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GUINEA-BISSAU: Cholera epidemic not yet peaked

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:04:14 GMT

Saturday, November 22, 2008

DAKAR Monday, October 13, 2008 (IRIN) - DAKAR, 13 October 2008 (IRIN) - The cholera epidemic is still out of control across Guinea-Bissau, with the number of cases doubling in the past three weeks, bringing the total number of people stricken to 10,476 as of 9 October. There have been 312 new infections in the past two days, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and 181 people have died from the disease. “The epidemic is not under control. I don’t want to be alarmist, but we haven’t...

Source: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=80887

GUINEA-BISSAU-SENEGAL: Child trafficking on the decline say local authorities

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:04:14 GMT

Saturday, November 22, 2008

BISSAU Wednesday, October 15, 2008 (IRIN) - Child trafficking from Guinea-Bissau to Senegal is on the decline, partly due to better collaboration among local residents, civil society groups and government, local authorities said. Government officials and aid workers say more and more sectors are on the watch for suspicious movement of children. “Now a whole new set of actors are involved who weren’t in the past – border police, governors, even truck-drivers unions, and we receive information...

Source: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=80928

GUINEA-BISSAU: Cautious optimism ahead of parliamentary poll

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:04:13 GMT

Saturday, November 22, 2008

BISSAU Saturday, November 15, 2008 (IRIN) - UN and other international observers say they are cautiously optimistic ahead of Guinea-Bissau’s parliamentary elections set for 16 November, while some citizens fear violence in the country long plagued by unrest. The breakdown of a national stability pact only four months ago -- followed by the dissolution of parliament -- sparked concern that the political situation might be too fragile for elections....

Source: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=81483

Guinea-Bissau: High hopes for new government

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:36:52 GMT

Saturday, November 22, 2008

The African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde or PAIGC has won a majority in Guinea-Bissau’s parliamentary elections, which international observers say mark just the first of many complicated steps for restoring stability in the country.

Source: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81614

Guinea-Bissau: Cholera contained but source still unknown

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:19:16 GMT

Thursday, November 20, 2008

After more than six months of battling cholera in Guinea-Bissau the epidemic is now under control health officials say, though they admit they have not identified its root causes or put in place measures to prevent future outbreaks.

Source: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81560

GUINEA-BISSAU: Cautious optimism ahead of parliamentary poll

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 09:20:47 GMT

Saturday, November 15, 2008

UN and other international observers say they are cautiously optimistic ahead of Guinea-Bissau’s parliamentary elections set for 16 November, while some citizens fear violence in the country long plagued by unrest.

The breakdown of a national stability pact only four months ago -- followed by the dissolution of parliament -- sparked concern that the political situation might be too fragile for elections.

Shola Omoregie, special representative to the UN Secretary General and head of the UN Peacebuilding Support Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNOGBIS), told IRIN he hopes for an orderly vote. “We have appealed to political parties to maintain peace and security and if, after the ballot, the parties have a complaint, to go through the normal channels and not to take the law into their own hands.”

Up to 150 observers from the European Union (EU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and UN Office for West Africa (UNOWA) will monitor the elections, with the national independent electoral commission collating the results.

The EU, UNOGBIS, UN Development Programme and the UK government have helped fund extra police units at polling stations and have run civic education campaigns to encourage people to vote.

A July 2008 report by the International Crisis Group identified several risks to Guinea-Bissau’s stability including the military’s stronghold over politics, a tendency for the individual agendas of the political elite to dictate policy, and the widening net of criminal networks that have turned the country into a drug-trafficking hub.

Corruption concerns

Ex-President Koumba Yala, president of the opposition Party for Social Reform (PRS), has accused President Joao Bernardo Vieira of buying votes in favour of the Republican Party for Independence and Development, led by Vieira's former prime minister, Aristide Gomes.

One election monitor who wished to remain anonymous told IRIN that such assertions could not be substantiated.

Bissau-based journalist, Fernando Nhaga, told IRIN most political parties in recent weeks have issued public statements against the use of drug money to finance electoral campaigns and buy political favour.

Some residents of the capital Bissau hold out little hope for a transparent election. Sira Mane, a housekeeper, told IRIN: “I don’t even know who to choose anymore to lead this country. All the moreso because all of Guinea-Bissau’s politicians are corrupt. The same ones leave power and then come back into power."

Guinea-Bissau ranked in the bottom 20 of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2008 study measuring perceptions of corruption.

Unrest fears

In March 2007 the three leading political parties -- the PRS, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), and the United Social Democratic Party (PUSD) -- signed a power-sharing pact, which many hoped would bring stability. But in July 2008 the PAIGC pulled out of the agreement.

President Vieira dissolved parliament on 5 August replacing Prime Minister Martinho Ndafa Cabi of the PAIGC with Carlos Correia.

Some citizens fear the upcoming elections could lead to violence in the capital.

Marta Lopez, who lives in Bissau, said: “I’m scared that there’ll be more clashes. That’s why I’ve already taken my children to Bula, 30km north of Bissau, just in case.”

In the past elections in Guinea-Bissau have been marred by deadly clashes.

The UN mission's Omoregie said of the 16 November poll: "We’re not worried about violence or tension but we still have to be on the alert.”

Compromise

Many say whatever the outcome of the parliamentary election, the country needs political compromise. Former agriculture minister, Mamadou Badji, said: “The party which governs the country after the 16 November ballot will have to form another political coalition.”

Journalist Nhaga said the country cannot afford to have political partnerships fail again. “Those in charge must prove they are politically and institutionally mature to avoid another political crisis which will leave this country totally adrift.”

The head of the UN in Guinea-Bissau, Giuseppina Mazza, warned that even if the elections are a success, they are but the first step in a long process. "Elections should not be seen as isolated events…Once elections are over we have to look at what worked and what didn’t, and look towards the presidential elections in 2010. The democratic process is a long-term job.”

IRIN

Guinea Bissau: Aid for isolated north-west

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:56:48 GMT

Friday, November 14, 2008

Working with the Red Cross Society of Guinea-Bissau, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has begun a series of aid distributions near São Domingos in the north-west of the country.

In an operation to follow up Red Cross distributions of food aid last May to 20,000 people in the same area, the most vulnerable of those communities will be supplied with rice huskers, groundnut grinders, fishing nets, motor boats and bicycles in the coming weeks.

This isolated part of Guinea-Bissau, which is temporary home to some 8,000 Senegalese refugees from Casamance, faces numerous difficulties such as weak infrastructure. It has also been hard hit by rising food prices.

The latest operation is intended to help kickstart economic activity in the area and relieve its isolation. "What we're trying to do is give the poorest sectors of the population a long-term boost," explained Maurice Grundbacher, head of the ICRC's Ziguinchor sub-delegation in Casamance. "Our hope is that they will achieve self-sufficiency in terms of food."

The current operation is being coordinated by the Ziguinchor sub-delegation.

International Committee of the Red Cross

Stop child trafficking: one of the main objectives of UNICEF in Guinea Bissau

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:25:08 GMT

Thursday, October 23, 2008

According to studies carried out in 2003 in Senegal, most of the 120,000 children begging in the street of Dakar (Senegal) were from Guinea Bissau.
To date, child trafficking continues across the very porous border between Senegal and Guinea Bissau. Recent data from the Guinea Bissau border police shows that 104 children have been rescued from the traffickers in recent months, while being smuggled across the border.
UNICEF Bissau is working closely with the government and other partners, providing technical and financial support, to fight child trafficking in Guinea Bissau.

The local NGO SOS Talibe and border police in the east of the country estimate that about 200 children are trafficked every month to Senegal under the pretext of accompanying them to follow religious education. But once in Senegal, the reality turns out to be very different.
“Each child talibe is forced to bring to the teacher 300-500 francs a day,” says one rescued child. “And this is very difficult to do, those who don’t do it are tortured.”

There are also reports that many children from Guinea Bissau are seasonally trafficked to Senegal to work in cotton plantations. In most cases, parents believe that their children will receive a better religious education, but instead they are exploited for their labour.
AMIC, another local NGO involved in family reunification of trafficked children, estimates that approximately 98 per cent of the trafficked children are boys.

UNICEF is providing support to the Government of Guinea Bissau and 80 Border and Immigration Police have recently been trained on human rights principles, international and local legislation and other issues linked to child trafficking, including how to detect and stop child traffickers.
UNICEF is also supporting AMIC and SOS Talibe with institutional reinforcement and equipment, “So that they can more adequately and effectively provide assistance to children who are rescued during the process of family reunification, but to also conduct prevention activities in affected communities”, says Silvia Luciani, UNICEF Representative in Guinea Bissau.

Guinea Bissau has not yet adopted a law against child trafficking, and any progress in this area will have to wait until a new Parliament is elected after the previous one was dissolved in August 2008. UNICEF is also supporting cooperation between the governments of Guinea Bissau and Senegal to better tackle this issue. Progress in this area will resume once a new government is in place after the 16th of November legislative election.
In the beginning of 2009, UNICEF will also work with the Government to conduct an in depth study on child trafficking in Guinea Bissau.

UNICEF

GUINEA-BISSAU-SENEGAL: Child trafficking on the decline say local authorities

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:23:04 GMT

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Child trafficking from Guinea-Bissau to Senegal is on the decline, partly due to better collaboration among local residents, civil society groups and government, local authorities said.

Government officials and aid workers say more and more sectors are on the watch for suspicious movement of children.

“Now a whole new set of actors are involved who weren’t in the past – border police, governors, even truck-drivers unions, and we receive information from surveillance committees every two to three weeks about what is going on,” Karyna Gomes, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesperson in Bissau, told IRIN.

Abdoulaye Diallo, governor of the Guinea-Bissau town of Bafata 60km from the border, said: “We had 312 children intercepted at the Guinea-Bissau-Senegal border near Bafata in 2007 and just 111 so far in 2008.” This is after improved surveillance systems had been set up, he said.

Most of the intercepted children were between the ages of six and 10, according to Diallo.

An NGO from the region says it has seen a drop as well. André Sirro of the non-profit organisation SOS Talibé – which runs a welcome centre for intercepted children in Bafata – said the numbers were slightly lower but still dropping. “We have a 45% drop in cases since 2007,” he told IRIN.

Why the decrease

Diallo said community village chiefs, the governors of Kolda and Bafata on the Senegal and Guinea-Bissau sides of the border respectively, and border police from both countries, have set up surveillance committees that work with local authorities to report suspected transport of children crossing into Senegal.

The committees are supported by UNICEF and the NGO Plan International, both of which raise awareness of the trafficking phenomenon among police, communities, religious leaders and civil authorities.

Once detected, many of the children are brought to SOS Talibé’s welcome centres in Bafata and Gabu, another Guinea-Bissauan town, where they wait to be reunited with their families. “We identify the children, give them medical attention if they need it, and find their families. The families almost always take the children back – there was only one case when they didn’t,” Sirro told IRIN.

Why trafficked to Senegal

Government and aid workers closely following child trafficking say most of the children crossing the border are being sent to Senegal to become ‘talibés’ or followers of a religious leader – a marabout – to whom families send their children for learning the Koran.

A monitoring and evaluation specialist with the Dakar-based NGO Tostan, Cody Donahue, estimates there are approximately 120,000 talibés on the streets of Senegal’s cities, most of whom spend hours each day begging for money to pass on to their marabout.

Bafata Governor Diallo estimates that 85 percent of Talibé children in Senegal come from Guinea-Bissau, though this figure could not be confirmed.

The children are mostly trafficked to become talibés though many are also sent to work on the cotton fields of southern Senegal, and some become domestic labourers or sex workers, according to Sirro.

“Families tend to think their children are better off in Koranic schools in Senegal than in Guinea-Bissau,” explained Sirro.

Most of them travel from during the period of June to October, said Tostan’s Donahue.

Once children are separated from their families “they have only a small chance of seeing their parents again,” Donahue said. “Often they are so young that they don’t recognise them, and the younger ones tend not to know the name of their home village.”

Challenges

Sirro says the biggest difficulty NGOs face, other than working on a shoestring budget, is getting religious leaders, or Imams, on board. “Many religious groups in Bafata are angry that we are repatriating children and don’t want it to continue,” he said. “They think these problems should be left with religious groups to work out instead.”

“We need to do more with them to get them on board,” he added.

Plan International is working with marabouts to develop alternative Koranic schools in the regions of Bafata, Contuboel, Cossa and Ganadou in Guinea-Bissau, to encourage families to keep their children in-country.

Imam Bassirou Ndiaye, of the Pefine mosque in Bissau, told IRIN: “The teachings of Islam have never recommended that small children be sent by their parents to Koranic schools, nor have they encouraged the practice of marabouts mistreating and exploiting children.”

He continued, “These marabouts are not turning to Islam to meet their financial and food needs. Child trafficking in this situation is a way to give free rein to begging.”

Trafficking or migration

For Pierre Ferry, regional child protection specialist at UNICEF in Dakar, one of the biggest obstacles is identifying the children in the first place. “Lots of these children are not trafficking victims – they are just migrating, so to come up with exact numbers and identify trafficked children is a big challenge for now.”

“I have no idea if the numbers [of children trafficked between Guinea-Bissau and Senegal] are going down,” he added.

UNICEF is working with the International Labour Organization, Save the Children, Plan International and Terre des Hommes to come up with a better sense of which prevention strategies are effective and why.

For Sirro, the next step is to broaden their prevention work to a national level. Thus far, they have had only sporadic support from the Ministry of Women and Children in Bissau, but this is beginning to change. “This is important”, he said. “The central government has to engage in tracing children if we’re going to stamp it out across the country.”

IRIN

GUINEA-BISSAU: Cholera epidemic not yet peaked

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:20:12 GMT

Monday, October 13, 2008

The cholera epidemic is still out of control across Guinea-Bissau, with the number of cases doubling in the past three weeks, bringing the total number of people stricken to 10,476 as of 9 October.

There have been 312 new infections in the past two days, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and 181 people have died from the disease.

“The epidemic is not under control. I don’t want to be alarmist, but we haven’t reached the peak and there are still new cases every day,” Daniel Remartinez, emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Spain, told IRIN from the capital Bissau.

At 7,143, Bissau still has the highest number of cases, followed by Biombo in western Guinea-Bissau with 1,405 cases, and the Bijagos islands, 60km off the coast of the capital, with 441 infections – most of the Bijagos infections contracted in the past few weeks, according to Agostino Betunda, co-director of the Centre for Epidemiology in Bissau.

One in 10 people stricken by cholera are dying from it in the region of Quinara, which neighbours the capital, and one in nine in Bafata in central Guinea-Bissau, due in part to a lack of available treatment, according to Betunda.

MSF is providing treatment in hospitals and health clinics in Bissau, Oio and Biombo regions.

Source found

Epidemiologists in Bissau have traced the first case of cholera to an island in the southern region of Tombali.

“Our research points to Guinean fishermen living in encampments on the island of Campeane near the Guinean border,” Betunda said, adding that he believes the source of the epidemic is related to recent cases of cholera in Guinea. About 40 cases were reported in Guinea in May, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

“When there are cases in Guinea Conakry, often we have cases here,” said Sylvana Nzirorera, UNICEF deputy representative in Guinea-Bissau.

“The epidemic in Guinea was contained very quickly because the government response was very organised,” she said.

“There are no good sources of water on the island, so people cross the river to look for water. From there, it continued to proliferate throughout the region,” the epidemiology centre’s Betunda said.

Hygiene

Cholera is a recurring problem in Guinea-Bissau, particularly during the rainy months from June to October. A 2005 epidemic killed 400 people and infected over 25,000.

“We must look into the reasons why the country always has outbreaks. It is about lack of water infrastructure, but hygiene practices are also a major cause,” said UNICEF’s Nzirorera.

Nzirorera noted that under a third of Guinea-Bissauans believe that washing their hands will protect them from waterborne diseases like cholera. “This is a major problem,” she said, “Even people who have water do not wash their hands systematically, and those that do, do not use soap.”

UNICEF has put out radio announcements encouraging people to wash their hands regularly throughout the day. A UNICEF report investigating the causes of poor hygiene found that cultural practices play a role. “There is a saying [among some groups] that when a kid has dirty hands, he grows stronger,” said Nzirorera.

The UNICEF report also found that stigma surrounding the disease contributes significantly to prevention efforts.

“Most people in villages think cholera is a shameful disease so they hide it,” Nzirorera explains. “People are starting to link cholera with poor hygiene and they don’t want to be seen as dirty.”

Many people die at home or delay seeking treatment because they are ashamed to admit to the disease, she said.

End in sight

MSF’s Remartinez said the number of infections is expected to peak in the coming weeks, though he said it will be months before the epidemic is over.

“It is difficult to say how many cases we will have at the end. But it will not be over with the end of the rainy season. It will last for some time – probably into November or December,” he told IRIN.

Nzirorera was more optimistic. “The good news today is that Tombali region has not recorded any cases of cholera in the last four days,” she said. “With the rains almost over, we could start seeing the end of the nightmare soon.”

IRIN