How do you feed your family when you are living in one of the world’s poorest nations? Where every home you know has young wage earning population infected by HIV? And where every day a child loses one or both her parents to AIDs? This is the picture of the East African nation of Malawi. This small, land-locked and densely populated country which is blessed with the natural beauty of the Grand Rift Valley, Lake Nyasa, and Nyika Uplands, is today in the midst of an AIDs scourge. Around 30 percent of the population of Malawi are HIV positive and it is home to 700,000 AIDs orphans.
Malawi
But that is not all. With one in five adults infected with the dreaded HIV/AIDS, a disease that has no vaccine or cure, this country is also struggling with a food security crisis. The famine which began in 2002 has in its grip over 5 million of its 12.1 million population. Even today 90 per cent of the population survive on subsistence rain dependent agriculture and the mean per capita income is less than $1 a day.
The nation faces deteriorating infrastructure, poor access to electricity, water, and communications, medical treatment, and low life expectancy - 36.5 years - the Human Development Indicators (HDI) speak for themselves. Yet from this bleak environment comes a success story. The Malaysia based non-profit WorldFish Centre is running a project that assists Malawian families affected by AIDs and poverty to set up tiny fish farms.
With the sum of just $100 per family WorldFish enabled the construction of a small rain-fed ponds stocked with juvenile fish. Once the fish grow and reproduce, the ponds become a source of food for the families. They also provide livelihood assistance with less labour than subsistence farming. This is important as many families to benefit from this scheme are made up of AIDs orphans and their grandparents.
To make this operation more sustainable, the fish farms are being twinned with kitchen gardens. Farmers are encouraged to use farm waste and crop by-products to feed their fish, while growing more vegetables using pond sediment as fertilizer. A small fish farm of 200 square meters stocked with fish such as tilapia, can produce between 60 and 90 kg fish annually. In Malawi village markets, a kg of fish often sells for $2. As a result around 1200 participating families have doubled their income while improving their diet.
Fresh Fish
The director general of WorldFish Stephen Hall observed:
These small fish points offer tremendous benefits to struggling farming families in rural Africa whose many challenges have been greatly compounded by AIDS’.
This scheme is likely to be expanded to 26,000 households in other African nations including Mozambique and Zambia. Daniel Jamu, the regional director for WorldFish in eastern and southern Africa said:
We hope to reach this goal within 2 to 3 years. We have also received requests for information from as far as Nigeria.
So long as there is no vaccine or cure for HIV/AIDs, and the poor continued to be overlooked by the medical establishment which can assist in both preventing and controlling this disease, innovative arrangements as those practised by WorldFish appear to be the only hope for the young of nations like Malawi. WorldFish is backed by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and World Vision, an aid group.
Read: Reuters
Image 1: Wikipedia
Image 2: Wikimedia
