The American Idol African plight

Can someone explain the typical African problem that exsists over there.
It seems much bigger than: disease is rampant, not enough clean water, food, and schools.
AI Solution: Get enough money to feed them, cure disease, and build schools.

But isn’t there a bigger problem looming that they’re not addressing that’s exsisted for as long as I can remember that money isn’t going to fix? Where are all the adult males and exactly why are there so many kids?
I’ve heard (rumors, gossip) that the men don’t live in these villages but just come by to have anonymous sex (rape?) these women, they continually get pregnant and have multiple children, and it’s all just tolerated/accepted because that’s just how the culture works over there.

Have I been duped? What’s the real story here?

I don’t think you’re off the mark at all.
I hope all the campaigns work. Maybe they will, someday…probably not in our lifetimes. But I can’t help feeling that we’re all like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill only to have it roll right back down again.
Aside from the poor treatment of women you mentioned, there is a tremendous amount of ignorance and superstition, most notably where HIV/AIDS is concerned. Put those together, and you get an environment where men do as they please, do whomever they please, never mind the consequences, and then take off and do it somewhere else, leaving women with tons of kids since birth control doesn’t seem to be available or approved of (if I’m wrong, somebody tell me). Too many people in one place = not enough resources for anyone. Add civil unrest, genocide, and drought (global warming?), and you have a picture of what we’re up against.
My theory is that until the causes of overpopulation, at least, are addressed, the misery will continue no matter how much international aid pours in.

Standard disclaimers apply, and I hope to be proven wrong, and all that.

I just recalled something else, which my 80-year-old mom was sharp enough to point out while watching the first night of Idol Gives Back. She said, “No wonder they’ve got malaria. There’s GARBAGE all around them!”

  Are any of the aid organizations working on waste removal services?

I work in international development, but don’t have first-hand experience of Africa.

The problem of overpopulation is only addressed by reducing poverty and improving education. It can’t be tackled in isolation and all societies have demonstrated that the moment educational levels and/or the standard of living go up, the birth rate declines.

Most community development projects would address environmental health as part of their priorities. I didn’t see the report - which country was it from?

But yes, Africa’s problems are complex and it’s often hard to maintain hope.

Corruption is the number one problem in Africa. Even the cast off clothes we donate with the expectation it’ll be distributed for free there is actually sold in Africa as per author Paul Theroux. Read Dark Star Safari.

Overpopulation and lack of birth control is a problem but be careful about referring to “the culture.” Africa is a big continent. There is nothing close to a homogenous culture. There are hundreds of different cultures. You can find huge disimilarities even between tribes who live a couple of miles away from each other. So what part of Africa are you talking about and what specific culture?

JillGat posted this a while back, and it has stuck with me as one of the most informative (and depressing) things I’ve ever read about the problems in Africa. It’s a long read but worth every word.

Originally posted by JillGat:
But back on topic, here is the closing speech by Ambassador Stephen Lewis at the AIDS conference in Toronto. I think it’s a pretty good summary.

Ambassador Stephen Lewis
UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa
Closing Plenary of the International AIDS Conference
18 August 2006
Toronto, Canada

This is the last speech I shall make at any of these international conferences in my role as United Nations Envoy. I’m glad, for obvious Canadian reasons that it comes in Toronto. But I’m equally pleased because this has been a good conference, covering an extraordinary range of ground, and I therefore feel confident in asking you to join with me in giving force to the oft-repeated mantra: “Time To Deliver.”

Of what would that meaning consist? Allow me to set out a number of items.

Number 1: Abstinence-only programmes don’t work. Ideological rigidity almost never works when applied to the human condition. Moreover, it’s an antiquated throwback to the conditionality of yesteryear to tell any government how to allocate its money for prevention. That approach has a
name: it’s called neo-colonialism.

Number 2: Harm reduction programmes do work. Needle exchange and methadone treatment save lives. More, it would be positively perverse to close the ‘Insite’ safe injection facility in Vancouver when it has been positively evaluated in a number of studies; in fact there should be several more such facilities in Canada and around the world. Russia, Central Asia, parts of India are all struggling with transmission through injecting drug use. To shut ‘Insite’ down is to invite HIV infection and death. One has to wonder about the minds of those who would so readily punish injecting drug users rather than understanding the problem for what it is: a matter of public health.

Number 3: Circumcision, as a preventive intervention, should not be subject to bureaucratic contemplation forever. We have enough information now to know that it is an intervention worth pursuing. What remains is a single-minded effort to get the word out, respect cultural sensitivities, and then for those who want to proceed, make certain that we have well-trained personnel to do the operating.

The men are lining up for the procedure in Swaziland. And when I was in the Zambian copper belt, just a couple of weeks ago, at an animated meeting with the District Commissioner, he indicated that he was a part of an ethnic group which was circumcised. I then revealed that I was circumcised, and there followed a joyous frenzy of male bonding amongst all the circumciseees. The fact of the matter is that even in the remotest parts of Africa there is now an awareness of the issue; it’s important to act on it.

Number 4: The growing excitement around a microbicide is entirely warranted. This is a preventive technology whose time has come. To be sure, there can be no flagging in the dogged quest for a vaccine, but it would appear that where preventive technologies are concerned, the microbicide is first in line. Now is the time to make certain, in advance, that when the discovery is made, it is instantly accessible and acceptable to the women of the world, wherever they may live.

Number 5: In the hierarchy of preventive measures, the Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission is very near the top. It is a bitter indictment that so few HIV-positive pregnant women have access to PMTCT. But that’s just the half of it. It is inexcusable that in Africa and other parts of the developing world we continue to use single-dose Nevirapine, rather than full triple therapy during pregnancy, as we do in western countries like Canada. This means that hundreds of thousands of babies continue to be born HIV-positive, rather than reducing the transmission rate virtually to zero. I ask: what kind of a world do we live in where the life of an African child or an Asian child is worth so much less than the life of a Canadian child?

Number 6: It is now accepted as unassailable truth that people in treatment need nutritious food supplements to maintain and tolerate their treatment. And yet, there is a growing clamour from People Living with AIDS that decent nutrition simply isn’t available, leaving them in a desperate predicament. The World Food Programme released a study at this conference calculating the cost of food supplementation at 66 cents a day for an entire family; what madness is it that denies the World Food Programme the necessary money?

Number 7: One of the issues that received an insufficient airing at this conference is sexual violence against women. Just a few months ago, I was visiting the local hospital in Thika, Kenya, which houses the one rape counseling centre in that part of the country. The rise in sexual violence has meant that there are over thirty reported cases every month, with multiples of that number never of course reported.

In April of this year there were forty-six reported cases. Twenty-two were under the age of eighteen; half of those were under the age of twelve.
Horrific you say? Without question. But how would you characterize an emerging pattern of the sexual assault of women between the ages of sixty-five and eighty, the rapists confident that they can rape with impunity without fear of transmission?

Sexual violence is everywhere reported, from marital rape to rape as a war crime. The phenomenon is by no means singularly African; we live in a world community where the depravity of sexual violence has run amok. In Africa, however, the violence and the virus go together. And yet, we lack the laws, the jurisprudence, the enforcement that would give to women even a modicum of protection. If ever there was a cause to mobilize AIDS activists around the world, this is it.

Number 8: We urgently need a resolution of the vexing debate over testing and counseling. We made progress at this conference, but by no means definitive progress. It seems to me that the growing embrace of routine testing and counseling, with an opt-out provision to protect human rights, is the appropriate emerging consensus. Everyone should keep an eye on Lesotho where the Know Your Status campaign will, I believe, become the bench-mark, pro or con, for the continent and beyond.

Number 9: There is an ongoing epidemic of child sexual abuse. The dynamic of abuse of children is often different from that of the sexual abuse of women:
what is common to both is the terrifying danger of transmission. Children require different interventions. Alas, we are nowhere near the articulation of a response. In this instance, as in every such instance, children are relegated to the scrapheap of society’s priorities, and have been so relegated throughout the twenty-five years of this pandemic.
Number 10: It is impossible to talk about children without talking about orphans. And it is impossible to understand how, in the year 2006, we still continue to fail to implement policies to address the torrent, the deluge of orphan children. Countries have programmes of action; they languish unfunded. One of the most chilling pieces of statistical data is the finding that only three to five per cent of orphans receive any intervention of any kind from the state.

The monumental numbers of orphans, so many of them now adults because the pandemic has gone on for so long, pose a bracing, almost insuperable challenge for the countries which they inhabit. I appeal to everyone to recognize that we’re walking on the knife’s edge of an unsolvable human catastrophe. Inevitably we’re preoccupied with the here and now, but the cumulative impact of these orphan kids, their levels of trauma, their overwhelming personal needs, their intense collective vulnerability strikes at the heart of the human dynamic, creating a sociological rearrangement of human relationships. And we’re doing so little about it; our response is microscopic. We are inviting the whirlwind, and we will not be able to cope.

Number 11: It is impossible to talk about orphans without talking about grandmothers. Who would ever have imagined it would come to this? In Africa, the grandmothers are the unsung heroes of the continent: these extraordinary, resilient, courageous women, fighting through the inconsolable grief of the loss of their own adult children, becoming parents again in their fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties. I attended a grandmother’s gathering last weekend on the eve of the conference: the grandmothers were magnificent, but they’re all struggling with the same anguished nightmare: what happens to my grandchildren when I die?

We need major social welfare programmes that will recognize these essential caregivers’ contributions to society as legitimate and difficult labour, and offer the guarantee of sustainable incomes to the grandmothers of Africa: from food to school fees to income generation, the answers must be found. It’s another test for the delegates to this conference.

Number 12: In the midst of everything else, we must continue to roll out treatment. I am worried by the new figures. There were one million, three hundred thousand people in treatment at the end of 2005. Six months later, there are one million, six hundred and fifty thousand in treatment. The additional three hundred and fifty thousand seems a very modest increment. Treatment is keeping people alive; treatment is bringing hope; treatment is stimulating prevention; treatment is meshing more and more frequently with community-based care; we cannot let the process slow.

Number 13: And while I’m on the issue of treatment, I am bound to raise South Africa. South Africa is the unkindest cut of all. It is the only country in Africa, amongst all the countries I have traversed in the last five years, whose government is still obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out treatment. It is the only country in Africa whose government continues to propound theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state. Between six and eight hundred people a day die of AIDS in South Africa. The government has a lot to atone for. I’m of the opinion that they can never achieve redemption.

There are those who will say I have no right, as a United Nations official, to say such things of a member state. I was appointed as Envoy on AIDS in Africa. I see my job as advocating for those who are living with the virus, those who are dying of the virus . all of those, in and out of civil society, who are fighting the good fight to achieve social justice. It is not my job to be silenced by a government when I know that what it is doing is wrong, immoral, indefensible.

Number 14: Unbeknownst to many, we are on the cusp of a huge financial crisis in response to the pandemic. I think we have been lulled into a damaging false security by the fact that we jumped from roughly $300 million a year from all sources in the late 1990’s, to $8.3 billion in 2005. And indeed it sounds impressive. But we need $15 billion this year, and $18 billion next year, and $22 billion in 2008. Any straight line projection will take us to $30 billion in 2010 . the moment of universal access to treatment, prevention and care.

We’re billions and billions short of those targets. If these circumstances continue, universal access is doomed. All governments, as they continue to expand their treatment and prevention initiatives, are spooked by worries of financial sustainability. They’re right to be spooked.

The financial promises made at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles one year ago, are already unraveling. We will never accumulate the extra $25 billion for Africa by 2010 as was committed.

PEPFAR has not yet announced its extension beyond 2008; when it does (as it surely will), the annual contribution, given the other demands on the US Treasury, will probably remain at $3 billion a year. That large amount was a very significant percentage of the total expenditure on AIDS back in 2003/2004. But as a percentage of what is needed for global AIDS programmes in 2008 — $22 billion — $3 billion seems pretty paltry from the world’s superpower.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is still half a billion short this year and more than a billion short next year. At the moment, there is no obvious way to close the shortfall. It is almost inconceivable that the extravagant promises of Gleneagles are revealed as so fatuous that the Global Fund is now compromised. No one is asking for any more than that which was promised. But the Pavlovian betrayal of the South has already begun.

Everything in the battle against AIDS is put at risk by the behaviour of the G8. Yesterday, Dr. Julio Montaner characterized that behaviour as genocide. I remember back in 2001, in an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, I used the phrase mass murder. It’s hard, in the face of the annihilating human toll, not to be driven to linguistic extremes. This issue of resources makes or breaks the response to the pandemic. It is imperative that the delegates here assembled never let the G8 countries off the hook.

Number 15: I want to say a strong word about human capacity.

What has clearly emerged as the most difficult of issues, almost everywhere, certainly in Africa, is the loss of human capacity. In country after country, the response to the pandemic is sabotaged by the paucity of doctors, nurses, clinicians and community health workers . the shortages are overwhelming. Everyone is struggling. Most of the shortage stems from death and illness; some stems from brain-drain and poaching. But whatever the source, we have a problem of staggering dimensions.

The capacity crisis illumines, more than anything else, what is needed. There are solutions: investment in the public sector and in extensive ongoing training can begin to fill the gap. But again it needs the donor community to uphold its responsibilities. And most important, the key to recovery lies at country level. The key to subduing the entire pandemic lies at country level.

What has to happen, I think, is that we place a temporary moratorium on the endless, self-indulgent proliferation of meetings, seminars, roundtables, discussion groups, task forces ad nauseam, plus the production of reports, documents, monographs, statistical data ad repetition, and concentrate every energy at country level.

At the opening of this conference, Peter Piot talked of the next twenty-five years. He’s right to do so. He indicated it would be a long and difficult haul; he’s right again. But if the next twenty-five years are to take advantage of the guarded optimism of this conference; if the next twenty-five years are to overcome the lethargy and inertia of the last twenty-five years; if the next twenty-five years are to link, inseparably, poverty and disease and the Millennium Development Goals, then it has to happen, in-country, on the ground, organized and orchestrated by the countries themselves.

And the agencies on the ground, whether multilateral, bilateral or civil society, must be held accountable. That’s what’s been missing. That’s the job of the delegates to this conference: holding people and organizations accountable. And that includes everything from the pharmaceutical companies that have been so intractable about prices of second-line drugs to bilateral trade agreements designed to deny access to generic drugs.

Number 16: This 16th International AIDS Conference, beyond any preceding conference, has given voice to youth. But it’s still a limited and marginalized voice, reflecting the hostile ambiguity of the adult world. The figures are brutal and stark: fully fifty per cent of new infections between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. And yet who can deny the appalling absence of programmes for, and engagement of, young people in the fight against the pandemic. The situation cries out for redress . and it must be redressed well beyond smarmy tokenism.

Finally, in my view, as delegates doubtless know, the most vexing and intolerable dimension of the pandemic is what is happening to women. It’s the one area of HIV/AIDS which leaves me feeling most helpless and most enraged. Gender inequality is driving the pandemic, and we will never subdue the gruesome force of AIDS until the rights of women become paramount in the struggle.

Last Monday morning, at the women’s march, the signs read “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”. That was the slogan that captured the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights in 1993. It was the slogan repeated at the Cairo Conference on Population in 1994, and yet again at Beijing in 1995. It’s never been made real, and so long as men control the levers and bastions of power, it never will be real.

Whether it’s the apparatus of the United Nations, including the agencies, or the endless numbers of High-Level panels, or auspicious studies of human development like the Blair Commission on Africa, the demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident. And those examples are but proxies for the wider world, particularly the developing world, where freedom from sexual violence, the right to sexual autonomy, to sexual and reproductive health, social and economic independence, and even the whiff of gender equality are barely approximated.

It’s a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.

My closest colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that one of the ways to diminish the impact of the AIDS virus is by creating a powerful international agency for women, funded and staffed to the teeth. There must be voice and advocacy and operational capacity on the ground for fifty-two per cent of the world’s population. There is a UN reform panel at the moment, contemplating the creation of a new entity, provided they have the courage to confront the warped and abysmal gender architecture of the United Nations. If they find the courage, I deeply believe that we could begin to still the carnage.

And what works for AIDS can work everywhere.

I challenge you, my fellow delegates, to enter the fray against gender inequality. There is no more honourable and productive calling. There is nothing of greater import in this world. All roads lead from women to social change, and that includes subduing the pandemic.

For my own part, when I leave my post of Envoy at the end of the year, I have asked that my successor be an African, but most important, an African woman.

Look at oil rich Nigeria where people don’t have electricty they’ve been going backwards since 1960 except for eitherthe military or civil leaders raking in the cash. The entire world knows the recent election was a sham.

"Nigeria’s elections-for governors on 14th April, and for the country’s president on the 21st-were heralded by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is stepping down after two terms, as the first in the country’s history to have successfully transferred power from one civilian head of state to another. But voting was so undermined by open displays of rigging, intimidation and violence by the ruling People’s Democratic party (PDP) and its armed thugs that the elections’ real significance may be to illustrate just how far Nigeria is from accountable, democratic government.

Official results show a stunning success for the PDP. The party’s presidential candidate, Umaru Yar’Adua, received 70 per cent of the vote, according to the electoral commission, and its gubernatorial candidates won at least 29 of Nigeria’s 36 states. But condemnation of the polls has been unanimous. EU observers said they fell “far short of basic international and regional standards,” and the US pronounced itself “deeply troubled.” More than 300 Nigerians lost their lives in election-related violence."

I couldn’t tell, and I don’t recall if anyone on the A.I.G.B. broadcast mentioned a specific country.

Wherever the American Idol crew was visiting.

In Southern Africa even across the tribal divides the men are well aware that condoms reduce the chances of S.T.D. transmission and prevent pregnancy but the use of prophalactics is considered “unmanly” so they dont bother using them even if they are aware that they are H.I.V. positive.

Another problem with the “macho” culture in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa is that the women do all ,and I do mean all the work .
Everything from arable farming ,tending to the livestock,water and firewood collection ,cooking and looking after the children.
The men will occasionally take the livestock out to pasture but mostly spend the their days drinking beer with the other men .
This culture is by no means universal but is very widespread.

We can’t ignore the “rich” history of colonialism, which has effectively drained many of Africa’s resources and sent them to the rich countries, meaning that Africa simply doesn’t have the tools it needs to solve its problems.

Third world nations are still suffering crippling debt from the 1970s, and because they have so little income there is no hope of them even paying the interest let alone paying down the principal. Austerity programs imposed by the IMF and other similar international financial institutions have hugely reduced the ability of many nations to produce any income (for instance, resources are usually not owned by the state but by multinational corporations) for themselves. These same austerity programs have also often resulted in the privatization of social services (health care, education, utilities etc), which often results in large numbers of people going without these services.

As a result, national economies are so busy struggling to keep up with debt payments there is no chance of building the capacity (in the form of infrastructure, education, etc) necessary for them to “pull themselves out of poverty.”

Colonialism combined with these interventions by international institutions result in African political economies that bear little or no resemblance to the democracies that we enjoy. Corruption and civil war are a natural result of such utterly dysfunctional institutions.

Agricultural subsidies in some developed nations result in the “dumping” of cheap-or-free products into African markets; as a result African farmers cannot sell what they produce (it is hard to compete with cheap-or-free when your customers are living on less than $2 a day).

And this was BEFORE the HIV crisis.

Thomas Homer-Dixon talks about an “ingenuity gap” where the problems we are facing are increasingly difficult to solve, and we are becoming increasingly less able to solve them. The way this manifests in Africa is that on the one hand, we have these massive problems, and on the other, we have a continent full of people of whom too many are largely uneducated and without the tools to “help themselves,” and/or malnourished and suffering from terrible diseases (many of which are quite preventable). I don’t know about you but I don’t work too well when my stomach is growling - and I have a strong and healthy community, I’m not constantly worrying about my family dying of AIDS or in a civil war or getting massacred by a corrupt government, I basically have all the advantages and I still get to stay home from work when I have the flu.

I say put the resources back in the hands of Africans and DROP THE DEBT IMMEDIATELY. For a start.

Oh yah, also:

Depending where you are talking about, many join gangs or armies. Many leave to seek their fortune however they can (and too often end up on the bottom of the sea, or in detention centres).

Because, while in a city, another kid is another mouth to feed, on a farm it’s another pair of hands. Also birth control is not always available, and if it is women often aren’t in a position to make sure it gets used.

Funny that, in ‘Colonial’ days things were quite well administered, the average African living in a ‘Colony’ was quite well off - for example law and order is the most basic prerequisite for any form of economic activity.

I can’t see how losing gold and diamonds particularly hurt the average African and I’m not sure that they would know what to do with wolfram.

In terms of agriculture, Zimbabwe used to be able to feed itself and export enough to make the place pretty prosperous. Of course the evil ‘colonists’ stripped off the top soil and shipped it to Europe.

The major problem with Africa is that it has porous borders, trouble in one place slips over into the next. Couple that with guns, pangas (machetes) and a pretty warm climate and you have a recipe for disaster.

As for the loans, nobody in their right mind would ever lend anything to an African government - (except maybe SA and formerly Zimbabwe) those loans are from things like the IMF, World Bank etc - sometimes from Governments.

Personally I think that most of Africa would benefit from ‘Colonial’ administration.

Oh, God, not this again!

No, Africa doesn’t need ‘Colonial’ administration.

But you, FRDE, need to visit The Pit

Might want to read up on King Leopold II and the Belgian Congo, and see just how well colonialism worked out.

@MrDibble I said ‘most of Africa’ - I certainly did not mean South Africa, although as we’ve discussed before SA does have porous borders, albeit less than most. I think it is up to 3 million Zimbaweans - according to the BBC.

@Guinastasia I certainly exclude the Belgian Congo, actually the Belgians were adept at making a mess - for example they were responsible for the Hutu/Tutsi split in Rwanda. However Angola, Mozambique, Chad, Ghana, Rhodesia, Uganda etc etc etc were all a lot nicer places when under European administration.

Is this the same work which also discussed how medicine which was shipped all the way to Africa was taken out of the refridgerator so someone could keep beer cold?

Funny how everyone know the solution to all of Africa’s problems. I’ve lived here a year and don’t even have a clear picture of what kind of problems there are in my little town in Cameroon, much less how to fix the whole damn contient.

Around here, people have a lot of kids because they are mostly substinance farmers, and rely on their labor to work their farms. They also have a lot of children because otherwise their life is pretty boring and repetitive. Generally you don’t have too much in the way of career, entertainment, or material pocessions. Family is the whole reason for living. It works exactly the same way as it did with our ancestors, who also had all kinds of children even though they did not have much in the way of material wealth and were often under the rule of wealthy tyrants. It will end exactly like it did with our ancestors, with urbanizations and industrialization that take away the material incentive to have lots of kids and provides other ways to pass the time.

As for the adult males, they are here. There are tons of them. I don’t know where you got the impression that there are not. There isn’t yet too much in the way of jobs in my area, but for the most part, just like people in America, they do the best they can to support their family. Yes, sometimes the head of household lives in the larger city where there is work and supports his family (which also includes older parents, cousins and other kin in school, any local orphans they can afford to support, etc.) The idea that men in Africa on the whole simply hang around in cities and make occassional rape sprees into the villages is absurd and offensive. They are for the most part humans who care about their families just like us.

Of course there are plenty of problems. But the cause and solution for them are not simply one liners. Personally, I think working towards more education, income, and power for women is the number one most important thing we can do to stop AIDS. The second most important thing is to fight against the chronic malaria, dysentary, cholera, etc. that will kill you much quicker than AIDS will. It’s hard to take something that takes years to kill you seriously when there are so many things that can kill you in a week.