Women Farmers in Tanzania - I'm a farmer, get me out of there!

Women farmers at the Maisha Plus Village teach youngsters from the city how to grow and prepare their food/Sven Torfinn

I spent a few days in a typical African village in Tanzania with thatched huts, water well, goats and scrawny chickens scurrying about, but this village was actually built from scratch at a secret location in the Pawni region. It was the set for a Big Brother-type show organized by the international development charity Oxfam and the popular Tanzanian reality TV show Maisha Plus. Fourteen women who farm small plots of land in rural Tanzania and 26 youths from the cities competed for the titles of "Mama Shujaa Wa Chakula" (woman food hero) and youth food hero.
 
The idea was to give young contestants and millions of viewers a taste of what women in Africa go through to put food on the table with limited resources and in the face of enormous challenges. It was also a rare opportunity to celebrate them, put farming and gender issues on the agenda and force politicians to listen.

Here is a short blog post I've written for the Economist:

Farming in Tanzania

I'm a farmer, get me out of here

Dec 18th 2012, 9:57 by V.M. | DAR ES SALAAM

STARS of most reality television shows spend their time nibbling earwigs, sunbathing and bickering. Those taking part in a Big Brother-style show recently broadcast in Tanzania, however, had a more productive experience.

Fourteen farmers, all women, and 26 urban youngsters were thrown together in a specially constructed village under near 24-hour TV surveillance. The women set daily tasks from their own lives—growing vegetables, looking after cows or fetching water—which the teenagers had to complete in order to survive. The farmers were given farming tips and got to talk to politicians and policy-makers in the "diary room".

In Tanzania, as in many African countries, women produce much of the food that feeds their people, but few own their land. "Women are treated as tractors, but they have to treat their husbands like angels," said one of the contestants.

The Women Food Heroes competition, run by Oxfam and "Maisha Plus", a popular Tanzanian reality TV show, gave the young contestants and its viewers a taste of what women in Tanzania endure to put food on the table. It was a rare opportunity to promote women’s voices and celebrate their contribution, says Mwanahamisi Salimu of Oxfam. It was also a chance to push for them to have access to the same kind of support and rights already available to men farmers, she continues. It showed that small-scale agriculture is a sustainable way of feeding the country.

Broadcast nightly on the biggest national network and promoted on social media, radio and newspapers, the programme reached more than half the population. In the countryside, people gathered in community centres to watch it. Its popularity has forced politicians to talk about farming, a subject about which they are usually fairly quiet.

The winner, Sister Martha Mwasu Waziri from Dodoma, who won $6,300 to buy farming equipment, says she wants to turn her farm—which she built on a scrap of wasteland—into a demonstration farm to show others what they can achieve. "I learned so much here and that is more important to me than winning the competition," says Mary Kamwaka Maumbi, another finalist. "I’ve learned how to do a crop calendar, when to start breeding my pigs and when to inoculate them, how to get my produce to the market and what to do with my money.  I’ll put everything into practice and will show others how to do it.  It will have an impact on my whole village."

Women Connect, Build Peace

Here is a great initiative that brings together women from Arab, Muslim and Western communities around the world to help breaking down cultural and religious stereotypes and misunderstandings.

The Connection Point Dialogue was launched a year ago by Peace X Peace, a global women’s peacebuilding network, to counter the alarming rise in Islamophobia.

It is a forum for open, informal, real-time communication that can humanize distant peoples and expand worldviews.  The first phase was a blog where women from all over the world could write, ask questions, debate and learn about one another. The second phase uses videoconferencing to further the cross-cultural exchanges.

Stephanie Knox Cubbon, one of the program’s facilitators, says:  "Though we come from different places, we share many challenges and issues, and together we can learn strategies to overcome these challenges. The Connection Point Dialogue allows women not only to examine these challenges, but to brainstorm ways to take collective action to make the world more peaceful for everyone....in today's increasingly globalized world, a program like this is needed now more than ever."

Founded in 2002, Peace X Peace (pronounce Peace by Peace) involves 20,000 women in 125 countries.  Their programs promote gender equity and peacebuilding through leadership development, mentorship, public policy and intercultural dialogue. They are great! Read more about them here and look for their posts on my blogroll. 

Kampala Convention – Africa takes the lead to help IDPs

IDPs in a DRC camp/IDMC- Nicolas Postal

 

Across the world, millions of people are forced to flee their homes because of war, natural disasters and other reasons, but have not crossed an internationally recognised border: they are internally displace people (IDPs). As such, they are not refugees and don’t have any special status under international law.

But today, Africa has made global history by pioneering a ground-breaking new legal framework to protect and assist them.  The Kampala Convention, which came into force today (6th December 2012), is a tool designed by Africa for Africans, which binds governments to provide legal protection for the rights and well-being of those forced to flee inside their home countries due to conflict, violence, natural disasters or development projects.

Almost 40 per cent of the all the people worldwide who have been displaced within their own country as a result of conflict or violence live in Africa. The continent is home to 9.8 million people displaced by conflict – almost four times the number of refugees in the region. When those forced from their homes by other events, such as natural disasters are included, this figure is even higher.

The Kampala Convention is an innovative and comprehensive framework that seeks to address the needs of internally displaced people and the communities that take them in, and to help them find solutions to reestablish their lives. Among measures national authorities must take under the Kampala Convention are:
• gathering data on and identify IDPs to understand where they are and what they need.
• providing personal ID documents.
• tracing family members and help to reunite them
• consult with IDPs in decisions related to their needs

“The reality is that right now, people are forced to flee their homes for a whole host of causes, from natural disasters such as floods and droughts, forced evictions because of development projects such as dam building or logging projects, as well as war, conflict and violence,’’ said Kim Mancini, Senior Training and Legal Officer at the Internal DisplacementMonitoring Centre (IDMC). ‘’The Kampala Convention is comprehensive in that it addresses the multiple causes of displacement, so this signals an important step towards addressing the plight of millions of Africans who are uprooted from their homes.’’

"While recognising the responsibility on states and enabling IDPs to claim their rights is a huge achievement, and one which we hope will encourage other world leaders to follow suit, this is a beginning, not an end,” says Sebastían Albuja, Head of the Africa Department at the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre(IDMC). “The convention will not in itself create significant concrete change for internally displaced people until measures are taken by the 15 countries currently legally bound by the convention to ensure that it is reflected in their national legislation and made into a concrete reality.’’

 The Convention was actually adopted by the African Union (AU) on 23 October 2009. But it only came into force today, 30 days after Swaziland became the 15th country to ratify it, pushing the Convention over the threshold necessary for it to become legally binding.

                   

 The countries which have ratified the Kampala Convention are:

 Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Gambia, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and most recently, Swaziland. 

While 15 countries are now legally bound by the convention, 37 of the 53 countries in the AU have signed it, which means that they are committed to its content, but they are not legally bound by it. "The countries who have not yet adopted the convention must do so, as a legal framework is the very basis of ensuring the rights and well-being of people forced to flee inside their home country’’ says Albuja.

The Sun's page 3: 'boobs are not news' say protesters' video

                   

                   

          

Non-British readers might not know this, but our best-selling newspaper, the Sun (circ. 2.7 million), features daily a topless young woman on page 3.  When I present the Sun newspaper as part of an overview of the British media in my journalism class, my international students are rather incredulous and many are deeply offended. Here, people are used to it and no one raises an eyebrow at the men who slowly study their page 3. on the tube.  Young women apparently volunteer to figure there and boyfriends send pictures of their sweethearts to the Sun as a tribute to their beauty.  But many women resent this blatant sexism in our media and have campaigned against page 3. for decades. 

Last week, on the 42nd anniversary of the first topless woman appearing on page 3 of the Sun, the human rights group Object led a protest against the tabloid's sexism and objectification of women. Demonstrators prepared giant birthday cards – one with images of  topless women from the tabloids and one with fully-clothed professional men from the same papers – and delivered them in front of the office of the Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan, at News International's headquarters in London. 

Mohan defended page 3. as an "innocuous British institution" while giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry in February.  And previous Sun’s editors, including Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), have always maintained that page 3. is part of the DNA of the paper and that people who object could simply not buy the paper. But that’s not the point: even if we don’t read the Sun, the images are there. What is the impact of continuously presenting women as sex objects and men as doers?

By the way, when protestors put a photograph of the birthday cards on Facebook, it was swiftly removed without warning, because the explicit images apparently violate Facebook's terms. Yet these images came from our national newspapers, fully available to all, sold in supermarkets and newsagents.

And it’s not like pages. 3 are a blip in media portraying women as capable and respectable.   It would help if there were at least more positive images of women and more women's voices to balance this out. But as numerous projects have shown, this is far from the case.  A report by Women in Journalism last month showed that women account for just 16% of those mentioned or quoted in lead stories. And when they were mentioned, they were often presented as victims. (See my previous blog post about this.)

Women have campaigned against page. 3 all along without much success, but let’s hope the Leveson inquiry will help bring a new focus on sexism in the media.

Anish Kapoor does a Gangnam Style in support of Ai Weiwei

 

Turner Prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor has made a rousing (and funny!) video in support of prominent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. 

Amnesty International activists and various artists gathered at Anish Kapoor’s London studio this week to shoot a parody of South Korean rapper Psy’s mega hit Gangnam Style film in support of Ai.  Ai’s had done his own version last month, featuring the original video interspersed with clips of him and friends doing the popular dance, wearing handcuffs to represent the lack of freedom of speech in China. The film was immediately removed from the web by the Chinese authorities.

Kapoor’s parody version, called "Gangnam for Freedom", was choreographed by Akram Khan, who helped craft the Olympic opening ceremony for London 2012.  Leading figures from the arts, including artists Mark Wallinger, Bob and Roberta Smith and Tom Phillips, dancers Tamara Rojo and Deborah Bull, Southbank Centre Director Jude Kelly, made cameo appearances.  

The video also includes contributions sent from MoMA, Guggenheim, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Helen Bamber; Hanif Kurieshi, and many others.  

Kapoor, who sported a brigh pink T-shirt in the video, said: “Our film aims to make a serious point about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It is our hope that this gesture of support for Ai Weiwei and all prisoners of conscience will be wide-ranging and will help to emphasize how important these freedoms are to us all.” 

The film has won support from various human rights organizations, among them, Amnesty, Liberty, Index on Censorship and The Helen Bamber Foundation.  

Museums and organizations around the world will be screening the film, including the ICA who will be showing the film prior to each feature shown in their cinema from Friday, for two weeks.

Judgement day – Iran Tribunal exposes mass massacres of the 1980s

 

Family members of political prisoners executed during mass massacres of the 1980s and the summer of 1988, gather at Tehran’s Khavaran cemetery to commemorate their loved ones/ Iran Tribunal 
 

Following a harrowing three-day hearing at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Iran Tribunal, a tribunal of conscience, delivered its interim judgement on October 27^th.  According to the tribunal, the Islamic Republic of Iran committed crimes against humanity and gross violations of human rights against its citizens committed during “the bloody decade” of 1980s.

This is a monumental achievement for the survivors and families of the victims of the mass massacres of political prisoners in the 1980s. The Tribunal has allowed their voices to be officially recorded and heard in court for the first time in 25 years. Unlike atrocities in Rwanda, Srebrenica and General Pinochet's Chile, they never had any opportunity for justice and legal redress.

"The consequences of this judgment are profound,” says Prof John Cooper QC, the lead prosecutor at the tribunal. “It finally provides an independent and authoritative finding that the Islamic Republic of Iran [was] responsible for murdering and torturing [its] citizens on a staggering scale. This judgment, along with the carefully documented evidence from over 100 victims can now be presented to the international community as part of the victim's fight for justice.”

When the judgment was announced, the courtroom fell quiet.  The silence was thick with emotions held back for 25 years. Then the people in the assembly slowly stood up and held pictures of their loved ones killed by the Iranian regime in the purges of the 1980s.  All were weeping.

For me, it was an emotional moment as well as I have come to know many survivors and bereaved over the many years I’ve been trying to report the story. I’ve followed the making of the Iran Tribunal - a grassroots movement created by survivors and families of victims because no official bodies would investigate their complaints.  It is a testament to their determination and resilience that they’ve managed to put the truth out there after all these years. The process also exposes shortcomings of the UN and other international bodies, which were supposed to investigate these atrocities. For information about the Truth Commission, the first stage of the Iran Tribunal, click here.

Read my blog in the Economist about the Iran Tribunal’s judgement here.http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/10/iran-1988

It’s a Men’s World - Men still dominate British newspapers

Plus ça change…

I was shocked by the recent research carried on by Women in Journalism, a networking and campaigning organization I am a member of, showing that men still dominate not only the stories on national newspaper’s front pages, but the bylines as well.  They studied all the major UK national daily newspaper's front pages from 16 April to 13 May this year.

When you look around newspaper offices and TV stations today, there seem to be as many women as men, but when it comes to writing the news or appearing in it, women still can't quite make it up to a third of all contributions.

What appears on front pages is important because, despite declining readership and revenues, they still help dictate the day's agenda for both online and broadcast news.

The study found that 78 per cent of all front page bylines were male, versus 22 per cent female, with wide variance between titles. The Daily Express was the title with the most female bylines with a 50/50 split. The Independent had the least – a pathetic 9 per cent!

The content of the lead stories was also dominated by men, according to the WIJ research.  Eighty-four per cent of those quoted or mentioned by name in front-page stories were men. However, 79 per cent of those who might qualify as "victims" in front-page stories were women.  I guess the same might be said about the coverage of Africa news. 

But that’s not all. Across newsrooms, three quarters of news journalists are men while women make up just a third of journalists covering business and politics, according the WIJ research.  When I started as a journalist more than 20 years ago, the figures were similar. It is so depressing to see that nothing at all has changed after all these years. And it is not just the coverage of politics, business and sports that men dominate, but they also make 70 per cent of arts reporters and up 49 per cent of lifestyle reporters.  

Women were also found to be less likely to be in senior newspaper positions, with eight out of the top ten newspapers having almost twice as many male editors as women editors.

Sue Matthias, who is a Women in Journalism's committee member and edits the Financial Times Weekend Magazine, said: "Women's rights in the workplace may have improved, but this research shows that there is still a long way to go in British newspapers.

"The gender imbalance we have uncovered is shocking and it seems old attitudes are still alive and well in many places."

What surprises me is that during the eight years I have been teaching journalism, the majority of my students have been women. Yet, the jobs still seem to go to men. Why is this so?