From 2007 to 2009, HarvestPlus (a global NGO aimed at reducing world hunger) and its partners disseminated orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) to 24,000 farming households in Uganda and Mozambique with the goal of reducing vitamin A deficiency. OFSP has higher vitamin A levels than white or yellow sweet potato. An evaluation of the intervention found a 68% and 61% increase in adoption of OFSP in Mozambique and Uganda respectively. The share of OFSP in the total area dedicated to sweet potato increased sharply as households substituted white or yellow sweet potato with OFSP. There was also a significant net increase in vitamin A intakes in young and older children and women in these countries. In some instances, this increased intake resulted in children reaching the recommended intakes for their age group. The author of the study discusses how to reduce costs of promoting and scale up of the intervention through greater diffusion of OFSP between farming communities.
Poverty and health
According to IRIN News, new cases of leprosy have been reported from clinics in Antalaha, a remote area of Madagascar. The driving force behind the outbreak of the disease is increased malnutrition, the article reports, caused by dramatic increases in the price of rice. And while people are becoming poorer and more susceptible to illness, the public healthcare system is receiving less money from the government. According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), government spending for health dropped to US$2 a person in 2010, compared to $5 in 2009 and $8 in 2008. Clinics in remote places like Antalaha are the most likely to suffer from shortages of drugs and medical supplies. Six to 12 months of treatment with multidrug therapy - a combination of two antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory (medicines that the World Health Organisation distributes for free) - stops the disease from spreading, but there are other obstacles to overcome. The main one, according to medical workers, is that the Malagasy authorities declared that leprosy had been eradicated from the country in 2010. Medical workers are reported to be afraid to report new cases to the authorities as this will contradict the official position on the disease. Diagnosing the illness can also be tricky in a tropical climate that causes many dermatological problems, and basic items like bandages – which are needed to dress the wounds – are usually lacking in health centres.
Less than half of development aid approved by the European Commission is explicitly linked to international objectives on reducing poverty, a new study has found. Health and education assume a central role in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which were approved by all of the UN’s member countries in 2000. The eight objectives include targets to substantially reduce illiteracy, deaths of mothers during childbirth and of children before their fifth birthday, and the incidence of major diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 2010. Even though the European Union has undertaken to finance the attainment of these goals, its executive branch or commission appears to be attaching less importance to primary education in poor countries than it did at the start of this decade, according to Alliance 2015, a coalition of anti-poverty groups.
Unlike the other developing regions of the world where poverty has been on the decline, the proportion of people living below the poverty line in Africa increased from 42.6 percent in 1980 to 44.1 percent in 1990 and 45.7 percent in 2003. Consequently, an increasing number of Africans have suffered from insufficient income and capacity to access food and other basic amenities such as potable water, minimum health care and education. The poor performance of the continent in achieving sustained economic growth and poverty reduction is also manifest in that, although most African economics remain essentially agrarian with about 60 percent of the total labor force being employed in agriculture, the continent has failed to feed its growing population. This paper attempts to understand how the African continent found itself into this loop of poverty. The author analyses the causes that have brought Africa to its present state of poverty and food insecurity.
This paper examines the impact of undernutrition among preschool children on subsequent human capital formation in rural Zimbabwe. We use a maternal fixed effects – instrumental variables (MFE-IV) estimator with a long-term panel data set. Representations of civil war and drought 'shocks' are used to identify differences in preschool nutritional status across siblings. Improvements in height-for-age in preschoolers are associated with increased height as young adults and the number of grades of schooling completed. Had the median pre-school child in this sample had the stature of a median child in a developed country, by adolescence, s/he would be 3.4 centimeters taller, had completed an additional 0.85 grades of schooling and would have commenced school six months earlier.
This paper finds that there is a clear association between the risk of maternal death and a variety of poverty-related characteristics. Moreover there is an indication that maternal mortality is a sensitive marker of disadvantage, since non-maternal deaths did not exhibit such extreme clustering in the poorest groups. The authors demonstrate the magnitude of the poor-rich gap in maternal mortality, and should be a stimulus to setting and monitoring poverty-relevant development goals.
In this report, the authors argue that food security in Southern Africa needs to be "mainstreamed" into the migration and development agenda and migration needs to be "mainstreamed" into the food security agenda. They set out to promote a conversation between the food security and migration agendas in the African context, focusing on the connections in an urban context. Four main issues are singled out for attention: the relationship between internal migration and urban food security; the relationship between international migration and urban food security; the difference in food security between migrant and non-migrant urban households; and the role of rural-urban food transfers in urban food security. Findings indicate that most poor households in Southern African cities either consist entirely of migrants or a mix of migrants and non-migrants. Rapid urbanisation, increased circulation and growing cross-border migration have all meant that the number of migrants and migrant households in the city has grown exponentially. This is likely to continue for several more decades as urbanisation continues. Policymakers cannot simply assume that all poor urban households are alike. While levels of food insecurity are unacceptably high amongst all of them, migrant households do have a greater chance of being food insecure with all of its attendant health and nutritional problems.
In present-day South Africa people are daily confronted with individual or group scenes of violence in places people live in poverty. Despite political promises, the common experience is of a housing shortage, poor education, few jobs and very little prospect of alleviating profound poverty. This article explores the possible and potential links between poverty and violence, in order to gain deeper insight into their intrinsic meaning and the circularity of linkage between the two. In order to do so, it revisits the definitions of poverty and violence, emphasises the extremely important role ‘human needs’ play in both poverty and violence,
examines the phenomenon of the ‘behavioural sink’ which refers to the
negative effect of overcrowding on humans as biological beings and establishes whether theories on male violence offer insight into the problem.
In this cross-sectional study, researchers screened 131 adults with or without pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) for HIV, wasting and disease severity using the 13-item validated clinical TB score and 24-hour dietary intake recall. Of the 131 participants, 61 were males and 70 females. Overall men and women had similar age. In average 24-hour nutrient intake, the following were low among patients with severe TB: energy, protein, total fat, carbohydrate, calcium, vitamin A and folate. Patients with moderate-to-severe clinical TB score had lower average energy intake than patients with mild TB scores (6.11 vs. 9.27 megajoules [MJ], respectively). The average 24-hour nutrient intakes of wasted and non-wasted TB patients were comparable. Nutrient intake among men was higher when compared to women regardless of wasting and severity of TB. Among those with wasting, men had higher average energy intake than women (8.87 vs. 5.81 MJ, respectively). Among patients with mild disease, men had higher average energy intake than women with mild disease (12.83 vs. 7.49 kcal, respectively). These findings suggest that severity of pulmonary TB and female gender were associated with reduced nutrient intake. Early diagnosis and nutritional support may be important in management of patients.
In this study, researchers examined the use of contraception among women in 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa with regard to wealth-related inequity. The analysis was conducted with Demographic and Health Survey data from 13 sub-Saharan African countries. The researchers found that the use of contraception has increased substantially between surveys in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia but has declined slightly in Kenya, Senegal and Uganda. Wealth-related inequalities in the met need for contraception have decreased in most countries and especially so in Mozambique, but they have increased in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia with regard to spacing births, and in Malawi, Senegal, Uganda, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia with regard to limiting childbearing. After adjustment for fertility intention, women in the richest wealth quintile were more likely than those in the poorest quintile to practice long-term contraception.