Zambia

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February 27, 2013 | 12:00 PM | By  | 

From Zambia to America, a plea to continue the global fight against AIDS, TB and malaria | 

Luwiza Makukula
Luwiza Makukula

It’s hard to imagine Luwiza Makukula of a dozen or so years ago.

“Things were very difficult in Zambia then,” said Makukula, a soft-spoken and elegantly dressed grandmother of two I met briefly during a visit to Seattle this week. Her visit was sponsored by the anti-poverty organization RESULTS, a group which the Seattle Times’ columnist Danny Westneat once described as “the most influential anti-poverty group you’ve never heard of.” One of the reasons for this is the way RESULTS has operated for some 30 years – quietly, persistently and face-to-face.

That’s why Makukula came here from Zambia to tell her story.

“I lost my husband to HIV in 2001,” she said. “We didn’t know but after he died I started getting sick with fevers, in and out of the hospital.”

Makukula was eventually diagnosed with TB, and then found to also be HIV-positive. By then, she was in a wheelchair, suffering from exhaustion and cognitive lapses. They put her in an isolation ward that she said “felt like jail.” The drugs she needed to stay alive cost about $200 a month, in a country which at the time had an annual per capita income of about $1000.

She wasn’t alone in her deadly predicament. At the time, HIV and TB were burning a wide swath across much of southern Africa. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, AIDS, Bob Dickerson, Global Fund, Joanne Carter, Luwiza Makukula, RESULTS, tuberculosis, Zambia
October 24, 2011 | 12:21 PM | By  | 

World population soon to hit the 7 billion (or so) mark | 

Flickr, hikingartist.com

Sometime around Halloween, we’re told, the world’s 7th billion living person will be born.

It will be a statistical and somewhat sketchy milestone since there is no way to actually, accurately, identify this bouncing 7-billionth baby. That won’t stop anyone from trying, of course, and so the UN is suggesting each country identify its own 7th-billion baby.

Whether you should celebrate this milestone, recoil in horror or shrug depends upon your perspective regarding global population growth. Author of the the term (and book called) the “Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich continues to predict doom and gloom due to the swelling global population.

But Ehrlich’s earlier predictions of mass human starvation in the 1980s caused by too many people didn’t come true. Starvation still kills (as is happening right now in East Africa) but not really due to too many people. We still have enough food to feed everyone. The reason people starve today is due more to economic and political barriers.

Zambia is the world’s fastest growing nation, and also a low-income country. That’s generally regarded as being on the problem side of the population equation. Population growth and poverty are not a good mix. Yet for many poor farming communities in Africa, larger families translated into a larger family labor pool, as well as the parents only form of social security for when they get old or sick.

One of the main solutions to the problem of over-population and poverty is to educate girls and women about family planning, and to reduce the barriers for girls getting an education.

As this report from The Guardian notes, Tanzania is learning the value of education as a means to encouraging reduced family size:

A third of Tanzanians over 10 years old cannot read or write and those women with no education have an average of 6.9 babies. Women with a primary school education have 5.6 babies on average and those with secondary and higher education, just 3.2 babies.

So how much as the world’s population grown since you were born? I’m not a spring chicken and the world had only 2.8 billion people milling around when I came into being. China’s population was on the decline back then (due to extreme poverty and bad politics).

You can see for yourself how things have changed since your birth date using this interactive from The Guardian.

FILED UNDER: Basics, famine, Paul Ehrlich, population, Zambia
July 12, 2011 | 9:56 AM | By  | 

Good news: 28 countries escape poverty trap | 

Flickr, Stuck in Customs

Progress is like a river

The Guardian reports on new data indicating we are making progress against poverty:

Remember the poverty trap? Countries stuck in destitution because of weak institutions put in place by colonial overlords, or becausse of climates that foster disease, or geographies that limit access to global markets, or simply by the fact that poverty is overwhelmingly self-perpetuating. Apparently the trap can be escaped.

Zambia and Ghana are specifically celebrated in the article as having risen rapidly from “low-income” toward “middle-income” status, according to new World Bank country classifications.

Low-income means countries in which people make less than $1,005 per year (why that extra $5?). Lower middle-income countries where people make between $1,006 and $3,975 per year and upper middle-income countries are those where people make $3,976 and $12,275 annually.

So what’s the behind this rapid progress? The authors provide three key perspectives:

1. Foreign aid, public and private investments to poor countries actually work.

2. The World Bank country criteria may not be measuring poverty accurately since many of those people living in poverty live in middle-income countries.

3. Fighting poverty is becoming increasingly a matter of domestic politics, a recognition of and public intolerance for inequity.

 

FILED UNDER: Basics, Ghana, low-income countries, poverty, World Bank, Zambia
January 10, 2011 | 9:30 AM | By  | 

Experts question PATH’s claims of success against malaria in Zambia | 

Flickr, by ACJ1

One big malaria success story is a program in Zambia run by Seattle-based PATH.

It has involved a rapid expansion of the use of bed nets, insecticides and other measures aimed at preventing mosquitoes from spreading the deadly parasitic disease.

Called MACEPA, the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa, PATH and Zambian officials claim it is having a big impact, especially when it comes to reducing the number of children killed by malaria.

Some global health experts, however, have doubts about those claims of success.  And, they have had a devil of a time trying to get data on the program from PATH and the Zambian government to check up on these claims of success.

PATH

Kent Campbell

“The bottom line is that the program is working well. We consider it a model approach that we hope to see widely adopted across Africa,” said Dr. Kent Campbell, director of MACEPA for PATH and a former top malaria expert for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Emmanuela Gakidou, Günther Fink, health metrics, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Kent Campbell, malaria, PATH, Zambia