KENYA: Squabble over Global Fund money threatens ARV access

Photo: M. Sayagues/PlusNews

The row could hamper HIV treatment

NAIROBI,� – A row between NGOs involved in the fight against HIV in Kenya could result in the country losing out on money from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

A group of NGOs under the umbrella group, the Kenya Consortium to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, is accusing one of the Fund’s principal recipients in Kenya, CARE International, of being too slow to release money it was allocated.

“We are concerned that while the Global Fund has done its part by disbursing US$4,735,494 to CARE International Kenya in March this year, the pace of implementation has become an issue of great concern,” the consortium said in a letter to the National AIDS Control Council (NACC).

“We believe that if this is not addressed quickly, it could negatively impact on future rounds and even our ability to source funding for HIV and AIDS elsewhere,” it added.

The consortium says that unless the money is utilized and accounted for by November, the Fund is unlikely to release the next allocation for HIV programmes.

However, CARE International’s country director, Stephen Vaughan, says his organization has been releasing funds to groups that have accounted for previous allocations.

“We cannot release funds to those who have not accounted for funds already given to them,” Vaughan said at a press conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on 6 October. “Let them provide clear accounts on how they spent the money already given out to them.”

We cannot release funds to those who have not accounted for funds already given to them

He noted that of 58 civil society groups that receive funding from the Global Fund through CARE International, only 26 had met the Fund’s accounting criteria.

AIDS activists are concerned that access to treatment could be affected if the row continues and the Global Fund does not release the next allotment of money in November.

“This is unfortunate, because the information we have is that the ARVs in stock at the moment will not last long,” said James Kamau, coordinator of the Kenya Treatment Access Movement. “It is sad because it is the ordinary people who suffer in such circumstances.”

The NACC has convened a meeting on 9 October to try to resolve the situation.

The Global Fund is one of Kenya’s main supporters in the fight against HIV, having provided more than $87 million for prevention, treatment and activities related to improving the quality of life of people living with HIV.

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ZIMBABWE: Positive women’s football beats stigma

Photo: IRIN/PlusNews

“People…always express their surprise that members of the team look healthy”

HARARE,� – Janet Mpilime, 32, captain of the ARV Swallows, an all-woman football team based in the informal settlement of Epworth, 10km east of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, has just led her team to a 2-1 victory over Sporting ART.

Wearing a football kit similar to that of Spain’s number-one team, Barcelona, and smiling broadly, Mpilime explained that the name ARV Swallows was chosen to help fight stigma against people living with HIV.

ARV is short for antiretroviral, the life-prolonging drugs used to treat people with HIV, while ART stands for antiretroviral treatment. All the women in both teams are positive.

“We come from a very poor neighbourhood which has been hard hit by the effects of HIV/AIDS, but for a long time many people have suffered, endured and died in silence, as they were afraid of declaring that they were HIV positive,” she said.

“Following the formation of our team in 2008, many women came out of their shells and we now have more than 20 women who play for the team.” ARV Swallows have already won three competitions, and have helped change the perception that people living with HIV are too sickly to participate in sports.

“People in the different communities that we play in always express their surprise that members of the team look healthy,” said Mpilime, a single mother of two who tested HIV positive four years ago. “Through football, we have gone a long way in fighting stigma.”

Chris Sambo, a veteran football administrator who now coordinates 16 teams of HIV-positive female players in three of Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces, came up with the idea of using football to fight HIV-related stigma in 2007.

“Football is the most popular and unifying sport in the world, and I believe that it makes a very good platform for encouraging behavioural change and the fight against the stigmatization of people living with HIV,” he told IRIN/PlusNews.

Before and after matches, the women give talks on the effect HIV has had on their lives and how they have overcome hurdles, while peer educators hand out HIV/AIDS information and condoms. Peer educator Fredrick Chitalu, 46, spent much of the match between ARV Swallows and Sporting ART fielding a barrage of questions from inquisitive girls and women.

“These football tournaments are always well attended, and all the literature – and both male and female condoms – run out because people are eager to learn more about HIV and sexually transmitted infections,” he said.

Sambo noted that the project had so far failed to recruit enough HIV-positive men to form male teams. “That has been a blow to our efforts; however, the involvement of women and the youth has helped a lot because we now have men making inquiries on how they can participate.”

The greatest challenge has been funding. “Because of financial constraints we are not able to play as regularly as we would want. Some companies and banks have given us support, but for a programme as big as this, we would want a lot [more].”

Mpilime said many of the women were experiencing economic hardship. “All our members are not formally employed and we survive by selling fruit and vegetables and firewood. Poverty impacts on our nutrition because we are not able to have a healthy and balanced diet.”

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CAMBODIA: An “epidemic” of evictions

Photo: Christopher Shay/Phnom Penh Post

A man holds his child as he walks through the remains of a community known as Group 78 in central Phnom Penh

PHNOM PENH,� – About 700 police and soldiers in riot gear arrived early one morning, waking 58-year-old Teth Neang with a baton and forcing her into a truck.

After they bulldozed her home, they drove her to the outskirts of the capital. She alleges they then dumped her – and 1,000 other families – in an open field, and drove off.

That was three years ago. Since then, Neang has lived in a government-sponsored relocation site at Andong, 20km outside Phnom Penh, without healthcare or a job.

The land she was removed from – Sambok Chap village, in central Phnom Penh – remains barely used by a private developer.

“The developer didn’t give me a home like they promised,” she told IRIN. “I slept in the field for a week, even in the rain.”

With the help of a local Christian missionary, Neang has managed to build a tarpaulin hut but her home is regularly flooded and she has no source of clean drinking water.

“How am I supposed to work here? In Phnom Penh we had jobs and ways of living. Out here, nobody takes care of us.”

Going landless

In recent years, NGOs and rights groups have raised concerns over what they say is an epidemic of forced evictions amid spiralling land prices and lax enforcement of laws.

Many evictions make way for hotels and skyscrapers in the rapidly developing capital. In the countryside, evictions are often justified to make way for logging, mining, resorts, casinos or plantations, say NGOs.

Licadho, a Cambodian NGO, said in a May report that 133,000 people, or 10 percent of Phnom Penh’s 1.3 million, were believed to have been affected by evictions since 1990.

And more than 250,000 people in 13 provinces have been hit by land-grabbing and forced evictions since 2003, it said.

Meanwhile, rural landlessness has soared from about 13 percent in 1997 to as high as 25 percent in 2007, according to Bridges across Borders Southeast Asia (BABSEA), a regional NGO that works on land rights in Cambodia.

“The mismanagement of state land has negatively impacted [on] the poorest Cambodians most,” said David Pred, director of BABSEA, in a statement on 1 October. “Rural and indigenous communities have been deprived of the land on which their lives depend.”

NGOs report that many evictees such as Neang are denied basic healthcare and water services in their relocation sites, provided by the government and usually in areas too far from the inner city to find jobs.

Records destroyed

Scores of land documents were destroyed under the Khmer Rouge regime, leaving many Cambodians unable to prove ownership.

The government has justified evictions as part of the country’s development plan, and has claimed that residents squat on land illegally. But according to Cambodia’s 2001 land law, anyone who has used land for the past five years can claim full title to it.

One World Bank land-titling programme, the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP), was cancelled by the government in early September. The US$24.3 million project had issued 1.1 million titles since 2002 in an attempt to address Cambodia’s rampant landlessness.

Prime Minister Hun Sen said in early September that the move was due to “complicated and difficult conditions” surrounding the project.

However, Annette Dixon, the World Bank’s director for Southeast Asia, has said the Bank and government could not agree on a protection mechanism for land disputes.

“The government is making a mistake. The LMAP could be a tremendous boost for poverty reduction, giving people security to their land, which would lead to better planning and investment,” Ou Virak, head of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, a local NGO, told IRIN.

“Land conflict is the one issue that could undermine the current government and cause social unrest,” he said.

Controversial development

In perhaps the most controversial case, a politically connected Cambodian developer, Shukaku Inc., is filling in the Boeung Kak lake in northeastern Phnom Penh – one of the city’s few natural sites that attracts thousands of tourists each year.

The company has evicted about 900 families from the land since August 2008, and another 20,000 are set to be pushed out, according to BABSEA. Activists say the legality of the project is unclear, since Cambodia’s 2001 land law states that lakes are public property and cannot be destroyed.

However, officials have said the land belongs to the state, not families, and that the development is necessary.

“At Boeung Kak lake, we don’t evict people because it is state property,” Pa Socheat Vong, sub-governor of the Phnom Penh municipality, told IRIN. “We do things according to the law, and we need to build infrastructure and develop Phnom Penh. Foreign NGOs and journalists don’t know the truth about it.”

As part of the project, Shukaku has entered into a 99-year lease to develop 133ha of the lake and surrounding areas. It reportedly plans to build flats and shopping complexes.

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ZAMBIA: Mosquito-net fishing threatens Lake Tanganyika

Photo: UN

Fishermen on Lake Tanganyika bring in their catch

MPULUNGU,� – Frederick Sinjela, a fisherman in Mpulungu district in Northern Province, Zambia, cannot imagine how his actions could affect something as big as Lake Tanganyika, but his harmful practices, multiplied by thousands like him, are a real and growing threat.

“At least we know that fish will never finish – [there are] thousands and thousands – it is just that now [they] have gone deeper.” Nevertheless, the extended boat trip was still worth it: “I make about 20,000 kwacha [US$6] per day,” giving him a better-than-average income.

“We mount many lamps on our boats at night so that the fish think it is day-time and come out, and we catch [them].” This is the main fishing method on the lake. “But finishing? It will never finish,” he said confidently.

There was really no reason to think fish would run out: Lake Tanganyika is huge and has always provided food and an income to the millions of people living along its shores; up to 40 percent of the protein in their diet comes from fish.

It is the world’s longest (670km) and second-deepest (over 1,400m) freshwater lake; at over nine million years old it is also home to some of the oldest fishing settlements on the planet.

Its importance to the region cannot be overestimated: a rapidly growing population of some 10 million people in four different countries – Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Zambia – share the lake’s watershed and depend upon it for fresh water, food, transportation and income.

Now we have to go very far away to catch fish. In the past, we would catch a lot just 10 metres from the shore

Yet some of Sinjela’s colleagues, like Justin Mambwe, were worried: “Now we have to go very far away to catch fish. In the past, we would catch a lot just 10 metres from the shore. There is a difference between now and the way fish used to be.” The catches were also smaller.

Fishing ‘sustainably’

Wilfred Sikanyika, a local environmental campaigner who used to work for Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture, told IRIN: “We are deeply concerned at these indiscriminate fishing activities on the Zambian side of Lake Tanganyika.”

Fish stocks have been declining over the years and there are very few fish on the Zambian side. “Our people are now going as far as Tanzania and DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo],” he said.

“People are using mosquito nets and everything they can [to catch fish] – these mosquito nets take in everything,” he told IRIN.

Using mosquito nets, which have an extremely fine mesh, means the fish are caught before they can reach maturity and spawn, a major reason for declining fish stocks. Moreover, the nets, which are mainly distributed in government malaria eradication campaigns, are not being used for their intended purpose.

The concerns go far beyond long-term food security, health and livelihoods: this destructive practice is putting the lake’s renowned biological diversity at risk.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global environmental network, no place on earth holds such a variety of life. Lake Tanganyika harbours over 2,000 different species, of which more than half are found nowhere else. The fishermen target only six species, but the mosquito nets are indiscriminate.

The lake is under threat: overfishing caused by population growth along the shore is depleting its stocks and shrinking their diversity; industrial and agricultural pollution, like fertilizers and pesticides, are degrading water quality; deforestation is contributing excessive amounts of sedimentation, changing the aquatic environment.

“We are currently working on forming an association that will look at protecting the biodiversity of Lake Tanganyika and promoting sustainable fishing methods,” Sikanyika said.

The�future of fishing

Justina Zimba, a research officer at the fisheries department in Mpulungu, said exact figures on fish stocks were hard to come by, making it difficult to assess the extent of the decline.

“Data collected since 1980 shows that the catch and catch-per-unit effort of certain species like kapenta [also known as the Tanganyika sardine] has drastically declined, especially in the heavily exploited [Zambian] southeastern arm of the lake,” she noted.

Photo: Nebert Mulenga/IRIN

Protein rich Kapenta fish for sale on the shores of Lake Tanganyika

“There are no resources at the moment for us to do the monitoring, or even carry out the latest fish-census exercise. We are currently depending on data from the fishing companies and going by their figures.”

The problem transcends national boundaries. “Addressing these threats effectively requires the cooperation of the four countries [sharing the lake] and appropriate regulations for the lake, because at the moment the lake is regarded as a ‘no man’s land’ and people fish everywhere.”

However, the Lake Tanganyika Sustainable Management Project, a cooperative effort by Tanzania, Burundi, DRC and Zambia, has been set up under a common Lake Tanganyika Authority.

“We realised that the dwindling of fish stocks … was a matter of serious concern among all the … [lakeshore] countries. We do not even know whether all the 350 endemic fish species can be easily found in the lake today,” said Kenneth Nkowani, Director of Zambia’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

The Zambian component of the project will stem overfishing and control sediment flows from the steep mountainous terrain. According to Nkowani, “We want to see change in the way people manage the lake within a year or two.”

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