NEWS / PRESS BBOK

How to help a village acquire a Platform

THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, Wenesday, December 23, 1998.

"Breaking chains of poverty" 
Improving human rights means giving women a greater role in society, 
particulary in Mali, where women bear the brunt of poverty  

ANAKAGA, Mali

Each day of her life, AïssataI Tamboura pounded millet for two hours. It took her four hours to get water.

Them the diesel motor came to Anakaga.

It runs the pump that drawn the water from the well. It grinds the millet. What once took six hours now takes one.

For three hours a day, Anakaga has electricity.

« We are very happy », Tamboura said. « Now, we are selling things and browing beer. »

What residents of the developed world take for granted carries the sir of the miraculous in Anakaga and elsewhere in this west African nation of almost 10 million people. Clean water where there had been none, electric light where it had been dark, these developments immediately after and improve lives throughout rural Africa.

With the help of the Malian government, Anakaga’s motor came through the work of the United Nations Development Program, a multinational agency that combines the work of the United Nations, donor organizations and governments to help raise living standards and increase opportunities in the developing world.

UNDP’s work here helps mark the 50^th anniversary of the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a manifesto that identifies a decent standard of living as an inalienable human right.

IN MALI, this right often goes ignored. This year, at least onethird of the world’s people live in poverty.

Poverty here, and elsewhere in the world, has a woman’s face.

So does much of the fight against poverty. One is Kebe Tantou Sambake’s.

She runs Tantou Teinture, a center that dyes cloth, teaches dyeing skills to girls and also helps those girls learn to read, write and handle basic business skills.

Through a program that gives her access to credit, she’s build her school, attended conferences in other African nations and the United States, and bought a computer. In a nation with few telephones, Sambake is on the Internet.

She got where she is, a cernent building next to a small dump in the Magnambougou neighborhood of the capital city of Bamako, by going door to door to find women interested in joining a dyeing association and then by courting various groups to find investment capital for her business.

« I want to share what God has given me in terms of knowledge with other women. » Kambake said.

IT’S NOT EASY. Girls in Mali tend to be most illiterate. Many live in the countryside, where illiteracy is even worse.

« We have an illiteracy rate of  70 percent for girls » said Adama Samassekou. Mali’s minister for primary education. Only 37 percent of Malien girls are in school.

President Alpha Oumar Konare wants to change that, but his popular democratically elected government has few resources to make it happen. Mali has never had much ; an increasingly global economy that values cheap manufacturing centers isn’t making things easier.

Once part of french West Africa, Mali straddles a precarious fine between the Sahara Desert and the savannas to the south. Early in its independence, it managed to else out an existence.

Then came the droughts that devasted this part of Africa – the Sahel – from 1972 through 1974. At least 40 percent of the livestock died : starving people ate their seeds and picked the leaves off the few plants that survived.

Westerners added a new word to the vocabulary of suffering – kwashiorkor – the malnutrition that leads to children with distanded stomachs.

Another round of drought in the 1980s compounded the problems. In Mali, in villages from Anakaga, to Kerou to Timbuktu and Kangaba, rural life looks much as it did centuries ago.

Unless there’s a motor. Or a way for people to learn to read.

In Anakaga, most villagers live is mud huts with grass roofs.Unal the motor, it had no elctricity, Running water came only if some-one poured it from a bucket.

Adults and children alike go through life covered with a layer of dirt ; many children wear no clothes at all.

But the motor, which UNDP representatives call a multifunctional platform, has helped move Anakaga further.

« This will be the most famous project in west Africa in five years’ time », said Finn Tore Rose, a Norwegian who is the UNDP’s resident representative in Mali.

This project stands out because it creates its own power.Besides grinding millet, the motor helps gring pourghere seeds that produce a kind of oil that, when mixed with diesel fuel, helps perpeinate the village’s fuel, making it kind of a perpetual motion machine, Rose said.

Throughout Mali, women do most of the work, and a major part of the human rights initiative here is to empower them to play a greater role in Malian society.

THERE’S MUCH to be done. For one, it’s estimated that 94 percent of women in Mali have gone through some form of genital mutilation or clitoridectomy, in which part or ail of the clitoris is removed.

Second, Mali is 90 percent Muslim, and most men have more than one wife. By working with the multifunctional platform in Anakaga or renting oxen in Kangaba or dyeing cloth in Bamako, Malian Women have gained a chance to earn and save their own money.

« We are not giving the money to our husbands », Tamboura said. « We have the platform because we saved the money to buy it ».

In village life, most Malian men don’t work. Women do most of it, and much of it is backbreaking particulary in the villages without power.

Residents of Kerou, also in the harah Dogon country, don’t have a motor. Women there use long, atout wooden poles with metal handles to pound the millet grains into something edible.

Working two at a time, their toil has a peculier percusalve rhythm as they take turns plunging the poles into a wooden bucket filled with millet.

Village men drink tes and talk. Some practice drumming. When they have extra money, they often use it to find another wife, making it easier to understand why a current wife would be relectant to share.

This contrast between men and women and Efe with a motor and Efe without one is evident in Xervu, about 45 kilometers from Anakaga.Only a new well, complete with power, makes things tolerable.

What has made their project a success said Fatoumata Togo of Kerou, is that the UNDP and the government came to the village first to determine its needs. Someone in a far-off capital didn’t impose their needs on them.

« If you want to help someone, you have to know them better », said Togo, a woman who coordinates the weil in Kerou. They came here to do that ».

One reason Mali is gradually crawling from its status as one of the word’s 10 percent countries is that a change in the philosophy of most nongovernmental organizations has been met with a change in government.

For years, Mali had one of west Africa’s most oppressive and despotic dictators in Moussa Traore. Grand projects would be launched with foreign assistance, much of it coming from France, the Soviet Union and China.

Those projects would stop before being finished, government officials would have siphoned off too much for themselves.

Roads remained primitive, even those in Bamako. Electric power existed only in theory.

Traore’s government also specialized in denying human rights. Political opponents would be sent to a camp in far northern Mali, at Taoudeni, where they would work in the salt mines.

Often, opponents never made it that far.

« If the government found out we were talking about anything critical, someone would come to your house in the middle of the night and shoot you » said Mamadou Gueye , a U.S. educated professor at the University of Mali.

That changed in 1991 after a coup led by Col. Amadou Toumani Toure, known nationally by the French pronounciations of his initials – Ah.Tay-Tay.

Toure led a transition government that held democratic elections in 1992, which saw the election of Konare, a former journalist and professor.

Now, Mali has more than 30 newspapers in a nation with at most a 50 percent literacy rate. The political opposition is active and vocal, although its exact platform is hard to decipher. Once a year, any Malian is invited to the nation’s Palais of congress for a meeting with government officials.

This forum would be familiar to anyone who’s ever attended an American city council meeting. Complaints range from disputes over land to one Malian complaining about his firing from his Peace Corps-related job for sexual harassment.

While this forum brings people to the national government, Konare has decentralized much of what used to be handled in Bamako. This, he said, will allow people to feel much clover to their government and understand what it is trying to do help improve conditions.

« The population will have ownership, » Konare said.

What they still own most, however, is poverty. Until that changes big-picture talk of human rights will come in second to survival. 

Ray Locker
Ray Locker is a senior editor for news at The Tampa Tribune. He visited Mali this month on a fellowchip sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors Group.