The 6thedition of the BCW (Building and Civil engineering Works) and Infrastructure Conference will be held Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the 10-11 October 2019. The conference aims to explore how to develop public and private partnerships, promote infrastructure development in a more adapted and dynamic way, as well as position Africa as a destination of […]
Clean water
Saving Africa from Lies That Kill – New Book
My new book, Saving Africa From Lies That Kill: How Myths about the Environment and Overpopulation are Destroying Third World Countries is now available online and in book stores everywhere. In print and eBook through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million. Note: some bookstores may not have it yet, but asking for them to order it for you will help to get it on the shelves faster.
From the back cover: In Saving Africa From Lies That Kill, Kay Kiser exposes the long-standing crimes committed against developing nations by the United Nations, World Bank, USAID and Planned Parenthood. Under their guise of “aid,” these organizations mire the underprivileged in isolation, poverty, sickness, and ignorance.
In her book, Kiser argues:
•Poverty, not overpopulation, causes environmental damage. Higher standards of living and lower infant mortality can improve the environment and stabilize the population.
•Developing nations need access to reliable electricity in order to end energy poverty. This will, in turn, provide clean water, develop transportation, and power hospitals, homes and industrial investment.
•Africans aren’t lazy; they’re weakened from malaria, parasites and dysentery. They need insect and disease control for a healthy workforce.
•The Green Revolution and modern agriculture can feed everyone and end deforestation.
Fortunately, you can do something about the problem—and Kiser shows you how!
After reading the book, please remember to review it on Amazon; share it with a friend and do your part to end bad practices. Visit my blog for more information and to sign up for email updates at https://savingafricafromliesthatkill.com/ and like my Facebook page.
Siemens and Ethiopia collaborate to address urgent energy and infrastructure challenges — Database of Press Releases related to Africa – APO-Source
Siemens (www.Siemens.com) today announced it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia to support the government’s objective of becoming a low middle-income country by 2025. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) addresses the country’s energy and infrastructure sectors. Other key aspects of the agreement include financing concepts that will… […]
Ending Energy Poverty in poor countries
Seeking to End Suffering by Ending Energy Poverty
By Matthew Vadum March 19, 2019 Updated: March 20, 2019
A former Texas state lawmaker is spearheading a campaign against radical environmentalists and powerful international organizations, whose policies keep people in developing nations in desperate poverty and misery by discouraging the development of electricity-based networks worldwide. Jason Isaac is taking aim at those promoting the scourge of “energy poverty,” which keeps people in underdeveloped countries poor and sick, shaving decades off life expectancies on the African continent and elsewhere by making it difficult for consumers to access electric power for their daily needs. Isaac represented District 45 in the Texas House of Representatives from January 2011 to January 2019 as a Republican. While there, he was a member of the Energy Resources Committee. Isaac recently joined the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan research institute in Austin. At TPPF, he is senior manager and distinguished fellow of the “Life: Powered” initiative, whose mission “is to ensure that Americans understand the connections between energy, prosperity, and freedom.”
To see more, click here to visit The Epoch Times
AfricaSan5: African Development Bank calls for scale up in implementation of sanitation targets, honours Piers Cross — Database of Press Releases related to Africa – APO-Source
The African Development Bank (www.AfDB.org) has called on development partners to scale up support for implementation of sanitation programs to fast track Africa’s progress and deliver on its promise to the continent. “Achieving the Ngor Commitments and the ambitious targets for sanitation and hygiene within the Global Development Agenda can only become a reality if […]
Is Violence the cause or a result of primitive conditions ?
Violence as an Excuse to prolong primitive conditions
Violence is one of the excuses used to unnecessarily prolonging primitive conditions in Africa that long ago should have been replaced with roads, electricity, safe water and sanitation systems, improved homes, schools, medical clinics, modern agriculture, industry, foreign and domestic investment, international markets and trade. Africa needs Investment, Infrastructure, Education, Employment and Disease Control, not population control and extreme cultural preservation imposed through international interference.
I recently talked to a friend who had been convinced by a person from South Africa that violence and prejudice among rural Blacks are the reasons for the primitive conditions, and the reason why changing the situation is hopeless. The rural Blacks were seen as savages without normal human emotions and aspirations for their families, unwilling to improve their lot. This reflects the long-standing, internationally held prejudice, dare I say worldview, revealed in my book, that the rural poor in developing countries are genetically inferior, unwilling and incapable of improvement, and overpopulated, all of which are untrue. My friend was sure that I was quite naïve about true conditions in African and other developing countries. She did not know about my own work and life experience with the many people from developing countries who shared their experiences with me and proved the prejudices to be wrong.
Of course, I recognize the existence of violence, prejudice and superstition among powerless poor people. However, these continuing problems, including violence, are a result of, not the cause of, long-standing primitive conditions imposed by international organizations and corrupt domestic governments. Because my book is about correcting conditions brought about and continued by international Western powers, and not about local internal problems, I have not spent a lot of time on descriptions of specific internal conflicts other than to point out that corrupt governments almost guarantee such reactions among the powerless and dispossessed.
African countries would have progressed beyond primitive conditions long ago if they had been allowed and encouraged to develop apace with the rest of the world. Colonial powers and later Communist influenced corrupt dictators failed to educate the people and develop infrastructure such as roads and electrical systems that could eliminate isolation and develop the rural economy beyond subsistence. Foreign aid without accountability has propped up corrupt leaders who actually benefit from keeping the people poor, isolated, sick and ignorant, so that foreign aid keeps coming. Foreign aid should be replaced with foreign and domestic investment, and accountability of the leaders to the people, not their donors.
While businesses in many cities are growing at a rapid pace, much of rural Africa is stuck in the 18th century, where we all once were. Many rural poor constantly exist at the mercy of the next drought, flood or epidemic, without knowledge or appreciation of microscopic pathogens and parasites, while feeding themselves by slash-and-burn subsistence farming of low yield, unimproved crops, much of which is lost to vermin and insects. Modern agriculture can end deforestation, improve nutrition and can stabilize the population through reduced infant mortality. Modern agriculture, education, medical care, access to markets, electricity and industrial employment could alleviate much of the suffering.
Want to help? My book outlines some of the many ways you can get involved.
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My new book, Saving Africa From Lies That Kill: How Myths about the Environment and Overpopulation are Destroying Third World Countries is now available online and in book stores everywhere. In print and eBook through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million. Note: some bookstores may not have it yet, but asking for them to order it for you will help to get it on the shelves faster.
After reading the book, please remember to review it on Amazon; share it with a friend and do your part to end bad practices. Visit my blog for more information to sign up for email updates at https://savingafricafromliesthatkill.com/ and like my Facebook page.
AgroEcology blocks improvements for the poor
Uber-organic campaign enshrines primitive agriculture and malnutrition as human rights
Paul Driessen and David Wojick
Friday, July 20, 2018, 11:11:47 PM
Not every poor person in impoverished places around the world aspires to the modern living standards they see and hear about: indoor plumbing, electricity for lights, a refrigerator and stove, a paucity of disease-carrying insects, top-notch schools and hospitals, their children living past age five. But many do.
Not every poor African, Asian or Latin American farmer wants to give up his backbreaking, dawn to dusk traditional agricultural practices, guiding his ox and plow, laying down meager supplies of manure to fertilize crops, surviving droughts, repeatedly hand spraying pesticides to battle ravenous insects – to reap harvests that often barely feed his family, much less leave produce to sell locally. But many do.
Unfortunately, they often face formidable foes. An absence of electricity, roads and other infrastructure. Corrupt, kleptocratic governments. Nonexistent property rights and other collateral to secure loans. Powerful, well-financed eco-imperialists whose policies perpetuate poverty, malnutrition and disease.
Banks and other carbon colonialists glorify limited wind and solar energy for poor villages, while denying financial support for fossil fuel electricity generation. Anti-chemical fanatics promote bed nets and narrowly defined “integrated pest management,” but bitterly oppose chemical pesticides and the spatial repellant DDT to kill mosquitoes, keep them out of homes and prevent deadly malaria.
Radical organic food groups battle any use of genetically engineered crops that multiply crop yields, survive droughts and slash pesticide spraying by 75% or more. They even vilify Golden Rice, which enables malnourished children to avoid Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death.
Now poor country families face even harder struggles, as a coalition of well-financed malcontents, agitators and pressure groups once again proves the adage that power politics makes strange bedfellows. Coalition members share a deep distaste for fossil fuels, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, corporations, capitalism, biotechnology, and virtually all aspects of modern agriculture.
Their growing social-political movement is called “AgroEcology.” While the concept is studiously vague, it essentially asserts that indigenous, traditional farmers must be shielded from market forces and modern technologies, so that they can continue using ancient, primitive, “culturally appropriate” methods.
AgroEcology is anti-GMO organic food activism on steroids. It rejects virtually everything that has enabled modern agriculture to feed billions more people from less and less acreage and, given the chance, could eliminate hunger and malnutrition worldwide. It is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers and chemical insecticides – and even despises mechanized equipment like tractors, and the hybrid seeds and other advances developed by Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution.
AgroEcology advocates tortured but clever concepts like “food sovereignty” and the “right to subsistence farming by indigenous people.” It promotes “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices,” thus excluding the vast storehouse of non-indigenous learning, practices and technologies that were developed in recent centuries – and are readily available to anyone with access to a library or internet connection.
Or as they put it: “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” Food sovereignty also “focuses on production and harvesting methods that maximize the contribution of ecosystems, avoid costly and toxic inputs, and improve the resiliency of local food systems in the face of climate change.” (The 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty. In Mali!)
Some adherents even seek the “re-peasantization” of Latin American society!
AgroEcology has the financial backing of far-left foundations like the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which collectively have committed more than $500 million to a raft of like-minded NGOs.
Its precepts and policies are approved and actively promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and other UN agencies at their taxpayer-funded international conferences. These agencies are even beginning to demand adherence to über-organic practices as a condition for receiving taxpayer funding for agricultural development programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. (But taxpayers and legislators who provide the funding have been permitted little substantive input on any of this.)
It’s all justified – and often accepted without question in government agencies and universities – by reference to the politically correct, virtue-signaling terminology of our era: sustainability, sustainable farming, dangerous manmade climate change, social justice, indigenous rights, self-determination.
Also typical, anyone opposing these ideologies, policies and demands is vilified as a “willful supporter” of violence against women, “land-grabbing” by multinational corporations, peasant farmer suicides, “mass expropriation and genocide” of indigenous people, and crimes against humanity.
Imagine how intolerant AgroEcology ideologues would react if a farmer wanted to assert his or her food sovereignty and self-determination – by planting hybrid corn, using modern synthetic fertilizers or (heaven forbid) planting Bt corn (maize), to get higher yields, spend less time in the field, spray fewer pesticides, or improve the family’s living standards by selling surplus crops. And yet many want to do exactly that.
“By planting the new Bt cotton on my six hectares [15 acres], I was able to build a house and give it a solar panel,” Bethuel Gumede told the late Roy Innis, then chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, during a trip to South Africa. “I also bought a TV and fridge. My wife can buy healthy food, and we can afford to send the kids to school. My life has changed completely.”
“I grow maize on a half hectare,” Elizabeth Ajele told him. “The old plants would be destroyed by insects, but not the new biotech plants. With the profits I get from the new Bt maize, I can grow onions, spinach and tomatoes, and sell them for extra money to buy fertilizer. We were struggling to keep hunger out of our house. Now the future looks good.”
Equally relevant, how can agricultural practices that barely sustained families and villages before the advent of modern agriculture possibly feed the world? As Dr. Borlaug said in 2006: “Our planet has 6.5 billion people. If we use only organic fertilizers and methods on existing farmland, we can only feed 4 billion. I don’t see 2.5 billion people volunteering to disappear.”
AgroEcology promoters like Greenpeace, Food & Water Watch, Pesticide Action Network, Union of Concerned scientists and La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way) pay little attention to any of this. They’re too busy “saving people” from “dangerous” hybrid seeds, GMOs, agribusiness, farm machinery and chemicals. Not that any of them would ever want to toil on any of the primitive farms they extol.
Greenpeace frightens Africans by claiming “some researchers think DDT and DDE could be inhibiting lactation” in nursing mothers. So families are afraid to use DDT, and millions die from preventable malaria, while still more millions suffer permanent brain or liver damage from the disease. Would it also oppose cancer-curing chemotherapy because it causes hair loss and reduced resistance to infections?
Modern instruments can detect chemicals in mere parts per billion (the equivalent of a few seconds in 32 years) or even parts per trillion (a few seconds in 32,000 years). That’s hardly a threat to human health.
But Luddite eco-imperialists and über-organic food activists stridently oppose any manmade fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, while saying “natural” pesticides commonly used by organic farmers are safe. In reality, copper sulfate can kill humans in lower doses per kilogram of body weight than aspirin, and exposure to rotenone causes Parkinson’s Disease-like symptoms in rats and can also kill humans.
UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, US and EU government agencies, and real human rights advocates should challenge and denounce AgroEcology agitators and their financial enablers for advancing fraudulent claims that perpetuate malnutrition, poverty and human rights abuses in the world’s poorest countries. They should also cut off funding to any government agencies that support AgroEcology nonsense.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of books and articles on energy, climate change and economic development. David Wojick is an independent analyst specializing in science and logic in public policy.
For original article go to Luddite eco-imperialists claim to be virtuous
Safe Drinking Water Report for Nigeria
Do 80% of Nigerians lack safe drinking water? It’s worse than that
Reblogged from Africa Check blog
Claim
Close to 80% of Nigerians lack potable water.
Source: Journalist Dele Sobowale (May 2018)
downplayed
Verdict
Explainer:
90.8% of Nigerians’ household drinking water contaminated by E coli bacteria.
- A journalist recently claimed that over 80% of Nigerians lack water that is suitable for drinking.
- A large survey of households published in 2017 found that 90.8% of Nigerians’ drinking water contained some level of E coli bacteria.
- Only 3.7% of Nigerians had good access to clean water that was completely safe to drink.
Women collect water in a camp for internally displaced people in Bama, Nigeria, in December 2016. Photo: STEFAN HEUNIS
To continue reading and for more details, see the original article at Africa Check
Additional Information:
The Table in the article is from “Nigeria Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2016-17Survey Finding Report October, 2017″
The global MICS programme was developed by UNICEF in the 1990s as an international household survey programme to support countries in the collection of internationally comparable data on a wide range of indicators on the situation of children and women.
Slow Sand Filters for water purification
Slow sand filters are one of the easiest ways to clean water of pathogens and colloidal particles. Building a slow sand filter for home use requires little beyond local materials. A good manual I found that explains the finer points of operation and construction is “Biosand Filter Construction Manual” through CAWST Center for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology that can be downloaded as a pdf file at https://resources.cawst.org/construction-manual/a90b9f50/biosand-filter-construction-manual
UV purification of drinking water
UV from sunlight will kill most bacteria and parasites in six to ten hours in clear plastic one to two liter soda or water bottles if the water is clear. Prefiltering is recommended. Laying bottles on a reflective surface will enhance purification. Larger bottles are not recommended because UV from sunlight is reduced by traveling through a greater depth of water. The larger the bottle, the longer it takes to purify. Source of the image is UNICEF
Additional water filtration and purification information is available in my book Saving Africa from Lies That Kill on Amazon and on this blog site.
Long Term Solutions to Raise Developing Countries out of Extreme Poverty
Long Term Solutions for Developing Counries
- End Population Control Campaigns
- End DDT Bans to reduce Malaria, etc.
- Implement Hygiene Education Programs
- Aggressively Treat All Worm Infestations
- End Insistence on Subsistence Farming
- End the European Union Ban on Importing GMO Crops
- End Insistence on Solar and Wind Power Only
- Provide Electricity and Clean Water Systems for City Slums and Rural Villages
- Encourage Foreign and Domestic Investment
- End foreign aid without full accountability
DETAILS
- End Population Control Campaigns.
- We need to work to stop these campaigns by groups such as UNFPA, USAID, WHO, World Bank, International Planned Parenthood, Population Council, and Club of Rome. A few ways to do this are to Expose the lies about overpopulation, their sources, and their aim. The overpopulation myth is all about socialist control, racism, elitism, and misguided environmentalism. Poverty, not overpopulation is harmful to the environment. Raising people out of extreme poverty will benefit the environment.
- Defund all programs that promote involuntary or forced sterilizations, birth control, or abortion. Promote voluntary, informed choices only. President Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which withholds funds from foreign aid programs that promote or perform abortions. He also defunded UNFPA through the Kemp-Kasten amendment, which prohibits funding for any organization supporting coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization. Unfortunately, some other population control advocacy groups have stepped in to fill the gap. The US must pressure the UN and member countries to end this practice worldwide. The US must also defund Planned Parenthood.
- End overstocking population control drugs, devices and sterilization supplies in hospitals and clinics. Use the funds from this and other population control activities to stock medical facilities with medicines and supplies for endemic diseases such as malaria, TB and parasites. Medical facilities need supplies for treating injuries, surgical supplies and vaccination sera to save children’s lives.
- Provide sanitation, clean water and soap for handwashing for all clinics and hospitals.
- Train local people as medical assistants in the tradition of the field medic as a first line of defense.
- End Western values-based sex education in schools that encourages abortion, multiple partners, and thus sexually transmitted diseases. These practices are contrary to local cultural and religious beliefs and practices. We must respect their cultural and religious beliefs, which value children and family above all else. Imposing Western values on them destroys families and results in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Encourage monogamy and fidelity in marriage to one sexual partner as one of the best ways to reduce sexually transmitted diseases.
- End DDT bans to reduce Malaria, etc.
- Begin widespread spraying in homes and medicate victims to cut the cycle of malaria and other insect-borne diseases.
- The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, IARC, and other agencies that regulate possible toxins must change their regulations to allow DDT to be used for control of mosquitos and other insects.
- India is a good example of how effective this approach can be. In several government facilities, India manufactures DDT and other insecticides that can be purchased by people in African and other developing countries. India sprays DDT on interior walls of homes twice a year in malaria prone areas. This practice is a good first step in ending the malaria cycle and has greatly reduced the deaths from malaria in India. Africa could reduce theirs accordingly with DDT on interior walls as well as use of bed nets. Bed nets alone are not a good substitute for DDT spraying.
Figure 27: Global Malaria Deaths[1]
India is included in the South-East Asia group.
- Implement Hygiene Education Programs.
- Focus on educating all people, especially rural poor, about microbes and hygiene.
- Teach skills needed to provide clean water
- How to filter and purify water
- How to make soap and set up handwashing stations
- How to dig wells and latrines
- Safe use of composted wastes for fields
- How to keep waste and other contaminants out of streams.
- Aggressively Treat All Worm Infestations. Alongside treating for worms it’s important to provide shoes for all children to prevent re-infestation.
- End Insistence on Subsistence Farming as a more sustainable method. Encourage modern agricultural methods and improved varieties that are better suited to their environment, with higher nutrition and higher yields. This also ends or reduces slash-and-burn deforestation.
- End the European Union Ban on Importing GMO Crops. This and other protectionist philosophies, stagnate development in European countries and cause African countries to reject improved crops.
- Educate the people and the leaders of developing countries about modern agricultural methods and the benefits of GMO and other high yield varieties.
- Educate European leaders and farmers about the potential market for their goods in developing countries. This can be accomplished through advertising campaigns to the general public, not just entrenched government leaders.
- End Insistence on Solar and Wind Power Only.
- Encourage large and small electricity projects by all means possible, including fossil fuel, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear.
- Fund large and small hydroelectric and fossil fuel power plants and transmission lines into rural areas through loans.
- Until larger projects and grid systems can be implemented, promote local mini and micro hydroelectric, geothermal and fossil fuel systems. These small systems can be incorporated into a wider grid when that becomes available.
- Provide Electricity and Clean Water Systems for All City Slums.
- Improve housing, sanitation, and clean up standing water and wastes that breed insects and disease.
- Spray insecticides regularly to reduce insects that carry diseases.
- Cleaning up the slums can go a long way toward encouraging investments.
- Encourage Foreign and Domestic Investment.
- It is important to encourage investment in all sectors including agricultural, natural resource extraction, manufacturing, service sector and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).
- It is time to re-examine the company town concept. Historically used for extraction industries in isolated areas, company towns can be useful for other businesses such as manufacturing, service and STEM in order to attract, train, and house employees and their families.
- Encourage building of company towns with homes, hospitals, schools, and markets for employees in remote areas that provide electricity, clean water, latrines or sanitation systems. These company town projects should include progressively extending roads beyond the town over time to help others not directly employed by the companies, but that could market agricultural products to town inhabitants. Such road extensions over time can provide the basis of a larger transportation system that can encourage further foreign investment in newly opened business centers. Inhabitants of shanty towns (city slums) can be employed and live in new company towns near cities.
- End foreign aid without full accountability
- Any foreign aid needs to be tied to full accountability and transparency by governments about how the money is used and its impact on the people.
- Free ride foreign aid to governments must be ended to make leaders more accountable to the people, not just their foreign donors. This can lead to free and fair elections as well as economic development that builds the tax base.
Corruption is still an issue in many of the developing countries in Africa and elsewhere. Corruption, along with domestic unrest, are major barriers to attracting foreign investment. This corruption is encouraged, supported, and prolonged by foreign aid given to the governments, not directly to the people or to infrastructure contractors. Many government leaders have fat bank accounts by skimming most of the aid that is intended to help the poor and build infrastructure. Even when aid is given in the form of goods, not money, a similar picture emerges. The people may get very little of it as the goods filling warehouses are either sold on the black market to the highest bidder or are left to rot for political reasons.
The future of Africa looks bright and development is booming in the cities and in more developed agricultural areas. The average GDP growth rate for sub-Saharan African countries is 6.2 percent. Cote d’Ivoiri, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have GDP growth rates over 7 percent. This is great, but somewhat misleading since a percent of a smaller economy is a smaller amount of growth in real numbers. However, if these growth rates continue as they have been, it will result in real economic progress.
Although, historically, agriculture and extraction of natural resources have been the mainstays of African prosperity and development, half of all foreign investment in recent years has been outside natural resources. Of the countries that have this profile, a group of countries called the African Lions, which include Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, have led the way. Rwanda has had a growth rate of 9 percent since 2001 because of its favorable business creation policies.
- In Rwanda child mortality has been reduced, nearly all children have access to education and 98 percent have access to healthcare.
- Ethiopia has a growth rate of 10 percent but 20 percent of the population are still in extreme poverty with nutritional issues.
- Botswana has become a leader in online banking due to its low corruption levels and secure business environment.
[1] WHO, 2016
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If you like this post share it with your friends, and sign up to follow my blog by email at http://Savingafricafromliesthatkill.com. Thank you.
The book: Saving Africa from Lies that Kill: How Myths about the Environment and Overpopulation are Destroying Third World Countries is available in print and eBook online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million and in bookstores. If you like the book, please leave a review online at Amazon.com.
Developing countries need immediate solutions to problems
Developing Countries need Immediate Solutions to Long Term Problems
The ultimate aim of infrastructure and economic development should be to connect all rural villages to the electrical grid with vehicle passable roads for access to markets, schools and medical facilities. However, this will take time, so other immediate actions are needed to improve the lives of the rural poor, starting with education and access to clean water for all.
Immediate Solutions
- Education
- Clean Water
- Sanitation
- Insect and disease control
- Roads
- Electricity
Summary of Short Term Solutions: (Note each item is discussed in greater detail in earlier blog posts and chapters of the book Saving Africa from Lies that Kill: How Myths about the Environment and Overpopulation are Destroying Third World Countries )
- Education. The number one need of these people is education. All other improvements spring from that knowledge. For example, with a knowledge and understanding that invisible microbes and worm eggs cause disease, measures can be undertaken to reduce or eliminate them from water, food and surroundings. If the people believe diseases are caused by witchcraft or other capricious magic, there is no incentive to improve their infrastructure. Once they understand that there is a logical cause for diseases, improvements will be inevitable. Education can also teach childcare and literacy, as well as agricultural and trade skills.
- Clean Water. This can be accomplished without electricity by inhabitants if they are shown how. Clean water wells, low sand dams, slow sand filters or similar clean water resources will go a long way toward eliminating the number one killer of infants and young children, diarrhea from contaminated water. If you understood that giving your babies and toddlers contaminated surface water could make them very sick or kill them, you would gladly do whatever it takes to avoid that source or to purify the water before drinking it, and you would want to help provide and maintain other sources of clean water. They would too.
- Sanitation. Digging pit toilets can end open defecation and disposal of raw human waste in fields, which can reduce water contamination, illness and parasites from these sources. Human and animal wastes can still be used on fields for fertilizer, but only after composting for months or a year to eliminate harmful microbes and worm eggs. Ending open defecation and wearing shoes can end most worm infestations. Composting before using manure has an added bonus because raw or “green” manure can harm plants unless allowed time to decompose. Otherwise it can “burn” plants. NOTE: “green manure” as used here is historical terminology for poorly decomposed or raw manure. Under new terminology, green manure refers to plant material that is composted.
- Insect and Disease Control. Here again, education is important for understanding measures to prevent mosquito breeding and to protect themselves from bites. DDT and other insecticides offer real hope for reducing or eliminating insect vectored diseases. Bed nets treated with insecticides will reduce bites on sleeping people, but that is only part of the answer. Flies, fleas, lice, ticks and mites also carry many diseases, so elimination of these insects from within the home is important. Diseases and parasites can be cured with medicines and medical facilities, ending the cycle of spreading diseases.
- Roads. Passable roads are important to break the isolation trap. Many road improvements can be done gradually by villagers if there are enough healthy people and incentives to do the work. Roads are important to be able to get to medical facilities and for access to markets to sell their crops.
- Electricity. Access to electricity or gas for cooking and heating can reduce indoor air pollution from bio-based cooking fires and facilitate water purification for homes, schools, clinics and hospitals. With electricity, houses can be closed against insect entry by using screens and fans for cooling. With electricity, refrigeration is possible for safe storage of foods. Electrification usually needs input from outside the village to accomplish. Mini and micro loans can be used to build local low capacity hydroelectric dams or diesel power plants and medium to low voltage transmission lines locally. All other short-term solutions listed here can be accomplished very quickly by knowledgeable, healthy, and trained inhabitants. Again, education is the key. Teaching local people how the do these things will go a long way toward raising their standard of living, improving their quality of life, lowering under-five mortality and raising life expectancy.
See next blog post for longer term solutions to improve health of the rural poor and raise the economy beyond extreme poverty.
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If you like this post share it with your friends, and sign up to follow my blog by email at http://Savingafricafromliesthatkill.com. Thank you.
The book: Saving Africa from Lies that Kill: How Myths about the Environment and Overpopulation are Destroying Third World Countries is available in print and eBook online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million and in bookstores. If you like the book, please leave a review online at Amazon.com or other outlet.
This is the second in my Modern Mythology Series. My first book, Perverted Truth Exposed: How Progressive Philosophy has Corrupted Science was published in 2016. It is available in print and ebook, on line only, through World Net Daily store, Amazon, Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble. See the companion blog at www.realscienceblog.com for related posts and pages.