Hey guys! Just wanted to share a pervasive issue that
has been very heavy on my heart lately: food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa. My
family hails from Ghana, a nation that has made significant strides in alleviating
poverty, which is directly linked to food insecurity. Ghana was the first
country in the region to meet the first Millennium Development Goal to
“eradicate extreme hunger and poverty by 2015”1 having drastically
reduced its Global Hunger Index (GHI) from 21.4% in 1990 to 8.9% in 2012.2
Malawi, whose inhabitants are simultaneously battling the ninth highest
HIV/AIDS rate of 11%, has followed Ghana’s suit and reduced its GHI by 13.2%
from 1990 levels. But there is still much to be done.
Poverty and
infant mortality rates in the northern part of Ghana far exceed those of the
south, while in Malawi, high susceptibility to extreme floods and drought
annually has rendered the country’s communities at severe risk of food shortage
and malnourishment. Worldwide, land used for agriculture has grown by more than
10 million hectares per year since the 1960’s, and inhabitants of the
sub-Saharan region rely heavily on agriculture for food and a means of
livelihood. Our changing climate, however, is affecting atmospheric weather
patterns and resulting in extreme events that endanger agricultural production.
805 million people around the world are chronically hungry, of which 160
million children have stunted growth. Food insecurity not only affects an
individual’s mental, physical and emotional capacity (e.g. a child’s cognitive ability)
but also prevents civilians from contributing to their national economies.
More than
half of those civilians are women, many of whom were and still are denied the
rights to go to school, work, and plan their pregnancies around their ability
to effectively raise their children. Studies have been done on understanding
the roles of men and women in societies: developing nations tend to anchor the
woman to the home to tend to the children and domestic duties while the men go
out to work and seek knowledge. As a result, women have less access to
resources and are more prone to diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. These
women don’t have the tools they need to rise up out of poverty and constant
childbearing (a sub-Saharan African woman has 5.4 children on average) in order
to provide for their families and have representation during parliamentary discussions.
There are currently 222 million women with “unmet need”, which is the desire to
plan the timing and spacing of pregnancy but cannot – as a result there is no
control over family size and child mortality rates increase.
If more
women were granted family planning resources such as birth control, pressures
to have children would decrease and population growth would be less of an
environmental burden. If more women were
granted access to education, they could help run community water and sanitation
projects and treat disease, as well as increase crop yield by 20-30%. Gender
roles would shift and women would be able to make more well-informed decisions
for themselves and for their families, which would in turn help communities
work as a unit and prosper. $150 million people would be less hungry if women were
empowered and allowed the resources to thrive. Let’s reach out to these women by volunteering our efforts to
organizations such as Oxfam, USAID, Feed the Future and The Hunger Project, who
are doing everything they can to bring women the resources they need. Let’s
write letters to global leaders who are preparing for this year’s UN summit in
New York. Let’s raise awareness within our own communities. Empowering women is
empowering nations. And empowering nations is working towards a brighter, more
wholesome future for mitigating climate change and eradicating poverty. So let’s
empower! Together.
Endnotes
1
Millennium Development Goal 1. (2015,
January 1). Retrieved May 1, 2015, from
2 Country Global Hunger
Index Scores by Rank. (2015, January 1). Retrieved May 1,
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