometrine are not available.

Doctors like Ahsan are dismayed at moves to get WHO to reverse its listing in April 2011 of misoprostol among essential medicines that “satisfy the healthcare needs of the majority of the population” and are  “available at all times in adequate amounts and in appropriate dosage forms, at a price the community can afford.”

Findings of scientific studies published in the August issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine are being cited in suggesting that WHO should “rethink its recent decision to include misoprostol on the essential medicines list.”

Allyson Pollock, who led the study, stated that there is insufficient evidence to suggest that misoprostol works in preventing PPH. Instead, she urges poor countries to improve primary care and prevent anaemia to lower the risk of haemorrhage following delivery.

Ahsan, however, says that in Pakistan some 80 percent of pregnancy cases end up with the mother’s uterus failing to contract naturally after delivery, calling for the use of uterotonic medicines to reduce bleeding.

“Nearly 27 percent of maternal deaths in Pakistan are caused by excessive blood loss after childbirth,” Ahsan explained to IPS.

According to the latest Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (2006), Pakistan’s maternal mortality ratio stands at 276 for every 100,000 live births, and is among the highest in South Asia.

Bleeding, the leading cause of maternal deaths worldwide, is defined by the WHO as blood loss greater than 500 ml following a delivery.

The fact that misoprostol is also misused in Pakistan – and other developing countries like Brazil – to induce abortion cheaply, has added to controversies over the drug.

“I don’t care if people think it is used, misused or even abused…I know it saves mothers from dying,” says Ahsan.

Unlike other uterotonics, misoprostol has the advantage that it does not need refrigeration for storage and can be easily administered orally by trained birth attendants, Ahsan said.

A joint statement by FIGO and the International Confederation of Midwives states: “… in home births without a skilled attendant, misoprostol may be the only technology available to control PPH.”

Zulfiqar Bhutta, head of women and child health at the Aga Khan University, Karachi, and member of the independent expert review group for maternal and child health to the United Nations secretary-general, agrees with Pollock that misoprostol needs to be evaluated more robustly.

“But I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water yet,” Bhutta told IPS. “There is a need to increase its use in the right circumstances and also carefully monitor misuse. It is no magic bullet and should not lead to complacency in provision of essential maternal services,” he said.

“I think the point of the paper published recently is to try and separate  science from messianic zeal,” says Bhutta who is also co-chair of ‘Countdown to 2015’, a global scientific and advocacy group tracking progress towards the U.N. Millennium Development Goal Five pertaining to maternal health.

“Misoprostol is promising and we should do our best to evaluate its safe use,” said Bhutta. “But, there are people in Pakistan who are recommending large scale distribution to families for use in all births. Will this be cost-effective or indeed safe?”

Pollock’s study has stirred international concern. International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Upeka de Silva told IPS in an e-mail that if WHO withdraws misoprostol, it would mean “countless women will be denied life-saving care and forced to suffer pregnancy-related complications which are entirely preventable.”

“We are fully aware that all studies have limitations and that continued research on best practices for maternal care is needed,” de Silva said.

“However, for the purposes of meeting the urgent needs of women, particularly in rural, underserved communities, we are confident about being guided by the abundant literature and expert evidence supporting the safety and effectiveness of misoprostol for multiple reproductive health indications,” de Silva said.

Further, she said: “The increasing number of clients provided with safe abortion services, treatment for incomplete abortion and PPH through clinics run by our member associations is further evidence that misoprostol should remain available and accessible.”

“It’s alright to stir confusion sitting in cushy offices, but the ground reality in Pakistan is quite different,” said Ahsan. “The conditions we work under are very, very constrained…let’s not forget the hot temperatures and long power outages (causing refrigeration failure).”

By Kara Santos
MANILA, Aug 27 2012 (IPS)

This year’s floods, one of the worst in Philippine history, destroyed a staggering 57 million dollars worth of crops, pushing  this climate vulnerable country to implement disaster risk reduction measures.

“We used to schedule our harvest season around the wet and dry months. But now you can never tell,” says Teresita Duque, a rice farmer in the Nueva Ecija province of the Central Luzon region, the ‘rice granary’ of the Philippines.

“The sky suddenly darkens, and the rains just fall,” Duque, who uses native rice varieties and eco-fertiliser on her farm, told IPS in an interview in Manila.

Monsoon rains enhanced by Typhoon Haikui near China had already been drenching Luzon, the Philippines’ main island, for several days when, from Aug. 6-7, nearly two months worth of rain fell on Metro Manila and several provinces in Luzon.

At least 95 people perished in the ensuing floods and landslides, with nearly a million others forced to evacuate their homes.

As the Philippines tries to emerge from years of agricultural backwardness and attain food self-sufficiency, farmers, non-government organisations (NGOs) and government agencies are trying to map out strategies that can mitigate the effects of weather patterns gone wild.

Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), a non-profit agricultural research centre based in Los Banos, Laguna, believe that a flood resistant variety of rice, dubbed ‘submarino’ for its ability to withstand two weeks of submergence, could be one answer.

Last year, when typhoons Nessat and Nalgae devastated Central Luzon, farmers who had planted ‘submarino’ were able to harvest their crops even after their paddies had been submerged for nearly a week.

Glenn Gregorio, senior scientist and plant breeder at IRRI, told IPS that several ‘climate-change ready’ rice varieties, including drought-resistant varieties, are being developed at the institute.

“When you talk about floods in the country, you often see images of urban areas with cars floating and people stranded on their rooftops, but the farmers are really the worst affected,” Gregorio told IPS in a telephone interview.

The farmers’ group ‘Sarilaya’ agrees that while agriculture in the Philippines needs to adapt to climate change, it is best to stick to naturally resilient native varieties rather than go in for hybrids developed in laboratories.

Sarilaya workers say that hybrid varieties are dependent on expensive chemical-based fertilisers which, in the long run, ruin the soil and harm the health of farmers and communities.

“Extreme weather patterns are making the agricultural sector more vulnerable than ever before,” said Pangging Santos, advocacy officer at Sarilaya that works to empower farmers like Duque. “What used to be considered normal is no longer normal.”

“There are many different native varieties that still need to be tested, but the experience of our farmers shows that native varieties are more sustainable than hybrid varieties in the long run,” Santos told IPS.

Sarilaya runs a farming school and model eco-farms in Northern Luzon where farmers learn how to make their own organic fertiliser. Farmers are taught to make pesticides from locally available ingredients instead of buying costly chemical-based insecticides and sprays.

Duque said where she used to spend at least 223 dollars on farm inputs for one cropping, she now spends less than 16 dollars, mostly on organic fertiliser and pesticides.

“We need to change our mindsets about climate change strategies and look at long-term sustainability,” said Santos.

Sarilaya’s strategy of promoting organic farming is in line with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s vision of ‘climate-smart agriculture’.

Hideki Kanamaru of the Climate, Energy and Tenure Division of the FAO says climate-smart agriculture is about sustainably increasing productivity. It is also about adaptation and mitigation by reducing greenhouse gases from agricultural production without compromising on food security.

Kanamaru introduced FAO’s vision during a symposium held in February by the Philippines department of agriculture, which was attended by policy makers, scientists and practitioners from the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation nations and select organisations.

The essence of FAO’s climate-smart farming is careful use of natural resources such as land, water, soil and genetic material as well as good practices that include conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, agro-forestry and sustainable diets.

While the government is providing free rice seeds and crop insurance to farmers in Luzon – where crops have been severely damaged by floodwaters and heavy rains – the country’s climate change commission admits that it may be too late to meet this year’s rice harvest targets.

In 2010, the Philippines topped the list of rice importers when it bought up 2.5 million tonnes of rice. While determined efforts towards self-sufficiency have brought the figure down to 860,000 tonness in 2011, plans to drop imports further have gone awry.

The national climate change action plan says that sensitivity to weather fluctuations “will greatly affect the country’s production and have a domino effect on our target of self-sufficiency by 2013.”

The plan notes: “The Philippines, being archipelagic and because of its location, is one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change…ranking highest in the world in terms of vulnerability to tropical cyclone occurrence.”

When President Benigno S. Aquino III signed into law the People’s Survival Fund (PSF), on Aug. 17, by amending the Climate Change Act of 2009, it was not a moment too soon.

“As we have seen clearly over the past few weeks, there is a pressing need to financially support disaster prevention efforts of local government units,” said Senator Loren Legarda, the driving force behind the 2009 law, at the launch of the PSF.

Worth 23 million dollars annually, the PSF will finance adaptation programmes and projects based on the National Strategic Framework on Climate Change. The fund may be augmented by donations, endowments, grants and contributions.

“The signing of the law signifies the president’s commitment to better prepare the country for erratic weather patterns and climate change,” said Elpidio Peria, convenor of Aksyon Klima, a coalition of 40 civil society organisations working on climate change.

Aksyon Klima released this month an e-toolkit (www.aksyonklima.com) for mainstreaming disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation and helping local governments plan for extreme weather.

*With Art Fuentes

Researcher David Still has found a way to contain the pathogens in human waste in order to use it as a fertiliser. Credit: Yuven Gounden/IPS

By Yuven Gounden
PRETORIA, South Africa, Jul 4 2012 (IPS)

As South Africa grapples with reducing its sanitation backlog, scientists seem to have found a way to reduce the build up while simultaneously combatting the country’s food insecurity. The solution? Safely using human waste as fertiliser.

Although almost 11 million South Africans have been served with basic sanitation since 1994, more than 13.3 million people had not yet accessed basic sanitation services by 2008, according to the country’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

But in addition to this, South Africa’s pit latrines are filling up faster than their expected design life, according to the Water Research Commission (WRC).

“Only one third of municipalities have a budget to maintain on-site sanitation. If pits fill up, all the hard work that was done to address the sanitation backlog will be wasted. Why not use faecal sludge (FS) to address the growing problem of food insecurity by planting fruit trees? Or use the sludge to cultivate trees for fuel or paper production?” asked WRC researcher David Still. The result was the formation of the project titled “What happens when pit latrines get full.”

“It is clear that in our country the use of vacuum tankers is not always a solution because of access problems, and also because of the foreign objects found in pit latrines,” he said.

Human excreta or FS have valuable nutrients such as Nitrogen, Phosphates and Potassium and the average person excretes enough of this per year to sufficiently fertilise 300 to 400 square metres of crops.

However, using FS as a fertiliser can be hazardous because of the pathogens it contains, especially if it is used for surface spreading and where edible crops are cultivated. There is also a risk that the FS could contaminate groundwater.

“We looked at the possibility of harnessing the nutrient value of the sludge whilst containing the hazard posed by the pathogens until they died off,” said Still.

In order to find a way to contain the pathogens in the FS, research was conducted on two pilot sites, one in Umlazi and the other in Karkloof, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The local municipality and the South African Paper and Pulp Industry (SAPPI) respectively own the sites used.

Still and his team discovered that by burying the FS in pits and planting on top of it, pathogens were contained and eventually died off.

Trenches of about 0.75 metres in depth were dug and partly filled with FS of varying volumes. Two control sites where no FS was added were also monitored. The trees in the area were monitored for growth and volume those planted above the FS showed significant growth and volume, “as much as 80 percent”.

In order to test for the presence of FS pathogens, the researchers searched for the eggs of the large roundworm, a hardy parasite. If the eggs were found, it meant that the FS still contained pathogens and was harmful.

“Analysis of sludge extracted at periodic intervals indicated that no roundworms could be found after a period of 30 months after burial in the ground,” Still said.

Sfundo Nkomo, an engineer with Partners in Development, tested for microbes at the Umlazi site.

“One has to monitor the situation because of the risks involved. It is clear that the technology works and that the plants have nice dark green leaves. Of the nine rows of planted trees, those with the sludge treatment were bigger and better developed.”

Groundwater near the entrenchment sites was also monitored to determine whether the sludge affected water quality. At the Umlazi site, which is flat and sandy with deep soils, no impact was observed. However, at the site near Karkloof, which is sloping with shallow soils, a small increase in nitrate concentrations in the groundwater immediately after rainfall was observed.

It showed researchers that sites selected for deep row entrenchment should ideally be flattish and have deep soils.

Lindiwe Khoza’s house in Umlazi was selected as a test site. The sludge was buried in the ground here and citrus and peach trees were planted on top.

“The fruit grows much faster and it seems to be tastier and juicier than fruit bought at supermarkets. We now enjoy fruit from our own garden,” a delighted Khoza told IPS through a translator.

The land management programme leader at Sappi Forests, Giovanni Sale, said that they had also seen a marked increase in tree growth in the areas where deep row entrenchment was used.

“This improvement in tree growth, however, unfortunately does not make up for the very high site preparation. Land preparation costs were in the region of thirty times more than conventional forestry practice. Therefore, the economics alone do not make this a viable commercial practice at present,” Sale said.

He added that if the local municipality were to start a deep row entrenchment project on their own land, and crop it with plantation trees, Sappi would assist.

“Sappi would be in a position to offer superior planting stock, technical assistance and a market for this timber. If the municipality were to adopt this practice and if smaller volumes of sludge are buried at regular intervals using labour, a small work force could be kept busy,” he said.
He did add that it was “a once-off experiment.”

Jay Bhagwan, the director of Water Use and Waste Management at the WRC, said that deep row trenching could provide both food and fuel security for communities.

“Communities can grow fuel wood trees or fruit trees according to their requirements. Plant growth and fruit development are greatly improved with the application of the sludges. The technology has enormous potential. Making sanitation work also raises such exciting possibilities for smart management of our resources,” Bhagwan said.

According to Still, providing sanitation is not about building more toilets. “It is about managing sanitation smartly.”

Following numerous warnings issued by geologists, health scientists and environmental experts throughout the United States, Europe is now well aware of the high ecological and health risks associated with the exploitation of shale gas fields.

Shale gas extraction releases high amounts of methane, which contributes significantly to global warming. Credit: ProgressOhio/CC-BY-2.0

Yet, despite ample knowledge and strong public opposition from various local communities, the recently discovered shale gas deposits across Europe – in particular in France, Germany, and Poland – are highly coveted and will likely soon be exploited by the traditional oil, gas and mineral multinationals.

This year, test drillings are expected to begin in more than 150 locations in Poland, which allegedly contains the richest shale gas fields in Europe. In Germany, local electricity providers have obtained rights to drill in numerous localities in the Northern federal state of Lower Saxony. The French government, meanwhile, has chosen more than 70 sites for drilling, mostly along the Mediterranean coast, around the southern city of Marseille.

Similar projects are under way in Switzerland, Britain, Sweden, and other European countries.

Local communities and environmental groups opposed to the projects argue that the geochemical procedures necessary to liquefy shale gas pose such grave threats to human health and surrounding ecologies that governments should prohibit them.

The recent Oscar-nominated documentary film Gasland by U.S. journalist Josh Fox has fuelled opposition against this burning issue by laying bare the health and environmental risks associated with the oil extraction process.

A week ago, the film was screened in the picturesque Provencal village of Moissac Bellevue, some 650 kilometres south of Paris and just north of Marseille, for an audience of several hundred people. Among the viewers were mayors of numerous neighbouring villages, mobilised by the growing concern within their own constituencies.

“Exploitation of shale gas fields in the region constitutes an enormous risk of ground water contamination due to the massive use of chemicals in the process,” Pierre Jugy, mayor of Tourtour, another Provencal village near Marseille, which will eventually be affected by the drillings, told IPS.

“Given the ambiguity of national legislation on the matter, and the health risks for our citizens, I ask all mayors in the region to prohibit the drillings within their jurisdictions,” he added. “It is our responsibility as elected representatives of our region to guarantee that such risks do not (become a reality).”

The ‘ambiguity’ Jugy was referring to arose from a government decision to suspend its own drilling permits, and commission yet another study on the health and environmental impacts of shale gas exploitation.

Similar studies are under way in Britain, Germany, and other European countries.

No more ‘fracking’

The most controversial procedure associated with shale gas is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In order to liquefy the gas, wells are dug and then injected with millions of litres of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure, in an attempt to ‘fracture’ the geological masses containing the shale gas.

Benzene is one of the many highly dangerous chemicals used in the process, while similar chemical compounds mix with, and finally contaminate, underground water supplies.

The health and environmental claims against fracking and similar procedures are well founded: In a recent case study, benzene was found in ground water in the north German region of Allerdorf, in Lower Saxony, near a drilling station.

“Last December, we took water samples at a location just above the pipelines of the drilling,” Heinrich Cluever, a local farmer, told IPS. “We found benzene in a concentration of 4,000 microgrammes per litre of water.”

A benzene concentration of as few as five microgrammes per litre is considered carcinogenic, according to Hermann Kruse, professor of chemistry and toxicology at the university of Kiel, located some 300 kilometres west of Berlin.

“Benzene is one of the most dangerous chemical materials we know,” Kruse told IPS. “It is one of the very few chemicals we definitively know causes cancer.”

Benzene has also been found in other regions in Lower Saxony, where local populations have been experiencing extremely high rates of cancer. In Allerdorf alone – a village of less than 30 households – dozens of cases of cancer have been detected.

These ominous signs are widespread and have led to calls for a complete ban on fracking in Germany. So far, however, the government has only pledged to establish strict rules for the projects but stopped short of imposing a ban.

Apart from localised health risks to communities living in the surrounding area, shale gas extraction is also hazardous to the planet as a whole, since fracking releases high amounts of methane, which contribute significantly to global warming. In general, fracking is believed to produce a highly negative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions balance.

Environmental activists believe that, if the European Union is serious about reducing the region’s contribution to climate change, it will stop drilling altogether.

Experts also predict that the shale gas projects will fail in Europe for a host of other reasons.

“On the one (hand), the geology is extremely complicated,” Ingo Kapp, researcher at the German Geological Centre in Potsdam, near Berlin, told IPS. “On the other side, Europe’s high population density makes the drillings much more difficult. Finally, the environmental rules are stricter (here) than in the U.S.”

Kapp added that the European geological structures containing gas lay much deeper than in the U.S.

“They are also smaller, and of a different geological nature, which makes drilling much more expensive,” Kapp told IPS.

Such data is corroborated by GASH, a joint venture funded by leading energy multinationals for coordinating corporate research on shale gas in Europe.

“Western Europe is a region that has been said to have only minor shale gas resources,” GASH said in a communiqué. “One reason for this is Europe’s strong compartmentalisation of the geological setting compared to the large sedimentary basins in the U.S.”

For such reasons, Kapp predicted, “A gas revolution (similar to the one) in the U.S. won’t happen here.”

However, some troubling cases should serve as a reminder to the European activist community that they still face a long battle against multinationals and governments with vested interests in extraction projects.

For example, in Poland, where well over a hundred drilling projects are slated to commence in 2012, environmental activists’ efforts to discuss the risks with local populations have been hindered by the fact that government officials have branded their public education campaigns “national treason”.

By Isaiah Esipisu
MAKUENI DISTRICT, Kenya, May 22 2011 (IPS)

Gadam sorghum was introduced to semi-arid regions of eastern Kenya as a way for farmers to improve their food security and earn some income from marginal land. The hardy, high-yielding sorghum variety has not only thrived in harsh conditions, it has won a place in the hearts – and plates – of local farmers.

Gadam sorghum. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

KASAL, the Kenya Arid and Semi-Arid Lands programme of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), introduced gadam sorghum in eastern Kenya in 2009 for commercial production.

“The programme is a public-private partnership with an aim to improve income and food security among smallholder farmers in arid and semi arid parts of Kenya,” said Dr David Miano, the programme’s national coordinator.

The idea was to introduce a viable crop for largely marginalised land in Kenya’s arid zones, giving farmers there an additional crop that can sustain their livelihoods.

Eastern Kenya is characterised by drought, sometimes going without rain for two to three years at a stretch. After careful selection from several existing sorghum varieties, scientists say that gadam has been found to be the best placed variety able to survive and yield well in such tough climatic conditions.

“Apart from being ideal for beer brewing, it is as nutritious as any other variety of sorghum,” said David Karanja, a research scientist at KARI and the principal investigator for the Gadam Sorghum Production and Marketing Project

Sorghum making converts

Sorghum is not a new crop in this part of the country. Farmers here have always grown red sorghum varieties, but in small quantities as few people cared to eat it, and there was no market for it.

Despite persistent drought in this semi-arid part of the country, farmers have for years opted to grow maize, which is highly vulnerable to the conditions.

Gadam is a sorghum variety from Southern Sudan. It is early-maturing, high yielding, and is highly adapted to stressful drought prone areas. KARI is in the process of crossbreeding it with other varieties – hopefully to come up with a more superior variety.

“When the government introduced this sorghum variety for the first time in 2009, I was reluctant to take it on despite the promise of a ready market,” said Teresia Munyau, the chairlady of the Tears of Women Farmers Self Help Group and one of 3,200 farmers who took part in the project.

She committed two hectares to sorghum – a quarter of the land owned by her family in the village of Mwaani, in Makueni District. She harvested twelve 90-kilogramme bags of grain. Through the self-help group, she sold eight bags to Smart Logistics, the firm contracted by the breweries company to purchase sorghum on its behalf at 1530 Kenyan shillings per bag (17 dollars), and kept four for domestic use.

She plans to plant sorghum on four and a half hectares next planting season.

“Seventeen shillings per kilo – paid by the breweries company – is far higher than the Sh 10 or even less paid for the same quantity of maize, during the harvesting period,” said Veronica Mutindi, a farmer from Kitwasi village. “It’s a premium price, given that before we got access to the commercial market, we used to sell a kilo of red sorghum at five shillings a kilo to local consumers.”

Makueni district farmers were happy with the yield, but researchers say that an outbreak of quelea birds was a major setback. “In some areas, the birds consumed more than a half anticipated yield while still in farms. This means that another season without such an outbreak will guarantee much higher yields,” said Karanja.

Crop proves unexpectedly popular

The initial plan, supported by EABL and KASAL, was for clusters of farmers to combine their harvests for sale to Smart Logistics which would further consolidate the crop and deliver it to the brewers in bulk.

However, only 875 of the more than 3,000 farmers who took part in the pilot project, agreed to sell even part of their harvest to East African Breweries – originally expected to purchase the entire crop.

Like many other farmers, Munyau says it does not make sense to sell her grain when the countryside is expecting drought in the next few months. “I will not go begging for food and alms from humanitarian organisations for my children to eat,” the mother of four told IPS. “That is why I will make sure that I have at least three bags of sorghum in my house at any time.”

“It was due to the plentiful harvests that we started exploring new methods of cooking sorghum, a move that has made the crop popular in just a year,” said Munyau.

Locals have taken to grinding it into flour to make ugali (the flour is mixed with boiling water) or porridge. They also mix the grain with rice, pigeon peas, or beans and other legumes to make delicious meals.

The KASAL program, which is funded by the European Union and the Kenyan government, has now been extended to 3,800 more farmers in other parts of the country, including the Coastal, Rift Valley and Western regions. “We are up-scaling because so far we have not been able to meet the commercial market demand,” said Karanja.

Last year, EABL was seeking 12,000 tonnes of sorghum; farmers in the project delivered close to one thousand tonnes. This year, the company wants even more.

“The breweries company has requested us to supply them with 24 million kilogramnes of sorghum. That is why we must introduce as many farmers as possible to sustain this growing commercial market demand,” said the researcher.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WINDHOEK, Apr 3 2011 (IPS)

As water resources in Southern Africa come under pressure from growing population, climate change and increasing industrial and agricultural use, economic accounting for water is among the tools that could aid better management.

Fetching water from a Namibian canal: accurate data on water use is lacking across Southern Africa. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

EAW complements information in the System of National Accounts, the standard tool for economic reporting and planning. It collects and quantifies detailed data about water use to understand the value of non-marketed goods and in so doing better appreciate the true contribution of water to the economy, which is presently underestimated.

“To put it very simply, EAW helps us to better understand the trade-offs that are made when using water,” says Dr Amy Sullivan of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network who heads the Limpopo Basin Development Challenge.

The SADC Economic Accounting of Water Use project set out to establish standard methodologies, raise awareness around water accounting and build capacity for countries to set up their own water accounting systems.

The pilot was run in Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia and Zambia as well as in two river basins, the Orange-Senqu and the Maputo. It revealed several challenges to implementing EAW in the region, including collecting the wide range of data required from numerous institutions and in the case of transboundary river basins, coordinating this across national boundaries.

“EAW requires substantial data and data availability varies greatly among SADC member states,” says Manase.

Economic accounting for water produces six accounts that track quantity and quality of water, as well as its flow into the economy and back out again – including monitoring pollutants in wastewater and sewage. It presents the physical stocks and movements of water alongside the economic figures for productivity of the many sectors that use water as an input.

The picture that emerges provides a more comprehensive valuation of water’s contribution to sectors like agriculture and mining and as a consumer good in its own right in the case of domestic water supply. It also accounts for the environmental value of water, for example in the contribution wetlands make to water purification and flood control.

“Economic accounting of water combines different factors relating to water use such as hydrology, economic assessment of water resources, pollution and social distribution. It is a multidimensional system,” says Sullivan.

“It doesn’t just look at the hydrological component or the economic returns, but also takes ecological sustainability and equity into account. So it is a step up from either taking a purely hydrological, economic or ecological point of view. It is an attempt  to plan and manage water resources on a basin level in the best possible way.”

“Although EAW is a critical tool for efficient and effective management of water resources,” says Manase, “it is not yet widely applied in the SADC region.”

At present, only Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa are compiling water accounts at varying levels of detail.

More accurate assessment of the role water plays in the economy – and the effects of economic uses of water on present and future availability – will aid comparison of benefits across sectors and accurately document inefficient use. It could also help water managers make a strong case for investment in water infrastructure.

“Water accounting started as a research tool, but it is slowly moving on to be a useful tool to inform policy-making,” says Sullivan. “It is still early days, the potential of economic water accounting has not yet been reached, but as the models get more detailed and allow for elaborate scenario-testing EAW will be better suited for decision-making.”

Excerpt:

On Apr. 5, the United Nations Children’s Fund will launch a report on teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone. Teenage pregnancies account for 40 percent of maternal deaths in the country, and the report comes as public health authorities recalibrate strategy to address a problem that endangers both mothers and children.

This young woman from Makeni dropped out of school when she had her first child at 16. Credit: Anna Jeffreys/IRIN

Seventy percent of teenage girls in Sierra Leone are married, according to a 2008 survey by the World Health Organization, in a country where early marriage is supported by traditional practice.

The United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) report, “A Glimpse Into the World of Teenage Pregnancy in Sierra Leone”, states that “such importance is given to girls marrying as virgins that the age of marriage often coincides with the first occurrence of female menstruation”.

Drawing on research conducted in four regions, UNICEF’s report finds the typical consequences of teen pregnancy are social stigma, unstable marriages, poverty and the end of a girl’s education. UNICEF cautions that comprehensive evidence-based data on the phenomenon is still limited, but the issue has become a focus of concern for educators, doctors, politicians and parents alike.

Poverty and stigma

Kadiatu – not her real name – lives in Kissy Mess Mess, in the eastern part of the capital, Freetown, with her three children. Now 27, she recalls how she became pregnant with her first child.

“We were a poor family and I was really in want for virtually everything, from food, clothing, to even paying school charges… so I got this man that was ready to provide all of these, so i yielded to him,” she told IPS.

Her boyfriend was 30; she was just 15 at the time, preparing to take her Basic School Certificate Examination. She was taken to the doctor with what was suspected to be appendicitis – it turned out that she was three months pregnant.

“I told my boyfriend immediately,” Kadiatu recalls.

His reaction? “You have to get an abortion! Just get rid of it!”

“The man – who had been showering me with gifts and telling me all kinds of loving words – denied that he was responsible for the pregnancy,” Kadiatu recounts. She had the baby, but like many others in her position, she dropped out of school.

“I became pregnant again at 17 for almost the same reasons as the first pregnancy. Now I have three children, I am still a single mother and my only means of survival is to hawk fruits in the market and rely on favours from men who promise love,” she says, “but what they really want is to sleep with you and run away afterwards.”

In 2009, village chiefs in one northern province passed bylaws that require that when a schoolgirl falls pregnant, she and the father must both drop out of school. This scheme quickly drew criticism for only compounding the problem of stigma and a high dropout rate.

In Koinadugu District, also in the north, the Biriwa Youth Association for Development took the opposite tack, offering school-age girls between the ages of 12 and 16 the chance to win scholarships to attend university – if they passed regular examinations by a community nurse to “prove” they were virgins. This initiative too was quickly scrapped.

Stigma aggravates problems

In a draft report for the World Health Organisation, Dr Helenlouise Taylor noted that few teens have ante-natal checkups, instead trying to hide their pregnancy or try to abort. This makes early detection of potential problems in a high-risk group very difficult.

For her research, directed towards developing strategies to reduce Sierra Leone’s maternal mortality rate, Taylor visited 14 districts of the country, observing conditions, interviewing health workers and using a questionnaire to collect information about patterns and trends of maternal care as well as training and equipment in health facilities.

In the draft report’s recommendations for teenage pregnancy, Taylor says measures to reduce coerced sex and unsafe abortion and increase access to contraception for adolescents are all important, and makes several important suggestions regarding information and reducing social stigma to encourage young mothers to make use of available health care.

She urges a review of life skills and biology in the school curriculum, as well as tighter links between schools and antenatal clinics – possibly even offering antenatal care at schools. She also calls for appropriate training for health personnel and teachers to help both groups communicate accurate and effective information on sex and birth control to teens.

Maud Droogleever Fortuyn, child protection director for UNICEF in Sierra Leone, told IPS that bringing about changes in behaviour and attitudes will take time. She said UNICEF has been supporting local NGOs conducting baseline surveys to improve understanding of the extent and nature of teenage pregnancy, developing modules to improve knowledge, as well as working with traditional authorities to develop effective bylaws that will support teen mothers, especially with completing school.

By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Apr 1 2011 (IPS)

Clementine Auma was still living in a displaced person’s camp in Gulu district when she acquired the treasure she’s gone into the house to fetch. She re-emerges from her home with a white box in her arms: a solar oven.

Women get a first look at a Sun Oven in northern Uganda. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

“You have to make sure that you see the shadow of the oven while facing the sun, so you have positioned it well to trap the sun,” she says.

Auma is one of a small handful to receive a Sun Oven during a pilot project in southwestern and northern Uganda, testing them before manufacture and sale nationwide.

“It is very good,” she says of her oven,” because you can boil tea even while you are digging in the garden.

Sun Oven

Her oven is a box roughly 50 x 50 centimetres, and 30 centimetres deep. Its outer shell is made of plastic, lined with insulation to keep heat in, and then an inner shell of anodised aluminium and a clever swinging shelf that both allows the hot air in the cooking chamber to circulate all around the pot and automatically levels the base of the oven, which should be tilted towards the sun using an adjustable leg built into the back of the box.

The cooking chamber – matt black to better convert the sun’s rays into heat – is covered with tempered glass to keep the hot air in: the Sun Oven, say its manufacturers, reaches temperatures comparable to a standard oven. The whole ensemble weighs 9.5 kilos.

Margaret Sempijja, says these ovens can be used to cook almost any kind of food, as long as the chef knows how to mix it before putting it in. “Some people don’t know that posho [a staple meal of ground maize] can be prepared in this oven. But posho which is prepared in this oven is wonderful,” she smiles.

Another woman with experience using the solar oven, Saida Matovu, says she has found it both convenient and efficient, but she complains that the pot is very small if one has a large family to feed – and of course the whole apparatus is useless on rainy days.

A larger version of the solar oven is also available, big enough to serve in institutional settings such as a school or an orphanage.

Over 90 percent of Uganda’s population relies on biomass – usually wood – for cooking and heating in rural and urban areas alike. Studies by the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) indicate that firewood and charcoal contribute 88 and 6 percent to the country’s total energy consumption, respectively. Electricity and hydrocarbons account for the remainder.

Appropriate technology

Prince Ronald Mutebi first saw a Sun Oven at a Rotarians’ conference in a Chicago hotel seven years ago and immediately thought that it could be a useful tool to both slow deforestation from harvesting firewood and protect the health of Ugandan women suffering from respiratory diseases linked to long hours spent cooking over a smoky wood fire.

Mutebi, now the Executive Director of Sun Oven Uganda Tek Consult Group, partnered with U.S.-based Sun Oven International to import the stoves which he has since field tested in rural areas. He now plans to set up a manufacturing plant that will distribute the sun stoves across East Africa.

“I knew about the technology but I had never seen the technology this effective. And when I saw it at the conference in my mind I said Ugandan sits just at the equator so we have the abundant sun. So if it works elsewhere, then it will work in Uganda,” Mutebi told IPS in an interview.

He explained that the oven is so well insulated that it can keep food warm for up to four hours, as long as the cooking chamber is not opened.

“It is culturally sensitive: you can cook dinner at 5:00 p.m. and not serve it until later in the night. So it can work in most communities where dinner is normally served in the night [long after the sun has set].”

These ovens were developed in the mid 1980s by Tom Burns, a retired restaurant owner in the United States and long-term member of Rotary International, who set out to make a durable and inexpensive solar oven. Rugged and rust-proof thanks to the use of aluminium, the ovens, according to Mutebi, should have a a fifteen-year lifespan.

Mutebi says the oven will initially be sold in Uganda for the equivalent of 170 dollars, but that price could go down once mass production starts. “Still that cost is high for an average Ugandan. So we’re planning to create sort of a hire-purchase scheme for the ovens, whereby people can pay in installments,” he said.

Spreading the word

Several development groups in Uganda have seen the Sun Oven as an opportunity to bring change in communities. The Nyanya-Kentale Kukama Butonde Group, a local environmental group based in Rakai district in southwestern Uganda is promoting it.

David Sentongo, the group’s chair, told IPS that demand for the ovens is steadily increasing as the communities come to know about its benefits.

“We got fifteen ovens which we distributed to a first group of our members. Out of the fifteen, we gave two to some people in the communities who are not our members, just to show those Sun Ovens are for everyone,” he said.

He wants the group to acquire an industrial-size unit that could be used as a community oven for baking.

Mutebi said Sun Oven Uganda already has the components to assemble 365 solar ovens in the country; he hopes to put them together and on the market before the end of the year.

He told IPS that price remains the biggest obstacle to the ovens rapidly gaining a foothold. Relatively few households will have that much money to put down, but high interest rates for consumer loans make arranging financing a difficult challenge.

Back in Gulu district, Clementine Auma is reluctant to lend her precious oven to anyone, despite its portability. “Some people come to borrow it to make bread, but my fear is that it could get damaged.”

Back into her thatched-roof house it disappears: a valuable tool to protect health and the environment. And to make marvelous, flavourful posho.

Excerpt:

French economist Esther Duflo thinks poverty can be alleviated or even eradicated with the right policies. All it takes is for politicians to “translate research into action,” implementing programmes that have been shown to work.

French economist Esther Duflo Credit: A. D. McKenzie/IPS

But that is easier said than done. Duflo, who last year won the American Economic Association’s prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, acknowledges that it is sometimes frustrating to get policy makers to apply the results of research that could improve people’s lives. Sometimes they do not know the evidence and so cannot take the right approach, she adds.

In April a new book by Duflo and co-author Abhijit Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, will once more turn the spotlight on actions to tackle poverty. The book aims to make 2011 the year that the “economics of poverty” become a key part of international political discussions.

“Fundamentally, I think it is a subject that people are interested in,” Duflo told IPS. “The differences in income between the poor world and the rich world are so great that people have to be interested.”

The 38-year-old Duflo, who is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and who often lectures in France as well, is credited with making development economics “chic”, according to some French reviewers.

Doing her PhD at MIT, Duflo chose to enter an unusual sphere of research — at a time when most students specialised in other fields, and the subject was not as “popular” as it is now becoming.

“It was not considered a fancy area of study,” she says. “There was a generation of people who had started looking at development from other fields. They had their own theories and only a few were economists. What I contributed to doing was to start going into detail. But I did have advisers and mentors.”

Duflo’s major role in the field has been to use research to show which programmes are the most effective in combating poverty. According to MIT, her work “uses randomised field experiments to identify highly specific programmes that can alleviate poverty, ranging from low-cost medical treatments to innovative education programmes.”

In a landmark study, Duflo, along with Banerjee and Rachel Glennerster, executive director of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), discovered that the rate at which families in northern India will immunize their children jumps from about 5 percent to nearly 40 percent when parents are offered a small bag of lentils as an incentive.

Duflo seems an unlikely person to try to argue with those in power. Slightly built and eschewing the glamourous-intelligentsia look for which many French intellectuals are known, she seems at first glance to be a down-at-heel graduate student.

When she begins talking, however, there is no doubting the importance of her research. What she does is backed by scientific evidence, demonstrated by graphs and other tools.

Duflo is also a director of MIT’s J-PAL, an organisation she co-founded in 2003 with Banerjee, MIT’s Ford International Professor of Economics, and Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist who now teaches at Harvard University.

J-PAL’s researchers do scientific studies in various countries, working with national governments as well as non-governmental organisations to implement programmes to eliminate poverty, says Helene Giacobino, the general director of J-PAL Europe.

“Much of our work is to evaluate the different policies or programmes against poverty and to see the impact and effectiveness,” Giacobino told IPS.

Since 2003, more than 235 evaluations have been carried out in 38 different countries, examining unemployment, absenteeism in education, social programmes and other issues.

Many of the evaluations are long-term studies, lasting up to three years or more. In Kenya, for instance, J-PAL’s researchers found that school absenteeism was linked to intestinal worms. When de-worming pills were administered to children, researchers found that absenteeism was reduced by 25 percent.

Since then, the Bill Gates Foundation has supported a programme to provide de-worming medicine to those who need it, and J-PAL helped to start Deworm the World, a non-profit group that helped the Kenyan government treat 3.6 million children in 2009, according to MIT.

In another investigation on the use of mosquito nets in Africa, the J-PAL affiliated researcher Pascaline Dupas showed that people who were given free nets used them just as much as those who bought them.

The findings debunked the myth that people who get things for free do not appreciate or utilise them.

“This showed that it was better to hand out nets freely to people so as to prevent malaria,” said Duflo. “It’s a way of helping those who couldn’t afford to buy them anyway.”

According to many of her colleagues, Duflo brings “something new” to the field of development.

“She’s totally involved, and she contributes to making a change in the world,” Giacobino said.

Duflo herself says that she is motivated by the example of her mother, a doctor who used to travel to developing countries to help victims of war.

“I was always interested in these questions of is there something that can be done to help the lives of the poor,” Duflo said. “I realised that economics was a good angle even if it seems a little remote.”

She said that with the new book and J-PAL, she and her colleagues “hope to try to improve policies that affect the lives of the poor, leading to better health, education, and access to finance.”

By IPS Correspondents
LILONGWE, Mar 31 2011 (IPS)

Post-partum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. A decade of applying research to midwifery practice in one Malawi district demonstrates that PPH is quite easy to prevent.

One in four maternal deaths worldwide is due to post-partum haemorrhage (PPH) – excessive bleeding after childbirth; for Africa the figure is one in three.

Malawi has an extremely high rate of maternal mortality, at 807 women per 100,000 live births, with 25 percent of these due to PPH. But these figures represent an improvement over 2004 when maternal mortality was 1,120 per 100,000 live births.

Prevention

Maternal deaths are overwhelmingly preventable, if warning signs are noted, timely action is taken, and affordable and easy-to-use drugs are available to birth attendants.

Elimase Kamanga, the reproductive health coordinator at Dedza District Hospital in central Malawi, told IPS changes to birthing practices have brought great success to the unit.

“We used to remove the placenta manually before a policy was put in place to for the placenta to come out naturally. The women would bleed uncontrollably in such a situation and many would die due to loss of blood,” said Kamanga.

Research shows that active management of the third stage of labour – during which the umbilical cord is tied off and the placenta is expelled – is key to preventing post-partum haemmorhage. This involves giving the labouring woman oxytocin, controlled cord traction as needed (assisting delivery of the placenta), and massage of the uterus once the placenta has been delivered.

Kamanga said skilled birth attendants are no longer allowed to conduct manual removal of the placenta in Malawi.

“Now a deliberate policy is in place for the administration of active management of the third stage of labour (AMTSL), a medical process for preventing and treating PPH,” said Kamanga.

Challenges

But challenges remain, says the senior midwife. Many women in Malawi give birth outside of a health facility and this is frustrating the efforts to manage birth complications. The 2004 Demographic and Health Survey says up to 43 percent of pregnant women in Malawi give birth without skilled attendants.

“Many women still go to traditional birth attendants and some give birth at home where they are attended to by their mother or mother-in-law. In this case the women do not have quality care and when they bleed heavily they die. Most times such women are brought to a medical facility when it is too late to be given medical help,” said Kamanga.

But the Dedza district where Kamanga works an area where initiatives to reduce maternal mortality are working; a community maternal health programme was set up here in 2000, and not a single maternal death has been registered in Chaponda village since 2006.

The maternal health programme involves local people and traditional leaders in task forces and committees on safe motherhood. Pregnant women are encouraged to visit clinics for antenatal care and to deliver their babies in hospital if possible. The community has enacted by-laws against giving birth at home or at the hands of traditional birth attendants.

Evelyn Kaphuka, 43, a mother of four from Chaponda village, is one woman who had a narrow escape due to post-partum haemmorhage. “I went to a traditional birth attendant when I gave birth to my first born child, who is now 24 years old. I bled a lot soon after he was born.”

She was rushed to the hospital after she fainted. “I was lucky because there was a vehicle in the village belonging to one of my nephews who was visiting from town. I surely would have died otherwise, because it takes close to three hours to get to the hospital on a bicycle, but my nephew was able to get me there within 30 minutes,” said Kaphuka.

For more than a month afterwards she was too weak to even nurse her son.

“I realise the importance of going to hospital to give birth and I encourage all pregnant women in my area to access medical care at birth. The other three children I have given birth to were born at the hospital,” Kaphuka said.

Malawi is working towards sustaining and expanding implementation of measures against PPH, according to Eliza Chodzadza, a lecturer in maternal and child health at University of Malawi’s Kamuzu College of Nursing.

“Active management of third stage of labour is one of the major issues in the midwifery curriculum. It is traditional practice now in every labour ward in Malawi,” said Chodzadza.

Excerpt:

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Mar 29 2011 (IPS)

Talk about foul foundations: the Katwekera Tosha Bio Centre is built on the stuff that goes into toilets. This community centre in the Nairobi slum of Kibera goes well beyond solving sanitation problems – it is a model for green energy, a meeting place for locals, and turning a profit for its operators.

The dire sanitation systems available to the hundreds of thousands living in Kibera, often called Africa’s biggest slum, has been well-documented.

Less talked about than the infamous flying toilets – bags full of faeces tossed as far as possible, neighbours beware! – is the challenge of household energy for the urban poor.

The high, and rising cost of fuel – kerosene, paraffin, charcoal, firewood – takes an enormous bite out of the income of poor households. The use of polluting energy sources in closed spaces levies an additional charge against the health of the poor; the wider environmental implications of fossil fuels or inefficiently burned biomass completes a glum accounting.

Every challenge an opportunity

“The Umande Trust is a rights-based agency which believes that modest resources, strategically invested in support of community-led initiatives, can significantly improve access to water and sanitation for all,” says Paul Muchire, the Trust’s communication manager.

This mission statement has guided the Trust towards partnerships with community-based organisations to improve the living conditions of people in places like Kibera.

The Trust first set out to build toilets and bathrooms, but had a larger vision: TOSHA, “Total Sanitation and Hygiene Access”, was born.

“The idea was to exploit biogas from these toilets to provide household energy that could be used by the community in preparing their various dishes,” says David Kihara, who manages the business side of the Katwekera Tosha Bio Centre.

The centre has toilets and bathrooms on the ground floor – the toilets are connected to a bio-digester, with a dome-shaped holding tank in which biogas is produced. Raw human waste from the toilets flows in, and bacteria break it down, releasing methane gas which collects at the top of the domed tank.

“A pipe is then plumbed into these toilets and connected to the first floor, which is where the cooking area is located,” says Kihara. The gas is piped to collective stoves one floor up – and is usually sufficient for community members to cook on throughout the day.

“We pay a very small fixed fee for whatever dish we would like to cook. It is a very cheap source of energy and we cook on a first-come, first-served basis,” says area resident Nina Oyaro.

More than merely functional

Muchire explains that the centre is intended to be much more than a utilitarian place where people can relieve themselves, take a bath or cook.

“They are centres for many things. We have built the capacity of the CBOs attached to various bio centres to a level where they can fully exploit the space on where the centres stand.”

It is left to the community to decide what sort of venture to set up on the top floor. “Some bio centres have set up DSTV [satellite television], where people can come and watch matches for a fee, as is the case with Katwekera Tosha,” says Otieno Owour, another resident.

Muchire says the centres have become important places to exchange information as well, as can be seen from the posters lined up on the walls communicating one message or another.

“They are not just community kitchens but also meeting places where people can leisurely while away the evening after a long day’s work,” Muchire adds.

From a business perspective, the profits from these centres are also significant. Katwekera Tosha makes a monthly profit of between 350 and 650 dollars.

This money benefits the residents who have registered with the community-based organisation.

The centre opens at 5:30 a.m. and closes around eleven at night. Muchire would like to extend these hours: “The ideal situation would be to operate 24 hours, but insecurity in the slums is a reality.”

Perhaps that’s the next challenge for the community and Umande Trust. Centres like Katwekera Tosha are a giant, sustainable step towards assuring the energy security of slum dwellers.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 28 2011 (IPS)

In the early 1990s, a group of researchers set off for a small rural village in the eastern part of South Africa. Their intention was simple: teach the community how to rehydrate sick babies.

Armed with a one litre soda bottle, a simple rehydration recipe, posters, pamphlets and talks, they spent weeks sharing their knowledge as part of a national initiative to reduce child mortality.

But months later, there appeared to be little change in the village. Researchers sent to document the campaign’s success were surprised. The instructions were correct and had been distributed; the message had been received… but no one in the community had a one-litre bottle.

It was a simple oversight, easily rectified by changing the guidelines to use a different container to make up the recipe – every kitchen in the village had a cup.

Soul City’s Dr Sue Goldstein tells this story to illustrate how it’s possible to fail to communicate simple, useful scientific knowledge without an adequate understanding of your target audience.

Tailoring the message

The Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication, a non profit organisation, was started in 1992 in a bid to reduce child mortality caused by dehydration. “Children were dying unnecessarily and it was because people did not know what they were supposed to be doing,” says Goldstein.

Information was widely available on the process of rehydration but it did not seem to be having an impact on the desired audience. After studying the situation, Soul City decided to launch a television soap opera to capture their target audience. A radio show and newspaper series quickly followed.

In trying to describe the relationship between research and mass media campaigns, Goldstein uses the phrase “simplification versus complexity.” At one end stands the scientist who seeks in-depth knowledge and at the other the ordinary non-scientific individual who prefers a simple explanation.

Melissa Meyer, Project Coordinator for the HIV/AIDS and the Media Project, says, “Research and entertainment need not be at odds with each other. With just a slight adjustment in perspective, they can be used very effectively to complement each other.”

Programmes such as Soul City reinsert real people into research. “Truly good entertainment is well-researched,” says Meyer.

Signs of success

Soul City appears to have found a formula that successfully conveys important health messages while grabbing the attention of its audience through a dramatic storyline containing all the elements of a prime time soapie.

Rumbidzai Musiyarira, a fan of the show, says, “Soul City opens your eyes to taking precautions and protecting yourself.”

HIV and AIDS-related issues have been a recurring theme in the series.

“The show is very enlightening” says Musiyarira. “I realised how easy it is for HIV to spread within a family or community.”

One storyline followed a woman unknowingly infected with HIV by her husband through several episodes. She believed her husband was being faithful, but as things unfold, he proved to have had multiple partners. The readily identifiable scenario highlights research showing that multiple concurrent partners play in the spread of HIV in Southern Africa.

“It is my absolute passion to get scientific knowledge out,” says Goldstein. Through an intensive nine step process, scientific research is translated into Soul City content by a team of creative agencies, researchers, test groups and others.

“We not only measure our reach, but we also measure what people understand from the campaign and whether they have actually made any changes in their lives in relation to the show,” says Goldstein.

Issues such as depression, tuberculosis, housing and alcohol abuse have all featured in the series.

Deborah Ndlovu, another long time follower of Soul City, believes watching the programme can change behaviour, having seen changes in her own life.

“It teaches you to be honest to your partner,” she says. “You must be fair and you should know your status and practice safe behaviour.”

More than just tv

Soul City is a marriage between education and entertainment. A booklet is released after each thirteen episode series has been aired, to reinforce the basic messages and provide supplementary scientific information. Soul City also has a Facebook page and a website, but Goldstein admitted that the organisation has yet to truly harness the power of the web. “I think we are still in the learning phase with that kind of media.”

The television show reaches approximately 16 million South Africans and has drawn the attention of numerous organisations who hope to get their messages across via this medium.

It is not always easy. “We currently have a meeting with a group of people interested in climate change and they want the scientific evidence to go out in quite a scientific way,” Goldstein says. “it’s not necessarily going to speak to people. You have to reach people, otherwise they are just not going to listen.”

She admitted that not all the show’s themes have been successful. No changes in people’s attitudes were recorded after an episode in series 6 focusing on xenophobia was aired. “It wasn’t negative change but there was no change, we made the local character too sympathetic and that was a problem,” says Goldstein.

Careful testing prior to the show being aired has reduced the number of failed attempts.

Goldstein emphasised the need for innovation, research and a thorough knowledge of the intended target market for any organisation that was seeking to create a similar programme. “Identify who needs this information and what media they consume.”

Television, newspaper, radio and magazines are available to organisations to reach broad audiences. South Africa’s Public broadcaster is a powerful partner, although it sometimes presents a problem for the edutainment model as it tries to dictate that the show will air at a less than optimal time.

“Journalists are always looking for material, and if you can provide it in an easy to read way they will be very happy with you,” says Goldstein.

Research, dedication and a firm belief in the importance and relevance of its messages have enabled Soul City to put research findings, scientific knowledge and life-saving messages into broad circulation.

Excerpt:

Smallholder farmers in Bandundu Province are boosting their harvests with the help of the sweetly-named velvet bean.

Mucuna pruriens var utilis Credit: Japan National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences

For some time, farmers in Bandundu, particularly in the Kwilu district, have been battling static or declining agricultural output – not entirely surprising when they were forced to plant on the same land without applying fertiliser or allowing fields a fallow period.

But several dozen smallholders in Kwilu have adopted Mucuna utilis – the velvet bean – as a means of protecting soil fertility.

“Ever since we started using this plant, we haven’t had any problems with infertile soil. Thanks to the plant, this year our family has produced five bags of groundnuts, whereas in the past, without the Mucuna utilis, we were getting only one and a half or two bags,” says Nicolas Mimpaka, a peasant farmer from Kwenge, 25 kilometres from Kikwit, the capital of the mainly rural province of Bandundu.

Mimpaka and others in the the Kwilu district in the south of the province come to Kikwit to sell their produce – groundnuts, maize, cassava, rice, marrows, beans, and other vegetables – to traders or to transport companies who provide Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, with fresh food.

The velvet bean has been introduced to the area by the Support to Peasant Farmer Development Initiatives (known by its French acronym, AIPD), an umbrella organisation for agriculture in the area.

“From 2008 to 2009, we carried out experiments in the Kwenge and Lukamba regions, and we observed positive results,” says Emmanuel Malenda, an agronomist and one of the managers of AIPD.

Mulenda says out of 50 fields under observation during that research period, 45 became more fertile thanks to Mucuna utilis, and produced great quantities of cassava, maize, groundnuts and marrows. The plant is a legume that is grown in conjunction with other plants as a cover crop, a live mulch that helps retain moisture and transfers nitrogen from the air to the soil via its the nodes on its roots.

During workshops to promote the plant, agronomist Cyprien Ngeleto highlighted the plant’s useful characteristics. “Mucuna utilis can be planted towards the end of the rainy season, as it is drought resistant. After cultivation, it protects and regenerates the soil, due to the rapid germination of the plant’s seeds over a period of four to six days.”

Farmers enthusiastic

“As agriculture is our livelihood, this plant is helping us a lot. My husband doesn’t have work, but we eat nearly every day,” says Jeanne Mplilikwomo, a Kikwit farmer. She says farming has allowed her to buy her children’s school uniforms and pay their school fees.

On a community radio programme, another smallholder, Jeanine Mandondo, comments: “Instead of practising the system of making forests fallow, a system that takes five, six or eight years, we prefer to grow this plant ourselves, and it is definitely the secret to increasing our agricultural production.”

“Six months is enough for Mucuna utilis to fertilise the soil,” adds Robert Manianga, a farmer from Lubungu, another village within a few kilometres of Kikwit.

The velvet bean is quickly securing a place in the farming practice in this corner of Bandundu, where it is contributing to food security and rural livelihoods.

By Zukiswa Zimela
NAIROBI, Mar 23 2011 (IPS)

Climate change has become an important part of the development agenda. In Africa, farmers and consumers alike are feeling its effects on productivity and food security.

Professor Judi Wakhungu is the lead researcher on the Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change project, which is gathering data and case studies of adaptation to provide policy makers with technical and scientific evidence to guide them.

Q: How will the results from the research project help farmers? A: We are working in eight different countries and looking to see how communities are coping with climate change.

What we are doing in Kenya is comparing the dry land area in eastern Kenya with another one which is in western Kenya, close to Lake Victoria. The experiences in the two zones are almost opposite each other in this regime of erratic weather that we are experiencing.

The one closest to the lake is challenged with continual flooding every year, while in the zone on the eastern side, rains fail to fall.

We don’t have the answers: what we are doing is trying to look at what the different communities are experiencing and then drawing on that to inform policy.

What we hope to see is plans to be implemented as international policy so that we can have institutions and laws on how we are supposed to respond when the situation becomes tragic. At present we do not have a response mechanism.

Q: What are examples of farmers who are already successfully adapting to climate change? A: For instance in eastern Kenya in the Makueni district, we saw a lot of innovation in terms of how farmers were coping with drought. Whereas in Oyola and Wakesi, which is near Kisumu we saw that farmers were having difficulties coping with the flooding.

In some cases farmers depend almost entirely on the national government  to get seed [with drought or flood-resistant qualities]. On the other hand, in some communities, we have found that the farmers themselves have really become innovators. In the sense that some farmers now became specialists and are able to produce hybrid seeds which could cope with the extreme climate.

Q: What are your concerns with farmers relying on the government for seed? A:  It brings a sort of dependency which as a subsistence farmer is a very dangerous position to be in. The whole notion of being a subsistence farmer is to be self-reliant.

On the other side we have seen that farmers have started to depend on what we call “orphaned crops”. Farmers used to depend on sorghum and millet, then they moved on to maize and in some cases rice. Now they have turned back to the old crops.

Farmers ought to be the custodians of the seed.

Q: But would it not be better for farmers if governments had a well-managed system that would provide them with seed in times of need? A:  Absolutely. That’s why we continue to do the work that we do is so that government can put programmes in place where they have the infrastructure to get food to people who need it.

Q: If agriculture and food security are priority areas when facing climate change, how can using arable land for biofuels be justified? A: The answer is yes and no. You have to look at the conditions in each and every African country; we cannot make a blanket statement.

Let me give you an example: Tanzania has made agriculture a national priority – they even have a national slogan which says, Agriculture first and agriculture for the future.

Tanzania has a lot of land and a different land tenure system in that the land belongs to the government. So they have set aside a trust and some of the land has been set aside for biofuels in the form of jatropha and sugar cane farmers for ethanol. The argument is that if the ethanol production is successful, then the people will be able to earn revenue in order to grow food.

Q: Yet in the case of Tanzania, IPS recently reported on a botched biofuels project in the Kilwa District… A: That particular project was badly planned, and they also chose to use one biofuel – jatropha – which is not the best for this area.

So this was rushed through, without the policies in place and the company seemed ill-prepared to deal with the local conditions and the local politics. Also, misinformation was given to the farmers on how they were to benefit.

We have used this project to show how important it is to have the right policies in place, the right legal framework in place so that all partners understand what their responsibilities are.

A: In Kenya, we just don’t have that kind of land [available], to put aside tracts of land to attract foreign investors for biofuels production. This has been attempted, but it has been very politically charged with people coming out and saying that some of these deals are not being conducted above board.

So it would be a disaster here and it would lead to food insecurity.

Excerpt:

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Mar 16 2011 (IPS)

A community-based organisation in the Kenyan slum area of Kibera set out to clean up garbage and deal with waste water; Ushiriki Wa Safi ended up creating a community cooker that turns waste into an energy source.

Laina Saba residents can now cook on a communal stove fuelled by garbage. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

But some have seen this as an opportunity to bring change to communities. Ushirika Wa Safi – (loosely translated, the name means “an association to maintain cleanliness” in Swahili) – a community-based organisation in Kibera, was formed to deal with the garbage problem in Laini Saba, one of the thirteen villages that form Kibera slums, often described as Africa’s largest.

The CBO has come up with a remarkable solution in the form of a community cooker that turns garbage into energy. It is a recycling project that is transforming the lives of local residents.

Discovering the wonders of the “cooker”

“When we started the CBO, the idea was to start a project that could help keep the environment clean. We therefore began by constructing trenches where people could pour dirty water. Further, we divided Laini Saba into four zones and each zone would meet once a week to collect and burn garbage,” explains Bernand Asanya, the project manager.

The four zones would meet every three months for a general cleaning exercise. This approach seemed satisfactory for a while but with time, people began to dump garbage into the trenches meant for dirty water.

This presented a fresh problem as the trenches began to look and smell like open sewers. It is at this point that Ushirika Wa Usafi decided to experiment by coming up with a garbage-fired boiler that would provide hot water for showering.

“We had already built a number of toilets and bathrooms where the community pays a few shillings to either use the toilet or to take a shower. The reality in Laini Saba, as is the case with most slums, is that there are neither toilets nor bathrooms. People bath in their tiny houses and relieve themselves in plastic bags,” Asanya explains.

Transforming the lives of the poor

But when they presented their idea to Planning Systems Services Limited (PLANNING) – a group of international architects – to assist them in developing a design, their idea developed into a pilot project that has transformed the lives of many residents of Laini Saba village.

The architects proposed that instead of developing an incinerator that would only heat water for bathing, they could develop a community cooker where the locals pay a fixed fee to cook their food.

As fate would have it, the chairman of PLANNING, Jim Archer, had been developing a plan to address waste management in Africa and was determined to work together with the CBO.

“We therefore went back to the drawing board and bought 500 nylon sacks. We then approached the local chief with our idea and he helped us organise a meeting with the locals. During this meeting we communicated our intention to maintain cleanliness and also to build a community cooker,” adds Asanya.

The sacks were distributed to the people with the instructions that once the sack was full the CBO, with the help of a group of young people would come by to collect the garbage in a wheelbarrow, immediately return the sack to the owner.

The garbage would then be deposited at the project site for sorting. “We don’t burn everything,” Asanya says. “We sell some of the garbage as scrap and make money from it. Material that can be burnt is then channeled into the cooker and used to generate heat.”

Changing lives

“This community cooker has changed our lives. For a very small fee I can cook the meal of my choice, bake, and even take a hot bath at the adjacent bathrooms as I wait for my food to cook,” explains Nora Kaseu, a beneficiary.

To keep the garbage burning, a quantity of used diesel is employed, that would otherwise have been disposed of in a manner that further harms the environment. At the bottom of the cooker is a metal plate, where a drop of water and a drop of diesel are released at the same time and in equal measure to continuously generate sparks that keep the garbage burning.

The CBO has employed a caretaker who is always on standby to keep the cooker burning. What seemed like an impossible situation of garbage control has led to the creation of employment for youths who collect the garbage, as well as the caretakers working at the project site. It has given the community an environmentally friendly way of disposing of waste.

Resident Daina Waithera, says that compared to other sources of fuel, it is proving quite economical: “The ashes from the cookers are also useful. They are collected by people who have pit latrines at home to keep away the foul smell and to keep the waste from rising to the surface.”

Excerpt:

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Feb 15 2011 (IPS)

David Lenamira, watching as usual from a seat outside his compound, has no trouble picking out his sheep as the herd boys drive them home every evening. The red-brown animals are smaller than those in his neighbours’ herds, but he’s proud of them just the same.

Red Maasai sheep in Kenya. Credit: John Atherton/Wikicommons

Unlike most of his neighbours, Lenamira’s herd are Red Maasai sheep. Most of Lenamira’s fellow pastoralists in this semi-arid part of the country keep Dorpers, an exotic breed of sheep originally from South Africa. The breed has been promoted by the government since 1952 due to both their size and their high productivity.

Custom-designed sheep

“The Dorper sheep breed was developed specifically for semi-arid climatic conditions. But compared to the Red Maasai, Dorpers have bigger bodies, which mean that they need more feed. As well, Dorpers are less resistant to pests and diseases compared to the Red Maasai breeds, and they have been developed for a shorter time compared to the Red Maasai,” said Dr Pat Lenyasunya, a pastoralist veterinarian from Samburu.

Herders in Kenya’s dryland areas say that Dorpers are now proving less resilient under more frequent drought linked to climate change.

The conditions are bringing the qualities of Lenamira’s Red Maasai to the fore. This indigenous Kenyan breed, typically reddish-brown in colour, has not enjoyed much popularity internationally both due to its small stature and because it grows hair on its body rather than wool.

“I have seen my neighbours lose their Dorpers to drought, and this is an experience I wouldn’t want to go through,” says Lenamira.

His friend Kalani Lenguris, from Nontoto village, is still feeling the pinch after he lost 300 sheep during last year’s drought.

“I lost nearly all the pure Dorpers during the drought. The remaining are crossbreeds with the Red Maasai, but they are already emaciated by the drought that is ravaging our countryside at the moment,” Lenguris told IPS.

But the Red Maasai breed is under pressure, says Dr Jacob Wanyama, coordinator of the African LIFE Network, which works to defend the rights and livelihoods of pastoralists. “It is not easy to find pure indigenous breeds especially of cattle, sheep and goats.

“The few surviving animals have at least some genes from exotic animals, which dilutes the purity of the original indigenous genetic makeup,” he says.

“When I worked as an agricultural extension officer in the 1980s, one of the government’s policies was to promote high-producing animal breeds through encouraging herders to keep exotic breeds, or to crossbreed. At some points, we encouraged farmers to castrate the indigenous bulls so that they depend either on artificial insemination or have their animals sired by exotic breeds.”

At the time, Wanyama says, improving productivity of livestock seemed to be the magic bullet answer to poverty. “But little did we know that it was going to haunt us; most of the animal breeds currently available in Kenya and many other African countries are neither pure indigenous breeds nor pure exotic. The pure genetic biodiversity especially in Africa is almost extinct.”

Though no proper survey has yet been done to confirm this, Wanyama’s observations tally with the herder Lenguris: with increasingly frequent drought, farmers with pure exotic breeds are usually the first to lose their animals, followed by those with crossbreeds.

“This reveals how important it is to protect the genetic biodiversity,” says Wanyama.

Shepherds saving sheep

In an effort to safeguard the remaining stock of pure indigenous sheep, Lenamira and others have with support from the LIFE Network formed a conservation group composed of 60 pastoralists from the district, who have specialised in rearing Red Maasai. Each of them has between 200 and 500 animals.

The conservation group may have found some allies in an unexpected quarter. Animal genetic experts at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi have discovered that the Red Maasai breed has genetic traits that make it resistant to intestinal worm parasites, a major problem for sheep herders not only in Kenya, but on commercial farms in Australia and New Zealand.

Dr Okeyo Mwai, one of the lead researchers at ILRI, says that the individual genes have not yet been isolated; and scientists are still a long way from being able to transfer specific traits to other sheep breeds.

“At the moment, the most logical option is to have the Red Maasai bred [conventionally] for improved growth, fertility and feed efficiency,” says Dr Okeyo Mwai, one of the lead researchers at ILRI, “crossbreed with other hardy breeds to ensure that such important genes are not lost, but are sustainably conserved in commercial flocks, as we hold a waiting brief for genomic technologies to be become affordable and more practical.”

The government of Kenya has quickly recognised that, save for the modest efforts of groups like Lenamira’s, genetic treasures like the Red Maasai are under threat and indigenous breeds need urgent protection.

This realisation has led the government of Kenya to launch the National Advisory Board on Animal Genetic Resources to coordinate indigenous livestock farmers, research institutions, universities and all other interested parties in an effort to preserve the remaining genetic resources.

“The Board has already been launched. At the moment, we are in the process of drafting a bill on the same, which will be presented to the cabinet during the month of February 2011 to be turned into law,” said Cleopas Okore, the Deputy Director of the Kenya’s Ministry of Livestock and Development, and the Coordinator of the Advisory Board on Genetic Resources.

Isolation of worm-resistance genes from the Red Maasai sheep may see this most neglected sheep breed catapult into a very important resource, providing farmers with the most needed biological worm control mechanism.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
ABIDJAN, Jan 19 2011 (IPS)

Even while the country has faced civil war and political crisis, innovative research organisations have worked to meet the challenges of food security and rural poverty.

Tomatoes for sale in Abidjan. Credit: Zenman/Wikicommons

On his low-lying half-hectare of land, not far from Abidjan, François Adou usually grows cabbage, aubergine, potatoes, tomatoes and groundnuts on mounds. A year ago, the 43-year-old dug trenches in an 800 square metre section to devote it exclusively to a new technique for growing tomatoes.

The non-soil, or hydroponic, technique is being promoted by an independent organisation working on alleviating poverty in rural areas, the Agribusiness and Contract Farming House (known in French as GenieAgro). Farmers plant tomatoes or other crops in a substrate made up of cocoa hull fibres, sawdust and industrial waste of plant origin.

This mixture can be used to fill plastic-lined trenches, wooden boxes, or sacks supported above the ground on wooden trestles. The plants grow directly in this material.

Farmers smiling

“It’s a soil-less cultivation technique,” Adou told IPS, adding that the results have been great. In the first three-month planting cycle – March to May – he harvested between four and five tonnes of tomatoes. In August, he was already preparing for another harvest – this time anticipating six tonnes.

A kilo of tomatoes fetches between $1 and $1.25 in Côte d’Ivoire. On an initial investment of a million CFA francs (roughly $2000 dollars) to buy the substrate in which to grow the plants, he saw a return of $5,500 from the sale of his first harvest alone.

After Adou’s second harvest last August, his neighbour Amidou Traoré had seen enough. He followed Adou’s lead and set up with the hydroponic technique on 600 square metres of his own. “I pulled in 962,500 FCFA [almost $2,000 with my first harvest]. Half went to pay back part of the investment of 850,000 FCFA ($1,700).”

Converting discarded material from cocoa and coffee processing, as well as wood chips and sawdust means manufacture of the substrate that the plants grow in dovetails neatly with a problem of disposal of industrial waste.

Simplice Kouassi, a researcher and geneticist who before he joined GenieAgro worked at the country’s National Centre for Agronomic Research, explains that farmers working with hydroponic techniques can reap four or five times as many tomatoes than they would planting directly in the soil.

“For an area of 1,000 square metres, you need to invest three million FCFA (around $6,100 dollars). It’s possible to recover the investment in your first three months,” he told IPS. “Each growing cycle runs three months, and each time, a farmer can put 1.19 million FCFA ($2,500) in her pocket.”

Farmers have no need for chemical fertilisers, if they use the substrate produced by the facility GenieAgro set up for the purpose. The Bureau de Formulation de Substrats produces a mixture that contains all the nutrients growing plants need. A batch of substrate can be re-used two or three times before it has to be replaced.

Presently, the factory, based at Songon, southeast of Abidjan, produces only 200 bags of substrate a day. Some of the raw materials needed are often in short supply.

Reviving production

In recent years, the production of tomatoes in Côte d’Ivoire has fallen by more than 50 percent, from 320,000 tonnes to 150,000 tonnes, according to producers groups. This decline is primarily all due to bacterial ring rot (a plant disease). Additional factors include the late arrival of the rainy season and strong competition from tomatoes imported from Burkina Faso, Mali and Europe.

“There was a real threat to the local production of tomatoes which demanded that we find a response quickly… [useful] in the south. Because the north [of the country] remains attached to the traditional cultivation on the earth or still relies on irrigated farming that is very productive,” Antoine N’Guetta, an agricultural engineer, explained to IPS.

Non-soil cultivation of tomatoes has been adopted by nearly 200 of the countries 3,000-odd producers since 2009. The country’s tomato production has rebounded sharply to 225,000 tonnes in 2010.

Since 2009, with the adoption of cultivation soil-less by nearly 200 producers, the production has seen growth of around 50 percent, coming up to 225,000 tonnes in 2010. The country has some 3,000 producers of tomatoes.

This highly-productive, labour-intensive farming technique holds great promise for farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and beyond.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
LUAPULA, Zambia, Jan 4 2011 (IPS)

In Zambia, a silver lining has emerged for widespread rural hunger and poverty, thanks to homegrown agricultural research. Local scientists have successfully developed four new, early-maturing and high- yielding cassava cultivars in an ambitious research project conducted in the cassava-rich Luapula Province, under the on-going Root and Tuber Improvement Programme (RTIP).

Drying cassava Credit: Ken Wiegand/USAID

Dr Martin Chiona is the RTIP team leader based at the state-run Zambia Agricultural Research Institute (ZARI) station in the Luapula provincial capital, Mansa. With 20 years experience at the ZARI Mansa station, the plant breeder is the only surviving member of the 13 local scientists who started the RTIP in the early 1990s.

“This is a great achievement – not only for us but also for the whole country. The benefits of the new varieties speak for themselves if you consider there are so many things you can do with cassava which you cannot do with other crops like maize or wheat,” he says.

“What can we fail to do with cassava? With this crop, you throw away literally nothing at all. I strongly believe that we have the capacity to do the same in Zambia only if we become a bit more organised in this sector,” says Dr Chiona.

He adds that in certain rural communities of Luapula Province, some traditional uses of cassava include floor polish, hair chemicals, animal and fish feed from the leaves, firewood and seeds from the stems and fodder from the peels.

Many poor rural folk are embracing the new cassava cultivars as the panacea for changing their poverty-stricken lives. Rose Mwelwa and Elias Mwila of Mansa have many things in common. They each have five children, supported on the subsistence growing of cassava.

After participating in the RTIP demonstrations for the new cultivars, they are now community leaders in the programme’s promotion campaigns. Both now have a new optimistic view about cassava growing.

“As a widow with a big family, the new varieties will enable me to feed my family. I will also be able to sell the surplus and raise more money for other uses like health and education,” says 41-year-old Mwelwa.

For the unemployed 40-year-old Mwila, the new cultivars have given him renewed impetus to fend better for his family: ” I have been using the old variety of cassava since 1992 only for meeting my family’s basic food needs. But things have changed and now I am even planning to start selling the surplus.”

Meanwhile, researchers and authorities may have delayed the harvesting of the improved varieties to facilitate the implementation of the seed multiplication component of the RTIP that involves the free redistribution of the stems among many other prospective farmers.

Yet that decision has not daunted MwelwaMwila and 2000 other members of the Mansa District Farmers Association (MDFA), a key implementing partner in the RTIP.

MDFA organising coordinator, Joseph Chanda, says they are all still elated by the belated harvest. Chanda is also a full-time government-employed agriculturalist with over 21 years of service in Mansa alone. “We fully support this programme because it will help even more farmers access the new varieties. Cassava is a staple food here in Luapula and almost every household is involved in growing the crop.”

Luapula is Zambia’s leading cassava producing province. The Central Statistical Office (CSO) projects that the region is expected to harvest 1.5 million metric tons of cassava in 2010, up from last year’s 1.3 million metric tons.

The 2008 statistics further show Luapula Province as having the largest cassava production area of 115,000 hectares compared to Lusaka Province’s tail-ending 544 hectares. Cassava has indeed ‘come of age’ as an effective weapon not only to help combat hunger and poverty but also to support socio-economic growth at all levels.

For Zambia, the period 2001 to 2010 has been a successful decade for the agricultural sector in general and cassava sub-sector in particular. While the decade has closed with a record-breaking bumper harvest for maize, the nation’s staple food, cassava has also recorded steady progress.

The CSO statistics show a steep cassava production rise from 815,000 metric tons in 2001 to the 4.7 million metric tons projected for 2010. But while fears are growing that Zambia’s 2010 maize bumper harvest may go to waste owing to poor storage, distribution and marketing policies, the story looks different for cassava. In collaboration with donors, the government has just produced a document called ‘Cassava: A Strategy for Zambia’ as a blueprint to guide the development of the sector from 2011 and beyond.

The Civil Society for Poverty Reduction (CSPR) believes that to be effective, all attempts to alleviate poverty in Zambia must target rural areas, where the majority of the poor live. The CSPR, a network of civil society organisations, suggests that authorities should use the Sixth National Development Plan (SNDP) beginning in 2011 to transform rural areas and reduce poverty with emphatic support to agricultural development.

All the indicators are that cassava is still poised to grow in stature, as not only an important staple to reinforce the national food security but also as a cash crop to stem hunger and poverty through sustainable economic growth. And the sky is the limit if the collective zeal and will of the farmers, researchers, authorities, donors and other players and stakeholders in the cassava sector in Zambia is anything to go by.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 29 2010 (IPS)

While China faces grave water shortages, researchers at institutions across the country are working on new water- saving and desalination technologies that they hope can alleviate the crisis in the crucial years to come.

Despite billions of dollars spent on damming rivers, building reservoirs and digging deeper wells, farmers in the north toil on parched land while hundreds of cities across the country face water shortages and deteriorating water quality.

Beijing’s water shortage will soon reach 200 million to 300 million cubic metres, according to state media reports, as the city awaits the completion of the 62 billion U.S. dollar South-North Water Transfer Project, which will displace some 330,000 people.

The World Bank has warned that the country’s water crisis could spark unrest, pitting rich against poor and urban against rural. Without serious changes in water use, tens of millions of Chinese will become environmental refugees in the next decade, the Bank argues.

Meanwhile, countries downriver from the growing superpower – including Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – argue that China’s aggressive dam building in the Mekong River is robbing their citizens of water.

For some, the answer lies in desalination technology. China has been engaged in desalination research since 1958, and in 1975 it began research on medium- and large-scale distillation devices. In 1986, it finished construction of a seawater reverse-osmosis desalination device.

Tianjin, a coastal port city about 150 kilometres from Beijing, has become a national leader in desalination technology. In fact, the city has refused water from the south and instead focused on desalination efforts. According to the local government, the nearby Dagang Xinquan Seawater Desalination Project is the “largest seawater desalination plant in Asia.”

“Indeed, the municipality has been developing desalination technologies since the year 2000, and this has been regarded as a more likely source of water to meet the water supply needs of the municipality,” said a report by Probe International, an independent environmental advocacy group.

Wang Shichang, director of the Desalination and Membrane Technology Centre at Tianjin University, says researchers in China are currently working on more than 200 desalination projects, receiving support from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Science Foundation of China.

The centre that Wang leads introduced the first multi- stage flash (MSF) distillation devices, which distills water through several “multi-stage” chambers, each operating at progressively lower pressures. The vapor generated by flashing is condensed at each stage and turned into fresh water. The technology uses 25 percent less “feed water” than other desalination devices, Wang says.

The country’s desalination capacity reached nearly 200,000 tonnes per day in 2008, up from 30,000 tonnes in 2005. According to the government’s current development plan, the figure is expected to reach 800,000 to one million tonnes by the end of this year.

But Wang says support is still not enough. He notes that the gap between China’s innovation capacity and development and manufacturing capabilities compared to those of foreign countries remains vast. He says greater state subsidies and access to bank loans are needed to bridge that divide.

While Wang works toward creating new usable water, Tian Juncang, a professor at Ningxia University, is trying to reduce water wasted in agriculture.

Tian’s work focuses on using plastic mulch in conjunction with drip irrigation to suppress weeds, maximise the effectiveness of fertiliser and conserve water in crop production. Plastic mulch and drip irrigation can reduce the amount of water used in irrigation process by up to 50 percent, Tian says.

China’s agriculture industry currently uses 70 percent of all the country’s water, and much of it goes to waste, he says. Drip irrigation under plastic mulch can reduce the industry’s use to 50 percent.

“China’s agricultural industry faces grave challenges,” Tian tells IPS. But by implementing new technology, “the current amount of water can support double the farming land.”

The government has moved to promote water conservation. In 2007, it issued it’s 11th five-year plan for water conservation, proposing detailed targets, including increasing the agricultural water conservation rate to 50 percent from 45 percent between 2005 and 2010.

But Tian says water conservation must be a systematic effort with the support and cooperation of industry and society as a whole. Efforts to conserve water also require increased funding from the state, improved laws and regulations and more advanced and better-managed facilities, Tian says.

“Agricultural water conservation efforts have been strengthened in recent years,” he says, “but it’s still not enough.”

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Dec 28 2010 (IPS)

When French Jesuit priest and passionate agriculturist Henri de Laulanie developed the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation for Madagascar’s poor farmers in the 1980s, he probably had no idea that millions of farmers elsewhere in the world would one day benefit from it as well.

The Mandava weeder, a farmers' innovation, is lightweight and easy for women to use. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Ranging from new tools to the use of local materials to create organic fertilisers, these innovations have resulted in higher yields at lower costs for many rice farmers using SRI.

“SRI in India has often been made possible by small networks of innovators who have dared to experiment with an untested system of practices,” observes C Sambu Prasad, associate professor at Bhubaneswar’s Xavier Institute of Management.

“SRI is a farmer-to-farmer extension,” he adds. “Farmers experiment and their success convinces others to take up the innovations.”

India is considered by experts as among the original rice cultivating centres in the world. As in other Asian countries, rice remains a staple in this country, where some 44 millions of hectares are planted with the grain.

Conventional paddy cultivation practice consists mostly of raising seedlings in flooded nurseries for up to 30 days before these are transplanted. There is usually no regular spacing between clumps of plants, and inundation of the field is a must. Weeding is done manually.

By contrast, in the SRI method, single 12-day seedlings are transplanted at a precise spacing of 25-centimetre squares. The soil at the roots is also kept moist, well-aerated, and well-drained, while adding organic nutrients to it is encouraged. Frequent weeding is done with implements that also “churn” the soil, aerating it.

According to agriculture experts, this keeps the water requirement at a minimum. The attention paid to spacing the plants, meanwhile, means that the roots of each plant has enough room to grow, enabling it to flourish to its full grain-bearing potential.

SRI thus requires less seeds, water, and fertiliser even as it leads to greater yields.

Indeed, according to a comparative study by the Watershed Support Service and Activities Network (WASSAN), a non-profit organisation working with farmers here in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, SRI results in returns that are 52 percent higher than those from convention cultivation. And while gross yield was 18 percent higher with SRI, total input costs were 32 percent lower.

WASSAN researcher S Bhagya Laxmi says the reduction in expenditure with SRI can be traced in large part to the 37-percent slash in labour costs for transplantation. More than half of these labour costs are for weeding, she says, but with the local SRI innovations, “twice as much time” was even freed up for the women who used to do the backbreaking work.

In Andhra Pradesh, SRI has already inspired the creation of at least two kinds of weeders.

One is called the cono-weeder, which was designed by scholars at the state Acharya N G Ranga Agricultural University. The other is the Mandava weeder, which was named after the home village of a group of farmers who found the cone-weeder too heavy and cumbersome for them to use.

Putting their heads together, the farmers led by 50-year-old Parcha Kishan Rao bent the main stem of the university-designed implement, and replaced the straight handle with a curved one from a bicycle. Instead of the cono-weeder’s single-toothed drum, the farmers’ version has two, making it lighter and far easier to push.

Today the Mandava weeder is being manufactured locally and sold for 800 rupees (18 dollars) each.

Bommi Reddy Sudhakar Reddy, who comes from the same rain shadow region as Rao and company, has also come up with a multi-row marker that saves time SRI farmers at the transplanting stage.

Prabhavathamma Reddy in Mahabubnagar district, for her part, says she is now harvesting nearly double what she used to get from her four-hectare land. She says it is because of SRI, but it could also be because she feeds her paddy with a five-ingredient organic fertiliser that she herself makes at home.

She has kindred spirits in Karnataka state in the country’s south-west, where fellow SRI farmer Narayana Reddy recounts how two of his friends are using neem leaves to ward off pests and sowing traditional seed varieties first soaked in cow’s milk.

“For strange reasons,” says WASSAN director K Suresh, “the rice intensification method has been evolving more within the domain of people’s knowledge and through farmer network innovations than through the formal science establishments.”

And ever-fresh ideas from farmers translate into higher yields, many more small-time rice-growers are getting attracted to SRI, which in 2009 was included by the federal government in the National Food Security Mission.

Vinod Goud, a scientist with the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), says more SRI farmers can only be good news at a time when climate change is wreaking havoc on crop yields. Through SRI, he adds, greater food self-sufficiency and resource – especially water – conservation are ensured.

Excerpt:

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 28 2010 (IPS)

Agriculture remains one of the most significant economic activities in Kenya. It accounts for over 24 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with an estimated 70 percent of total production coming from small scale farmers who typically have about 2-5 acres of land, depending on the region.

Vegetable market in Kenya Credit: Miriam Gathigah

Various Government reports show that over 50 percent of children under five years are underweight and/or are suffering stunted growth.

“Although the situation might seem bleak the government has, as a result of innovations by researchers, made various attempts to improve the agricultural sector, particularly in the field of horticulture,” explains Naomi Chepkorir, an Agricultural Officer from the Rift Valley Region which is Kenya’s bread basket.

According to the Policy Paper in the Horticultural Industry, the outcomes of accelerating the growth of horticultural production should encompass aspects such as alleviating poverty and improving food security.

“With regard to vegetable production, the government is working closely with researchers to not only improve the quality of vegetables but to also diversify the variety,” explains Catherine Kuria, a small scale farmer in Kinale, Central Kenya.

Crop experts have established that the best kale in the entire country comes from Kinale, in Central province.

Kale is also popularly known as “sakuma wiki”, a name that loosely translated means that it can sustain people throughout the week due to its extreme affordability, particularly for those who earn a dollar and below a day. It is thus the single most popular and available vegetable.

“In spite of its popularity, varieties of kale available to farmers are generally of poor quality, yield easily to diseases and their production is also low,” explains Catherine Kuria.

Vegetables are grown by an estimated 90 percent of Kenyan households, with Kale accounting for the highest production.

In a bid to improve food security and consequently alleviate hunger, Kenyans can now enjoy new varieties of kale that are more productive and can cope better with the unpredictable climatic changes across the country.

In May this year, the Kenya National Variety Release Committee authorised the release of two varieties of the improved kale seed and were published by the Ministry of Agriculture, as is stipulated in the Kenya’s Seeds and Plant Varieties Act.

Three more varieties will be released into the market once they are finally approved. This is a result of a seed-bulking project funded by the Center for Agricultural Bio-Science International (CABI) Africa, which is a science-based organisation specialising in agriculture.

“Seed bulking is an innovative strategy to increase access to reliable seed varieties at a rate affordable to particularly small-scale farmers who may not have the funds to buy expensive hybrid seeds.” expounds Naomi Chepkorir. “It is also a way of empowering poor households who directly depend on agriculture for subsistence.

The new varieties are an improvement of the kale seed that is already in the market and has been for many years.” This innovation is a key development in light of the United Nations proclamation that 2010 should be an international year of biodiversity, which is basically the diversification of animal and plants and a concept that underpins agriculture.

The licensing of new kale varieties is also in line with a government programme dubbed ‘Njaa Marufuku Kenya’ which basically means eliminating hunger in Kenya .This programme supports agricultural development initiatives targeting the poor in rural areas, where an estimated 60 percent live below a dollar a day.

The licensing of the new kale varieties has seen farmers, particularly from central Kenya where kale is grown in plenty; speak in favour of the innovation.

Alice Itoti from Central Kenya, one of the farmers involved in the process of growing and testing these new varieties says that, “I have been growing vegetables for ten years and I have observed a huge difference between the old and the new variety of kale. The new varieties have bigger leaves and are of a notably higher quality.”

“They also give a higher production which is good for commercial purposes. Most of my consumers who have tasted the old and the new prefer the new variety.”

As the country continues to grapple with food insecurity, with a large percentage of the population relying heavily on agriculture for both food and cash crops, innovative strategies to diversify crops can be part of the solution towards improving food options, and consequently contributing towards the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 27 2010 (IPS)

Researchers in China, the world’s leading provider of wind turbines and solar panels, are working toward making renewable energy cheaper, more efficient and a bigger part of the country’s power grid.

A wind farm outside Tianjin. China is the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines and solar panels. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

Zhao Xingzhong, professor at Wuhan University’s School of Physics and Technology, is researching dye-sensitised solar cells, a low-cost, high- efficiency alternative to more prevalent solid-state semiconductor solar cell technology.

The practical implications are apparent, Zhao says.

“The production process of dye-sensitised solar cells doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, which means it won’t induce environmental pollution,” Zhao tells IPS. “And dye-sensitised solar cells only cost one- fifth of traditional semiconductor solar cells made from crystalline silicon.”

Although Zhao’s team’s research is unique at home and abroad, he says support from the Chinese government is far from enough. He notes that Japan and South Korea have jointly invested about 1.6 billion U.S. dollars on research on third-generation solar technology since 2000. In China, however, Zhao says there have been just five native projects in the solar field in the last decade, with spending of around 4.5 million dollars per project.

“It is difficult to break through the technological bottleneck because of the inadequacy of (financial) input,” Zhao says.

In recent years, China has become the global leader in renewable energy technology manufacturing, surpassing the United States in terms of both the number of wind turbines and solar panels it makes. The accounting firm Ernst & Young in September named China the best place to invest in renewable energy.

Chinese companies, led by the Jiangsu-based Suntech, have one-quarter of the world’s solar panel production capacity and are rapidly gaining market share by driving down prices using low-cost, large-scale factories. China’s 2009 stimulus package included subsidies for large solar installation projects.

In terms of wind power, home-grown companies have rapidly gained market share in recent years after the government raised local partnership requirements for foreign companies to 70 percent from 40 percent (the government has since removed local partnership requirements) and introduced major new subsidies and other incentives for Chinese wind power companies.

By 2009, there were 67 Chinese turbine providers and foreign companies’ market share fell to 37 percent from 70 percent just over five years ago.

But most of the parts produced by Chinese companies are based on technology developed from abroad, with scant focus on homegrown innovation in the renewable energy field.

Wang Mengjie, deputy director of the China Renewable Energy Society and former vice chairman of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Engineering, works in the biomass industry. He says bioenergy can be used to improve living standards in rural areas, and he is currently involved in projects aimed at providing farmers with equipment that can turn organic waste into clean biogas and fertiliser.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the number of biogas pools in China’s rural areas reached over 35 million as of the end of 2009, producing 12.4 billion cubic metres each year. The government has increased financing of biogas pools in recent years, to 5 billion RMB (754,547 million dollars) in 2009 from an average of 2.5 billion RMB (377.2 million dollars) in 2006 and 2007.

Despite the investment, Wang says China still faces technological hurdles in the biomass industry.

“In terms of biodiesel technology, Western countries like the United States and Germany lead the world, while China is still at its infancy stage,” Wang says. “China has no definite regulations or policies on biomass energy right now. Under the present circumstances, there’s no possibility for relevant enterprises to develop further.”

Critics say China’s interest in renewable energy is essentially a business opportunity – most of what it produces is sold abroad – and that it is less interested in applying the more expensive technology at home.

China has not yet caught up to the United States in terms of renewable energy production. The country is the biggest consumer of coal in the world and is expected to burn 4.5 billion tonnes of standard coal by 2020, according to figures from the National Energy Administration.

While coal will still make up two-thirds of China’s energy capacity in 2020, the government has promised to invest billions of dollars into the development of wind, solar and nuclear power. The country’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress, now requires power grid companies buy 100 percent of the electricity produced from renewable energy generators.

Official statistics released last April said that low- carbon energy sources would account for more than a quarter of China’s electricity supply by the end of 2010, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The figures revealed that hydro, nuclear and wind power were expected to provide 250 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2010, while coal will account for 700 gigawatts.

Excerpt:

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Dec 27 2010 (IPS)

She is already eight months old, but Aiman Azam can neither sit up nor clutch anything with her tiny hands. She cannot even hold her neck up or roll on her back. All she does is moan.

Eight-month-old Aiman, who has bacterial meningitis, in her mother Maria's lap. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

It took a couple of trips to doctors before baby Aiman was diagnosed as possibly having meningitis, an infection of the lining surrounding the brain and the spinal cord.

There are two types of meningitis: viral and bacterial. Aiman has been afflicted with bacterial meningitis, which often leaves those who survive permanently disabled – paralysed, hearing impaired, and even brain damaged.

Every year, too, an estimated 23,000 children die of bacterial meningitis in Pakistan. But Asif Khowaja, public health scholar at the paediatrics department at Karachi’s Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) says, the true burden of the disease remains invisible because of “limited laboratory facilities, prevalent use of antibiotics, and poor health-seeking behaviours in Pakistan”.

AKUH is currently conducting research to assess the impact of the introduction of a vaccine against the Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) bacterium, which is the leading cause of childhood bacterial meningitis in this South Asian country.

The research is also looking into the neuro-developmental outcomes among cases of bacterial meningitis.

The researchers hope that the results would underscore vaccine effectiveness against bacterial meningitis and estimate the burden of meningitis in Pakistan. If everything goes well, they say, the results could strengthen the advocacy argument for the sustainability of the Hib vaccine under Pakistan’s Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI).

“We are to enroll approximately 200 cases of bacterial meningitis, and five times the number of healthy age-matched children as the control group to establish dose specific vaccine effectiveness,” says Khowaja. “About 100 cases and 200 healthy children are also being evaluated for neurological and developmental outcomes.”

So far, the researchers have recruited half of the sample size from each group. According to Khowaja, the vaccine coverage among both groups is below 50 percent, a fact that only highlights the need for community awareness regarding meningitis and the availability of a vaccine against Hib.

Health professionals say public awareness is crucial to maximise the benefit of having the EPI and the Hib vaccine.

The family of baby Aiman, for example, had not known that the Hib vaccine was available for free through the public health system. Azam Khan also admits that before Aiman was diagnosed as possibly having the meningitis, he was only vaguely aware of the disease. Not one of his older children – all boys, aged seven, four, and two – had been given the vaccine either.

Pakistan introduced a new combination vaccine to protect its-under five population against Hib bacterium in January 2009. At present, the EPI is providing the three doses of Hib vaccine free of cost to children less than two years of age.

In 2011, the health ministry plans to introduce the vaccine against the Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterium that is yet another cause of bacterial meningitis.

Both the Hib and the pneumococcal vaccines are available in Pakistan, but are far too expensive for most people. The Hib vaccine, for instance, costs 1,200 rupees (about 14 dollars) per dose. An infant would need to be given three doses at six weeks, 10 weeks, and 14 weeks.

EPI deputy manager Dr Agha Ashfaq says that the introduction of the vaccine via the state health system “will not only reduce the disease burden, but will also considerably contribute towards achieving the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG), which is to reduce under-five mortality by two-thirds”.

AKU Medical Centre paediatrics head Dr Zulfikar Bhutta says that having the Hib vaccine, and later the pneumococcal vaccine, available through the state health system is indeed admirable. But he says these will not reach those most in need, largely because the routine immunisation coverage is dismal.

“The vaccine(s) need concerted media awareness campaigns,” says Bhutta.

Khowaja echoes this, noting that the current promotion of the vaccine is negligible. To get rid of meningitis, he says, a vigorous campaign is needed. “It must be taken door-to-door, the way anti-polio campaigns are carried out,” he stresses.

Health professionals say this is one way to ensure that the efforts of the cash-strapped health ministry to provide 15 million doses of the Hib vaccine alone per year would not come to naught.

The vaccine is being co-financed by the health ministry and Gavi, a Geneva-based public-private partnership aimed at improving health in the world’s poorest countries. Gavi is committed to the initiative until 2015. But EPI’s Ashfaq says, “Once Gavi leaves, we will be able to carry on just the same.”

Indeed, there is even a plan to reach over 90 percent of under-fives within the next two years, says Bhutta.

“We are trying to bring all stakeholders together to agree on a national plan,” he says. “There will be money, a lot of it for vaccines, but we need to ensure that we spend it wisely.”

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Dec 21 2010 (IPS)

Just two years ago, Ratha Majhi was at his wits’ end trying to eke out a decent living from his modest vegetable farm.

A woman farmer using the treadle pump in Orissa. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

But since then he says his life has changed, adding with pride, "The farm is now my own patch of green paradise."

It’s all thanks to a simple and cheap micro-irrigation tool. Indeed, since 1994, the treadle pump has been changing the lives of millions of farmers in this country, where some 60 percent of the population are estimated to be directly involved in farming.

Made of iron, the treadle pump is similar in principle to a hand pump. But instead of the latter’s single barrel or cylinder and the use of hands to pump water, the treadle or pedal pump has two cylinders and uses foot power to lift water from underground.

"Most farmers in India are able to grow just the monsoon crop," says Amitabha Sadangi, the man behind this wonder pump. "If they have a reliable irrigation system throughout the year, they could, even on their small patch of land, grow up to three crops annually."

The treadle pump is, in fact, one of two micro-irrigation gadgets developed by the Sadangi’s Delhi-based International Development Enterprises, India (IDEI) specifically for marginal farmers who tend to crops that occupy less than a hectare.

The other is the drip irrigation tool that was designed for use in southern and western India, where the water table is usually found only below 30 metres.

The treadle pump, meanwhile, is suited to regions with high water tables, such as here in eastern India. To use it, one drops the attached pipe into a dug well, or a river or hill spring, and then starts pedaling. An hour’s pedaling can pump out as much as 5,000 litres of water. Two hours’ pedaling would be enough to irrigate half a hectare of dry season vegetables.

Sadangi, 51, comes from a poor family here in Orissa state. Knowing firsthand the hardships subsistence farmers in these parts go through while trying to keep their crops irrigated, he says he became interested in manually operated treadle pumps in Bangladesh. Pretty soon, he had adapted the technology to suit local requirements.

One nifty feature of IDEI’s treadle pump, for example, is that it is foldable. At 18 kilogrammes, it is also portable – a necessity for most small farmers who have non-contiguous farmland holdings.

Tapan Pattanayak, IDEI’s chief general manager for the firm’s eastern India operations, says that operating the pump is "so easy that even a child, (female) elders, and even disabled people" can do it "by manipulating the body weight on two foot pedals or treadles and by holding a bamboo or wooden frame for support".

"One may even sit and pedal," he says.

Nabin Amanatya, 35, can attest to the pump’s user- friendliness. Afflicted with polio, he struggled for years farming his family’s spit-sized plot that reached a mere tenth of a hectare. Then in 2006, he bought a treadle pump.

His neighbours teased him when they saw him trying to make a go with the pedals. But he was soon tending a thriving garden of cucumber, ridge gourd, and lady’s finger – vegetables that are very popular in the local market. Within two years, Amanatya had repaid his father’s loan and had switched to better seeds and fertilisers.

"Now my family eats fresh vegetables and household expenses are met out of the income from vegetable sales," he says. "I have plans to purchase a bicycle after constructing the house. I have also decided to get an electricity connection for our house."

IDEI, which is a non-profit venture, made it a point to make the treadle pump as well as the drip irrigation affordable for marginal farmers. While the pump costs between 550 to 2,000 rupees (12 to 44 dollars), the drip irrigation is priced at 4,000 rupees (88 dollars).

Commercial irrigation equipment would costs much more. A diesel pump, for example, goes for at least 40,000 rupees (880 dollars). And then there would be the recurring diesel expenses.

Says Sadangi: "Affordability is crucial. Marginalised farmers cannot invest much more than their labour. We keep the cost and maintenance as low as possible."

But Pattanayak admits that some farmers are still finding the treadle pump and the drip irrigation beyond their means.

"With bankers’ loan ticket size not less than 10,000 rupees, farmers are facing difficulty getting loans to buy these equipment," he says. "Steel prices, too, have trebled the original treadle pump’s price tag over the last few years."

Sadangi, however, is poised to disburse loans to half a million farmers by next year. The scheme would involve a nano-finance (smaller than a micro-finance) company with 20 million dollars from U.S.-based financier JP Morgan.

IDEI has also tied up with JP Morgan up to 2014 to sell carbon credits at seven cents annually per unit from the fuel-saving treadle pumps. It sold 1.7 million tonnes carbon equivalent between 2004 and 2007 alone, and has received 87,000 dollars in total so far from the arrangement.

Sadangi is now busy working on low-cost sprinklers and water storage tanks, as well as looking into solar and wind pumps – still with the small farmers in mind.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SEIBERSDORF, Austria, Dec 17 2010 (IPS)

After successfully suppressing scourges of fruit, tsetse and screwworm flies in the Americas, researchers are exploring whether the same sterilised insect technique can be used to control malaria, which kills some one million people every year, many of them in Africa.

Malaria, the Silent Killer in Africa Credit: John Robinson/IPS

Entomologists and other researchers at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are testing whether sterilised insect technique (SIT) can be used to reduce populations of malarial mosquitoes. Experiments are taking place at the agency’s laboratory facilities in eastern Austria, and researchers emphasise that their work is at an early stage.

“What we are doing is not going to solve the malaria problem in Africa, that I can tell you,” said Marc Vreysen, who heads the insect pest control project run jointly by IAEA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

But a breakthrough could one day strengthen more traditional defences against malaria, such as bed nets and insecticides, Vreysen said from the sprawling laboratory complex 35 kilometers southeast of Vienna.

Though the IAEA is better known for inspecting nuclear sites and non- proliferation treaties, its researchers are engaged in other activities, such as using atomic technologies and precision measuring devices to develop more efficient crop irrigation techniques, improve medical diagnoses and calibrate scientific equipment. They also train scientists from developing countries.

The focus of the malaria research so far has been on Anopheles arabiensis, a mosquito species that thrives in the Nile River basin in Sudan. Sudan’s government requested IAEA assistance in reducing the prevalence of malaria in the region. More than 500,000 malaria cases are reported every year in the country of 43 million, and malaria accounts for some 32,000 deaths annually, according to the Global Fund, the public-private partnership that channels money into combating malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis.

Researchers at the Austrian lab have established a colony of the Anopheles mosquitoes that are the target of SIT research. Experiments involve a painstaking process restricted by the relatively short lifespan of the insects – – less than a month — and the handful of hours when the sterilisation procedure is optimal.

In the lab, the mosquitoes are separated by sex. The males get a blast of up to 100 Gray in a cobalt irradiator, a lethal radiation dose for a human. The sterilised males are then placed in a mesh-covered box where males and females mix in a frenzied mating ritual.

“This is like a crowded discotheque,” said Jérémie Gilles, a French entomologist and one of eight researchers working on the project.

SIT has been used successfully to suppress other pests — often invasive species — by flooding nature with insects that cannot reproduce.

Gilles and his colleagues admit that their lab research is a long way from possible application in the wild. A greenhouse is being built in this wintry part of Austria to create a more authentic habitat for future SIT testing.

There is the chance that what worked in eradicating other pests like the tsetse fly Glossina austeni from more confined areas, such as the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar, may not work with mosquitoes in the vast tropical regions of Asia, Africa and South America.

With 3,000 mosquito species, 50 of which transmit malaria, the IAEA researchers face daunting challenges. Techniques that are effective with the species found in Sudan may not work elsewhere. Infertile male mosquitoes reintroduced into the wild may not be as aggressive in the mating clouds as their more potent counterparts.

This is the first major project focusing on male Anopheles mosquitoes, whose main function in their short lives is reproduction. It is the blood-seeking female that transports the Plasmodium parasites that infect humans.

Though the technique is time-consuming and costly compared to preventive measures, researchers say SIT has advantages. Harold Townson of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, writing in a recent edition of Malaria Journal, says SIT could provide a more enduring solution than other eradication and prevention methods. For example, mosquitoes can develop immunity to pesticides, and over time, prophylactic measures may become ineffective against the parasites.

Vreysen, who worked on the tsetse fly eradication project in Zanzibar, says it could be as long as a decade before his team can put their laboratory studies on mosquitoes to practical use. “We are far, far from the endpoint,” he said. In the meantime, better prevention and treatment will have to suffice.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG*, Nov 15 2010 (IPS)

Researchers are testing a new combination of tuberculosis drugs on patients in South Africa which they are hoping will shorten the treatment term of the disease to six months.

Examining a patient with drug-resistant TB. Credit: Dominic Chavez/IPS

Kyazze is a TB patient at Uganda’s Mulago National Referral Hospital, and worried that he has been asked to stay in the hospital for two months.

“The doctor told me I will get 60 injections – one every day. And I have to be here for all that time, because the injection is administered early in the morning at 6:00 am,” he says.

Treatment will continue long after he’s released. Dr Okot Nuwagara, a TB specialist at Mulago, says the lengthy course of drugs can be difficult for patients.

“There many cases of patients missing their dose and that complicates the treatment. In fact they have to start the treatment afresh,” says the doctor, who has been handling TB cases for 14 years.

The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development says the new drug combination has already shown promise in individual tests, and could reduce the duration of TB treatment sharply.

The trial will take place in South Africa, at the Lung Institute at the University of Cape Town and the TASK Research Centre in Bellville. Sixty-eight patients will each receive two weeks of treatment and three months of follow-up to evaluate effectiveness, safety, and tolerability. After the results of this first phase are analysed, researchers will extend the test for longer exposure to the drugs.

The combination shows promise to treat both drug-sensitive (DS-TB) and multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). The current treatment of MDR-TB patients requires daily injections and drugs for a period of up to 24 months.

The Phase II trial called NC001 or New Combination 1, tests the new TB drug candidates PA-824 and moxifloxacin in combination with pyrazinamide, an existing antibiotic already commonly used in TB treatment.

No conflict with HIV treatment

Dr Andreas Diacon, the co-ordinator of the trials, says HIV is a big factor in TB as well. “None of these drugs have properties that might interfere with the HIV drugs … this is an especially good reason to test these new drugs, as some of the old drugs that were used did interfere with the treatment of HIV.”

Diacon also says researchers are planning to test other combinations of drugs, which could shorten the current testing processes substantially.

“At the moment we are trying to design new trials where new drugs are taken in new combinations from the start, which could shorten the time-span in which new drugs become available. Especially in South Africa we cannot wait for 20 years to have results.”

The South African government has welcomed the research, saying that a successful trial will benefit the world in the fight against TB.

“The development is also more important for us [South Africa] because of the high burden of TB,” said department spokesperson Fidel Hadebe.

The World Health Organization’s Stop TB Department Managing Director, Mario Raviglione, says there is a desperate need for new and better TB treatments to address today’s growing pandemic, which kills nearly two million people each year.

“It is extremely encouraging to see a growing pipeline of TB drug candidates that may revolutionize TB care and committed sponsors moving with speed and efficiency towards new regimens.”

The result of the trials are expected in the next three to four months.

*Joshua Kyalimpa in Kampala contributed to this report.

Excerpt:

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Oct 21 2010 (IPS)

As controlled field trials of a genetically modified (GM) crop are about to begin in five African countries amidst promises of improved crops grown under poor conditions, critics are charging organisations with selling out the interests of African farmers.

Improved maize varieties could boost crop yields in drought-prone areas in the south of Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana

Soon controlled field trials of 12 WEMA varieties will begin in the five African countries.

The drought-tolerant WEMA varieties were developed in partnership with the Nairobi-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF); the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico; multi-national biotechnology company, Monsanto; and the national agriculture research organisations in the five African countries. The programme started in 2008.

But organisations against GM crops, such as Gene Ethics, argue that this biotechnology is not about food security, but profits for commercial interests. Bob Phelps of Gene Ethics in Australia charged that the WEMA project with selling out the interests of African farmers. He said the project was advancing corporate access to public resources and markets in order to maximise private profit.

“This is nothing more than a scheme to unfairly promote and advantage GM techniques and their products over all other means to achieve rural sustainability for African communities. The AATF considers only genetic manipulation solutions to Africa’s drought problems, ignoring all other technologies and management strategies,” Phelps told IPS.

“The strategy also substitutes ‘drought tolerance’ with ‘helping plants to cope with the stress of drought’ – a more rubbery, unquantified and undefined concept open to interpretation,” Phelps said.

But Africa has more mouths to feed despite strides to boost agriculture investment and its under-resourced small holder farmers. Some farmers desperate to earn a living think the GM crops should be given a chance.

Berean Mukwende, a maize famer in Zimbabwe and vice-President of the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, said given poor growing conditions and low yields in drought-prone countries like Zimbabwe, drought-resistant varieties of staple maize should be considered.

“Seed is expensive and normally not available in rural areas and (are) often not the suitable varieties. But with yields low, higher yield and drought-resistant varieties (of maize) would raise productivity and are welcome,” Mukwende said.

He added: “Farmers do not have finance to purchase the seeds and welcome a reduction in cost and are always on the lookout for high yields, drought tolerance, and resistance to pests and diseases traits in seeds.”

AATF’s Project Communications Officer, Grace Wachoro, told IPS that the WEMA project is using advanced breeding technology based on germplasm from CIMMYT’s Drought Tolerance Maize for Africa. The project will incorporate the transgenic drought tolerance trait into some of these new drought-tolerant hybrids.

AATF said during moderate drought, the new varieties are expected to increase yields by 24 to 35 percent compared to current varieties without this form of drought tolerance. If the project succeeds, the increase in yields would translate into two million additional tonnes of maize harvested during drought years.

“That means 14 to 21 million people in the five countries we are targeting would have more to eat and sell,” Wachoro told IPS from Nairobi, Kenya.

In addition, AAFT says, the new varieties have human and environmental health benefits through the reduced need and use for pesticides. The crop is also fortified with increased minerals and vitamins for better health.

But biotechnology promises for boosting food security have not waned despite growing scepticism about the safety of GM crops. If anything, they have fed the case against GM foods.

Gene Ethics believes the WEMA plan focuses exclusively on higher yields with GM crops dependent on increasingly expensive and scarce inputs, such as oil-based fertilisers, pesticides and machinery fuels. The organisation said integrated, biodiverse cropping and management systems that would better serve the long-term needs of rural communities for environmental sustainability, nutrition and balanced diets should be considered as possible solutions.

AAFT has said smallholder farmers will have to pay for the seeds because Monsanto was donating advanced breeding, biotechnology, and expertise to improve the drought tolerance of maize varieties adapted to African conditions. However, they will not be charged royalties.

The varieties will be licensed without charge through AATF for development, testing, and eventual deployment through multiple seed distribution channels.

But Phelps is not convinced. He said nothing is free in the long run and African farmers will pay year after year for GM seed that they cannot save for replanting.

“Monsanto offers its GM seed products free at first, as it did in South America with soy and corn,” he said.

“Monsanto and AATF plan to hook African farmers and governments who will buy GM products later at top prices when other options such as farm-saved seed have disappeared.”

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