The people of a small village in the centre of the country are discovering that reducing gender imbalances between men and women may be the most effective tool in the fight against hunger
IT IS EARLY December in Bembeke, a cluster of mud huts and livestock pens about 75km off the main road on an escarpment of Mount Dedza, in central Malawi. This is the start of the hunger season, a dreaded spell between the autumn and the spring harvests in February, when food is scarce.
The inhabitants of this remote outpost are unusually at ease for this time of year, because the big news is of the bumper maize harvests of the past three years.
Jane Maxwell, wearing a floral-print dress she bought with money earned from selling surplus vegetables, walks around the village granary proudly pointing out that it contains eight 50kg sacks of maize. This means that while other parts of the country are feeling the first pangs of hunger, the people of Bembeke know where their next meals are coming from. They will grind this reserve maize and use it to make nsima, the national dish.
This is a dramatic turnaround in a place where the memory of famine is fresh.
In 2002 and 2005 Malawi lurched from crisis to crisis as erratic rainfall and the government’s decision to sell off the country’s grain reserves to service foreign debts left thousands dead from starvation-related illnesses. The government is quick to take the credit for success stories of improved food security in such places as Bembeke, citing its decision to distribute subsidised fertilisers to farmers to boost crop yields. But people here have a different version of events.
The farmers claim that recent improvements in the status of women has changed the way the community works thereby helping to put more food on all plates.
“Those fertilisers didn’t work,” says Angela Twalibu, a 37-year-old mother of five and sole breadwinner in her household since her husband died last year from HIV/Aids. “Some men got fertilisers. Then they went into town and sold them for beer. In the past all the decisions about food rested with men. Now women are able to talk.”
Giving women a voice has been central to the efforts of development agencies to accelerate progress in less-developed nations such as Malawi for decades. The groundbreaking work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, describing how investing resources in women and girls can be 20 per cent more effective in reducing poverty, has inspired a generation of workers in non-governmental organisations to implement gender equality in their assistance programmes. This approach has helped to boost the confidence of many of Bembeke’s women as men are no longer allowed to monopolise decision-making.
“In terms of leadership positions, women were always vice- this and vice- that. Now they are no longer the vice-chairperson,” says Donata Pias, the chairwoman of the operation that runs Bembeke’s new irrigation system for watering crops during the region’s many dry spells.
Changing behaviour in a rigidly patriarchal society such as Malawi’s is difficult. In the past aid agencies tried to improve the status of women by empowering them to challenge their husbands’ authority.
The fundamental flaw in that approach is that it fails to engage men, says Dr Vincent O’Neill, head of development with Irish Aid in Lilongwe, the capital.
“Gender is not a synonym for woman,” says O’Neill. “Gender considerations are a central pillar of all Irish Aid interventions. But we can’t pretend that men don’t overrule the women. They do. So, for us, men are a very important part of gender equations.”
This is why the British charity Concern Universal, supported with funds from Irish Aid, takes a nuanced, culturally sensitive approach to tackling the twin problems of hunger and gender inequality in Bembeke.
“The gender dynamics between men and women are vital to understanding hunger problems here,” says Vincent Doyle, a development worker with the charity.
“Rather than having one programme for women and one for men, we bring them together at all levels. And the most important level here is food. So we try to get men and women to work together.”
To the surprise of many men the results of this co-operation have been impressive.
“We thought it was a joke when they were introducing this idea, in 2007,” says Suilima Afak. The 40-year-old returned to his wife and children recently, after spending a number of years in South Africa.
“I see there’s a difference,” he says. “We had a mentality that a man is the president of the family. We give room to women to participate in decision-making now. And I cannot spend money without consulting my wife.”
An even more candid confession from Peter Tangare hits on what many see as the root cause of food shortages in the region.
“Men got jealous if their wives worked with other men,” he says. “Now they don’t take it as an offence. The community has made it shameful to beat your wife.
“I used to be rough on my wife. Beating your wife was not an issue. That’s what it meant to be a man,” he says, as a number of the women nod in agreement with his admission.
Last month the Malawian press reported a gruesome incident of a husband who, angry with his wife about the meagre meal she was about to serve him, plunged her head into a pot of simmering porridge. They lived in a remote area, so the woman was unable to get medical attention. She died shortly afterwards of her burns.
With stories like this, it is perhaps little surprise to learn that Malawi is well wide of the fifth Millennium Development Goal, of reducing gender inequality, even if it is on target to meet the first goal, of halving hunger by 2015.
Gender inequality threatens to push the number of chronically hungry people around the world above a billion, according to the 2010 Global Hunger Index report. It presents compelling evidence linking the low status of women in many parts of the developing world with high levels of hunger.
And the situation for many Malawian women may get worse in the coming months before it begins to get better. Evidence shows a strong seasonal dimension to levels of violence, with tensions within households exacerbated when food runs low.
For Maxwell, though, such problems are not an immediate concern. "Now we eat nsima, even in January," she says, shifting her smiling gaze from the granary to her surrounding fields of swaying maize.
This article was supported with a grant from Irish Aid’s Simon Cumbers Media Fund
