Nipate
Forum => Kenya Discussion => Topic started by: Globalcitizen12 on April 07, 2017, 02:34:08 PM
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http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/news/In-northwest-Kenya--drought-brings-more-girls-to-school/539546-3879918-x21wpx/index.html
ore than 38,000 households in Turkana County receive the payments, officials said.
Ipapai has kept back some of that money – at points burying it in the ground without her husband’s knowledge – to try to keep her daughter in school. Other money she has invested in starting a kiosk selling Turkana baskets, beans and other food.
The 39-year-old mother is not the only one who has used social safety net payments to rethink what resilience to drought should look like.
In recent years, other parents in the area also have decided to forgo marrying their teenage daughter to win dowries, instead relying on social payments to get them through droughts and investing in their daughters’ education and future employment prospects as a new more resilient form of savings.
Digging up solutions
The transition to keeping girls in school has not always been an easy one. When Lopungre passed her primary school exams, in 2014, her father began making plans for her marriage.
“That was the main plan, but before marriage arrangements commenced I dug out the money from the ground and, with something in my hands, I convinced my husband that it was time for our daughter to proceed with her education,” the girl’s mother said.
With memories of the animals that succumbed to the 2011 drought still fresh, her husband finally was persuaded and offered to sell two camels to support his wife’s idea.
As a result, Lopungre became one of the 35 girls who started at the new Nakurio Girls Secondary school in 2015. Today the school has 150 girls, nearly all of them from the Turkana community.
“People in this county are slowly changing their mentality. Unlike what happened just 10 years ago, where girls were forcefully married off in exchange with livestock, the same parents are now willing to sell the very livestock in order to pay school fees for their daughters,” said Missionary Alfred Areman, the principal at the school and a clergyman at a local Catholic church.
According to Leonard Logilai, who has been the administrative chief in Lorengelup since 1997, many girls started school following the 2011 drought that consumed most of the community’s livestock.
“Some (families) have been selling the surviving livestock to pay school fees, while others use part of the HSNP money to settle the fees arrears,” he said.
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What can one really do with Sh. 2700 per household per per month? Actually think of that, instead of just going along with parts of what you want to be a feel-good story. And 38,000 people? Remind me: how many millions are starving right now? Is the national government still begging for help from the "international community", saying it has neither enough money nor enough food to feed its population? If so, both government and the starving need to be told of the wonders of MPESA; I'm not the one who needs to hear it.
Anyways ... I notice that while cropping the article, in order to make it suit your point, you left out this:
Hard-hit herder families are instead selling drought-threatened livestock and using the money
and this:
Some (families) have been selling the surviving livestock to pay school fees ...
and
...
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A small good is being done we just need "to appeal to donors to give more"..It is a gift we cannot count a gifted goat teeth.It is not polite to do so
We need to throw another 4 billion at this problem I