AFRICAN WOMEN KEY TO FOOD SECURITY

Throughout the African continent, women are crucial to food security. They grow and harvest the crops for household consumption, they cook the family meals and they breastfeed their babies. WFP has chosen "Putting women at the centre of food security - what are the challenges?" as its theme for International Women's Day on March 8. Here are the stories of four Kenyan women living with recurring food shortages and how WFP food aid has changed their lives.

WOMEN FARMERS PRAY FOR THE RAIN

Living in Turkwell, Turkana, Melenea Ayokon, knows what it is to go hungry. As a farmer dependant entirely on her crops for her family's survival, she faces an incessant battle against recurring drought in the region.

Every rainy season Melenea and the other women look to the skies, praying for rich rains to feed the fields.
However, even when rains are good, there is often not enough water to irrigate her small plot.

And when the harvest is poor the family is left destitute, unable to store adequate food supplies from season to season.

To survive a bad season Melenea often turns her hand to charcoal production, but wood is scarce in Turkana and it has only ever generated a few shillings towards the cost of feeding the family. Sometimes Melenea and her children are forced to trek many kilometres into the forests in search of wild fruit when nothing else is available.

The last resort is often to beg food from relatives in the larger towns. One meal a day is often as good is things get.

When WFP started a Food for Work project in the area, Melenea's life changed radically for the better. Not only could she rest peacefully at night knowing she could feed her entire family on the food rations she received in return for her work, but she could also look forward to enjoying the benefits of the new irrigation system she helped to build in the Food for Work project.

This year, Melenea and the other villagers are confidently preparing their land knowing that poor rains cannot kill their crops and jeopardise their children's health.




REFUGEE WOMAN'S BAKERY WONDER

Nasro Hussein Abubakr has lived in Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenyan for more than seven years.

Nasro had to flee the 13-year war in her home country Somalia along with hundreds of thousands of her countrymen.In the camp she was initially unable to make a living as refugees are not allowed to be employed or to integrate in Kenyan society. She is also isolated from her Somali community as she married a man from a tribe different to her own.

After a violent attack by relatives, Nasro and her family now have to live behind the chain-link fence that protects the most vulnerable refugees.

Nasro has, however, managed to overcome the hostility and build a livelihood supporting her family with more than just the basic food provided by WFP.

Thousands of tins and sacks are delivered to the camps each year and, in 2002, WFP made the empty containers available to the refugees to sell in order to generate income. Nasro was one of the beneficiaries and the 10,000 kenyan shillings ($132) the sales generated was enough to construct a mud oven and start a small production of bread, biscuits and cakes.

The bakery has developed into a thriving business and now Nasro and her family are also selling tea, goat meat and vegetables. Nasro is generating 400 to 500 KSH per day. Having cash allows her to buy extra food and soap, clothes and medicine for her children.




FOOD POWER FOR MAASAI GIRLS

Nice Mulejo, a nine-year-old Maasai girl, came home from school one day and found her family brewing beer - something the Maasai do for special occasions. Her mother told her that the next day would be her last at school. Then she would have to help prepare for the party. It was to be her party - her wedding party!

Now, two years later, Nice Mulejo is one of 410 girls living within the protective walls of AIC Girls' School in Kajiado.

The school finds and rescues young Maasai girls from traditional female circumcision and marriage to men sometimes five times their age. WFP provides a free lunchtime meal to all the school's pupils.

"Some of the girls we get are seriously traumatised and often physically damaged, as they already have been sexually abused by their so-called husbands," says Priscilla Nangurai, AIC Girls' School headmistress.

She explained that it is common practice among the Maasai not to inform the-bride-to-be that she is getting married - let alone circumcised- until the actual day of the event. This despite the fact that marriage without the prior knowledge of both partners is prohibited by law in Kenya, as is marriage before the age of 18.

The school lies in the Maasai heartland. Some 85 percent of its pupils are Maasai girls. It is generally very difficult to get the Maasai people to send their girls to school. They regard school fees as too expensive and are particularly reluctant to invest in girls' education.

"For our day scholars the free lunch is very important. It motivates the parents to send their girl children to school. At least their child is secured that one meal, when there is no food in the family", says Nangurai.

"Before WFP donated food the day scholars were all send to school without lunch and the girls would hang around the boarders' dining hall hoping for leftovers. Teaching was difficult past midday. The girls couldn't concentrate."

PROVIDING FOR 12 GRANDCHILDREN
AT THE AGE OF 86

Selina Paulina Aponde is only one of many grandmothers that have experienced the dreadful effects of the AIDS epidemic.

At the age of 86, she has become a single provider for seven of her 14 orphaned grand children. Fragile and weak, she could not work the land and was forced to send her grandchildren begging from neighbours, in the streets and at markets.

"Mama Pauline was crippled from starvation, she was hanging heavily on two crutches and could hardly move. Now she walks leaning lightly on a stick and her grandchildren have gone back to school" says Mary Makokha, Director of Rural Education and Economic Enhancement programme (REEP).

Makokha identified Mama Pauline as an HIV-affected woman eligible for food assistance under WFP's new HIV/AIDS programme in Busia.

HIV and AIDS create pockets of famine in areas otherwise prosperous and fertile. Many families suffer from lack of food because the parents who normally provide for the family - old and young - are dying or are already dead as a result of AIDS.

Often the family did not eat for several days in a row. Pauline and her children were slowly withering away from hunger.

"Now, when you come to Pauline's house you can hear the children play outside. Before the children were all crammed around her in the dark - weak and dizzy from hunger - and at least one child was lying feverish on her mat," says Makhoka.

Unfortunately, Pauline's eldest granddaughter has suffered the long-term effects of their food shortages. As the eldest, she felt greatly responsible for her grandmother and her siblings. The men in the community took advantage of the girl's desperate situation when she was barely 12 years old - nobody knows exactly when it started. They offered her food in exchange for sex.

Josephine (not her real name) is now 14 and despite the free food provided by WFP today, her life has taken a turn that is difficult to reverse.