Alumni Dinner in Geneva

A group of Geneva-based alumni met together for dinner on September 26^th. Twelve alumni met for drinks and nine had dinner together. The group consisted of former students and staff and was organised by IDS Ambassador Milasoa Chérel Robson.

 

The reunion coincided with the visit of former IDS alumni Chair Richard Longhurst (DP81) and his wife Judy (former IDS staff). The group consisted of  Ricardo Gottschalk, Samuel Gayi and Milasoa (all from UNCTAD), Sarah Cook, Director of UNRISD, Maite Irurzun (of l'Agence de Médecine Préventive and former IDS Alumni Committee member), Sally-Anne Way of  OHCHR, Arianna Rossi, Azfar Khana and Edmundo Werna (the three of them from ILO) and Shin-Yuan Lai of the Permanent Mission of Taiwan.  

Shin-Yuan surprised the group by generously footing the bill at the restaurant. Richard briefly outlined some of the recent changes at IDS including the appointment of the new Director, Melissa Leach, and the alumni emphasised how important it is for them to be kept in touch with developments at IDS, and encouraged all IDS staff visiting Geneva to get in contact with the group.

Milasoa shared with the group the intention to organise an intellectual event in cooperation with IDS in the forthcoming months. The idea was well received and gathered support from some alumnis who are keen to contribute to developing stronger links between IDS and the Geneva-based international development community.

- By Milasoa Cherel-Robson and Richard Longhurst

An Open Letter from our First Alumni Scholarship Student

Mir Dosteen Hoth

I am very grateful to the IDS Alumni Team for their generous support to my educational ambitions in Development Studies by selecting me for the IDS Alumni Scholarship.

I am in permanent employment with Govt. of Balochistan as a fast stream entrant as Civil Service Officer since 2011. During all this period I have served Govt. of Balochistan in different positions and was responsible for a variety of tasks including supervision & monitoring of developmental schemes, managing a housing scheme, ensuring provision of health and educational services and other basic amenities to the poor masses and to some extent looking after law and order situation within a District.

Capacity building is a vital part of our career planning which helps us better understand the key issues and in effective service delivery which are crucial to the Economic Growth and Human Development. I, therefore, planned to study a course in Developmental Studies to get the knowhow of the modern developmental theories and ideas being practiced in different parts of the world. It will surely help me in making a positive and responsible contribution to make this world a better place for the humanity.

I was interested to secure a place within the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) for this course as IDS is a well-known research institution, as well as it has a result oriented approach.  Moreover I found this institution challenging the conventional and traditional ways of dealing with longstanding world developmental issues.

I am enrolled on MA Development Studies and I hope this one year course will help me in grasping the key concepts and ideas about various paradigms of Development and ways to counter the obstacles to development such as bad governance, lack of transparency and accountability, economic dependence, poverty, lack of proper infrastructure and many more.

I intend to resume my service with the Govt. of Balochistan after the completion of this course. Balochistan is the most under-developed and poverty ridden province of Pakistan. This problem of under-development engendered so many social, political and economic complications within the region. I am hopeful that after completion of this course I will be able to take informed decisions in my future assignments with Govt. of Balochistan, and play a positive and productive role in bringing the marginalized communities in the mainstream to reduce the level of distrust on the State.

I assure the respected IDS Alumni team that their generous contribution will certainly make an impact on the lives of millions of people living thousands of miles away.

 

Why are 1 in 4 South Africans hungry?

On Saturday afternoon, 18 October, more than 300 people, mostly farm women from small towns and farms in the affluent and picturesque wine and fruit growing region of the Western Cape, marched through the streets of Cape Town. Their bright green T-shirts proclaimed ‘HUNGER HURTS’. Many carried hand-written placards and banners:

‘We have the right to food’
‘Farmwomen feed the nation’
‘A hungry child can’t learn’

The march was organised by the NGO ‘Women on Farms Project’ as a World Food Day event. It coincided with the launch this month of ‘Hidden Hunger in South Africa’, a report by Oxfam which highlights the shocking finding, from the 2013 South African National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, that 26% – one in four, or approximately 13 million – of South Africans currently suffer from hunger and a further 28% per cent are at risk of hunger.

Availability Versus Access

How can over half of all South Africans be food insecure, in an upper-middle-income country that produces more than enough food to feed the nation – enough, in fact, to export almost 2 million tons of maize (pdf) each year to its neighbours and overseas? As with many of South Africa’s economic and social challenges, inequality is at the heart of the issue. It is not inadequate availability of food that is the problem; it is inadequate access to food – by race, class and gender.

The Oxfam report identifies several factors for food insecurity in South Africa, including:

• Unemployment (25%) and underemployment (e.g. seasonal and daily farm labourers)
• Low wages for the working poor (which make adequate nutritious food unaffordable)
• Rapidly rising food prices (and price fixing of bread, maize and dairy products by cartels)
• Gendered inequalities (in access to employment, wages, and the burden of unpaid care work)
• No access to land (<2% of South Africans grow the majority of their own food)
• Poor nutrition (“poor households have good access to bad food but bad access to good food”).

How is food security a priority for the South African Government? 

The marchers approached Parliament. Their placards asked some challenging questions:

‘Why must we go hungry in a country of plenty?’
‘Do your children go to bed hungry?’
‘Can you feed your family on R12.41/hour?’

R12.41 (about 70p) is the legislated hourly minimum wage for farm workers in South Africa. Their monthly minimum wage of R2,275 equates to just £127, or $218, far below the national average gross national income (GNI) per capita of $600. In many households this is the only income, to be divided among several adults and children. A simulation by the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy found that a nutritionally balanced diet would cost a family of four R2,308 per month in 2012 (pdf).

The marchers in Cape Town reached the gates of Parliament. A spokesperson for the farmwomen read their Memorandum aloud before handing it over to representatives from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, who signed it to acknowledge receipt before responding.

The Memorandum included the following demands, among others:

• Realisation of the constitutional right to food
• Faster land redistribution that will benefit women
• Expropriation of unproductive and multiple farms
• An end to farm worker evictions
• Regulation of food corporations to stop their profiteering off basic food stuffs.

The Government spokesperson responded, but the farm women were not easily convinced.

Government: Food security is a priority for this government.
Farm woman: How? How?
Government: We will ensure that no South African has less than two meals a day.
Farm woman: More empty promises!”
Government: This week we celebrated World Food Day...
Farm woman: There is nothing to celebrate. We are hungry.

Nothing to celebrate, indeed. As Nelson Mandela said around the time of South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994:

“Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs.”

Authors
Stephen Devereux is a Research Fellow in the Rural Futures cluster at IDS, and an adviser to the Centre of Excellence in Food Security at the University of the Western Cape. 
Colette Solomon is Director of the NGO ‘Women on Farms Project’ and an IDS Alumna.

Mother’s Little Helper

By Akansha Yadav

Earlier this year, I was giving social audit training to a group of women and men in Gumla district of Jharkhand when a toddler of a young mother (a trainee) decided to be cranky for her attention. She tried to humour him and feed him but to no avail. While this distracted her from the class, others too started glancing at her with impatience. Embarrassed and under the pressure of those accusing glances, she tried her best to console the child. Gradually, people sitting at the back started raising demands of either quietening the child or leaving the room. Some even whispered why come to a class with a child !?! Amongst that mixed din, a loud male voice stood out categorically asking the mother to take the child outside. Embarrassed, she started to rise, pick up the toddler when I intervened and asked her to sit again. My team members and I tried to distract the child and finally got him to play again with others... and so we continued the training after a gap of about 20 odd minutes.  

I feel this incident highlighted some significant social behaviour towards mothers coming to work and a brief insight into the gradual process as to how they are forced to leave the work force. The mother obviously did not have any help at home where she could have left the the child, nor a crèche at the centre for training (which was already in shambles!). Her concentration in the class was divided between her child and the discussions, though her participation and responses were quite good. Had she gone home that day with the child, she would have not completed that training, or gone on the field to conduct field interviews for social audits. Apart from the experience, it would have also deprived her from the honorarium she would have earned for her work. All because she is a mother with no day care help for her child.

Another issue that I felt got raised was embarrassing a mother for bringing her child to work. She can't leave him at home and if she does, it also means she stays back and automatically gets out of the workforce in due time. A man (amongst many others sitting there!) feels he has the authority and social sanction to tell a women, his fellow trainee nonetheless what she should do with her child. He does not feel an iota of shame or realises the kind of embarrassment he has caused to a mother.

While gender sensitisation is the buzz word of this decade, how exactly does it translate in real life, in social and work scenarios? I say this because the training that all of them were undergoing at that moment included village survey on gender based indicators and specifying outcomes on how a certain welfare scheme has affected lifestyle and lives of women in the village amongst other things. Theoretically or verbally perhaps, the man who shouted across the room was in-sync with terms like women empowerment, participation, economic freedom etc, etc.. but clearly there was a disconnect. He was trying to learn this as a professional skill with no intention of understanding or assimilating it in his social life. He mentioned delay in time and class schedule with much more urgency, without grasping the practical compulsions of dealing with a young child.

If no-one in the class interferes and even the trainer does not interfere, the mother would have picked up the child and gone home. Why this behaviour does not outrage others? How exactly we can enforce gender sensitisation in practice? Why we do not emphasise on the need for formal and compulsory child care for working mothers? Possibly this insensitivity and its many manifestations are the reasons, why educated or ambitious mothers have to stay at home!

Read Akansha's original post and her other blogs

And if you'd like to follow her on Twitter, you will find her @akanshayadav

IDS Alumni have an evening in Kampala – Emmanuel Nshakira Rukundo

Occasionally, I read the Yellow Monday online to see what is happening at IDS, nee publications, research in the pipeline and who is hiring where?  It is always refreshing as it keeps me almost plugged into current events at IDS.  It gives me the opportunity to share with other people especially alumni I meet once in a while.  In one of my routine snowballing through the Yellow Monday, I got to know that IDS Fellow Patta Scott-Villiers was in Kampala from 1^st to 12^th June.  

Of recent I have been talking with a few of the alumni in Uganda about when to have an event.  We are about twenty or so alumni in Uganda, including a cabinet minister, two professors and a big number in NGOs and development agencies.  A few emails with the alumni and Patta gracefully agreed to a quickly organised dinner.  We actually plucked Patta from the busy essay marking she was doing!  About three of the alumni turned up and it was a good dinner over drinks and Chinese cuisine in Kampala.

Dinner chat was good, oscillating from new leadership at IDS to post 2015 development agenda and Patta’s experiences living with a rural household in Uganda for a week. While trying to evade the normal development cliché discussions, what was outstanding was the issue of access to information.  It cuts across the whole spectrum of development that access to information will be as crucial to national development macro goals as it will be for small community level development outcomes.  Patta’s week with family in rural South Western Uganda exposed the fact that households on community level in numerous instances did not have the right information or any information of specific interventions such as insurance.  And for young professionals, most of the information needed, such as on study opportunities and funding is not available in mainstream channels such as government departments.  Of course debates on including access to information as one of the goals for post 2015 development agenda remain high.  And as development professionals, we continue to follow and look forward to the benefits to come.

A number of alumni sent in their apologies for not making it but we agreed to have a better organised and certainly better attended alumni event so soon.  It was a wonderful evening with Patta and really good IDS alumni catch up in Kampala!  Looking forward to the next one!

 

The Blind Spot That Is Child Labour

Children working is a common sight in India - young girls carrying water and/or washing utensils, young boys working in the fields or indulging in activities not compatible with their age - such as gambling. Rather than going to school, they often work for ungodly hours. And worse, they have no right over income and resources that they generate (if at all they are paid!)

While travelling around various states in India, I keep coming across these images, quite often and much the same. Children out of school, working in horrible conditions with no bargaining power, underpaid and malnourished. Some see it as cheap labour and some see them as not our responsibilities but a product of unavailable or poor public education system. 

They live in conditions we will never allow or even imagine for our own children. Admittedly, we have grown immune to these images given how pervasive they are and despite the shocking nature of this reality, it does not seem to assault our senses any more.

Some of these images left me disturbed and I am curious to know if you notice the phenomena that is child labour. Do share your views.

A boy cutting onions for his father's railway side restaurant in Paderu, Araku Valley, Andhra Pradesh. He had a small puppy to keep him company while he went about doing this mundane job.

A young girl doing embroidery on a bag for selling it at her stall in Hampi, Karnataka

Children often serve as cheap, acquiescing labour. If not employed by their own parents (and simultaneously being out of school), they work for very low wages for others and quite often exposed to exploitation - physical, mental and emotional and most vulnerable to abuse on regular basis. 

Few months back, while eating at a roadside dhaba in Jharkhand, I came across a nine-year boy working there. Dressed in tatters, he was serving beer/whisky to group of men sitting inside playing cards. When I asked the dhaba owner about his schooling and working hours (who was a migrant from nearby Bihar and more excited to tell us the story about how he established this dhaba than deal with this interrogation!), he dismissed it summarily stating, "he is my 'naukar', why will he go to school?".

The word 'naukar' loosely translates to the word lackey in English and if one lives in an artificially sanitized environment for a long time, this term has long been replaced with a lesser (but still) offensive maid, chotu or bai in towns. It repulsed me to hear that word and what I found more infuriating was dhaba owner's sense of entitlement over him and complete dismissal of the boy's property rights.

A group of young boys gambling with coins gathered from River Godavari in Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh. Don't miss the bunch of magnet rings they use ...

You can barely see past that tight huddle and what is going in there. It was strange to see the impeccable method they had developed overtime for gathering Re 1, 2, 5 and 10 coins thrown in the river by those bathing in it  through those magnet rings and expert diving and swimming, then using those coins to gamble amongst themselves.

Carrying loads of water from community hand-pump for her house in Dumbriguda, Andhra Pradesh

Washing utensils with cold water in winters and then carrying it home in Shivrajpur, Jharkhand

Barely 100 metres away from that girl washing utensils, these boys playing gully cricket in the same village. I have hardly ever came across girls playing or running around

Ready with her broom to clean the house, all of three years old in Nagpur, Maharashtra!

This are some common images that I feel also reinforce gender roles. I have observed girls industriously working like ants going about household chores - travelling long distances for water for household use and cooking, cleaning or washing utensils at community hand-pumps and boys playing and/or indulging in nefarious activities.

Older sibling (usually a girl) taking care of younger one in Shivrajpur, Jharkhand.

Lack of care facility, more often than not entrusts older siblings with the responsibility of younger ones. Particularly in the states of Bihar and Jharkhand, I observed that almost every household had more than four-five children (very young in age). While both parents work in the field, the responsibility of taking care of younger ones falls on the older ones especially sisters, who may not be old enough to take care of either themselves or the younger ones, but they have to learn.

In case there is no one reliable at home to take care of children, mothers often bring them along at work sites, which is hazardous amongst equipments and heavy loads of stones etc. There is the absence of crèche facility and they often prefer that their children remain in the sight.

At a NREGA worksite in Bastar, Chattisgarh. Under the NREGA guidelines, a crèche at work site is mandatory, though I have never come across any.

Amongst these, something heartening I saw in Ghanpur, Warangal that enthralled me. This is a private school where I saw young kids with equal gender participation learning English and rhymes, being taught by enthusiastic teachers which was quite refreshing :)

Learning... Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

By Akansha Yadav, MA Development Studies 2012. Originally published at Lives Some Live

(Copyright of all the images used in this blog rests with Akansha Yadav)

India currently is home to largest number of child labourers in the world. Some 12 million children are out-of-school, as per UNICEF 2014 data and many more that goes unrecorded and have been pushed into bonded child labour, working in brick kilns, beedi-rolling, carpet weaving, commercial sexual exploitation, construction, fireworks and matches factories, mines, quarries, silk, synthetic gems...the list goes on. 

Connecting India’s Villages with Successful Village Migrants

A rather common question asked amongst Indians on being acquainted with one another is regarding their “native place”; the village, town, or city that the person originally belongs to. Having been born in the southern city of Chennai, but brought up in the western city of Pune; with my mother having roots in Iran, and my father having roots in the north-western State of Gujarat, the quintessential question of “my native place” eludes me.

Gayathri (left) is a 'successful migrant' and is helping renovate the lavatories in the primary school in Melmayil

The significance of a person’s roots has developed a monumentally different meaning to me in recent times. It stemmed from a rather passionate meeting between representatives of the organization I work for and an NGO that focuses on rainwater harvesting in rural Tamil Nadu. While we were deliberating the location of the rainwater harvesting project we would like to fund, one of the associates of the NGO emphatically stated “make sure the employees of your organization can draw a strong emotional connect to the location of the project”.

That single expression has now led us to developing a web platform which showcases India’s villages in a rich and highly visual manner. The purpose being, to provide a platform for “Successful Village Migrants” – people who themselves, their parents or grandparents, have roots in a village in India – to stay connected with and contribute to their native villages. 

Children at the primary school in Melmayil village, Vellore, Tamil Nadu

Plenty of first or second generation migrants visit their native villages annually, whereas many third or fourth generation migrants might have never visited their native villages but yet have distant relatives still residing there, or even sometimes donate money to the village temple. By displaying India’s villages in all their glory as well as short-comings, we are hoping to build on this connect that people have with their native places and channel individual contributions towards the most under-served regions of India.

A project of enormous scale, considering India has 640,000 villages; a project that would involve millions in expenses and a minimum gestation period of 5 – 10 years to really witness meaningful impact; all based on the promise of emotion. Based on the emotional connect that people have to the villages that they come from.

Children at the primary school in Melmayil village, Vellore, Tamil Nadu

The project, with only a temporary name – “My Village” – and a temporary website – is just a few months in but is already seeing success. A French gentleman with roots in the quaint Union Territory of Pondicherry scouted out the most impoverished village in the area and is now collecting funds to start a Tailoring Unit for 8 women. A young IT professional with roots in the District of Trichy is mobilizing resources to fund a ‘Supplementary Education Programme” in the village of Kattur Ramanathapuram in his district.

Could it be possible for a rural development project to sustain itself purely on an emotion? Do you think with time this project will grow to an extent that truly encourages “Successful Village Migrants” to take an active role in the development of their own “native” villages?

Follow the progress of this project on the website or facebook page.

– by Jenaan Lilani, MA Development Studies 2009 - 2010