Abundance: The “Giving and Training” Event
One the 24th May 2017 Abundance held a 'Giving and Training' event at Mbando Village, Machinga, Malawi. This was an event to showcase the skills acquired through the recent training programmes ran by Abundance. Attending and participating in the event alongside Abundance included the Wonderful Youth Group, Mothers’ Support Group, Home-based care, and Gogo Group, and the following guests: Representing the ward councilor: Mr Erik Kazithe, Senior Group Village Head Mbando and other Development Committee members and village heads.
The Abundance team received a very warm welcome as songs were sung as women danced around as the materials were being offloaded from the vehicle. An opening prayer was made, followed by a poem by a member of Wonderful Youth Group. The poem highlighted some problems the youth are facing. The poem also hinted at massive deforestation that is happening in the nearby Chikala Mountain.
Scoping Trial, Malawi
Scoping Trials
Sustainable Futures in Africa is an interdisciplinary collective aiming to build understanding, research, and practice in socio-ecological sustainability in Africa. In order for relationships to be built, methodologies to be explored, and to achieve the shared understanding that is aspired for, the SFA network is running trial research projects. These are being run with an emphasis on the trial and error aspect, for researchers to explore the unfamiliar, social scientists exploring hard science and vice versa. Furthermore colleagues in Glasgow will take every opportunity to work with the projects in Nigeria, Malawi, Uganda and Botswana as they develop.
Malawi Research Project: Creative Geovisualisation
This research trial took place from 24th - 26th May 2017 through a collaborative partnership including:
- Philip Nicholson, University of Glasgow
- Professor Deborah Dixon, University of Glasgow
- Dr. Deepa Pullanikkatil, Abundance
- Dr. Boyson H Z Moyo, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources
- Dr. Hazel Long, University of Glasgow
- Dr. Brian Barrett, University of Glasgow
Dr. Deepa Pullanikkatil departed from South Africa and Dr. Boyson H Z Moyo from Malawi for Glasgow on the 22nd May, arriving 23rd May. The research team was based in the University of Glasgow for the 24th, 25th and 26th May.
At the end of May, Philip Nicholson, Deborah Dixon, Brian Barrett, and Hazel Long were joined at the University of Glasgow by Glasgow PhD alumni Boyson Moyo from Malawi, and Deepa Pullanikkatil from South Africa. From the 24th to the 26th of May they spent time collaborating, sharing research, and discussing methodologies, working on a creative geovisualisation project on the theme of environmental sustainability in Malawi.
For the project they focused on two sites in Malawi, the Tikondwe Freedom Gardens, an organic farm, and the Likengala River. In preparation for the meeting, participants collected and shared various kinds of data sets for those sites relevant to their own expertise. As a result, the first day involved discussions around the nature of the data, i.e. how it was acquired, what methods were used to capture it, why was it captured, who owns it, and so on. The following two days were focused on a collaborative effort to bring these different types of data together into a narrative structure using the storymap format as model.
https://twitter.com/SF_Africa/status/868489776621645826
https://twitter.com/SF_Africa/status/868200955719946240
https://twitter.com/SF_Africa/status/868044176570580992
In Partnership with
Legal Wallet
Sustainable Futures in Africa is delighted to have our partner Stewart Paul as part of the team. Stewart Paul is the Managing Director of Legal Wallet:
www.legalwallet.org
About Legal Wallet
Legal Wallet founded by Alfred Andrew Kankuzi, is a non governmental organisation that connects ICT, Law, Education and Governance. Established in 2015 the organisation uses technology to combat some of the governance pressing challenges and legal Issues that affect Local Malawians. It is motivated and driven by a passion for enhancement and entrenchment of rule of law, citizen participation in the democratic process, respect for human rights and access to justice. It recognises that the ignorance of legal information has led to untold human rights abuses and victimization, observing that the well-being of a society and its subsequent socioeconomic progress cannot be separated from access to legal knowledge, further observing that there are is a knowledge gap between the people of Malawi and the laws that govern them and that access to legal information is essential to the social economic development of any nation.
Vision
Legal Wallet envisions an empowered society full of citizens with necessary tools to fully participate in all democratic processes.
Objectives Of The Organisation
The objects of the Registered Trustees of Legal Wallet shall be to fulfill the following outlined objects:
a) To bring the laws of Malawi closer to the general populace by conducting sensitization campaigns on electronic and print media, tour of rural and peri- urban areas, primary and secondary schools and drop in Legal Wallet Centers that will be established throughout Malawi.
b) To provide the legal aid services to indigent individuals and vulnerable groups such as women, children and prisoners among others and such services shall include but not limited to advisory and litigation services.
c) To protect citizens from unscrupulous individuals purporting act as legal aid service providers.
d) To partner with other local as well as international legal aid service providers in providing legal aid services to indigent and vulnerable individuals.
e) To partner with government and other non- governmental organizations in inculcating democratic governance, rule of law, an enhanced knowledge of the law and participation in development related activities.
f) To provide and promote a synergy between technology and governance issues in Malawi at the grassroots through development of software and mobile applications in the governance sector.
g) To conduct research and conferences on such topics as access to justice, impact of certain laws on different sectors of our society, human rights, rule of law, governance, development and other related issues.
Read more about Legal Wallet here: http://startupcompete.co/startup-idea/social-entrepreneurship-it/legal-wallet/56791
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Telling Stories about Community Development; Why “Abundance” takes an integrated development approach
Written by Deepa Pullanikkatil
Post Doctoral Fellow, Rhodes University
Founder, Abundance
“A world of abundance, where there is plenty for humans and where nature is thriving”, is the vision of our non-profit organization in Malawi called “Abundance”. We have often been critiqued to be an organization that is focusing on too many things. “So, what is your area of focus?”, “Aren’t you doing too many different things, could you not narrow your projects down to one or two?” These are some of the questions people often ask us. To answer them, I tell stories; real life stories about people I have met while working in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in our world. These are the people who inspired Abundance, to take an integrated approach to development.
Supporting community participation is key
We were working on a climate change adaptation project in Lake Chilwa Basin in southern Malawi. It is a lake basin with 1.5 million people, predominantly subsistence rural communities with natural resource dependent livelihoods. We were confident in our thinking that we were providing ideal interventions for climate change adaptation to communities in the Lake Chilwa Basin. Feeling quite satisfied in the knowledge that we knew exactly what the communities needed to adapt, we brought forth interventions such as solar fish dryers, fuel efficient stoves and efficient fish smoking kilns; we promoted conservation agriculture, we provided trainings on climate change and with the communities we planted, lots and lots of trees. But when we went to the villages, we realised that women’s participation was not as good as it should be and that men had other challenges they wanted to share with us. Men came to us with their two main concerns, cholera and bilharzia (a debilitating disease caused by parasitic flatworms called schistosomes affecting the urinary tract) and asked us if we could do something about that. Women said that poor access to family planning and reproductive health services were the challenges they faced. The reasons for their reduced participation was now clear. How could men attend meetings when disease burden was so high? How could women participate actively when they had so many children or so many sick people to care for?
Why interconnectedness matters
Faced with the dilemma of how to address the health and family planning needs of communities through a climate change adaptation project with a specific livelihoods and environment focus, we realised that the way forward was to use an integrated approach. We could no longer take a sectoral approach, because communities did not live their lives in compartments. They lived integrated lives with needs that were interconnected. If we wanted to help them adapt, then we had to understand and work with interconnectedness. These often cuts across sectors and does not fall under a narrow themes of livelihoods or environment. We had to open our eyes to these new perspectives.
In order to address the cholera and bilharzia challenges, we environmentalists were required to learn about disease and parasitology. We learnt that the challenge of bilharzia was partly created by well-intentioned irrigation coverage expansion. This was a method intended to help communities improve agriculture and adapt better. But in areas where bilharzia is endemic, increasing irrigation coverage allow snails which host the bilharzia causing parasite to spread to such waters, thus spreading bilharzia in to areas where previously it was not prevalent. In such a situation, environment, irrigation and health are intertwined. Without integrated planning there is risk of creating negative impacts through well-intentioned projects. We collaborated with health institutions and undertook research. We found prevalence of bilharzia was indeed high – up to 49% in some areas. The publication of the research was shocking to many and since then, a lot of attention shifted to the neglected disease of bilharzia, and help poured in.
It’s nice when people think you’re an expert
While doing research on bilharzia, as environmentalists, the first hurdle we had to overcome was that of our own ignorance, or lack of interest to work on a field that we knew nothing about. Mostly it was the fear of appearing ignorant, after all don’t we all like being the “experts”? We as environmentalists had to learn about health, about parasitology and diseases. Going beyond our comfort zone was a humbling experience and finally, in the end, as thousands of people got treated for Bilharzia, it was satisfying to see community needs met, exactly the way they should be met.