Before I rush into my busy day:
CNN has published an article on Josh Nesbit’s project at St. George’s in Namitete, Malawi. I wrote about the project here and talked about it at BlogCampSwitzerland.
Archive for the 'Malawi' Category
Recommended reading:
BBC’s James Morgan on fish farming in rural areas of Zomba district, Malawi.
It’s a perfect circle. “Or what we call an integrated agriculture-aquaculture (IAA) system,” says Joseph Nagoli, of WorldFish. “This isn’t high input fish farming. This is simple and sustainable.”
Just a quick note to point to an interesting interview with an official of MTN Uganda at:
Appfrica: Interview With MTN’s Erik van Veen - Part 1
These points caught my eye:
(…) revenues per user, are very low in Africa by international standards, and require a low cost operating model if the Operator is to be profitable. If you look at East Africa, new customers joining the mobile category spend about $4 per month – that is not a lot!
(…) I see Asian, especially operators from the sub-continent, playing a bigger role in Africa as they have been able to survive in cut-throat, highly competitive, low tariff environments in their home markets.
(…) And then you have to deal with the cost of doing business in Africa. Infrastructure and productivity remain major hurdles that add costs to the P&L. Our own success, relative to other companies in most African economies, has backfired on mobile operators in Africa, where governments see these as an easy source of tax income. In East Africa, excise tax (read luxury tax) has been institutionalized within the mindset of financial ministerial policy on tax. Uganda has the 2nd highest tax burden on mobile services in the world, Tanzania 3rd. Just think about it – in Uganda we hand over nearly a third of the cost of every call to the government. What a shame!
It is a short sighted initiative that is impeding growth of the ICT industry.
Very interesting read!
Quick side notes:
There was a recent article that Malawi is considering to add (or has already added) a 10% tax on all airtime. I can’t find the Daily Times article online any more (note to myself: make a screenshot next time) See this Daily Times article.
There’s also White African’s catch phrase to keep in mind.
I just surfed through lots of cool new photos in the Malawi group on Flickr.
Including these photos of Mulanje mountain by Lisa de Vreede:
As announced on Twitter, I presented a talk on mobile technology in Malawi at today’s BlogCamp in Zurich to share what I’m learning from the African blogs and tweets that I follow on a regular basis.
I started my talk with a short intro on Chiperoni (I am a bridge blogger somewhere between Basel and Blantyre) and why I blog. How much I appreciated Alex Antener’s news stream published on a Polytechnic server during the last Malawi general election. Then pointing to White African’s blog post discussing Twitter’s decision to discontinue its SMS service to the rest of the world. I tried to point out the potential a “Twitter to SMS” service could have for Malawi, where most of the population does not have access to the internet or even a plain old fixed telephone line.
I described the current situation. And how this is changing with mobile technology. I pointed to Mike McKay’s blog post about a rural area in northern Malawi where villagers climb an ant hill to get a better signal.
In Switzerland we take a lot of things such as the excellent infrastructure we have for granted.
I shared some of my observations from my recent holiday in Blantyre, some data on the pricing models and how public wifi is being introduced in urban areas.
I was a little shaky on the stats side of things, telecommunication regulations, as well as who owns the major cell phone service companies, TNM and Zain. I’ll need to do more research here. I might have got some of my facts mixed up.
I did refer to the new airtime tax that is being introduced.
Examples referred to:
- Health: The FrontlineSMS project in Namitete, Malawi
- Agriculture: Cy Kuckenbacker’s video interview with rural farmers
- Media: Ushahidi.org and Sokwanele
This talk was inspired by White African’s and Soyapi Mumba’s tweet streams. Zikomo kwambiri. Keep on tweeting.
Flickr credits: White African, Hackerfriendly, all other photos are my own.
Big zikomo to Persillie and Mlle A. for reviewing my slides!
I enjoyed presenting very much (note to myself).
Oh and I forgot to mention my chat with a Limbe internet cafe manager during the talk…
I stumbled across this blog by Josh Nesbit discussing the use of FrontlineSMS, a tool to set up a text-based communications network, in a rural health project in Namitete, Malawi.
Here’s a 7 minute long interview with one of the community health worker. At about 3:00 she starts discussing the advantage of having a cell phone:
And here’s an interview with Alexander Ngalande, a nurse at St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete, regarding his experience with FrontlineSMS:
He now uses SMS to communicate with the community health workers to coordinate his medical visits to remote villages. Previously he required a motorbike to send a message when he would be in attendance.
Examples of text messages being sent:
- A man missed his appointment with a TB officer. A CHW was texted, who reported the man had gone to Zambia for a funeral. The hospital will be notified upon his return.
- An HIV support group met, and decided on new member guidelines. Via SMS, the group leader asked the hospital to print copies for the lot.
- A CHW asked about ferrous sulfate dosages, so he could administer the proper amount to an anemic child.
We take this type of communication between medical staff and patient for granted.
See also this BBC article.
See also this previous entry on the Coca-Cola Index.
Malawi blogger Victor Kaonga writes about the long queue at the Road Traffic office:
NDAGHA: What I saw at the Road Traffic Office in Lilongwe
I waited in a similar queue in Blantyre during my visit last year.
Cy has uploaded a video discussing the benefits of mobile technology for farmers in Malawi:
stumbled across this:
Malawi Travel Guide and Bicycle Touring Guide
Not very detailed though. The south is less hilly than the north. Ok.
Chinese restaurant in downtown Blantyre in Malawi.
(BTW, this is a Chiperoni.org Internet Marketing experiment….
If you read this blog post and then end up going to eat at this BT restaurant, please tell the owners where you first heard about it…)
stumbled across this:
Wikipedia in Chitumbuka
I spent a couple of sunny, winter days in Malawi’s biggest city, visiting family and meeting friends.
I’ve started uploading some of my snapshots to Flickr. More to come as I sift thru the GBs of data.
Travel was uneventful, except for the fact that my luggage took 6 days to arrive in Blantyre. It started out with a harmless announcement by the SAA pilot that he would need to unload some cargo due to overloading. Overloading a plane is a safety issue, and I’d rather wait for my bags than crash into some mountain. Later during the flight, the pilot announced that 23 bags had been left behind. But no worries, the bags would be brought to Chileka on a later flight on the same day. This was the start of various misinformed messages.
The flights between Jo’burg and Blantyre are always fully booked and a lot of cargo is shipped by air.
Anyway, my bags finally arrived in good condition. The SAA staff at the Blantyre office were very polite and helpful. And I learnt that I’ll put my camera charger into my camera bag. Instead of my checked luggage.
Flying back was uneventful as well. Except for a small scare. During the security scan check at Chileka, my camera bag fell right through a defect rung in the conveyor belt onto the floor. Luckily the bag is well-padded and nothing happened to my cam.
Cam bag = already amortized.
Another Chileka detail, I’ll not forget so fast: several Blantyre kindergarden and school classes came out to the airport to watch the aeroplane land and take off. Just for fun. They sat on top of the observation deck’s wall, shouting “aeroplane” and stomping their feet on the iron sheet roof of the departure hall below.
Recurring news topics:
The attacks on foreigners in some South African townships had many Malawians worried about their relatives. Several dozen buses were sent to bring home fleeing Malawians. For generations Malawians have gone to South Africa to work there. And some have lived all their life in SA. From a linguistic perspective I wondered why the BBC and other media used the term “xenophobic attacks” instead of the “r” word.
Muluzi’s arrest.
The Zimbabwe election.
Internet in Blantyre:
Compared to last year, there are more WiFi hotspots. The costs are high, especially for private customers. The IT marketer in me kept discussing possible business ideas that improved connectivity could entail for Blantyre-based companies. E.g. outsourcing accounting services to Blantyre or working with a creative agency.
It was good to see BT. A mixture of peanut butter, BBC World Service, Chombe tea, nsima, boerewors, chiperoni, jumping dogs, waiting…
Bennett has listed an overview of Malawi radio stations:
- MBC Radio 1 (state broadcaster)
- MBC Radio 2 FM (state broadcaster)
- Capital FM
- Power 101 FM (Provides live internet streaming)
- Radio Maria Malawi (Provides 24 hr live internet streaming from Malawi. Currently my fave, because it brings me closer home when I am outside Malawi.)
- Star FM
- Zodiak Radio Station
- Trans-World Radio Malawi
- CFC Radio (Blantyre only)
- African Bible College (ABC) Radio (Lilongwe)
- Joy FM
- Malawi Institute of Journalism (MIJ) FM
I particularly enjoyed the talk shows on MIJ during my rare visits.
Monire monire! Muli uli?
Tobias Kumwenda has started a blog to teach Tumbuka ( via Global Voices):
The mission of this weblog is to teach those people who are not ChiTumbuka speakers located across the world, but have developed passion to learn this language.
A great idea. Keep up the good work!
See also Wikipedia:
The Tumbuka language is a Bantu language which is spoken in parts of Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania.
The language of the Tumbuka people is called chiTumbuka - the ‘chi’ in front of Tumbuka meaning ‘the language of’, similar to ‘ki’ in kiSwahili or ’se’ in seTswana.
The World Almanac (1998) estimates approximately 2,000,000 Tumbuka speakers exist in the aforementioned three countries.
There are substantial differences between the form of Tumbuka spoken in urban areas (which borrows some words from Chichewa/Nyanja) and the “village” or “deep” Tumbuka spoken in villages. The Rumphi variant is often regarded as the most “linguistically pure”, and is sometimes called “real Tumbuka”.
Disclaimer: Coming from Blantyre, my Tumbuka knowledge is non-existent, except for some vocab overlaps with Chichewa, even though I went to college with lots of northern Malawians.
for future reference:
I use Twitter’s direct messages to send out an occasional text message. I’m trying to set up a Twitter account for my family in Blantyre. The idea would be to DM them via Twitter. But somehow, the cell phone authentication is *not* working. (Any ideas?)
As an alternative, I found this page listing services that offer free text messages from a web interface, mostly for Switzerland:
http://www.tiptom.ch/gratis/sms.html
A third alternative is to upload a couple of Euro/$/CHF to my Skype account and text directly from my Skype client. I’ve used this in the past for text messages and voice. Works great.
There’s a CNN TV report on the shortage of qualified medical personnel in Malawi. I zapped into it yesterday. It shows the dire situation at Mulanje District Hospital and in a rural dispensary. They interviewed a volunteer doctor from Uganda, a midwife who works in rural villages, a couple of Malawian doctors that are working in Manchester, UK:
According to the report, at one point in time there were more Malawian doctors in Manchester than in the whole of Malawi.
I’ve seen some hospital wards and I agree that the task is daunting. The wards are overfull. Patients and their guardians often lie on the floor in the corridors, under the beds.
Regular readers of Chiperoni know that I’ve been pointing to various blogs and articles on this topic from time to time. The dire conditions described in the report are realistic.
How to stop the brain drain? This is not an easy topic, cos every employee will - and needs - to look at their personal situation. Although this is not only about money, the salary plays an important role. Cos one salary needs to supports a lot of dependents. As one of the UK-based doctors says in the report, he can support more relatives with the better UK pay. I read somewhere that the amount of money transferred by Western Union back to Africa exceeds the foreign aid provided by the US and the EU (cf Africa: Sending Money Home) and is probably a lot more effective.
I’m against policies that bar qualified Malawians from working in the US or in Europe as suggested in the report. That’s not the way to go forward on this. The better way is to improve the work conditions in Malawi. I believe that many Malawians would consider returning if some of the surrounding conditions would improve. Cos all is not golden in Europe.
In the 70s and 80s, most of Malawi’s doctors were trained in the US and in Europe. They had a hard time adjusting to the conditions they found when they returned back home. Many stayed in the West. In the 90s, medical schools were set up to educate doctors within the country.
Factors that influence a personal decision to emigrate:
- Salary
- Work conditions (i.e. availability of modern equipment, labs and tests, qualification and number of co-workers, quality of management, further training, work load, working hours, holidays)
- Political situation
- Corruption within the workplace and outside
- Merit-based promotion
- Economic situation within the country
- Infrastructure (e.g. frequent power cuts, water supply shortages, very bad roads, no or very expensive telecommunication services)
- Crime rate (e.g. clever guys that steal telephone cables as they are installed and sell them for much less than they are worth, increase in burglary, armed robbery and mugging)
- Availability of good schooling for your children esp. in remote hospitals
- Changes in Malawi family tradition (e.g. the rules that quasi-dictate how and when you need to take of your family relatives encourage some to search for kms of distance)
- …
I studied at the Malawi College of Accountancy in Blantyre and we often discussed the greener pastures of Botswana and beyond.
Some figures I found from 2005:
There are only 100 doctors and 2,000 nurses for Malawi’s 12 million people because many health care workers trained in the country now practice in developed countries, which pay higher salaries. Rich countries also provide better working conditions for doctors, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has added a “heavy burden” to health care on the continent, the Times reports. In addition, many health care workers in Malawi have become sick with HIV/AIDS or have died. Nearly 15% of Malawi’s adult population is HIV-positive. Some hospitals in Malawi have resorted to hiring retired medical workers to fill the gaps, according to the Times. Atta Gbary, the World Health Organization’s Africa adviser on human resources and health, said the shortage of medical workers in Malawi means that when donors offer funds “it is impossible to use them because the people are simply not there to work anymore.” According to Gbary, 23,000 medical workers leave Africa annually and there are only 800,000 medical workers working on the continent currently. Malawian Health Minister Hetherwick Ntaba said the country should require its medical workers to serve several years in the country after completing their training. He also said that foreign governments that employ medical workers from Malawi should compensate the country for the cost of training new doctors and nurses. The United Nations estimates that it costs $100,000 to train a specialist doctor in Africa.
And from May 2007:
A shortage of health workers in Southern African countries is undermining access to antiretroviral drugs in the region, according to a Medecins Sans Frontieres report released on Thursday, the AP/Houston Chronicle reports. According to the AP/Chronicle, the report focused on the conditions in South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique and Lesotho.
The report found that South Africa has 393 nurses and 74 physicians per 100,000 people; Lesotho has 63 nurses and five physicians per 100,000 people; Mozambique has 20 nurses and three physicians per 100,000 people; and Malawi has 56 nurses and two physicians per 100,000 people. According to the report, Africa has increased access to antiretroviral drugs among people living with HIV/AIDS from 100,000 people in 2003 to 1.3 million in 2006. However, the shortage of health workers is preventing further expansion of drug access programs, the report found.
(update)
As Victor rightly points out, the CNN report is very one-sided, esp. regarding the images and the way the sick are portrayed. There are many Malawi doctors and nurses that serve their country conscientiously against all odds.
and Lujeri Tea Estates in an interview with guardian.co.uk:
My favourite hotels are…
Locally run guesthouses. I stay in many around the world, but recently I was in the tea estates of Malawi and stayed at the Satemwa Guesthouse in Thyolo (00 265 1473 256; satemwa.com) and Lujeri Lodge (00 265 8 854 894). It was so beautiful just sitting out on the veranda of these old planters’ houses looking across to Mount Mulanje with the red earth of the land against the vivid green of the tea fields. The guesthouses are almost from another era - basic, but meet all your needs and are quite romantic, with cool marble floors, fans on the ceiling and large beds with mosquito nets.
Source:
Me and my travels: Harriet Lamb, Director of The Fairtrade Foundation | Travel | The Observer
I noticed a new website on Malawi: http://malawiweb.net/
browsing aimlessly thru my Malawi photos…
While googling “porters race” I found this:
Rogue Training Systems, a health and fitness company in Austin, Texas, is giving Malawian runners the chance to run Austin’s AT&T Marathon in February 2008.
Heavy rains are causing the Zambezi and the Shire to flood.
Here’s a BBC report:
The Malawian government is warning people to relocate from flood-prone areas, but many have been reluctant to leave their farms.
Another Malawi blog I’d like to share with you:
Dr Khumbo Kalua writes about his studies and work as a Senior Eye Specialist in Blantyre.
Google Book Search on chiperoni:
The climate is tropical and monsoonal with a wet season (November to May) and a dry season (May to November). The dry season is mostly cool but hot and humid prior to the first rain. Maritime influences ameliorate the dry season in the Shire Highlands with periods of light, misty drizzle, locally known as chiperoni.
The International Herald Tribune writes:
29. MALAWI
Blame Madonna. Safarigoers tended to overlook Malawi, but that has changed since she began her effort to adopt a 1-year-old boy from this tiny African country that lies within the Great Rift Valley. Next July, the luxury lodge Pumulani (www.pumulani.com) is set to open 10 villas on spectacular Lake Malawi, home to rare cichlids and pied kingfishers.
All listed in the NYT