One of the goals of the campaign is to increase the number of women who understand their rights and can effectively defend them as Adelina Ortiz did. To help educate the next generation, the campaign developed a program for teachers and schoolchildren in 2007 that teaches young people about how to prevent gender violence and what to do if they are attacked.
"We used to talk about gender equity here," says Patricia Jovel. "But never gender violence." Jovel is the director of a school participating in this new initiative in El Progreso, a village perched on the impossibly steep Quetzaltepeque volcano outside San Salvador. The school, where 850 students from 6 to 16 years old attend classes in two half-day groups, is a collection of six cinderblock classrooms topped by metal sheet roofing on either side of a terraced concrete courtyard sloping down the mountainside. It is a beehive of activity after classes, as without any level area for a playground, the students play tag around the central courtyard in the brisk mountain air. Jovel says the young women who sometimes have to walk home in the dark after school are now better equipped to fend off the young men offering drinks and cigarettes to them. "Thank God there have been no rapes," she says.
The students have learned their lessons well: Karla Sanchez, 15, says it is a matter of her basic rights. "Everyone must respect our rights as children, girls, youth. We all have the same rights, and no one can violate them. And if something should happen, we know we can tell our parents, our teachers, or adults we trust. They are here to help us," she explains patiently. And if these people can't help, she knows where to go. She lists a number of institutions where she can turn for protection: the Human Rights Office; the National Police; and the Salvadoran Institute for the Advancement of Women, known as ISDEMU. As she leaves, Sanchez articulates one essential idea about reporting gender violence: "We should not be afraid of what people say."
In 2007, this pilot project in 53 schools exposed 25,000 students to the key messages of the campaign and trained 1,000 students and 1,000 teachers. The teachers now have incorporated violence prevention into their curriculum, and they work with the trained students. The pilot was supported by the Ministry of Education and was such a success that the minister decided to incorporate it into the public school curriculum nationwide.
Sustained pressure to change societal attitudes toward women is a slow process. One effective way to question long-held ideas and beliefs is to educate those entrusted with defending the rights of women, protecting them in the community, and helping them if they are attacked or injured. These include public officials like police officers, judges, public health officials and doctors, and social workers. The campaign organized a formal training program at the University of Central America (UCA) in 2005, and 45 people attended.
Maritza de Vasquez, a psychologist at the family court in the city of San Marcos, just outside San Salvador, says this training has helped her assist the many women who come through her office. De Vasquez says that women are hearing the messages of the campaign and are taking action to protect themselves. In the steady stream of domestic violence and divorce cases she sees, there is a different attitude. "Women take the opportunity to come here and talk about their situation they come here right away to denounce it," she says. "They are expressing their rights more openly now."
Back in Ahuachapan, Ortiz grows corn and raises sheep to support her children and grandchildren. He husband is in jail awaiting a hearing. "I'd rather see him in prison than anywhere else," Ortiz says. It was her participation in a sheep-raising program run by one of Oxfam America's partners, Association of Salvadoran Agriculturalists (AGROSAL), that exposed Ortiz to the human rights training that helped her defend her own life and protect her children. She points out that in all her training to become a health worker, no one ever educated her about domestic violence or how to prevent it. "The training taught me that women have rights and people are obligated to respect them," Ortiz says. "This made me act, to look for help, and thank God I found it."
]]>Mogale, 37, is open about her status: she has been HIV positive for two years, and she is living with it. After all, she is doing better now and hopes the worst is behind her. "Now I am really fit compared to when I was sick—I can go a long distance walking now," she says. She regularly walks about one and a half miles to the headquarters of Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba, a community organization where she is part of a support group for people living with HIV/AIDS in her village of Welgavel.
Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba helped get Mogale out of bed and back on her feet. The organization sent a home-based care worker to nurse her, help her get to the hospital for treatment, teach her how to take her antiretroviral medication and manage her diet, and file for a government support grant—a source of money for disabled people.
Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba—meaning "health is the root of the nation" in Setswana, the local language—has about 21 caregivers serving 240 patients in four villages. They ensure that patients are taking their medication; they cook and clean, and disinfect and dress wounds from the many infections that bedevil those with an immune system compromised by HIV. In some cases they deliver food parcels to help families survive.
Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba is just one of thousands of local community based organizations helping the roughly 5.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. They are on the front line of the struggle, and play an essential role in providing services. "Community-based organizations are key in the fight against HIV/AIDS," says Gerard Payne the affiliate coordinator at the AIDS Consortium, an umbrella organization for the thousands of such community groups around South Africa. "Without them the fight against HIV and AIDS is a mere media campaign. They provide essential services in the community, they speak the language, and they understand the cultural issues in the communities."
Oxfam America is working with the AIDS Consortium to provide training and other support to community based organizations like Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba in South Africa's North West Province, one of the poorest areas of the country, with a high incidence of HIV/AIDS. The AIDS Consortium is working with 47 local community based organizations in the North West, and with funding from Oxfam it can expand its efforts to some of the 150 others struggling against HIV/AIDS in the province.
Pholo Mode Wa Sechaba helps patients get tested for HIV and, when patients test positive, counsels them on their treatment options and on how to "live positively." In addition to its home-based care program, it has a daycare for young children and an after-school program for orphans and others who need a place to do their homework and learn valuable life skills including how to prevent HIV.
Learning that you are HIV positive forces you to think about everything differently. Just having to share your status with your family is enough of a crisis for many newly diagnosed people. They then must struggle with how to live with what may at first seem a death sentence, how to make ends meet if they are too ill to work, how to endure the side effects of the medication, and how to manage the stigma of being HIV positive.
South Africa's health care system, while free, is overburdened and does not provide adequate social support for people living with HIV/AIDS. They can be tested, learn the result, and get a CD4 count (a measure of the blood cells that support their immune system). Many get free antiretroviral medication. But then they are really on their own—and if they lack a support system of family and friends, as many do in communities already ravaged by the disease, these patients are in crisis.
Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba helped Maria Mogale with these struggles, and helped her understand her treatment options. These are the most important lessons the organization teaches people in the community, particularly valuable to women who are sometimes excluded from health care options owing to poverty and discrimination—a violation of their right to health care. Family members may insist on traditional medicine, which frequently delays treatment, and can often hasten death.
Mogale learned this from Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba: "If people are sick, they need to go to the hospital, and not just stay at home and say they are bewitched," she says at her home, a three-room house made of metal sheets outside Welgavel. "I tell people, 'AIDS is there, but you can get better.'" She smiles as she speaks.
Mogale is a strong, positive example for members of her community—and this strength, tragically, is also a good example within her own family. Her daughter Portia, 18, learned she was HIV positive two months ago, and her 60-year-old mother Priscilla, who lives nearby, is also in treatment. Both are now thinking about their lives differently as well, and look to Mogale for advice on how to live and think about their future. Portia is in her second to last year of high school and is considering higher education, even as she is still learning what it means to be HIV positive.
For Maria Mogale, her future may involve helping others on a more formal basis: she wants to work with Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba. "I want to become a caregiver, and teach others what I have learned."
]]>Each season is slightly different than the previous one, but having anticipated the changing conditions, generation after generation learns to adapt.
But what happens when the seasons become less predictable and the conditions more difficult to manage? What happens when human activities, like burning coal, oil, and natural gas, change the climate—not just for a season, but for the long-term? Then, lacking the information or resources necessary to understand, prepare for, and respond to increased hazards, many of the world's poorest communities experience unprecedented stress.
]]>The survey report, "In Her Own Words: Iraqi women talk about their greatest concerns and challenges," is being released on International Women's Day to highlight the daily hardships women are facing as a result of years of conflict.
The report also calls on the government of Iraq to begin a 'surge' of investment into reviving Iraq's social welfare and essential services sectors now that the security situation, although still fragile, has improved in recent months. Critical in this effort is robust support from the international community. Such investment would benefit the population as a whole, and perhaps none more than Iraq's at risk women, and in particular, women-headed-households.
"Women are the forgotten victims of Iraq. Despite the billions of dollars poured into rebuilding Iraq and recent security gains, a quarter of the women interviewed still do not have daily access to water, a third cannot send their children to school and since the war started, over half have been the victim of violence. And to add further insult more than three quarters of widows, many of whom lost their husbands to the conflict, get no government pension which they are entitled to," said Oxfam International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs.
A large majority of women surveyed were not receiving any state support and had become so poor as a result of the conflict that many could not afford to provide their families with clean water, electricity, food, an education and medical treatment.
Oxfam and an Iraqi women's organization, Al-Amal Association, which conducted the survey last year, found that despite security gains some 60 percent of women said that their security and personal safety were was still their number one concern.
The majority of women surveyed also said that access to most services, including drinking water and electricity, was worse or the same in mid-2008 as it was in 2006 when levels of insecurity in Iraq were higher. A quarter of the women surveyed—24 percent—had no access to clean water. Nearly half of those who did have access to water—48 percent—said it wasn't suitable for drinking. Eighty-two percent said that access to electricity had worsened or had not improved since 2006.
"A whole generation of Iraqis are at risk. Mothers are being forced to make tough choices, such as whether to pay for their children to go to school and receive healthcare, or to pay for private power and water services. These are choices no mother should have to make, and they are not only threatening individual families. They are also threatening the future of Iraq itself," added Hobbs.
The survey also found that:
The specific hardships that some of Iraq's most vulnerable individuals cope with on a daily basis, as told by them, have overwhelmingly gone unheard.
Oxfam and the Al-Amal Association, the Iraqi partner organization that conducted the survey in the five provinces of Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Najaf and Nineveh, do not claim that the information they gathered from 1,700 respondents represents the situation facing all Iraqis, or even all women in Iraq. However, it does provide a disturbing snapshot of many women's lives and those of their children and other family members. The information presented in this paper was collected over a period of several months, starting in the summer of 2008.
]]>Paso suspected the reason for this neglect, and it became clear when one health official told Paso that he was not fit to wash dishes in their office because he was an indigenous Quechua speaker, an ethnic group at the bottom of the social order in the scenic region of Cusco. Paso was so discouraged that he almost believed him.
"I was lost," says Paso, now 37, married, and the father of three young boys. "I did not know what culture I belonged to."
Racism, and the discrimination it breeds, erodes the self-respect of the highland indigenous people of Peru. They turn away from their culture and slowly drop their traditional ways of living and working that are so well suited to the Andes. As a result, indigenous people are among the poorest in the country. Paso could see it around his village: farmers like him were not following their traditions of helping each other in their fields; they were poor and ashamed of their culture.
To get some perspective, Paso visited the Centro de Bartolomé de Las Casas, known by its initials CBC, because he had heard on the radio that it was running a bilingual education program designed to help indigenous leaders like him reconcile their place in Peru, learn about their human rights, and develop skills to represent their community with government officials. He joined the program and began learning to read and write in his own Quechua language as well as in Spanish, and he is now more confident in his ability to function in his own indigenous world and the official, Spanish-speaking culture of Peru.
With grants from Oxfam America, CBC had just finished a year-long consultation with Quechua-speaking community leaders and had jointly developed a curriculum designed to help young leaders value their own culture while operating in Peru's modern, post-colonial culture. "We have created a way to help people see they are part of one culture, but they recognize the other," says Nicolette Velarde, an anthropologist at CBC. She says this helps the community leaders create a "dialogue of respect and recognition of one culture with the other."
"Both are valuable," Velarde says. "I am different from you, you are different from me, but there is dialogue and respect."
After developing the curriculum, CBC is now in the midst of training its first group of leaders, which included Paso and 30 others from Cusco and Apurimac.
One of them is Guillermina Mamani Huamán, 53, a mother of four and grandmother of seven. She had a similar experience to Paso's the first time she visited the city of Cusco, 15 years ago. "It was the first time I ever left my village ... Every time I think of it I get emotional," she says, sitting at her loom, staked out on the ground on the banks of the Mapuche River rushing past her father and sister's house.
Huamán went to Cusco to ask a government agency for help in marketing artisan products, but, over the course of four days, she was repeatedly denied the courtesy of even a short consultation. She struggled to find her way in the city, unable to read the street signs, frustrated by her illiteracy, and discouraged by her confrontation with institutionalized racism.
Indigenous women get little help from government agencies whose mission is to assist them. And indigenous women have special problems, even within their own culture, in that men do not always respect the work they do in their homes, and artisan women find that their handicrafts do not fetch a very high price. Huamán intends to learn how to better promote indigenous artisanry and build respect for the work of women. "We need to value fairly what we produce," she says. "This traditional way of weaving is the fruit of our culture, and every weaving has its own character—each woman puts in the way she sees the world."
Paso and Huamán and all the other leaders are planning how they will use their newfound knowledge and leadership skills. Paso is planning to run for public office so he can better represent his community and ensure it gets the schools, health care, and clean water it deserves, without forsaking its cultural identity.
Huamán wants to continue her work to promote the handicrafts produced by women in her community so that they can be more financially independent. "I want to help women educate their children," she says while weaving next to the rushing river, "so they can read and write, and not face the discrimination that I have."
]]>"This is not a typical campaign,” said Janet McKinley, chair of Oxfam America’s board of directors and of the Campaign for Oxfam America. “We're not raising money for new buildings or for a perpetual endowment. The highest return a donor can get is to put money to work now.”
“Oxfam is seeking investors who want to expand our programs over a five-year period, building the capacity of poor communities, particularly women, to earn more, save more, invest in their families, and better manage their risks,” McKinley continued. “And given the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters, those risks are rising.” McKinley and her husband, George Miller, have already committed $5 million to the Campaign for Oxfam America.
“The show of support we have seen for the Campaign is especially significant since Oxfam, in order to preserve its independence and voice, does not accept funding from the US government. The organization depends entirely on gifts and grants from individual donors, foundations, and corporations to carry out its mission of poverty alleviation and social justice,” McKinley concluded.
To date, individuals have contributed 57 percent of the donations for the Campaign for Oxfam America. Foundations and corporations have donated 43 percent. The Campaign has received commitments for 10 seven-figure and 50 six-figure gifts.
Among the leading institutional donors, the New York City-based Ford Foundation has already committed $9 million to the Campaign.
“The foundation shares Oxfam America’s commitment to reducing poverty, creating economic opportunities, investing in women and families,” said Susan V. Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation. “We welcome these efforts to create lasting, equitable solutions to the most pressing global issues.”
Another major donor to Oxfam, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, CA, has contributed $4.5 million in current grants.
“Oxfam makes canny use of its financial support,” said Paul Brest, president of the Hewlett Foundation. “We share its goals of reforming aid and making global trade practices fairer as an effective way to lift the world’s population out of poverty.”
Funds raised through the Campaign for Oxfam America will support longer-term investment in four distinct areas of work:
She was also furious. "This should not happen to us," she said later, referring to the residents of her village of Teberebie, which had been relocated to accommodate a new mining operation in the area. "What did we do wrong?"
Mr. Baidoo had been walking away from a confrontation between farmers and a military force when he was wounded. The protest arose after the military began blocking a road the farmers used to travel to their fields where they grow cocoa and palm trees, yams, cassava, and other fruits and vegetables. Having recently been denied this route through the mine property, and tired of the alternative—a longer, 12-mile round trip on foot—the entire town turned out in February 2006 to demand access to the road. Baidoo and one other man were shot, and several people were beaten.
Amoateng immediately called WACAM, the environmental and human rights organization partly funded by Oxfam that had trained her and others in the community. "I reported that Anthony had been shot, and was lying in his own blood," she said. After WACAM's director Daniel Owusu-Koranteng called the head of the AngloGold Ashanti mine company, Baidoo got the medical care he needed to survive at the company's expense. After recovering for eight months in the hospital he is now disabled.
Teberebie is a farming community in the Wassa West District of Ghana's Western Region. The community was resettled in 1991 to make room for the AngloGold Ashanti, Iduapriem Mine, which is now producing over 300,000 ounces of gold per year. It is just one of many scenes of violence over the last several years, as Ghana has thrown open its doors to foreign companies and relaxed its rules on investment to encourage more mining. The shootings in Teberebie were just two of 15 reported by the BBC in 2005 and 2006.
Amoateng is now a leader of the Concerned Farmers' Association of Teberebie, which consists of 35 farmers who have worked with WACAM to learn about their human rights under Ghana's constitution and Minerals and Mining Act. She is leading this group in a legal case against AngloGold, alleging non-payment of compensation for their lost farms, which are now buried under piles of waste rock.
Amoateng, 30, said she is now more aware of how the government and mining companies in the area are violating the rights of people in her community—and what to do about it. "Because of WACAM, I now know where to go and who to contact in case of any problem in the community," she said. Her recent activities have included leading a march to the nearby town of Tarkwa, where radio, television, and newspaper journalists interviewed her about the situation facing farmers in Teberebie.
In Ghana, as in many other countries in Africa and other parts of the world, women do not usually lead political struggles. Speaking out publicly is simply out of the question for most women in communities affected by mining in Ghana. Men are normally perceived as the voices of the community. But with the right training and personal ambition, women like Amoateng are showing they are strong leaders.
To more effectively represent her community, Amoateng is presently studying to finish high school and prepare for university. She aspires to be a lawyer and an advocate for women and children.
Her concerns center on basic justice for Teberebie. "The 1992 constitution and the Minerals and Mining Act are my closest friends now," Amoateng said. "I don't want the mining company to cheat my community. And I know my rights as a citizen living in a mining community."
Amoateng's work is a good example of how WACAM uses education as a tool to empower mining communities in their struggle to improve their living conditions. Her training with WACAM has strengthened her community as well as her own ability to represent her neighbors. "This has made me very powerful in the sight of both the mining company, and the men in my community," she said. "I am proud of myself."
Jerry Mensah-Pah is a radio and newspaper journalist based in Tarkwa, Ghana, and has been covering human rights violations related to communities affected by mining for four years. He works for WACAM in the Western Region of Ghana as its assistant programs officer.
]]>Dalla Sissoko is watching this closely. Sissoko is one of the founders of the TONUS organization in Mali in 1995. This social service agency is now one of Oxfam America's partners in the Saving for Change program in Mali, and Sissoko is a micro-finance expert and head of the women's program at TONUS.
"We say that women are at the center of the Saving for Change program," Sissoko said on a rainy afternoon at the TONUS headquarters outside Bamako. "When we go to a village we have to speak with a chief or council, but after these initial meetings we are in contact only with the women. The women run the bank, keep the books, and run the meetings," she said.
It's no surprise that the women also enjoy the benefits of their Saving for Change group, Sissoko says. "We are seeing women have more money for buying things for the family and paying school fees. And many have extra money to buy things for their daughters when they get married, like a bed, and pots and pans."
Having more money to contribute to the family needs and expenses is a change in the role of women in the family. Men can see the benefits of the program, and their acceptance is important because participation in Saving for Change involves a time commitment from the busiest person in the family. "With Saving for Change women have two hours each week to talk among themselves, and they can have a break," Sissoko says, "They enjoy the company of their friends. It's really important to have this space. More and more, the men are allowing this time, and things are changing slowly. Many of the women are starting to wear better clothes, and the families are eating better. The health of children and their families are improving also, and men appreciate this."
But membership in a Saving for Change group goes beyond money and fellowship. "In most cases women do not get much information or training, but with the Saving for Change program they can get training among themselves," Sissoko says. TONUS trains women in managing their accounts, and in preventing and treating malaria, one of the most serious health threats in Mali.
And as with any organized group of knowledgeable people, Saving for Change group members look beyond their own personal concerns and advocate for ways to improve their community. In this case, groups propose ways to prevent malaria in the entire village. "They eventually start speaking in public," Sissoko says, ?and have opinions people respect."
Being involved in public affairs, and actually speaking your mind in public is simply out of the question for most village women in Mali. This is particularly the case in questions about public health, agriculture, access to water, and other crucial issues facing many villages. "Women are not really involved in development activities, these are dominated by men," Sissoko says. "Women just don?t make any of the decisions about development. They are not consulted and they are not heard. Women do not speak out in public. When they are young they are told that if they speak out they will never get a husband."
Minata Konaré, a 24-year-old mother of three and member of a Savings for Change group says that having the confidence to speak in public is one of the biggest changes for her, and it all started at her group meetings. "I never used to be able to speak in public, but now I can talk in public," Konaré says while passing by a friend's house on her way to work selling food in the village of Guily, near where she lives. "I used to always be at my house, but now I come to the village and talk with the other women, so this is opening things up for me."
The positive changes for women seen by Sissoko and others are being documented in a study carried out by Oxfam in late 2006. It looked at the progress being made in 20 villages in Mali, where researchers got numerous comments from women members of Saving for Change groups as well as their husbands and others in the communities. "Women are earning more money, and their new income enhances their status in their households," one researcher commented. "They are purchasing things they couldn't previously afford, they are contributing more to household expenses, and they report helping their husbands more."
Sissoko says women are creating ways for villages to better store their grains and other crops, eliminate mosquito breeding areas, and promote other positive changes they see helping everyone in the community. "Saving for Change helps women build confidence in their ability to do things," Sissoko says. "The entire village benefits from Saving for Change."
]]>Devapiriam is the director of Anawim Trust, a rural development organization that undertook relief efforts when the tsunami struck the coast of Tamil Nadu, India.
“Right after the tsunami," she says, "we provided people in the area villages with food, medical aid, and then temporary shelter."
But while she and her staff labored to get aid to everyone in need, she never lost sight of the particular struggles of women and children.
"Already we were working with women and children before the tsunami, because they were the most oppressed in the community. After the tsunami, initially most rehabilitation aid was given to men, who received fishing boats," says Shanti. "So we focused on the women."
She first helped women form self-help groups—community organizations where members save, lend, and invest money together. She then provided trainings to group members in both job skills and how to run a business.
In one highly successful joint venture with Anawim Trust, three self-help groups of Dalit women have come to own fifteen 30-foot fishing boats, which they rent out to local fishermen. At an impromptu meeting on the beach of Senthilveethi in March 2007, several of the women talked about the impact boat ownership has had on their lives.
"Earlier we used to work as laborers, but now we are the owners of boats," said Devika, who like many people here goes by only one name. "Now men are working in our boats. And we have confidence that we can be the owners of more."
"Now the other boat owners respect us as owners," added Maragatham, another self-help group member.
The police, too, are paying more attention to the rights of these women.
"In the past, the police didn't respect us. They ignored our complaints," said Muthulascmi, an elderly member of a self-help group. But when a motor from one of their boats was stolen, the police responded quickly. "We got it back immediately."
And with past hurts fresh in their minds, the women have taken steps to right some old wrongs. "We feel that we treat our laborers better than we used to be treated," said Maragatham. "Laborers now prefer to work with us because we always give them their fair share."
The experience of the women of Senthilveethi illustrates the impact that gaining access to high-value assets can have on impoverished women, and why gender researcher Chaman Pincha considers it a particularly effective tool for empowering women in the wake of disasters.
In June of 2006, Pincha and a team of independent researchers undertook a study—initiated and funded by Oxfam, and managed by Anawim Trust—to help document how gender affected the experiences of tsunami survivors, the various ways tsunami aid providers have integrated gender sensitivity into their programs, and what impact those programs have had on women and men.
Collaborating with a group of ten non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that share the goal of ensuring gender equity in aid delivery, she and her team carried out discussions with tsunami survivors in 45 villages served by the NGOs in the hard-hit districts of Kanniyakumari, Cuddalore, and Nagapattinam.
The field work revealed aid efforts that had missed the mark, but Chaman and her team put greater attention on practices that can serve as models for NGOs responding to future disasters.
“It was unfortunate that for the sake of avoiding bias, we couldn't hold focus groups in the areas where Anawim Trust works," says Pincha, "because a number of their programs reflect the best practices that emerged from the study."
Training women in nontraditional trades, for example.
In a spacious, well-lit room of the Anawim production center, a young woman named Selvakani sets up a job on a printing press. After two trainings followed by two years of hands-on experience, she handles the tools and equipment with ease—cleaning and installing rollers, positioning the image plate, and then running off a stack of flyers, somehow managing to keep her sari clean throughout. She prefers this work to her other alternative—agricultural labor—and with job offers at printing companies beginning to roll in, she has given herself a foothold in a relatively secure and well-paid line of work. Selvakani enjoys telling people about her job and says they respect her unusual skills. "They say, 'it's a good job that you're doing,'" she says with a smile.
"Training women in nontraditional skills breaks stereotypes and can enhance women's self-esteem. It helps them fetch better wages, and over time helps them achieve positions of leadership," says Pincha. "It's one good strategy for aid providers who are committed to women's empowerment."
The gender study, which is now being finalized, is one of several that Oxfam has carried out in the wake of the tsunami.
"By undertaking studies that draw out the experience and perspective of community members and combining that with the knowledge that aid providers have to offer, we hope to strengthen not only Oxfam programs but also those of the aid community as a whole," says Russell Miles, Oxfam America’s Tsunami Research Program Manager. "Sometimes the results confirm our hunches, sometimes they elaborate on existing knowledge, and occasionally they surprise us."
For her part, Devapiriam is looking forward to the completion of the gender study, whose recommendations she believes will help strengthen her already-impressive array of programs for women. "It's very important to us to have a chance to learn from the best practices of other organizations."
She takes her Oxfam guests to one last gathering before they leave town. In the village of Mangalawadi, a self-help group has purchased a collection of new chairs and utensils to rent out on big occasions, and today they celebrate the launch of the new business. It is a joyful event, where in amongst the formalities, spontaneous speeches erupt.
"Before we founded the self-help groups, we never had confidence in ourselves, and we had no assertiveness," says Alli, an elderly group leader, who has helped local groups collaborate with one another. "Forming a self-help group is not such a great thing in itself. Everyone is doing it. But here we don't just focus on money. Here we have created unity."
]]>So, three times a week, and sometimes more, women from the Abu Shouk and Al Salaam camps head out on four-hour treks to scavenge for fuel. If they don't come upon any trees, the women resort to clawing through the hard-packed earth to reach bits of root that they can burn instead.
But hard work is only part of their problem. Looming larger for these women is the constant threat to their safety: By venturing even a short distance outside of the camps they could face harassment, sexual assault, or even death. Since early 2003, conflict has wracked this region, forcing more than 2 million people from their homes. Many of them have sought shelter in camps like Abu Shouk and Al Salaam. But the demands of daily living—the need for wood, for jobs, for food—often require them to leave the safety of those camps.
Now, Oxfam America, together with the Sudanese Agency for Environment and Development Service (SAEDS), has launched a $132,000 program that will help thousands of displaced women stay safer in this volatile place. The agency is providing 4, 200 households with fuel-efficient stoves that, in many cases, will completely remove the need for women to hunt for wood. Two thousand of the stoves are kerosene-fueled; another 2,000 are efficient wood-burning stoves; and 200 of them use gas. The project will benefit about 25,200 people.
Women were excited about getting the stoves, said Sahar Ali, an Oxfam America program officer, who paid a monitoring visit to Abu Shouk in late January.
"Traditionally, the provision of firewood and fuel for cooking has been the responsibility of women," said Ali, in a report she filed after the visit. "There are few other sources of cooking fuel available to them."
But with the introduction of kerosene and gas, they now have other options. And the small round stoves that burn wood efficiently—as opposed to open fires—means women will need to make fewer of the dangerous scavenging trips.
Still, convincing women that gas is a smart way to cook has taken some doing, said Ali. They worried about its hazards.
"This is the first time for them using gas, and most of the houses are made from wood," said Ali. "If it burns, it burns all the camp. They said we prefer kerosene—not the gas."
The hesitancy about gas notwithstanding, the new stoves are bringing another important benefit to the region, too: some relief for the environment.
"North Darfur is mostly desert, and the few trees that provided a nearby source of cooking fuel when the camps were first created more than two years ago are all gone," said Ali in her report.
It's a trend that Ibrahim Suliman, a program coordinator for SAEDS, has watched for the past four decades as it's crept across the region.
"When I was a child, most of Darfur was covered in forest—even North Darfur," said Suliman, a native of Dar el Salaam, a small village about 30 miles south of El Fasher. But in the last 30 years, those trees and grasses have given way to desert. Why?
"Because of overgrazing," said Suliman. "Because there is no planning for animal breeding. And the firewood for cooking. And for houses—people build their houses from wood. And charcoal traders."
But with the introduction of the stoves, some of that degradation can be slowed since less wood will be needed for cooking. Suliman has even convinced his mother to switch to kerosene.
"She's very happy. It's clean," he said.
SAEDS is taking its concern for the environment a step further: It has launched a replanting project in Dar es Salaam and plans to begin a similar effort around the camps.
"Our philosophy is to restock the forest and all these things will be improved," said Suliman. "If we try to stop cutting trees and every year we try to plant many new trees, within four to five years we will be able to restock a big amount of trees. And we'll be able to at least make the environment more attractive than before and people can find grasses for their animals and be able to cultivate again. It might take a long time, but we have to start."
In Dar el Salaam, thanks to SAEDS, about 4,500 new saplings are now growing.
"In five to 10 years, I'm sure it will be green," said Suliman.
Near El Fasher, trees might also grow again. Oxfam's project with SAEDS calls for the planting of 10,000 seedlings around the camps. Families who have recently received the fuel-efficient stoves will be mobilized to do the planting.
]]>