photo: CAFOD/Adrian White
I spent the end of March and the beginning of April in the UK at the invitation of CAFOD to be part of the Put People First campaign during the G20 Summit in London.
When I arrived back in Zambia I was confronted with the news that things were getting more desperate for people. I found that more jobs have been lost, now more than 10,000 in the mining sector alone.
Many more industries are downsizing. The price of the staple food, increased in the month of April 2009. This has made worse the already grave problem of abject poverty in Zambia.
And I have also had a personal tragedy in the family while I was away. I lost my young sister. She died of HIV-related complications. She should still be alive today since she was on ARVs.
But ARVs go hand in hand with good nutrition. My sister could not afford proper daily meals since she was looking after a large extended family. Besides her three children, she was looking after six double orphans that our elder brother left behind.
Her story is commonplace in Zambia. The HIV and AIDS pandemic can be mitigated by people having proper access to medicines and food. Both have become bigger problems in the current world economic crisis.
It is such situations that prompt those of us in civil society to redouble our efforts to do more advocacy work, asking our governments, in Africa, not only to be accountable to the people, but to prioritise issues of poverty and unemployment in their economic policy frameworks.
Our governments, though, are also limited in their capacity to cope with the severe effects of the global economic crisis. This is where the rich countries come in. They should remain committed to their aid promises.
For countries like as Zambian and other poor countries, aid is a precious lifeline to ensure that more people do not slide further into extreme poverty.
Posted by Fr Joe Komakoma
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