Families in poor African countries have but one humanity, one opportunity. That opportunity, that time, is now, says Ronan Scully (pictured) of Self Help Africa

Recently, while meeting with business people and supporters of Self Help Africa in Ireland I was explaining to them about my recent trip to Africa and thanking them and the people and business people of Ireland for their kindness and support. 

I was telling them how it takes two days to travel from my in home in Ireland to the rural poor families with whom Self Help Africa works with in Uganda.  But in other respects it’s a journey that may as well be a million miles. After two days of travel, your eyes are heavy and your legs are stiff but your mind is racing. You cannot but question how come there are people living in such poverty. It is inevitable then that you ask ‘what can I do to help?’.

I made this journey recently with a great group of Irish supporters of Self Help Africa.  The 12-strong group, who had all undertaken an array of different fundraisers to cover the costs of the trip, were there both to compete in a 10K road race in Kampala, the capital, and then travel north to visit projects that Self Help Africa is implementing in communities in the east African country.

We read and hear a lot about changes that Africa is going through, and make no mistake there is change happening. Almost everyone is connected by mobile phone, the internet is spreading to the remotest corners, and with these and other technological changes, a transformation is taking place.

In Association with

Despite this however, the biggest challenge – poverty – stares you in the face, everywhere you look. Children are barefoot and in rags, schools are dirt floored and overcrowded, and electricity, if it exists at all, is not much more than a bare bulb hanging from a ceiling.  Life expectancy in Uganda recently topped 60 years of age. By our standards that is low, but when you consider that it has increased from 52 years of age just a decade ago, that is evidence of significant change.

Rural unemployment levels remain alarmingly high, and basic services — sanitation, basic healthcare, education and electricity — are way behind what we should expect in any country in the 21st century. The social and economic challenges that are faced by poor families are vast. It is difficult for us to imagine growing up in a world where you lack the very basics in life such as food, clean water, medicine, shelter, safety, a bed of your own.

Beyond that, there are few toys for children — no dolls, no soccer balls, no sweets and treats. Families struggle to fund the cost of sending their children to a school other than the very rudimentary overcrowded primary schools available at village level and, because of that, huge numbers of young and innocent children are condemned to a life of poverty from the earliest age.

Beyond Imagination

Growing up brings its share of problems wherever you are in the world, but growing up in a place like Uganda can be a struggle beyond imagination. You can often count yourself fortunate to be still alive at the age of five, and many of your friends have died of things such as malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and the like. If both of your parents are too still living that can be considered another miracle. Malaria is still the number one killer in East Africa, but AIDS comes in a strong second place.

Wherever you go you can see the evidence of the ravages of AIDS. In a country like Uganda, with a population of just over 40 million, there are as many as 1.2 million AIDS orphans. AIDS is the silent killer that sweeps through offices, villages, banks, schools and government institutions. In fact, many businesses refuse to give time off for more than one funeral a month to their employees, since death comes so frequently to families.

Self Help Africa is committed to reducing reduce poverty and hunger, by focusing on agriculture, which means both the capacity of small farms to produce the food that a family might need, and the capacity of the land to generate an income from which the household can invest in food, clothing, school fees, medication and the other necessities of daily life.

We visited a wide variety of communities and households that Self Help Africa is working with, and we saw first hand the impact that the simplest activities can have on ordinary daily life. Introducing farmers to new crop varieties, supporting families to set up their own modest backyard vegetable plots, and promoting new breeds of goats, pigs and poultry, are just a handful in a myriad of activities that are slowly, but surely, changing peoples lives.

Underpinning all of the activities that are being carried out by Self Help Africa’s Ugandan team is a relentless focus on training and education – so that farmers and their families can do it for themselves, and can make the changes that they want to in their lives. It’s why we are called ‘self help’!

Farmers can be risk averse. In Africa, where the stakes are high, and the margin for error is narrow indeed, it’s understandable. It takes courage and it takes belief to try something new. After all, if a new farming activity doesn’t work out, or a crop you know nothing about succumbs to a disease or a virus and you don’t know how to treat it – there could be lives on the line.

That’s why it’s important that the training that is provided is spot on, and the people providing the learning are able to gain the trust, and provide the back-up support so that farming families are prepared to make the changes that are needed to improve their lives and the circumstances for themselves and their families.

Self Help Africa achieves that in part by identifying and supporting community-based ‘lead farmers’ in the villages where we work, and by also establishing ‘demonstration plots’ to provide farming households with evidence to show them the potential of one particular crop, or of one particular type of compost or method of growing a plant that should be used.

Lead Farmers

‘Lead farmers’ — men and women who are of the community and from the community — are given the best quality training and support, with particular farming practices that they carry out on their own small farms, and are then supported to become village-based advisors who can help and support others with similar activities.

Community-based storage depots, where rural poor families can deposit their crops to a central point for collection and transport to markets are another simple example of identifying both a problem and a solution to the challenges that people face in their daily lives. In the far north of the country, Self Help Africa is supporting approximately 3,000 rural youths with training, so that they have some chance of earning a living in the communities where they were born and reared.

For too long, young people have been fleeing a life on the land in Africa because they feel it doesn’t offer anything for them.  And who would blame them. If the family only has a small portion of land, and if that has to be tended, day after day, using hand tools, why not strike out for city life – which looks so glamorous and exciting in the scenes you might see on TV or in a newspaper.

Sadly, city life for millions of rural poor Africans isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Indeed, some of the fastest-growing slums and shanty-towns in the world are springing up in Africa, while closer to home we are seeing all too often the terrible risks and dangers that migrants have faced as they attempt to seek a better life for themselves, away from the village.

Many millions of people in rural Uganda are living in chronic poverty, a crushing cycle where people are born in poverty, live in poverty and frequently pass that poverty on to their children. In spite of all the interventions put in place in Uganda, poverty and corruption still remain obstacles to its efforts to develop. But this should not stop us from trying to make a difference for the good of the genuine people in Uganda that need our help and support.

The call to overcome poverty and to uphold human dignity is not new, but today this challenge is especially compelling because we in Self Help Africa believe we have the capacity to make a difference — and, thankfully, we are making a difference for good in a lot of the areas where we work. 

Building on past progress and new opportunities, we can make this a time for hope, even though we are, at times, staring into the abyss caused by the global and Ugandan economic crisis. Hope offers the promise that, with shared sacrifice, wise investment and renewed commitment, we can actually reduce substantially the levels of poverty, hunger, and human deprivation in our own country and around the world.

A Billion Hungry

Now, well into the second half of 2018, more than half of the world’s population lives on less than €2 a day. More than 1.2 billion people live on less than €1 a day. More than a billion people across the globe, most of them children, live with hunger or malnutrition as a regular fact of life. They live in desperate poverty, which means they die younger than they should, struggle with hunger and disease, and live with little hope and less opportunity for a life of dignity.

The problems of the world can seem pretty overwhelming and it can sometimes feel that simply looking after our own is all we can do and yet, just a little would help so much. 

Families in these poor countries cannot wait. They have but one humanity, one opportunity. That opportunity, that time, is in the here and now. Their needs must be met today, not tomorrow. The fight against hunger and poverty in Africa — and in Ireland — is not anyone’s responsibility. It is everyone’s.

• To help Self Help Africa with its work or to chat to Ronan Scully about how you can ‘act locally but impact globally’, you can get in touch on (01) 677 8880 or simply send whatever you can afford to Self Help Africa, Westside Resource Centre, Seamus Quirke Road, Westside, Galway. More details on what the organisation does are online here. You can drop a note to ronan.scully@selfhelpafrica.org.