During the winter months of 2010, the Africa Reporting class traveled to various countries in sub-Saharan Africa and while traveling each student focused on a specific topic. The topics ranged from coffee manufacturing to beer brewing. Each photograph displayed shows what each student saw during their travels.

photo taken by Neelima Mahajan who traveled to Uganda

Yowana Simuya, a coffee farmer in the Nashanne village in Bududa district is pointing to his farm. Two-thirds of his farm has been devastated due to a landslide that occurred in August. He now lives in fear because there is a huge crack on what’s left of his farm and another heavy rain could easily devastate his entire land. The Bududa district has been experiencing terrible landslides since last year and several farmers lost their lives, as well as their farms.

photo taken by Paige Ricks who traveled to Uganda

In the United States, many relate beer drinking as a national pastime: A thing to do while watching Monday night football or barbecuing on the Forth of July. But, in Southern Uganda, men and women brew and drink beer to cure infectious diseases and lower malnutrition rates. Photographed is ajon, the traditional beer beverage in the Moda village of Kumi.

photo taken by Mwendalubi Maumbi who traveled to Kenya

In addition to erratic rain, pastoral farmers in Kenya have to deal the scarcity of land required to allow cattle to graze in the open. Above, Lawrence Njuguna Munyua, a successful dairy farmer, demonstrates a technique of planting Narpia Grass, used for fodder, for optimum yields.

photo taken by Jerome Hubbard who traveled to Uganda

Uganda is one of the largest producers of coffee in sub-Saharan Africa. The countries high altitude, high rainfall and mild climate are suited conditions for growing coffee. Above is a photo of a women workers picking out healthy coffee beans in a coffee factory in Kampala, the country’s capital.

multimedia project by Martin Ricard
The Online News Association (ONA) awarded Ricard’s project as the winner of “Best Multimedia Feature Presentation,” under the student category.

To view this project, visit Martin Ricard’s personal Website.

Richard Shermer is a 60 year-old consultant from Fresno, California who spent most of his life in the Bay Area and Central Valley. Besides being a father of four and a soccer fan, Shermer splits his time between his work in real estate development  and his long lasting passion, photography.

It was that passion that took him to Cuba in 2003, and to Africa a few years after that. During a photographic safari in Tanzania in 2005, he met a group of media professionals and photographers involved in charity projects. It was then that Shermer decided to give up photographing wildlife in Africa’s savannahs. He followed the group to the slums of Kampala, Uganda, where he photographed meager living conditions.  The country was in its final days of a 22-year civil war that displaced more than 1.6 million people and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

After visiting the slums in Kampala, he went to the Gulu district in Northern Uganda, one of the most affected regions during the war. There he met a young Acholi woman who took him to see the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps. For a middle class man from California, the IDP camps were a shocking and disturbing experience.

“Most children in the IDP camps were orphans”,  Shermer said. “I saw young boys making bricks and the red earth on their skins looked like blood to me. I was so startled that I had to do something”. The boys told him that they were working to get money for paying school fees.

Now, five years later, Shermer is the CEO of an American non-governmental organization Today’s Children, Africa’s Future (TCAF) that operates in Northern Uganda. As with most NGOs around the world, TCAF has a cause that seems noble: education. His NGO focuses on child sponsorship through a $40 monthly donation that pays for school fees, uniforms, books and supplies.

“I feel good about helping children and it seemed like the natural thing to do when I saw what was going on in Northern Uganda,” Shermer said. In April, TCAF extended its activities to a new project involving water pumps in rural areas. The idea is to sell pumps to small farmers. Each piece of equipment may be sold for approximately $350 and and Shermer said that part of the revenue will be invested in the children’s education project.

However, the reality is much less edifying. Officially, TCAF was founded almost two years ago, when the charity organization got its 501(c) (3) status. This certification exempts 28 types of nonprofit organizations from certain federal incomes taxes. It also implies that all donations are fully tax deductible, meaning that the money that originally comes from donors’ pockets will be paid, ultimately, by Washington.

“I hate to say this but giving money reduces the amount of money that goes to the federal government,” Shermer said.

Even with the deduction incentive, it has not been easy for TCAF to gather donors. Actually, the NGO based in Fresno has about 24 volunteers (20 of them students) and even fewer donors (currently 13). Shermer has personally sponsored 10 children and one of his granddaughters, Adrianna, pays the school fees for one Ugandan girl. The economic downturn has been pointed to as the reason for the shortage of donors. According to the Giving USA 2010, the annual report published by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, the total giving for 2009 is estimated to be $ 303.7 billion – a decline of 3.6 percent compared with 2008.

There is also extreme competition for charity money. In the United States, more than 1.2 million organizations are registered under section 501(c)(3). On the IRS website there are 95 nonprofit  associations in the United States  related to Ugandan issues alone. They are all exempt from federal income taxes – including Today’s Children, Africa’s Future. In one way or another, they are fighting for the same donors: Americans that want to help Ugandan people. Not to mention that there is an intense charity activity around the African continent – with results much lower than expected. The last United Nations’ report listed 3,776 NGOs in 2004, operating in Africa, that’s twice the number of NGOs since 1999.

“I have no experience running an NGO, but I know a lot about business. After my first visit to Africa, I felt I could use my skills and abilities to make important changes in the world,” Shermer said. He believes that his NGO will sponsor 100 kids in the next year. And now his goal is to make TCAF more appealing to donors. The website is being redesigned by a group of seven students from Santa Clara University. A more interesting website could attract potential donors and trigger generosity by what economists call “warm glow” or the sense of self-satisfaction that can stimulate people to give money to strangers.

“Showing pictures of kids and their personal stories is an effective way of inducing people to give more money,” said Clair Null, Ph.D in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor at Emory University. She attempts to analyze the competing influences of rational investment and good feeling in the paper: Warm glow, information, and inefficient charitable giving.

“Donors don’t make their gifts only based on social benefits. There is something else that matters to them and I interpreted it as the warm glow,” Null said.

Shermer’s efforts in getting more donors and financial independence for his NGO has left him no time to go to Africa in the past 14 months. Ideally he would like be able to visit the TCAF activities in Uganda every three months. For now, Shermer counts on his local friends to help watch over the project.

One thing might be true: his work may make difference in the lives of those 24 children that have been supported by TCAF.  But the larger truth is that tens of thousands of children will still go without an education in Northern Uganda this year — despite his efforts.

Maybe, goodwill and hard work aren’t enough.

story by Fabiane Stefano

Most of the residents here are poor, unskilled migrants from Senegal’s rural regions – agricultural people who fled the toil and diminished returns of the farm fields during periods of prolonged drought for the promise of a new life in the city. But once here, like so many of Dakar’s nearly three million residents, they’ve struggled to find stable sources of income and food.

A string of severe floods in recent years has made life in Diammaguen and areas like it even more unbearable. Now, a new generation must decide whether to stay and struggle in the city or return to the agricultural lives they left behind.

After the Floods from Matt Durning on Vimeo.

Audio Recording:
Madeleine Bair

Translation:
Elisabeth-Laure Njipwo

Produced, Shot, and Edited by:
Matt Durning

As the last farmers of Dakar are pushed to the margins, politicians and academics urge them to move further outside the city, to the Niayes Valley, where, they say, land is more fertile and less in demand. But even here, more than an hour’s drive from Dakar’s urban center, there is a frantic land grab taking place that threatens not only the livelihood of farmers like Papa Gueye but the food security of an entire nation.

Land Grab in the Niayes from Matt Durning on Vimeo.

Audio Recording:
Madeleine Bair

Translation:
Elisabeth-Laure Njipwo

Produced, Shot, and Edited by:
Matt Durning

story by Noemie Bisserbe

These boll worms — a major pest in cotton farming — are, however, of an unusual kind. They come from a small rearing facility in Phoenix, Arizona, where they have been irradiated to become sterile. As they are released in the environment, they will mate with the native population and produce eggs. But, the eggs will not hatch.

The Pink Boll worm Program — an aggressive trapping program to overwhelm native insect populations — is one of the most successful and longest running area wide integrated pest control programs in the world. For the past three decades, the program has allowed local cotton growers to manage the pest without the use of pesticides. This year, farmers believe that the pink boll worms have finally been completely eradicated from the San Joaquin Valley. “So far this season, no native moths have been identified in the valley’s cotton fields,” says Robert Hutmacher, director of the University of California’s West Side Research and Extension Center, in Shafter. “The program has been a great success and this is why cotton farmers in California have such high yields,” he adds.
Cotton production in California is of 2 to 2.5 million bales per year from approximately 700,000 to 800,000 acres of land. That’s five to eight percent of total US cotton plantings, but about 10 to 14 percent of the country’s total yearly production.

The San Joaquin Valley is also particularly well suited for cottons that are difficult to grow, explains Hutmacher. The region is well known for its Upland Acala cotton variety, that has very strong, long fibers, though California is also the country’s largest Pima cotton growing area.

Monsanto’s genetically engineered cotton, Bollgard, that is genetically engineered to resist pink bollworm and has been widely adopted in big cotton producing countries like South Africa, India and China, is not planted in California. “There is no use for it in the State,” says Hutmacher. California’s pink bollworm program could provide a viable template for developing countries where the high input costs associated to genetically modified crops, are hurting small farmers.

photo: Robert Hutmacher, director of the University of California’s West Side Research and Extension Center

This story originally aired on Living on Earth, a weekly environmental news and information program distributed by Public Radio International.

Weaving Dreams: Tracing Cotton and Fashion in Africa from Amanda Martinez on Vimeo.

A grass that grows as tall as a farmer and is topped with a bushel of golden grains, sorghum is among the world’s most important cereals. The crop was domesticated in Ethiopia thousands of years ago and disbursed through African and Asian trade routes to become a staple of many diets throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

More recently, though, sorghum’s importance has wilted under global pressures and competition. Beginning with colonial authorities who brought their favored crops to Africa, and continuing with cheap foreign imports into African markets, and current agricultural research funded by Western nations, indigenous grains have lost their luster in the food production and dietary customs of Africa.

Gebisa Ejeta, a Purdue plant geneticist, has developed strains of the grain sorghum that have changed the lives of many farmers in Africa. The sorghum varieties are resistant to drought and a parasitic weed called striga. (Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell)

But if sorghum is, as one book coined it, a “lost crop of Africa,” the work of scientist Gebisa Ejeta has helped resurrect the grain from obscurity and obsoletion. Ejeta grew up in rural Ethiopia, and when his studies led him to the agronomy department of Purdue University, the standout student concentrated his research on the staple of his homeland. For two decades the plant breeder not only developed high-yielding sorghum hybrids that could resist the natural challenges of the African landscapes, but, as Borlaug did his semi-dwarf wheat varieties, Ejeta took his seeds to the fields of East African farmers, and oversaw the planting of one million acres of his variety on Sudanese farms.

This month, at the annual World Food Prize conference in Des Moines, Iowa, the organization founded by Norman Borlaug granted Gebisa Ejeta with its prestigious $250,000 award

After receiving the prize, Ejeta spoke with the Africa Reporting Project’s Madeleine Bair about the bias of academic and commercial investment toward Western crops.

ARP: African indigenous crops like sorghum have generally been underfunded by research organizations and commercial interests, your research being a notable exception. Does this concern you?

Ejeta: I’m concerned that we don’t have a lot of investment in sorghum research. I’m concerned that there aren’t market opportunities for crops such as sorghum. But I’m not against the development of these other crops, because they are equally important. One cannot rely only on native crops, and we need to be available to use these other crops as well. But what we need to be working on is to develop the facilities for the important crops, for native crops like sorghum and others.

ARP: Who is working on that?

Ejeta: We are all working on that. But the problem is getting support has been very difficult. So we are hoping that with the new resurgence of interest, more and more opportunities will be there to address the problems of these indigenous crops.

ARP: Why is it difficult to get support for native crops?

Ejeta: I think it’s just a history in the past that has been the problem. Many of these donor agencies want to cover crops that are important in their homelands as well because there is a mutual benefit that comes out of discoveries that are made. But that’s why we need to push (the idea) that investments in indigenous crops are equally important because if we don’t do that then there will be sectors of our society would be left unattended for. The positive aspect I want to do is not take away from the developments in others, but try to bring these indigenous crops to that level as well.