FEMALE circumcision MUST STOP

There can be little doubt that female circumcision is one of the most shocking cultural practices found around the world. It contravenes women’s rights in a violent and obvious manner and is a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of millions of girls around the world.

It’s estimated that nearly 125 million girls and women have been subjected to this violation, and each year a further 3 million are at risk in Africa alone. Most people understand that female circumcision needs to stop, but often they struggle to explain why. Here a five reasons why female circumcision needs to stop.

1. It Causes Physical Damage. Female circumcision is almost never performed by people with any medical training. As a result the procedure causes numerous physical problems aside from the damage to the external genitalia. Victims of female circumcision suffer from greater levels of uterine and pelvic infections, scarring, pain during menstruation and sex, increased risks of bladder infections and many other physical problems.

2. It Leads To Psychological Trauma. As is to be expected, female circumcision gives rise to often severe psychological trauma. Women who have been subjected to it suffer from post-traumatic stress, anxiety disorders and depression.

3. Female Circumcision Reinforces Gender Inequality. In the cultures that practise female circumcision women have minimal rights and are often viewed as the property of their families and then later their husbands. The act of circumcision, as a violent assault carried out without informed consent, is a way to entrench this power imbalance. It is linked to girls dropping out of school early, child marriage and child pregnancy. All of these have a huge impact on a girl’s life opportunities.

4. It Has No Health Benefits. Despite the insistence of people within the cultures that carry out female circumcision, the procedure has absolutely no health benefits. It is often believed that a girl who has undergone circumcision is cleaner and more fertile, but this is known to be false. Female circumcision increases vaginal and uterine infections and also increases the risk of infertility.

5. It Is A Violation Of Human Rights. Female circumcision is a violation of the rights of girls and women. The UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution banning it because the practice is harmful and a serious threat to women. Because it is often carried out without consent, and forcibly against a girl’s will, it also contravenes treaties such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Female circumcision is a problem with complex and often deeply rooted causes, but it needs to be tackled. The pain and suffering it causes cannot be allowed to continue. You can help by lending your support to the campaign to end its practice within a generation

Diseases that affect our continent

Diseases

Malaria

Malaria is caused by a parasite living in the blood, which is caught from the bite of an infected mosquito. It is endemic across many parts of Africa. The parasite has a two day life cycle; every two days, when it breaks out of blood cells, a patient has a high fever which then subsides.
Without treatment, symptoms can carry on indefinitely. Though some forms of malaria are milder than others, causing lethargy and weakeness, other forms are more serious and in acute cases can lead to death.

85% of malaria cases and 90% of child deaths from Malaria are in Africa.

Different medicines are used to treat malaria. But providing mosquito netting to sleep under and dealing with stagnant water (where mosquitos breed) in nearby  vicinities can help too.

HIV/AIDS in Africa

HIV/AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease which kills people over a long period by damaging their immune system (their ability to fight off other illnesses).
AIDS kills around 6,000 people each day in Africa – more than wars, famines and floods. Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst-affected region of the globe, though the number of sufferers varies from country to country.

Least-affected countries include Somalia and Senegal (1% of adults). Swaziland is the worst-affected with 25% of adults infected.

HIV/AIDS:

• Kills a large number of adults, the breadwinners in any society, affecting national productivity,
• increases the number of orphaned children,
• puts a major strain on health services because people can be ill for a long time,
• affects school attendance, as children often have to find ways of earning money and/or caring for sick parents, and
• significantly impairs Africa’s economic development, which in turn affects the ability of the continent to cope with this epidemic.

Schistosomiasis / bilharzia

Schistosomiasis or bilharzia is a parasitic disease, where small flat worms develop inside the human body. They live in the blood vessels and cause damage to internal organs such as the bladder and kidneys.
The disease is caught when people go into water where the larvae of the worms have been released by freshwater snails. The larvae then bury into humans through the skin.

EMANCIPATION: Child labour in Africa

EMANCIPATION: Child labour in Africa

Child labour in Africa

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The percentage of children in hazardous work is highest in the Sub-Saharan Africa region (10 per cent). The number of child labourers also decreased in Sub-Saharan Africa (by 6 million). The net impact of these regional trends is that the population of child labourers is becoming more concentrated in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. According to the regional distribution of child labour for the 5-17 years age for 2008-2012, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 30 per cent of all 5-17 year-olds in child labour.

Although the decline in child labour during 2008-2012 offers some cause for optimism, Sub-Saharan Africa is still the region where children face by far the highest risk of child labour and also the region where progress has been slowest and least consistent.

An increasing number of African countries are developing National Action Plans (NAPs). However, progress towards the achievement of the targeted goals is slow. Nearly half of the 54 countries in the region have yet to begin designing their NAPs. There is a great need to improve and scale up implementation efforts in nearly all countries. Partly because child labour programs tend to receive low attention within national development priorities.

ILO child labour strategies and policy responses

The ILO identified the need to reinforce action for a continued focus on Africa. An enhanced focus and support for the development and full implementation of national action plans for the elimination of child labour, especially its worst forms, and the scaling up and replication of pilot projects, knowledge building and integration of child labour into national development agendas is a priority in Africa.

Some ILO member States have formulated National Action Plans with the aim of eliminating the worst forms of child labour in the shortest possible time. The ILO is supporting several countries in the region in this regard, a key objective being the development of national institutional and technical capacities for the effective implementation of National Action Plans.

In order to fight child labour in Africa, the ILO has now launched a resource centre for Africa: Clic-AFRICA. This online centre will keep track of child issues in specific African countries on a regular basis

Diagnosing the Problems of Education in Africa

Good education in Africa presently seems impossible if you are poor; it’s so expensive that it is only available to those that can afford it. The poor are left marginalized with substandard government schools 

After looking at the trend across Africa, and most especially in Sierra Leone where I have taken a critical look at the present system, I believe that the insistence on education based on meritocracy (students advance purely on merit) should be encourage as this will lead to equity. To make this work, the education system needs to be insulated from politics and this is one of the major problems of education in Africa.

The influence of politicians in formulating policies about education without consulting educators and bureaucrats’ does not help in tackling the issues education is facing. As Tharman Shanmugaratnam (Finance Minister and former Education Minister of Singapore) once said, “the role of political leaders is to keep politics out of education.”


How many African universities can overcome the political resistance to charging fees? Singapore has also done well with teacher training because it has been linked with pay-for-performance for teachers. Without the latter (which if often resisted by teachers’ unions across Africa), it is difficult to get results and accountability from the former.

Few parents can look forward with much glee to an evening spent poring over the accounts of their child’s school at the monthly Parent Teacher Association meeting. Even fewer have the financial expertise to know what fiddled figures look like, or the courage to challenge the head teacher’s excuses for why there are no textbooks. But maybe it’s time Africa’s parents stood up and challenged the endemic corruption across their children’s educational system.


But why are some parents still paying when education should be free? In some places, particularly in rural areas, schools receive such sporadic and minimal funding from the local and district authorities that parents have clubbed together and reinstated registration fees – as a way of simply providing some resources for their children’s classrooms and money to pay teachers.


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Parents need to be made to realise how they, and their children’s futures, are being cheated by the system. Our kids are the disadvantaged, how will posterity judge us in the future

discussingTHE AFRICAN PROBLEMS

STOP CHILD MARRIAGES IN AFRICA

THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION IN REDUCING GENDER BASED VIOLENCE IN ZIMBABWE

PREDICAMENTS FACED BY AFRICAN CHILDREN

Education

Poverty, labour, inadequate infrastructure and child marriage are all factors that prevent children from receiving an education. It is estimated that 30% of them do not attend school.

For a country to escape poverty, all of its children need to have access to a decent education.

Violence against children

In AFRICA  violence against children takes a variety of forms: physical, mental, sexual and moral. It occurs in both the home and at school. In the latter sphere, cases where children have been assaulted and even raped by their teachers are not uncommon; with girls who have been victims of rape often becoming pregnant and being forced to drop out.

Child prostitution – with all its attendant evils – is another problem. Though prohibited by law, it remains difficult to deal with. Its intractable nature is reinforced by the steady rise in the number of poor children, as well as the number of children orphaned on account of AIDS. These factors, in conjunction with sex tourism, have contributed to an increase in the incidence of child prostitution.

Child labour

Owing to ineffective legislation and extreme poverty, the percentage of children forced to forego an education for work remains high: affecting 26% of all youth aged between 5 and 14 years.

Many children work on plantations under deplorable conditions; others are employed as domestic helpers. These jobs are invariably physically and morally exhausting, and lead to apathy and hopelessness. Children who cannot find work often resort to begging in order to help support their families, gravitating towards a non-productive existence on the streets of the larger cities

GENDER BASED VIOLENCE SHOULD STOP IN THE AFRICAN SOCIETY

Violence against women and girls is one of the most prevalent human rights violations in the world. It knows no social, economic or national boundaries. Worldwide, an estimated one in three women will experience physical or sexual abuse in her lifetime.

Gender-based violence undermines the health, dignity, security and autonomy of its victims, yet it remains shrouded in a culture of silence. Victims of violence can suffer sexual and reproductive health consequences, including forced and unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, traumatic fistula, sexually transmitted infections including HIV, and even death.

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MATERNITY HEALTH IN AFRICA..A DREAM YET TO BE REALIZED AMONG RURAL WOMEN

CHALLENGES FACED BY WOMEN IN AFRICA

CHALLENGES FACED BY WOMEN IN THE AFRICAN  SOCIETY

  Violence and Sexual Violence Unsafe Drinking    Water HIV/Aids

Women and girls in Africa experience the same kinds of violence and sexual violence that women in other parts of the world experience. A common weapon of war in struggles such as those in Sudan and The Democratic Republic of Congo is systematic rape. Women living in villages and refugee camps are targeted for rape. Female genital mutilation, preformed ritually in some African cultures, is a violent and dangerous practice that women can seldom prevent. Forced marriage, being sold into servitude and early marriage are also struggles some African women face

• Lack of safe and clean drinking water is a problem for African women; more than 300 million people in Africa lack clean water. African women may walk up to five miles a day to fetch water. Health is endangered by micro-organisms in the water. Babies are often sickened when women must mix infant formula using the dirty water.

• According to the HIV/AIDS awareness and charity organization, Avert, 59 percent of those living with HIV are female. There is a gender element to the illness in African. Lack of awareness or partner unwillingness to use protection endanger women. Statistics on the number of younger women contracting the illness show that in the 15-to-24-age group, 75 percent of those with HIV/AIDS are women. Often HIV-positive women or those widowed by HIV/AIDS lose their homes due to stigmatization in the community. Pregnant and nursing women with HIV/AIDS lack access to drugs to prevent passing it to their infants.

.Education

• Two-thirds of the 40 million African children who do not attend school are girls. Only 60 percent of girls go to primary school. The majority, 53.2 percent, of African women are illiterate. In some countries, such as Mozambique, the illiteracy rate among women is double that of men. Many families can afford to send only one or two children to school. Often boys are sent instead of girls

these are the challenges bedeviling our beloved continent