News

Sometimes, life becomes hard in almost every aspect – no money, no clothes and not even the slightest idea of where the next meal will come from. This is what Loveness Jemusi went through for many years of her life.

Timidly posing for the camera but eager to share her story, Loveness from Kalombo Village in Mchinji district said she has been through a lot as a young girl growing up. These hard times forced Loveness and her siblings to do some piece work for their survival; and while she was in Standard 4, things got worse such that she dropped out of school. 

News recently rocked the country that blood banks and hospitals have been experiencing acute shortages of blood. As a result, preventable deaths have been occurring at hospitals.

Recently at Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH), the second largest referral hospital in the country – thousands of people have been in need of blood. There were 19 avoidable deaths at KCH over the course of a weekend in mid February, largely due to a shortage of blood.

Eluby Chabwera and her family’s normal routine of subsistence farming was temporarily halted when flooding affected their crops in early January 2015. Due to the heavy rains, almost all their crops were washed away, giving them the lowest yield they have ever encountered as a household. Eluby has two sons, Rafiki and Talandira, but she also looks after her sister’s daughter, Emily.

Taking up their role as nutrition champions, the Parliamentary Commission on HIV/AIDS and Nutrition recently went on a nutrition fact finding mission to obtain firsthand information on the nutrition situation in parts of the country. The committee intends to use their findings as evidence to lobby parliament to increase funding towards nutrition. 

For the fact finding mission, the committee went to various sites in Kasungu, Ntchisi, Mulanje and Blantyre districts.

Sitting in the district council hall on that hot October morning and listening to members of the Mwanza District Nutrition Coordinating Committee (DNHA) taking turns to describe how late they receive their monthly funds from Central government and how the figure continues to decline month in, month out, one conclusion came to mind—fair financing goes beyond the figures that government publishes in the pink book—the national budget. Fair financing is about how timely that money is disbursed to district councils and how adequate it is to implement planned activities.