UN Radio

UN and Africa

Programme Number: 159
Week of: Sunday, 01 July, 2007
Recording Date: Thursday, 05 July, 2007
Topical Issue(s):

"The annual summit of African Union leaders ended on Tuesday in the Ghanaian capital Accra. The theme of this year's meeting was the creation of a continental integrated African government. UN Deputy Secretary-General, Asha Rose-Migiro became the first woman to address the meeting. UN Radio's Gerry Adams talks to her about the challenges of a Pan-African government.

"Somali and Sudanese refugees living in camps in Kenya are in serious danger of malnutrition. Three UN agencies - the World Food Programme, the UN refugee agency and UNICEF- have issued an urgent appeal for funds.

"Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day" - that's the first of eight targets to reduce poverty agreed by world leaders seven years ago. They're known as the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs. At the end of June, we reached the halfway mark. In the following interview, Kasirim Nwuke of the UN Economic Commission for Africa gives an overview of progress in Africa towards meeting these goals.

PRESENTER: This is United Nations Radio in New York.

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PRESENTER:

Hello and welcome to UN and Africa. I'm Ransford Cline-Thomas.

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PRESENTER: In the programme today, it's the halfway mark to meet the Millennium Development Goals. The deadline - 2015. Can Africa do it? We'll find out what one UN expert thinks.

CLIP 1 Nwuke
"We do not think that all the countries in the region will meet all the goals by the target date. They face difficult challenges.

PRESENTER: Kasirim Nwuke is responsible for monitoring progress in meeting the MDGs, as the Millennium Development Goals are known. And later in the programme, we hear about an urgent appeal to stop severe malnutrition in Kenya's refugee camps.

CLIP 2 Pagonis

"What's been happening is that refugees have been selling food to try and make up these other essential supplies that they lack".

PRESENTER: Jennifer Pagonis of UNHCR on why malnutrition has become such a problem among refugees in Kenya. But first, UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha Rose-Migiro, the first woman to address a summit of the African Union, reflects on the relationship between Africa and the United Nations. So stay tuned to UN and Africa.

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INTRO: The annual summit of African Union leaders ended on Tuesday in the Ghanaian capital Accra. The theme of this year's meeting was the creation of a continental integrated African government. One of the participants at the Summit was the UN Deputy Secretary-General, Asha Rose-Migiro, who became the first woman to address the meeting. Gerry Adams of UN Radio called her up in Accra to ask her to elaborate on the challenges of a Pan-African government.

Migiro: Some of these would relate to the very problems that affect individual governments. There are issues of good governance, democracy, human rights, issues of specific groups of rights that relate for instance to women or children - these could be some of the obstacles because you can see that in Africa, their position differs. There are some countries that are more advanced in good governance and others are not. So these are the challenges we see toward getting an integrated Africa.

Adams: In your speech, you mentioned some of the obstacles to an integrated Africa and one of them included development and specifically health and HIV. Can you talk about that a bit?

Migiro: Yes. These are serious challenges to an integrated Africa in the sense that the problems of HIV and AIDS are the problems of child mortality and maternal mortality. All these eat into our development effort of the African continent. So they also have to develop common ways of addressing them. And on the other hand, the very fat that they are talking of integration means that they will have to deal with this issue as part of the process of development. They are an obstacle to integration but they are also an obstacle to development.

Adams: Regarding the MDGs and specifically maternal mortality, you mentioned that a woman in Africa has a one in 16 chance of dying in childbirth. Please give me some more information about child mortality and maternal mortality as it affects the MDGs.

Migiro: Child mortality continues to be a big problem in Africa as well as maternal mortality and mostly because the social services are inadequate. Women and children do not have access to health clinics, to hospitals. And there are questions of nutrition as well, all of which relate to the MDG goal number one that relates to poverty. Poverty puts African people in a cycle. You're poor. You cannot put in place social services. You have social services only a very few can acess, puts them in sort of a cycle

Dams: We are at the midpoint of the goal of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. What is your view of achieving them on time? Is there a difference between your view and that of the Secretary-General?

Migiro: Development reports have shown - that Africa lags behind and it is not likely that the continent will have implemented the goals by the year 2015. And this is why the Secretary-General has put in place a steering group to see how the process of MDGs could be even a bigger push. But in some countries on some of the goals they have made advancement. In Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, there is good progress in primary school enrolment. Malaria is being controlled in Niger, Togo and Zambia and… in other areas in relation to water and sanitation. So you can see that there has been progress here and there, but it's very sporadic, so to speak.

Adams: Final question ma'am - peace and security in Africa - how are we doing?

Migiro: Peace and security in Africa is fine. The situation compared to three or four years ago is better now. This morning I had the occasion to meet with a number of African leaders. There is satisfaction in Sierra Leone, in Cote d'Ivoire, in Liberia as well. I have met the leaders of this country and other leaders as well. So there is good progress in the area of peace and security.
But there are concerns also in some pockets, for instance, the DRC. (Democratic Republic of the Congo). There is still instability in the North Kivu. This is a constant concern. And I had the occasion to meet also with President Konare and other leaders to see what AU can do together with us, the United Nations in addressing all the issues there.

PRESENTER: And that was Asha Rose-Migiro, the Deputy UN Secretary-General.

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PRESENTER:: Somali and Sudanese refugees living in camps in Kenya are in serious danger of malnutrition. To prevent a further decline in the health and nutritional status of the refugees, especially the children, three UN agencies have issued an urgent appeal for funds. The World Food Programme, the UN refugee agency and UNICEF also warned of the looming nutritional danger in their appeal for funds, earlier this week. Diane Bailey has more.

DIANE: More than 230,000 refugees - mostly Somalis and Sudanese - live in remote camps at Dadaab and Kakuma in the north of Kenya. A recent survey found that the refugees there are severely malnourished. The World Food Programme's Christiane Berthiaume says warning signs of malnutrition were missed because the 2 camps are so isolated.

Berthiaume: Dadaab and Kakuma are in so remote place and Kakuma is located in the far west north part of Kenya. It's really in the middle of nowhere. Mothers do not bring their children. It takes a survey that UNHCR did and this is when it revealed that the situation was serious and those people on those two camps, depend 100% on our help. They are in semi-deserted area and there they cannot work.

DIANE: UNHCR's Emmanuel Nyabera works with the refugees in Kenya, and visited the camps as recently as two weeks ago.

Nyabera1: There were a number of children who were in the hospitals who were clearly malnourished, just by looking at them, they looked very, very weak and they were not really getting enough food. If you looked at the women, for example, they're also very desperately trying to breastfeed the children but that was also not working very well. The number of children in the hospitals had increased, and also the number of women in the hospitals had also increased. We could see that refugees were very desperate, trying for example, to sell some of their things, non-food items that we give them, so that they could buy other food from the market.

DIANE: The agencies say the malnutrition they are witnessing today is the result of chronic under-funding that keeps them from fully meeting the refugees' needs for firewood, soap and other essential commodities. Jennifer Pagonis of UNHCR describes it as a vicious cycle of refugees not only selling things like soap to buy food, but selling food to buy basic commodities.

Pagonis: We get about eighty percent of the funds that we need to provide for refugees around the world. And while the result of this is that they don't get the things that they need, in Kenya they receive about fifteen percent less of the firewood that they need, half the quantity of soap. They don't receive as much water as they should. So, what's been happening is that refugees have been selling food to try and make up these other essential supplies that they lack.

DIANE: In addition to providing these basics, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and UNHCR will provide foods with added nutrients and better health care with any extra funding that comes through as a result to Tuesday's appeal, says UNICEF's Miranda Eeles.

Eeles: There is an acute need for complimentary foods, such as ground nuts that provide extra nutrients, supplementary feeding for more children and therapeutic feeding to treat dangerously malnourished children. Over the past year, cholera, measles meningitis and Kenya's first case of polio in twenty years was reported in the camps, worsening the fragile nutritional status of young children.

DIANE: Emmanuel Nyabera says UNHCR needs just over seven million dollars to supply soap, cooking fuel, energy-saving stoves and those complementary foods rich in micronutrients.

Nyabera: For example UNHCR, we are looking at complimentary feeding; we are looking at at least giving the refugees firewood, giving them food that can compliment what they are given by WFP. Of course, we are looking at the health issues and seeing how best we can improve the conditions in the hospitals. This is a situation that has been going on for some time, and we felt that it was very crucial for us to come out and say listen, something has to be done, we have to blow the whistle; we have to make sure that people are aware that these are the conditions we have in the camps.

DIANE: The 3 agencies need a total of 32 million dollars for essential supplies over the next 12 months. For UN Radio, this is Diane Bailey reporting.

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PRESENTER:: "Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day" - that's the first of 8 targets to reduce poverty agreed by world leaders seven years ago. They're known as the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs. At the end of June, we reached the halfway mark, and it's time to assess how far we've come. In the following interview, Kasirim Nwuke of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, gave UN Radio's Patrick Maigua an overview of progress in Africa towards meeting these goals.

NWUKE: When we look at the levels relative to 1990, it is clear that sub-Saharan Africa is not doing as well as other regions. However, if we look at rates of progress from the 1990 levels, the region is doing pretty well in spite of its constraints. And the constraints are enormous and formidable. The continent is recovering from very low levels of performance in the 1980s. Conflict was very rife in the region, there has been a lot of out-migration of skilled professionals because of economic decline, commodity prices were very weak in the 80s so African countries had very limited fiscal space. Because they did not have the resources, the policy space was also very limited because of the need to borrow, and when you borrow from people they impose constraints on you that limit your ability to innovate with respect to policy. The story is not all that bleak as many commentators would like us to believe. (SEGUE) The region is doing well with respect to gender parity, to education and enrollments, to reducing hunger, and with respect to reversing the spread HIV and AIDS

PATRICK: We are at mid-level of the MDGs. Do you think Africa will meet the MDGs within those seven years? Or are we going to meet again to say we need more time?

NWUKE: We do not think that all the countries in the region will meet all the goals by the target date. Some countries such as DRC, Liberia, Sierra Leone are just emerging from conflict. They face difficult challenges. Other parts of the continent are contending with the impact of climate change and desertification so the constraints to their development are enormous. Many countries are probably at risk because of the increase in oil prices and energy prices. So as a region, the continent may not meet all the goals. But North Africa is doing well; parts of southern Africa are doing well.

PATRICK: What specific areas do you think the African leadership can do to help in achieving the MDGs?

NWUKE: Particular actions the member states need to take and are taking include a focus on regional infrastructure, or transboundary regional public goods. Many African countries are landlocked; the costs of transacting with the rest of the world are very, very high. Infrastructure remains a big, big, big bottleneck, a constraint to growth in the region. In many countries you don't have actually an integrated national market because the roads aren't there. Take Ethiopia for example (SEGUE): in many cases there is excess food production in the southern parts of the country and you have food deficit in the north where environmental conditions are very fragile. But because of the absence of roads and other infrastructure, it has been difficult in the past to move food in Ethiopia from the food surplus parts to the food deficit parts. And this is just demonstrated with one country. Consider many other countries-Niger, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso-that are landlocked. For those countries to increase their trade with the rest of the world and with other countries, the infrastructural problems have to be addressed. Political commitment is fairly important because without political leadership, there will be lack of focus on meeting the goals. We believe that in the region there is sufficient political commitment. In some countries there have been efforts to create dedicated offices on the MDGs. With respect to governance, especially economic governance, we think that a lot of the progress in the region in the recent past is essentially due to improvements in economic management and governance. There is renewed effort on the continent to tackle corruption. There is improvement in macro-economic management. Many countries' inflation has been fairly very low, domestic savings are rising and there is a return of capital in many countries, especially from the diaspora. So there is confidence arising in large part from improvements in governance. Not that there is not much left to do. We still have a lot to do, just like any other part of the world. END HERE

PRES: Kasirim Nwuke of the UN Economic Commission for Africa .

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PRESENTER:
And that's all for this edition of UN and Africa. Our Production Assistant was Beng Poblete-Enriquez and our sound engineer was Zach Pruit. And from me, Ransford Cline Thomas it's bye for now.

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