Chrissie Swan is our new Walk In Her Shoes Ambassador!
Logie-winner, radio personality and mother of two Chrissie Swan is our new Walk In Her Shoes Ambassador!
From 12 to 18 March, Chrissie will walk 10,000 steps a day, along with thousands of Australians, to raise money and awareness of the long distances millions of women and girls in developing countries walk every day for food, water and firewood.
Chrissie proudly displays her CARE pedometer and brand new sneakers for walking 10,000 steps a day from 12 - 18 March 2012! Image: Sean Fennessy/CARE.
‘When I heard that millions of women and girls spend hours walking every day, carrying heavy loads, instead of going to school or earning an income, I had to do something about it,’ Chrissie said. Read more…
Meet CARE’s AYAD in Ghana: Louise Atkins
This week we loved hearing from Louise Atkins, an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development (AYAD) working in the CARE Ghana office. Louise is working on a project to encourage development in cocoa growing areas of Ghana, with a particular focus on women’s empowerment and youth participation. As well as working with students, visiting CARE projects and learning the local language, Louise is enjoying all the sights and sounds Ghana has to offer – from snapping up a bargain on the side of the road to taxis full of goats and men in technicolour business suits!
CARE's AYAD in Ghana, Louise Atkins, and her colleague, George Achempim. Louise is working with CARE Ghana for six months, facilitating development in poor cocoa farming areas. Image: CARE
What is your role?
I’m an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development (AYAD) on a six month placement with CARE Ghana. Funded by AusAID as part of Australian Volunteers for International Development, the AYAD Program posts young Australians in developing countries to share knowledge and skills with the local counterparts in their host organisations. I’m working on CARE Ghana’s Cocoa Livelihoods and Empowerment (CLEP) project which focuses on facilitating the development of poor, vulnerable, and marginalised farming households in the cocoa growing areas of Ghana. My role is to assist in enhancing women’s empowerment across the CLEP program, and through CLEP’s Cadbury Cocoa Partnership initiative, I will work on improving youth participation in farming and community development. I’ll also be doing some work on developing training modules for identified additional livelihood projects. Read more…
By Amelia Poxon, CARE Australia Communications Coordinator
In the highlands of Ethiopia, 37-year-old Yalemie is helping her husband, her four children and her whole community to improve their health and their future.
Yalemie is a member of her village’s Water Committee, established through CARE’s water, sanitation and hygiene project. Her role in the committee is to be the pump attendant – she maintains and repairs the water pump that her village worked with CARE to build.
‘I am happy because I have benefited from pure water. I know about the parts of the pump and I can maintain them. Before, I didn’t know anything about hand pumps or pure water,’ she says.
Before the pump was here, Yalemie would walk for two hours to the river twice a day to collect water for her family. Often, her daughter would miss school so that she could help her mother make the long journey with heavy water containers.
Thanks to the water pump installed by CARE, Yalemie and the other women in her village have access to safe, clean water for their families. Image: Josh Estey/CARE
‘I fetched water from the river like the animals – we drank together with dogs, donkeys and horses. There were diseases like diarrhoea, particularly in the children. One of the older women who is now in our Committee was very sick from drinking the water. When she went to the health facility, the doctor said “you are sick because you drank dirty water”. She was vomiting, and had diarrhoea.’ Read more…
Niger: Hunger comes knocking
By Haoua Lankoandé, Advocacy Manager, CARE Niger
For those of us in the city of Niamey in Niger, we are seeing the first signs of food crisis spreading across our country. We have seen it before. It has already started, and it is coming fast.
The first phase is when young men and women start leaving the villages, coming to the big towns, looking for work. Knock, knock. They come to your door and say: ‘Do you have any work?’ You ask them, ‘What can you do?’ And they reply, ‘Anything. I can do anything.’
In the second phase, they come to the door, knock, knock: ‘Do you have any food? I haven’t eaten in three days.’
Tajana Dam Maya lives in Dakoro, Niger, where a food crisis is spreading. Photo: CARE/Melanie Brooks.
In the third phase, they don’t ask anymore. You wake up and go outside in the morning, and there is a family sleeping on your doorstep. They don’t ask for anything, they just look up at you, hoping. If you give them something, they say thank you. If you don’t give them anything, they are quiet. They just put their heads down, slowly get up and move to the next house. It takes just a couple of months to go from phase one to phase three. It’s amazing how quickly it happens.
We are already in phase one.
We need to act now: provide cash-for-work so people can buy food; provide school feeding programs so children stay in school; support resiliance efforts like community gardens and cereal banks. Once people start showing up in the cities, it means they are already coming to the end of their resources. They have sold their assets. They have no food.
This is happening now.
Assamaou Rabi, 23, holds her seven-month-old baby. Her husband, Aminou Chaibou, 29, sits behind her. Aminou participates in CARE's cash-for-work program, which provides participants with 1,000 Fr per day ($AUD 2) in exchange for work clearing an inedible weed that has taken over the pasture area, and reseeding it with local grasses that will provide food for local cattle. Image: Melanie Brooks/CARE.
CARE did an assessment in one of the villages, and already we are seeing that there aren’t many young men and women left – they are leaving for the cities and towns, hoping to find work. And here in Niamey, people are already starting to show up at our doors – ‘Knock, knock’.
Ten million people across the Sahel region in West Africa are at risk of a severe food crisis. Low rainfall and pests have destroyed entire food crops, leaving families with little or nothing to eat. CARE is urging Australians to act now to avoid a humanitarian disaster of the scale occurring in East Africa.
Please donate to CARE’s West Africa Food Crisis Appeal.
Ethiopia: Not just a divorcee
By Amelia Poxon, CARE Australia Communications Coordinator
Divorce can have social stigmas attached to it in countries all over the world. In Ethiopia, it can also leave women trapped in poverty.
Young girls in rural Ethiopia have limited opportunities to access education and are often married as young as 15 years of age. Their sole task is then to care for their husband’s household and their family.
With the average family size of three children, and without the knowledge and confidence to earn their own income, divorced or widowed women are particularly vulnerable to poverty.
Since joining a CARE Village Savings and Loans group, Fasika has gained new skills and has the opportunity to save for the future. Image: Josh Estey/CARE
Fasika is a 32-year old divorced mother of two. When she was married, she would help her husband with farming vegetables and grains. When he left her, she was forced to move to the country’s bustling capital, Addis Ababa, and seek work as a domestic servant. This is an option many women take, and is one that can leave them vulnerable to their employers. Read more…
CARE package stands the test of time
Laboratory testing of a 64 year old tin of lard, part of a CARE package sent from the US to Europe after World War II, found it was still edible today.
Curiosity got the best of German pensioner Hans Feldmeier, who had the tin tested because it didn’t have an expiry date.
The lard was part of more than 100 million packages that provided much-needed aid to people in war-torn Europe. The packages included items such as sugar, preserved fruit, chocolate, biscuits, coffee and tinned meat. Germany alone received more than 10 million CARE packages.
A CARE Package in the 1960s. Image: CARE
Ethiopia: Supporting people to get back on their feet
by Mandefro Mekete, Emergency Operation Coordinator, CARE Ethiopia
I clearly remember when the world started to focus its attention on the food crisis in the Horn of Africa – it was July 2011. At that time, more than 4.5 million people in Ethiopia were in need of food assistance and water shortages were putting millions at risk of diseases. By then, it had been almost a year since I released a drought alert for the Horn of Africa to our partners.
In August 2010, la Niña, a weather phenomenon that usually provokes dry weather conditions, was forecasted. As an Ethiopian who has been affected by drought, I knew the potential consequences of such a forecast.
CARE immediately started to prepare ourselves and we launched our first relief interventions in February 2011 with activities to provide water to drought-affected communities in Borena, southern Ethiopia. We also provided food assistance in East and West Hararghe in Oromia region and in Afar region in eastern Ethiopia. We later provided nutrition and livelihoods interventions in order to have an integrated response.
Chronic food insecurity is commonplace in rural Ethiopia in any year, irrespective of unusual climatic or economic shocks. Many factors contribute to this, including land degradation, limited access to basic social services, population pressure, and near complete dependence on rain-fed, subsistence agriculture.
The majority of Ethiopians rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. As most agriculture is rain-fed, reliable and sufficient rainfall is critical for the country’s economy and food security. Each year, depending on the location, Ethiopia has two rainy seasons and one or two dry seasons. The most difficult period of the year is called the “lean season”, when food stocks are low and the new crops have not been harvested yet. This usually happens at the height of the rainy seasons. Food prices tend to rise during that period while livestock prices significantly decline. Read more…
PNG: Birth attendants offer hope
by Blossum Gilmour, Mamayo Health Project Manager
Where did you give birth?
In my family’s coffee garden.
Who assisted you?
No one.
This is how a conversation started between CARE PNG staff and a new mother in rural Papua New Guinea. CARE had agreed to help the provincial government assess the support available to pregnant women and new mothers, and while the conversation above was common, the reasons why women were alone in the bush while giving birth are as individual as the women themselves.
Village Birth Assistants help local women, decreasing the barriers to giving birth at a health facility. Image: Josh Estey/CARE
The staff tried to delve to the root of women’s reasons for not going to a health centre to give birth and most of it came down to fear: fear of the health worker who is not from their village and doesn’t speak their language, fear of seeking help from a male health worker, fear that their family will be asked to pay for the service, fear that the medications they’re given will hurt them, fear that the health worker will yell at them and make them do things that feel painful or wrong.
It is a generally accepted fact that health workers in rural areas are ill equipped to deal with obstetric emergencies—they have not received the training or tools needed—and the nearest hospital is an expensive flight away. Their inability, and in some cases unwillingness, to provide basic antenatal and obstetric care speaks to a more deeply-rooted issue.
‘Do you know what the women of PNG call midwives? Barking dogs… because they never stop making a terrifying racket’ said a teacher in a university midwifery program. She went on to explain that the unit on bedside manner has just been taken out of the new midwifery curriculum. She wants to teach new midwives that they are service providers and need to have empathy for their clients but there are other priorities for the time being.
CARE PNG is working with the provincial government to support pregnant women and new mothers. Image: Josh Estey/CARE
So what is the solution? Where to begin?
CARE PNG, in collaboration with the Provincial Division of Health, is training Village Birth Attendants (VBAs) in some of the most remote areas of PNG. The primary role of the VBAs is to decrease the number of barriers to women giving birth at a health facility. VBAs are chosen by the women of their community and they are women themselves. This alone seems to engender trust. VBAs are then trained. They learn how to recognise the signs of high risk pregnancy and how to counsel women to go to the health centre for an antenatal check-up – addressing the individual fears that women have. VBAs then accompany the mother to the health centre and act as an advocate – both translating and explaining what the health workers are doing and ensuring the woman agrees to the interventions. VBAs assist the health worker throughout the antenatal checks and delivery, a constant companion and champion for the mother. Finally, when they are not able to get a woman to a health centre, VBAs are able to safely attend an uncomplicated delivery.
Since the introduction of Village Birth Assistants, more women at getting antenatal check-ups and attitudes towards local health centres are slowly changing. Image: Josh Estey/CARE
It’s far from perfect—VBAs are a stop-gap measure in the floundering health care system. That said, they are having an impact—more women are having antenatal check-ups and it’s hoped more will agree to professionally assisted births. VBAs are changing how women view the health care centre—one mother at a time.
Kenya: We don’t intend to stop
by Reshma Kahn, Advocacy and Communications Assistant, CARE Kenya
I still remember the 1st of May 2011. His Excellency Mwai Kibaki, the President of Kenya, declared the ongoing drought a national disaster and called upon donors and well wishers to support the country in that difficult time. For the many Kenyans living in marginal areas, the failure of two successive rainy seasons had made access to water for their household, livestock and farming needs increasingly difficult. For pastoralists who already live in the harsh arid and semi-arid areas, this made their already difficult lives even harder. The situation then worsened, with the declaration of famine in parts of southern Somalia. More and more families fled the country, leading to an unprecedented influx of refugees to the Dadaab complex in Northern Kenya.
- Dadaab Refugee Camp has been flooded with refugees as a result of the drought in the Horn of Africa. Image: Kate Holt/CARE
Dadaab refugee camps were created in 1991 to respond to the influx of Somali refugees fleeing the fall of their Government. Located some 80 kilometers from the border with Somalia, the three camps at Dadaab were originally built to house around 90,000 people. Today, they are home to over five times that number, mostly Somalis. Despite the severe overcrowding, CARE has continued to work in the camps over the past 20 years, providing much needed relief, food, water, sanitation and hygiene. When the influx peaked at over 1,000 new arrivals per day, CARE stepped up its programs. Additionally, we continued with our gender and community development agenda, providing counseling to numerous gender-based violence survivors in the camps as well as operating schools with over 15,000 students. Read more…
Walk in Agnes’ shoes
By Amelia Poxon, CARE Australia Communications Coordinator
In the red dusty landscape of southern Zimbabwe, a slight figure walks under the blazing afternoon sun with a tin bucket swinging by her side.
It looks like a difficult and tiring task, but 10-year old Agnes* is happy to collect clean safe water that is just 400 metres from her home.
- Agnes carries her 15 litre bucket to collect water every afternoon. Image: Josh Estey/CARE
Every afternoon, Agnes walks to a borehole that has been recently repaired by CARE to provide her and 300 other families with safe, clean water near their homes and school.
Collecting water is a task that is almost exclusively carried out by women and girls in developing countries like Zimbabwe. Without a safe borehole to collect water from, many females in Agnes’ community used to walk for hours, several times a day, to collect enough water for their families to drink, bathe and cook with. Even after walking long distances to find water, what they would source may not necessarily be safe to drink. Read more…
Haiti Earthquake: Two years on
Two years since the devastating earthquake which killed more than 220,000 people, Haitians are rebuilding their lives and regaining their confidence with assistance from CARE.
CARE has a five-year, $US100 million plan to help Haiti recover. These photos document the past two years of CARE’s work in Haiti, including the initiail devastation and the recovery and rebuilding phases.
The devastation in Port-au-Prince in the moments after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake. Image: Evelyn Hockstein/CARE
CARE began responding immediately, distributing food, water purification tablets and shelter to those in need. Image: Evelyn Hockstein/CARE
Haiti: School’s in
By Mildrede Beliard, CARE Haiti
Two years after the devastating earthquake in Haiti which killed over 222,000 people, CARE is helping communities to move from the recovery phase and work towards rebuilding their lives and regaining their independence.
Léogâne was one of the areas hardest hit by Haiti’s devastating earthquake on 12 January 2010. Officials estimate the tremor destroyed 80 to 90 per cent of Léogâne’s buildings, including many schools.
A young girl outside a destroyed building in Leogane in the days after the earthquake in 2012. Image: Evelyn Hockstein/CARE
The parents of Léogâne’s Mellier community have a long history of banding together to help one another. In the chaos that enveloped Haiti following the departure of the ruling Duvalier family in 1987, a group of parents in Mellier formed the Association of Parents of Mellier (ASPAM), a PTA-like association to make sure their kids’ schooling continued without interruption. Soon after, they opened a pre-school and an elementary school so their youngest children didn’t have to walk for hours to facilities outside Mellier if they wanted an education.
Even in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, when day-to-day survival was itself in doubt for many, parents began work to get their children back in school. For help, ASPAM turned to CARE, which has supported 78 schools since the earthquake, 20 in Léogâne alone.
‘CARE was with us from the start,’ says Ginette Louis Jean, director of the ASPAM pre-school. ‘CARE provided us with school kits for teachers, students and educational materials for the class.’
An ASPAM school in Leogane where CARE has assited with refurnishing and has distributed school kits to students and teaching materials to teachers. Image: Mildrede Beliard/CARE.
Zimbabwe: More than bricks and concrete
By Amelia Poxon, CARE Australia Communications Coordinator
When Serina learnt about the benefits of having a toilet in her home, nothing could stop her from getting to work and building it herself.
Serina is a mother of eight and member of a community health club facilitated by CARE in southern Zimbabwe. The area has very low access to sanitation, so CARE began working through the clubs to teach hygiene and sanitation principles and improve access to toilets.
Serina outside her home in southern Zimbabwe. Image: Josh Estey/CARE.
‘I’m very happy to be a club member,’ Serina explains. ‘I have learnt how to keep my house clean inside and out and how to avoid the spread of diseases in our community. Now I feel happy that I can teach these things to my children.’ In a country that suffered from a severe cholera outbreak in 2009 which claimed 4,000 lives, the importance of hygiene and sanitation cannot be overstated.
by Edward Boydell, CARE Australia’s Climate Change Adviser
Following more than two weeks of intense negotiations, the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa ended on 11 December 2011.
In the conference’s closing hours, parties agreed on an outcome that for the first time will force all of the world’s biggest polluters to take action to reduce the impacts of climate change. Currently this is no more than a mandate to work towards a legally binding plan to cut emissions, to come into force by 2020. Meanwhile, the Kyoto Protocol will enter a second commitment period to run from 2013-2020, and progress was made on a Green Climate Fund that will support developing countries to reduce their greenhouse emissions and adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change.
Zambia © Evelyn Hockstein/CARE
However, evidence is growing that this could be too little, too late, to avoid catastrophic interference with the climate system and warming in excess of 3-4 degrees Celsius. This would have a devastating impact on vulnerable communities and ecosystems, particularly poor women and children who have contributed least to climate change, but will be the hardest hit.
CARE sees a glimmer of hope in this pathway towards a long-term legally binding climate agreement for all greenhouse gas emitters, but the devil will be in the detail. Developed countries will need to commit to deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and honor commitments to direct up to $98 billion a year to developing countries through the Green Climate Fund by 2020; a significant challenge against the backdrop of economic uncertainty in the US and some EU nations.
Breaking down barriers in Vietnam
By Christina Munzer, CARE Australia’s Asia & Pacific Coordinator
I’ve recently come back from a trip to the Delta region of Vietnam and I am hopeful. Through dedicated local partners and funding from donors like AusAID, CARE is reaching the most vulnerable communities with development assistance.
Thanh and his family come to mind. Thanh is 26, with a bright face. He has what could be described as cerebral palsy but this has not been medically confirmed. Working through local Women’s Union and Commune People’s Committee members, CARE has been providing crucial water, sanitation and hygiene support to vulnerable households that lie scattered across the Delta, many areas that are now inundated by floodwaters. This included building an indoor toilet for Thanh, who has limited mobility.
An indoor toilet provided by CARE has made life easier for Thanh, who has has limited mobility. Photo: Christina Munzer/CARE
Up until three years ago, Thanh and his family were using the river to go to the toilet. This was incredibly difficult and at times humiliating for Thanh, who often required assistance from his mum or dad. As visitors to their home, we had difficulty disembarking from a small boat onto a muddy embankment to access their porch, our shoes clogged with mud. I found it hard to imagine what it must have been like to crawl across this same embankment, clothes all wet and muddy, just to go to the toilet. Read more…
