Monthly Archives: January 2012

World Vision volunteers – know as the ‘femme relais’ or ‘relay women’ – are trained to monitor mothers and children in each village. 

Justin Byworth, World Vision UK’s Chief Executive, has just returned from Niger where the population faces a growing food crisis.

Day 9, Niamey (Niger) and Paris airports

What a week it’s been in Niger. Full of heartache, but also of hope. Unforgettable encounters with incredible people. Children facing hardship that would be unimaginable had I not seen it with my own eyes. Hugely committed and capable people working to bring real change in those children’s lives.  Agencies and governments working together to stop the food crisis becoming a catastrophe.

Then there are the many wonderful people I’ve been in touch with this week in the UK who are smart and caring enough to open up their hearts and minds to a place so different and so far from home and to give of their time and resources to make such a difference. Tired as I am after such an intense time, it’s good to step back and reflect a little on what I’ve seen and learnt in Niger.

Power of sponsorship

Three people and my encounters with them stand out especially:

• Aissatou: eight years old, but looking no more than six. When her tiny frame walked into the room, as we heard of her escape from marriage with a man old enough to be her grandfather, it was if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.Through Aissatou, her two aunts already lost in childbirth and a third, Zainab, just 12 herself and also rescued from being a child bride, we caught a glimpse of the scale and tragedy of early marriage in Niger.
• Kidri: working for his children’s lives at the likely expense of his own.  Hearing his voice from the 50-foot hole, seeing his face emerge as he climbed up to meet me, then talking about our families, it seemed like the chasm between his world and mine was momentarily bridged.  For his ten-year-old son Amadou, healthy and at school, that’s a bridge that can impact a lifetime through the power of child sponsorship.
• Alhoussane: clinging on to her fragile little life, the pain of severe malnutrition etched across not just her face but her mother Rakia’s too.  It was hard but essential to take her picture for the world to see what will be happening many thousands of times over if we do not act now in response to the food crisis.

Preventing crisis

At the start of my visit I said that I wanted to see how the food crisis in Niger and across West Africa’s Sahel region compared to the famine I saw in Somalia and the Horn of Africa last summer – and whether World Vision and other agencies can act earlier to prevent the horrors of famine here.  It’s too early to say for sure, with long, hard months ahead before the next harvest, but the signs are hopeful that, yes – we can.

The Niger government and all agencies are working well together already with the launch of the international appeal by Niger’s prime minister in Tillaberi yesterday and last night’s reception for the visiting European Union humanitarian commissioner.  It was good to meet and talk with UNICEF, the World Food Programme, Save the Children, EU etc and to hear one clear message – if we act now, together we can prevent this crisis from becoming a catastrophe.

Overwhelming in scale

As I change flights in Paris, I see that today’s UK news is reporting that delays in the East Africa famine cost lives – undoubtedly true as I saw for myself.  As the reports say, we all bear a part of the responsibility for that – governments, UN, aid agencies, media and the public.  I remember well the reports of impending crisis there almost a year ago, and the difficulty we had getting support until the media helped focus the world’s attention there last summer.

By then the situation was already overwhelming in scale and need. World Vision and others still saved many lives there not least because of such a generous response from the UK public to the Disaster Emergency Committee appeal, which we are part of.  World Vision is not alone in already putting the learning from East Africa into practice here in West Africa.  We will not let that happen again.

The other focus of my visit has been to understand what childhood means somewhere like Niger.  I’ve seen how vulnerable children are to things that no child should have to experience.  Girls to the abomination of early marriage and motherhood.  Boys to the hardship of labour in unacceptable conditions.  For both girls and boys, this means having their childhoods taken away from them. We know Niger is not alone in this. We just cannot let this continue. It needs action at every level from those communities to their own societies and governments, through to our own government and the international community.  If we can do it to prevent famine in Niger, can’t we also protect children from such neglect, abuse and exploitation that is taking place every single day but all too often goes on unnoticed and unchallenged?

For all those who have followed my journey over the past week or so, through the blog, Facebook or Twitter – thank you.  It’s such a privilege to be able to see and share first hand some insight into just one of the many places where World Vision is working to bring real change to children’s lives. It’s special, too, to be able to interact and get to know some of the thousands of wonderful supporters that World Vision has for our work in Niger and across the world.  As I return home to my own beautiful family, I have so many things to give thanks to God for – as well as many people and places to continue to uphold in prayer.

Justin Byworth, World Vision UK’s Chief Executive, continues to blog from Niger where the population faces a growing food crisis.

Day 8, Ouallam and en route home from Niamey

Our last day in Niger and mixed feelings, with fond farewells to our friends and colleagues in World Vision Niger, eager anticipation of being back home with my family, and one final day packed full of experiences with the resilient and resourceful Nigerien people to reflect on.

A risky future

Our final field visit took us to Ouallam, even more of a desert and closer to the border with Mali and the nomadic Tuaregs for whom “a gun is an income generation tool”, as one local put it today.  The security laid on for us by local authorities was suitably upgraded from police to a fully armed vehicle, much like the infamous “technicals” in Somalia.

What stopped us on the road, though, was something much more vulnerable – a group of children walking the long trek away from the food crisis in their villages to an unknown and risky future in Niamey.   Eleven boys aged around ten to 14, with packages piled high on their heads, told us that they had been on the road for ten days and had walked nearly 100 miles from their homes.

When we asked what they would do when they got to Niamey, they had little idea. “We’ll beg,” was all that they said.  This brought to life the results of the new situation assessment which showed that the food crisis has a growing urban dimension to it. World Vision already works in some of Niamey’s poorest areas and, together with other agencies, is considering how to scale up our response there.  There are clear child protection issues here too. Just as in the Dickensian days of ‘Oliver’, we all know how vulnerable village children without their families can be in the big city.

Malnutrition battle

Our last visit to a health centre and nutrition clinic showed what results can be achieved by such simple interventions as training and basic materials for health staff and community volunteers.

In just one year vaccination rates have risen from 48% to 73%, the number of women giving birth with a clinic midwife has more than doubled, and family planning uptake has tripled.

Much more remains to be done though as Haoua, mother of a 17-month-old malnourished girl called Latifah, told us: “There are so many more in our village whose children are malnourished.”   The ‘femme relais’ health volunteers sat all in a row armed with their nutrition monitoring armbands – such a simple weapon in the frontline fight against malnutrition.

One of them, Hajira, told me: “We go to every house in the village, we even stop people in the street.” But she is worried, too, about the year ahead: “The situation will get worse, even the pregnant women are hungry now.”

Yet again, it’s the vegetable gardens that are providing a real answer to the failed cereal harvest. Here, more than 15,000 Moringa trees are producing four sacks of leaves every day and giving a real boost to families’ income. World Vision had just installed a new borehole to expand the garden further.

“Water means joy”

In such harsh desert conditions, if there’s one thing that so tangibly transforms lives, it’s water.  It was wonderful that our very last visit was to a community full of excitement at the arrival of clean water for the first time.

Across West Africa for more than 20 years, World Vision has been bringing water to dry land.  We don’t have many large scale infrastructure projects like this, but our lorry mounted drilling rigs are an investment with a huge return in human life.

The village leader Hassan, tells us: “For us, water means joy.”  The joy that comes from their children not having to drop out of school to fetch water from the next village over two miles away. The joy of knowing that they can now grow vegetables in a place where they’ll have no other crop for at least nine months.  Water that they can all drink safely.  Water for their goats.

Tireless work

As we heard all of this – and more from mothers, children and teachers in and around two tiny school classrooms, made from just sticks and leaves, where this well is being installed – it’s easy to see why the teams of World Vision water engineers love their job so much. They work tirelessly around the clock across this parched Sahel region. “They are more happy than you can ever imagine,” Adamou, supervising here today, tells me.  After five hours of drilling through the morning, they hope to hit the water table 50 metres or so down by the evening. This is their fourth well in the last week.

As we head back to Niamey for a last evening of packing, farewells and final meetings with government and international community colleagues, the image of tonight’s celebrations in Ouallam as they hit water are etched in my mind and will keep me going though the late night flight home.

Sponsor a child in Niger today

Donate to Children in Emergencies and help protect children living in the world’s most dangerous places

Justin Byworth, World Vision UK’s Chief Executive, continues to blog from Niger where the population faces a growing food crisis.

Day 7, Tillaberi

A week into our time in Niger, the nature of the food crisis here is still unfolding.  Today we analysed the new assessment data from government, talked with women digging rock-hard soil for a few kilos of food, and met Alhousanne – the most severely malnourished little girl we’ve seen so far.  Each adds another dimension to understanding what’s going on here, of what lies ahead through 2012 and of what can be done to stop or contain this.

We were in Tillaberi, centre of probably the worst affected region in the country and we were told one of the hottest places in Africa, and on earth, with temperatures often exceeding 50˚C in May.

Maternal nutrition

At a local health centre, part of World Vision’s ‘community management of acute malnutrition’ programme we met Alhousanne.  Six months old, it didn’t take the ‘red’ from the nutrition monitoring armband to know that she was severely malnourished.  Her ribs seem to be almost coming through her chest, her legs virtually withered, her skin unresponsive to touch and her face pained and crying.

At only 3.8kg she’s smaller than three of my four children were at birth, and she’s lost weight since her visit a week ago.  Her mother Rakia is very worried and clearly malnourished herself.  At only 17 with three children already, it’s obvious that this isn’t just the failed harvest that’s caused this.

Childhood marriage and motherhood have contributed to poor maternal nutrition that’s meant her babies are born very small and then she struggles to feed them.  The food crisis has magnified this to life-threatening levels as her husband searches unsuccessfully for work after they harvested nothing in October.

Stronger and healthier

Alhousanne’s two-year-old brother gives Rakia hope though. He, too, was severely malnourished and although still on the road to recovery is getting stronger each week with the therapeutic nutrition at the health centre and the support of their village ‘femme relais’ (literally, relay-woman) – the essential volunteers we’ve trained to monitor mother and child health in each village to educate, support and bring them to the clinic when needed.

Across the globe World Vision works like this, acting as the bridge between mothers, children and the lowest levels of the local health service.  Haoua, who’s with Rakia at today’s clinic is a great example of this – in her World Vision orange headscarf she confidently tells me how she’s seen many children become stronger and healthier during her four years as a femme relais.  She, too, is worried though: “In the days to come the situation will be worse,” she says. “If the mother is hungry, the child will be hungry”.

Hungry mothers though will do whatever they can to feed their children.  In the midst of an expanse of sun baked earth and rocks a few miles away we met 200 women and men digging crescent-shaped earthworks ready to catch some of the rains seven to eight months from now and grow grasses to feed their animals.

Scaling up help

Right now though, it’s the mothers and children that are eating animal feed.  One woman passed me a bowl of rough-looking cereal and only after I’d tasted it did they tell me that eating this goat food was one of the measures that they’ve taken to stave off hunger.  Apart from this, the only food they have is that which this World Vision and World Food Programme food-for-work project provides – with weekly rations of bulgar wheat, lentils and oil.  This two month project is exactly the kind of activity which we’ll need to extend and scale up to prevent this crisis turning into a catastrophe.

Having spent the last week in Isame, Tera, Komabongou and Sirba – all within Tillaberi – it was good also to meet the regional governor today.  He was open and frank about the difficult situation they face in 2012, but strong also on the government’s plans and very pleased to work together with World Vision and other agencies here.

His deputy responsible for managing the food crisis told us:  “We know you well.  World Vision has been here for a long time, helping vulnerable people, especially children.  With water, with long-term development and in crises, like the cholera last year.”  Tomorrow Niger’s Prime Minister is coming to Tillaberi to launch an international appeal for assistance to respond to the food crisis across the country.

Reading the report of the new assessment done by the government with UN and international agencies it’s clear why.   The number of people vulnerable or at risk has risen by 50 per cent since September to over 9 million.  That’s well over half of Niger’s 16 million people.  Tomorrow we’ll have our last visit to communities and meet with the visiting European Commissioner who heads their humanitarian work worldwide and with all the international agencies to discuss plans to respond to the food crisis here.

Sponsor a child in Niger today

Donate to Children in Emergencies and help protect children living in the world’s most dangerous places

Justin Byworth, World Vision UK’s Chief Executive, continues to blog from Niger where the population faces a growing food crisis.

Day 6, Niamey

A day of rest and reflection. After an early morning run in the quiet Sunday streets of Niamey, I joined a few colleagues at their church. So good to share the vibrant African worship together with people from Niger and across the continent – Ghana, Togo, Cote D’Ivoire, Rwanda and beyond.

Good also to have time to pray for Aissatou, Kadri and all those we’d met over the last few days.   The sermon was on courage in the face of fear, so relevant to Fatima and her battle against childhood marriage, drawing from Joshua in the Bible, the very same theme and book that my family and friends in church back home were looking at today.

After the service I compared notes on the food crisis with Oxfam’s humanitarian manager here, encouraging to hear again of good inter-agency work and a common perspective on the situation here.

Layers of vulnerability

Before plunging into our last two days in Niger, it was good also to cast my mind back to yesterday.  Komabangou had brought back to life vivid memories of my formative first overseas posting with World Vision all the way back in 1989, a few hundred miles west of here in Mauritania.  The desert dust and heat, couscous and freshly roasted goat (all parts of it!) for lunch and even the super-strong, sweet tea.  Back then I was a logistician sorting the medical and other supplies, helping to organise the weekly three to four-day trips to the bush, and learning so much including my first experiences of things I’ve seen here, babies being weighed, fed and vaccinated, mothers educated.

Our final stop in Komabangou was to meet another widow, Fatimata.  It wasn’t right to ask her, or Ramatou at the health centre, about their husbands’ deaths but it’s likely that these were mining related, adding another layer of vulnerability onto them and their children.

Simplicity of play

Fatimata’s children, 11-year-old Assitou and seven-year-old Sharifa, are sponsored and we spent a lovely time talking with them at their tiny home, a dome of twisted branches much like that I saw in Somalia in September.   Assitou is a confident boy and tells me how he is top of his class at school, loves geography and wants to be a teacher.  His sister sits shyly behind him, but admits that while she also wants to be a teacher she’s afraid of going to school and leaving her mother.

Fatimata tells her: “I don’t want you to end up a widow, panning dust for gold like me.” Assitou tells her not to worry about class.  They both smile when they describe the World Vision-supported celebration that all the children go to for the annual ‘Day of the African Child’.

We’ve heard this wherever we’ve been this week – the simplicity of time and space to play, enjoy good food and grow in their understanding and aspiration of what childhood could and should be for them is truly powerful.

Healthier and educated

Powerful too was our last visit of the day to Sirba, a neighbouring area where World Vision has been working a few years longer than Komabongou.  The difference was startling.  The women and men we met there were the most confident of all those we’ve seen here, overflowing with things they wanted to show and tell us about their communities and their children.   We saw a cereal bank that’s been going successfully since 2005 and is impacting over 3,500 people.

“This gives us food locally and at lower prices than the nearest market, which is 15kms away, now we can find grain all through the year,” said one woman.  We saw their new borehole providing clean water, kids on swings outside a refurbished school, extensive vegetable gardens.

They told us: “We’ve seen many changes in our children – they are healthier and being educated, now all parents want to send their children to school, especially the girls.”   As they waved us off they thanked World Vision and all those who sponsor children here and said we had been “like a new moon over Sirba”.

Sponsor a child in Niger today

Donate to Children in Emergencies and help protect children living in the world’s most dangerous places

Justin Byworth, World Vision UK’s Chief Executive, continues to blog from Niger where the population faces a growing food crisis.

Day 5, Komabangou and Sirba

It has been said that a million different people live in a million different worlds.  Today, in Komabangou, I got a glimpse of a world so different, so harsh, that it was more like being transported to another planet.

As my colleague Georgina put it: “At pretty much the hardest place on earth, children pound rocks to dust for pennies”.  A dust-covered people where fathers work themselves to an early grave just so their children can eat.

In this place, with no water, it is the traces of gold in the rocks beneath the desert surface that are the people’s lifeline.  But to get this out of the ground means facing hazards not seen in the UK for two centuries and living on the edge of existence for food, water and health.

World Vision is there helping children and their mothers and fathers cling on to that existence and in time to bring real, lasting change to these communities.

Knowing the dangers

Meeting Abdou Kadri – a 35-year-old father of four, including ten-year-old Amadou who is sponsored by a caring World Vision supporter in the UK – was the most dramatic and unexpected encounter I have had here in Niger.

As we walked towards a group of men amidst piles of rocks and sand, I realised there were scores of holes in the ground.  Hand-dug and just two or three feet across, I peered down into the dark deep below and heard the steady thud of digging.

In answer to my question of how deep these most basic of mine shafts was, one man called down below and we struck up conversation with Kadri – unseen over 50 feet below.  He had been down there for over four hours but told us he was just getting going for the day.  When he heard there was a visitor from the UK he said: “I’m coming up, I’d like to meet him”.  Seeing him emerge minutes later, climbing up the most fragile of footholds inside the hole, and beam a huge smile at me as he wiped his face clean was a surreal, unforgettable moment.

Kadri told me: “I don’t like this work. I’m only doing it so that my family don’t go hungry”.  He knows the dangers well and that he probably has just a few years life ahead of him.  Life expectancy of those working here is just 45.

That’s my age and as I sat next to him, with our legs over the side of the hole, sharing conversation about the four children we both have. I felt a strong sense of connection with him and of how different our lives are simply because of where we were born.

“I get pains in my body”

Just a mile or two across the desert scrub we met the younger generation who pound the rocks dug out by Kadri and his friends into the dust that is then sifted for gold traces.  Ten or so young men sit under a scrap of shade hammering down large metal pestles onto the rocks.

It feels overwhelming – the sun beating down, the constant sound and clouds of dust that fill the air and cover everything.  19 year old Hama Hamidou tells me: “It’s very difficult work and sometimes I get pains in my body, but it’s my only source of income”.  He started at just 16 and the contrast with my 20 year old son Joshua’s last 3 years at university and school couldn’t be starker.

Younger still is 13 year old Ibrahim, one of many boys who runs back and forth with supplies for those involved in the mining.  World Vision has been working here for the last three years and it’s good to hear that Ibrahim is in school and to see other teenage boys at the youth centre we established, where they’ve learnt carpentry and other skills to equip them with a trade that might give them another route than the dangerous gold mining.

Battle to survive

A stone’s throw away is Komabangou’s health centre, crowded with mothers and babies all attending a World Vision supported nutrition clinic.  In such a harsh part of one of the poorest countries in the world, many children face an uphill battle to survive long enough to even have the choice between gold mining and another path in life.

Our work with the health centre is changing that.  Surrounded by the noise of crying babies as they’re weighed, measured and arm measurements checked, I heard from Dr Abdou Karim that while malnutrition is on the rise – from 364 in 2010 to 541 in 2011- that only two of these children have died during that time.  Following the failed harvest, Dr Karin says: “In 2012 malnutrition is certain to rise, but we can cope as long as we get the support.  We have the staff, the material, the system – it’s working”.

The consequences of not getting the support are literally life and death for children like Magizdo.  She is two years old, severely malnourished and has malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea. An undoubtedly lethal cocktail had her mother Ramatou not brought her here where she gets therapeutic feeding – the highly nutritious ‘plumpy nut’, oral rehydration, soap and drugs to treat the malaria and pneumonia.  The trained local village health worker will monitor and support Ramatou and Magizdou closely over the days ahead and Dr Karim is confident that “she’ll survive and should recover well, they got here in time”.  Ramatou, at 26 already a widow with four children, is relieved: “I am so happy because I see my daughter’s health is improving”.

A different world

There’s much more to tell from today; time with children in another Komabongou village, a visit to a confident, go-getting community in neighbouring Sirba and eventful ferry rides over the Niger river.  This will have to wait until a much needed rest day.  For now, it’s the white dust-covered faces of the children in Komabongou and the thought of Kadri waking up to another day down a dark, deep and dangerous hole in the ground that I will carry with me, a world away even from Niamey (one of the least sophisticated capital cities I’ve seen), and a whole other universe from life back home in the UK.

Sponsor a child in Niger today

Donate to Children in Emergencies and help protect children living in the world’s most dangerous places