"When you educate your children, you provide a good generation for your community," says Abbis, 50.
That's the mantra that has helped to make her such a successful member of the Tea and Food Sellers Cooperative operating in the sprawling, dusty Elshabe market in Khartoum. It's one of three women's cooperatives that Oxfam America's partner, the Sudan Development Association or SDA, helped to launch. And now, with a new $50,000 grant from Oxfam, SDA is set to further expand its outreach to women vendors in the city by offering skills and management training, exploring new economic opportunities for them, and facilitating loans that will allow them to increase their incomes.
Established in 1990, SDA's central mission is to empower women. It started with the simplest of projects: a study of women vendors in Khartoum's markets—a group of people whose numbers had surged, but who faced few opportunities and little social support.
At the time, drought and conflict had driven many women and their children to Khartoum where the only way they could make money to support themselves was to sell food or tea in the markets, said Rugaia Salih Mohamed, SDA's program director. But they were not well-received.
"They were viewed as inferior," says Mohamed. And often, they were harassed or had their goods confiscated.
But with SDA's help, the women came together and formed a series of cooperatives, which offered them protection under the law, as well as financial and technical support—in short, a way for them to pull themselves out of the poverty that saddled them.
"Now, they know their rights," says Mohamed. "They can support their families and they don't need others to support them. It's liberating."
Among the projects the women launched was the Women Food and Tea Sellers Cooperative Restaurant. Housed in a long, narrow room in a building inside the market, the restaurant has a handful of tables and chairs at one end and a charcoal fire burning next to the wall. Co-op members can cook and sell their food here.
"They don't just stick to selling food and tea. They help others claim their rights," adds Mohamed. "Now, their children are going to university and they acquire other places themselves."
A few alleys away, in the mottled light of an expansive stall, co-op member Hiat Adam, draped in a peach-colored wrap, is serving tea from behind a tiny table. Each serving, offered in small, clear glasses, costs about 25 cents. Customers can also buy coffee for about 50 cents.
Joining the co-op was a pivotal point for Adam and the business she wanted to launch: The co-op provided her with a license so she could secure the space she needed to run her tea service. It also offered her the requisite health training.
"It's good to be a member," says Adam. "If you are working alone it's difficult to have a license."
Divorced and the mother of six children for whom she has sole responsibility, Adam is using the proceeds from her tea business to buy food for them and to send some of them to school.
"They have learned a lot," says Mohamed of the women in the co-op. "You can see the progress in everything—in their style, in their home, in their children, in their interaction."
]]>Shito Massele, a 30-year-old mother of four, sits outside, her back against the warehouse wall. She is one of 96 members of the Qubse cooperative, a cereal bank run by women and funded by Oxfam. In a community where women previously were not consulted on business decisions, today they are ensuring economic and food security for themselves and their families. In fact, their work will turn a profit, generating additional income for their village.
"Before, the women were not even supposed to come near the scale," Shito says. "Now we can weigh things ourselves, our own grain." On this property, the women are not just weighing the grain; they are also fixing the price and deciding when and where to sell it. The land is theirs as well, donated by the village administration.
The cereal bank began nine months ago, with help from Oxfam America and OSRA and the encouragement of the village administration. Given a warehouse and seed money, the cooperative now controls the purchase, storage, and sale of grain.
In Oromiya region, where the project is based, having control of these basic factors has a huge impact. Before the cooperative was established, farmers were forced to sell most of their crops immediately after harvest to settle loans and taxes. During the rainy season, grain was scarce and prices rose. To feed their families, farmers were forced to take out more loans at high interest rates—sometimes simply to buy back their own crops, continuing the cycle of poverty.
The new cereal bank has enabled the community to store some of its harvest, setting grain aside for sale during the rainy season when the market price is high. The women thereby make a profit and ensure food stability for the next planting season.
The cereal bank's organizers stipulated that each prospective member had to attend civic education classes focusing on women's rights. The combined impact of both the classes and the cereal bank has been enormous.
Following the training, attitudes toward traditional practices harmful to women have changed noticeably. Furthermore, the women have proved themselves just as capable of earning an income as men are, thereby gaining the respect of the entire community. Indeed, many farmers prefer to sell their grain to the cooperative because of its reputation for honesty; the women will not try to cheat the farmer.
Being valued in the community is new to the women, but hard work is not. Before the cereal bank, women had little power, according to 46-year-old Abebu Kebebe. She recites her daily activities in a monotone, as if it is a chant she is used to repeating:
"For us it is clear that men are not stronger than us. Early in the morning, I clean the house and take care of the animals, travel two hours to collect murky water, return, cook, take care of the children. It is the oldest burden. Nothing is as simple as it seems. We do a lot of work the whole day, but [the men] move oxen and plow for an afternoon and come home. They move the animals and consider they moved a mountain."
Now, however, the women make all decisions involving the cereal bank, and are able to control their finances and ensure their own economic security.
The success of the Qubse cooperative has not gone unnoticed in neighboring villages. Three kilometers away, another group of women approached OSRA and their village administration, asking if they too could start a similar project. Dirre Dame, 67, chairwoman of the new cooperative, says it began because "we were encouraged by the group, so we organized ourselves, inspired."
The new cooperative, Association Gura, has only been around for a month, but the impact on the women is already noticeable as they plan what to do with the eventual profits. This is the first time these women have had any economic power. In a village where the nearest school is a three-hour walk away, women see this is the beginning of change and a better life for their children.
Some of the changes may seem basic: food, clothes, education for their children. Other women have bigger dreams, hoping to invest in land or animals some day. Right now, however, they focus on meeting the basic necessities, including a secure source of food. They plan eventually to build a small health clinic with the profits, noting that many women die in childbirth because there is no clinic nearby.
Regatto Bedhasa, a 57-year-old mother of six, explains what empowering women to take control of their lives has meant to her community:
"This becomes a hope for us," she says. "We can change our life without having been educated, without knowledge, without experience. We can change our situation."
]]>In the camps for displaced people that stretch along Chad's border and across conflict-torn Darfur in western Sudan, the concept is hard to explain. In a world of want—where violence has forced more than two million people from their homes—how do you describe an abundance so great that it needs a cookbook loaded with directions to keep it all straight?
That experience helped define just one of the jarring truths about the global distribution of food that Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio explore in their new book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. A grand photo essay 288 pages long, the book took the couple on a journey to 24 countries where they got to know 30 families and the intricacies of each family's weekly food consumption. Family recipes accompany every profile.
Brand names and plastic packaging proliferate on some of the pages, testament to the global reach of processed foods and beverages. But on other pages, seeds and raw grains sit in burlap sacks—some more empty than full. A few of those limp sacks belong to the Aboubakars: D'jimia Ishakh Souleymane, who is a widow, and her five children.
The lessons Menzel and D'Aluisio learned from their visits with the Aboubakars are hard to forget, and they hope that readers who consume the stories and pictures in their book won't forget them either.
"What we really wanted to do was help people who didn't have a clue understand what was going on in the rest of the world," said D'Aluisio. "It's important—especially for Americans."
For starters, consider the water situation at the Breidjing camp in Chad where the Aboubakars have now lived for more than a year and a half. Their home is a small tent on a sandy plain crowded with countless others just like it. Oxfam has been providing water to thousands of people in the camp. The minimum provision in emergency situations such as this is just shy of 4 gallons per person a day.
"Water is one of the biggest problems," said Menzel. "Thirty thousand people use a lot of water. There's a big difference between having a faucet and carrying water and standing in line for water."
When the Oxfam water truck arrives to fill an empty bladder—a storage device that looks like a giant water bed—the relief that ripples through the blocks of tents is palpable, added D'Aulisio.
"The water is so precious," she said. "I do not turn a faucet on without thinking of all those people."
D'Aulisio's relationship with her garden has also changed since visiting the Aboubakars. Now, she wastes nothing from it, preferring to invest whatever time it takes to can the extra fruits and vegetables it produces.
D'jimia works hard for the little bit of extra food she buys for her family. She earns about $1.35 a day toiling in the fields of nearby villagers—when she can get the work. She uses the money to buy fresh tomatoes or dried okra. But the bulk of her family's diet—three meals a day—consists of the aiysh she stirs up in a big black pot over a fire outside her tent.
Aid groups provide the rations for the roughly 30,000 people in the camp. The allotments are far from lavish, and amount to about 2,100 calories per day per person in the form of a cereal, such as sorghum or millet, and small scoops of pulses and a corn-soy blend. The rations also include small amounts of sugar and salt.
"Most of everyone looks like they're on the minimum amount of calories needed," said Menzel. The rationing system takes into account only the numbers of people in a family, not the size of their appetites or where they fall on the growth charts.
"If you've got a lot of teen-age boys, you've got some difficulty," added D'Aluisio, speaking from her own experience mothering hungry boys.
D'Aluisio and Menzel learned about some of the ins and outs of camp management during their three-night sojourn in a tent at the Oxfam compound outside of Breidjing.
"Staying in the compound was great," said D'Aluisio. "We got to hang out with the people who were there."
One of the things that became clear to the couple during their stay at Breidjing is how complex the business is of feeding, sheltering, and providing water and sanitation for tens of thousands of people in a remote, arid place.
"Most people who see it from the outside don't see the difficulty," said D'Aluisio of the logistics in just getting enough food to people. "Sometimes there is a disconnect between the giving and the getting, and that disconnect is infrastructure."
For example, the camp was giving food out every 15 days instead of every 30 days—which would have been half the work—because it didn't have enough on hand. Food reserves were far away, and there was no guarantee when new supplies would arrive.
The difficulty in stocking Breidjing—or any of the camps in Chad and Darfur where hundreds of thousands of displaced Sudanese have lived in limbo since early 2003—is just the tip of a problem that affects millions of people around the world every day.
"Most hunger in the world is politics based," said D'Aluisio. "There is more than enough food on the planet to feed everybody. It's just warped in terms of who's getting the food and who already has the food. There needs to be more equality than there is."
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