A Fairer Education in Africa

Education is not a finite resource like drugs or energy, it’s self-perpetuating. It’s also empowering; enabling people to take control of their lives and have more say in how things are run. Education programmes are popular with charities and governments, but as with a lot of development, there’s devil in the detail.

Particular devils that are widely overlooked are the obstacles that girls face in getting to and staying in school. Money is increasingly there for building schools and improving teaching, but not enough attention is being paid to how gender remains a major factor in determining who actually gets access to it.

One organisation dedicated to rebalancing these injustices is Pathways Togo (www.pathwaystogo.org). Since its founding in 2010, Pathways Togo has been building more and more support for girls and young women to get a high school and university education through scholarships, mentoring and workshops.

The young women who have earned scholarships with Pathways Togo have overcome many of the obstacles typical of girls struggling to get an education in rural Africa. High on the list is pressure to marry young through arranged and often polygamous marriages. Furthermore early pregnancies, lack of access to sanitary products, and personal safety and health issues make attending school and studying at home impossible for many girls. Domestic duties also limit girls’ time to attend schools; many are expected to do childcare and work in family farms and businesses.

Paying for school is also a serious challenge for many students. Where boys remain priorities in families, girls will often have to depend on brewing and selling alcohol, moving away from home, and selling street food in order to support themselves and continue their education.

Others have had more support from within their communities, with many families investing a great deal in their children’s education. One young woman had narrowly escaped an arranged marriage at age 11, and with support from her sister had been able to earn enough money to continue through school, earn a scholarship from Pathways Togo and eventually progress to university.

Many of the young women Pathways Togo has worked with have felt that the presence of strong female role models has made a great difference to their lives and those around them. While these are undoubtedly signs of progress, the work still to be done is vast.

The support of volunteers who can raise funds for scholarships, and help provide training and workshops for girls and young women is what keep organisations like Pathways Togo doing what they do. Governments and international organistions are investing heavily in education, but without this crucial work to address the gender gap in education, more education investment risks exacerbating the gender gap in wider society.

The Egyptian Twitter Revolution?

Much has been written about social media’s role in the Arab spring. Few but the most hardline technodeterminists genuinely believe the existence of Twitter, Facebook and the like are solely responsible for the mass uprisings.

However,  a view persists that these tools played a fundamental role. Several news sources, the BBC and Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) among them, proclaimed social media’s impact in Tunisia’s so-called Jasmine revolution.

Let’s look at a couple of facts:

- Twitter activity abou the Jasmine uprising peaked on 15th January 2011 - the day after Ben Ali was deposed and a full three weeks after the protests began. The peak broadly correlates with Western Media’s interest in the Tunisian uprising. Stats here.

- The Sidibouzid hashtag that CPJ flags up as being critical in the revolution was only created on 27th December 2010, ten days after Mohammed Bouazizi set fire to himself and the day the protests reached the capital, Tunis.

Both these facts suggest there was no Twitter revolution in Tunisia. It was utilised primarily as a broadcast medium for westerners to follow events.

But what about Facebook?

This is rather more difficult to assess as Facebook does not make its data public. Tangential evidence suggests Facebook did play a significant part.

In 2008 there was another uprising in Tunisia in the mining town of Gafsa. Causes were similar - lack of employment and frustration at the corrupt regime. With an election pending Ben Ali took no chances, shutting down Facebook and sending in his forces. And the strategy worked. Ben Ali crushed the uprising and went on to win the election.

So what was the key difference?

In 2008 there were 28,000 Facebook users in Tunisia; in 2010 the were 2 million. By shutting down Facebook in 2010 Ben Ali risked politicising a fifth of his population, many of whom may have been apolitical to that point. However, by allowing users to post emotive videos, share links and formulate strategy online he allowed what he sought to avoid; apolitical citizens being politicised.

The sheer volume of Facebook users put Ben Ali in an impossible position. And this may indeed be social media’s strength - its latent potentiality. The vast majority of content being passed around on social media is in no way political but the dense interconnectivity of social media facilitates means messages can and do spread quickly if the offline environment creates the appetite for protest.

David Cameron’s call to ban social media during riots fell into the same trap. Such a move would irritate people who previously had no reason to protest, likely swelling the numbers involved in any uprising. In this sense, social media’s stength may well be in its numbers.

Hi, I’m Megan, a new media activist volunteer for People  & Planet - I will be sharing my thoughts,  ideas and experiences with you for the next year! At the moment I am president of Cardiff Uni’s People and Planet society and hoping to create some fun and magic for the newbies in September, as well as keeping the rest of the UK up to date on the Buy Right campaign.

Buy Right for Workers Rights

I am quite a passionate person and therefore will be exposing my anger or delight at the way the world is evolving. I would call myself a feminist, green human rights activist who is also very focused on having fun, therefore I hope to fit in well in the happiness of national People & Planet. Today, upon my first day of training, I learnt about the successes of People & Planet since 1968 and felt so proud to become part of such a productive and worthwhile organisation, where hopefully I can make a small impact myself

Since singing at a Fairtrade event at 14 I have felt determined to make human rights a priority, especially when thinking about the tiny things I can do to help. Therefore I will be spreading the word and mobilising students to put pressure on their university to join the Workers Rights Consortium, just as Sheffield are about to, and making sure that all the People & Planet’s across the country are making the most of Fairtrade Fortnight in February.

However I will probably be letting out some anger, perhaps just against statements made on Question Time by ignorant right wing individuals or expressing my constant disbelief at people who are so apathetic about climate change and human rights issues - in a hope that one individual, one day, might read my blog and start thinking differently and make a small change of their own.

Here’s to a year full of hope and ambition with my fellow media activists at People & Planet

Cheers!

Hey guys,

This is Katie Luxton putting my sustainably sourced and ethically made stamp on my first blog post. My Monday this week started out as usual - dodging bombs and using human shields.

Yes, I am a female James Bond and I plan to shake up and stir the cocktail of environmentalists who are as eager as I am to help make life a few ‘Degrees Cooler’.

In case you were wondering, I am of course referring to the current environmental campaign for Transition Universities at People & Planet. The bomb dodging was apart of the People & Planet Volunteer Media Activist training I have just undertaken. My use of a human shield was a warm up exercise to get the blood flowing to the brain; cue excellent media ideas.

For me, the training was a refreshing way to initiate putting my passions into practice. I hope to raise awareness on environmental issues, but most importantly instigate ACTION.

I learnt more about ethical investment and tar sands on the training which was something I was eager to clue up on. I also found an excellent introduction to ethical investment in the Guardian. I am definitely going to pursue this avenue of environmental conservation further. I will keep you updated if I find anything new; if readers have any fruitful suggestions on the topic, they would be more than welcome.

I also wanted to say thanks a lot to the staff members at People & Planet for making the experience so enjoyable. It was a great opportunity to meet the dedicated faces behind the organisation, but also my fellow Media Activists; like minded people trying to make the world a better place.

Be safe, be green.

Katie

By Laurie Cannell (this post first appeared at The Woodcraft Folk website)

Last Weekend I (Laurie Cannell) went to Shared Planet as Woodcraft Folk Blank Canvas 2011 organiser and the DF Affiliations Rep but mainly because it looked pretty darn exciting!

Shared Planet is Britain’s biggest gathering of students taking action on poverty and climate change and it’s organised by People and Planet, a network of student activist groups in universities around the UK. This year it was on the beautiful University of Birmingham campus.

It was an action packed, intellectual extravaganza of talks, discussion and creativity that all kicked off Saturday morning with a speech from Caroline Lucas MP (leader of The Green Party) about the problems we face politically right now. In particular; these crippling cuts. She doesn’t try to patronise with meaningless rhetoric or even dumb things down into simpleton’s terms too much. She just tells us how it is, and isn’t scared to tell you how she sees it.

Following her were the ‘Going Greener Transition Uni Awards’ where you could spot many a Woodie in the pictures of People and Planet groups that have done brilliant climate saving things in their unis. Things like banning bottled water and installing water fountains or organising fantastic green weeks filled with green action.

I then chose to go to a discussion panel about the global problems our appetites are causing and how we can change. We had a fascinating discussion with four knowledgeable panellists about the impact of our diet and growing population on the world. Topics such as the devastating impact of the growing soya for animal feed; the many ways of not getting your fruit and veg from a supermarket and if we can’t feed everyone now, how will we when there are 9 billion of us in 2050 were all tackled.

• Helen Rimmer(Food Campaigner at Friends of the Earth) got an anxious laugh at her stat that 6% of greenhouse gases come from animal’s backsides!
• Alys Fowler(BBC Gardener’s World presenter & author of The Edible Garden) told us we should eat weeds not fish to get our omega 3 fix.
• Kelvin Cheung (founder and CEO of FoodCycle) told us that 4 million in the UK live in food poverty, meaning they lack the necessary access, income or knowledge to eat properly.
• Pete Davis (founder of Part-Time Carnivore) shocked us with his stat that 92% of Brits eat meat EVERY DAY!

Later on in the day we had an interesting speech from John Hilary (executive director of ‘War on Want’) on the problems of consumerism and excessive consumption, which hooked me into another interesting panel discussion called ‘Who cares about Sweat Shops?’.

Where:

• Nadia (campaigner for War on Want) had a solution to the age old question, “Should I buy local or Fairtrade?” If we could just reduce demand, then workers would get a better price for each unit they sell and less to transport would mean fewer emissions from transporting.
• Anna (from Labour behind the Label) revealed that in a Fairtrade T-shirt, the cotton growing might be Fairtrade but the T-shirt manufacture probably isn’t.

I then went to a rousing workshop by Andy May founder of Take back Parliament and hard working promoter of the Yes! Campaign for the referendum on our voting system next May.  I learnt lots more about the huge potential for change a Yes vote next May would carry forward, but also that only 1 in 5 even know there’s going to be a referendum never mind anything about it. So there’s lots of work to do!

For dinner I had great fun going Skipping (getting food from bins) in the streets around campus. We weren’t particularly successful at first, a packet of crisps here a few chips there, but we did find a bin full of shredded paper which immediately transformed us all into 5 year olds and a good deal of lying in, jumping in, taking pictures in, how many people can you fit in ensued. When we got back to campus, however, we found a feast of sandwiches and yogurts and were filled up and ready to party.

The evening took on the form of a surreal mixture of enchanting singing, hilarious activist poetry and crazy, hula hoop fuelled dancing, all in Birmingham Uni’s imposingly magnificent great hall. And much fun it was too.

Sunday. After a rather uncomfortable snooze on the floor of one of the squash courts/bedrooms provided and a long breakfast with chat and card games the day got under way. We started with talks from Californian, Amanda Starbuck (Rainforest Action Network) on the ups and downs of tackling climate change in the USA and Colin Baines (coordinator of the Coop Bank’s Toxic Fuels campaign) who urged us all to go see the Tarnished Earth exhibitons in a city near you to learn about the horrors of the tar sands in Canada and told us all the great stuff the Coop Bank is doing to tackle climate change.

The rest of the day was one big open space session. People came up and pegged a topic they wanted to discuss to a washing line and introduced it into a microphone. Once there were about 50 topics they were split into three groups and discussions were formed around the great hall with notes taken and pegged onto another washing line for people to peruse at the end.

There were far too many fascinating topics to go to all of them, but some of the ones I went to were setting up a food coop (notice the foody theme of my interests…); transition towns; and Climate change paralysis.

So all in all it was an amazingly jam packed, fun filled, intellectually overflowing weekend that I would recommend to anyone interested in issues on climate change and poverty. Many thanks to TREE for paying for me to go and I hope next year we can have a bigger Woodcraft presence there!

P.s.

I’ve tried to give you a good flavour of my best bits but if you want to look at the full programme, not just what I did, go HERE. Or if you want to find out more about People and Planet, explore HERE.

Pictures stolen from divinephron on flickr, more HERE

I did my Year 12 work experience at People & Planet, the Oxford based student campaigning network in August 2010. People & Planet campaign to end world poverty, defend human rights and protect the environment, as I believe that all three are incredibly important issues, I decided that this would be a good place to do my work experience.

From the offset of working at People & Planet, I was struck by how friendly the staff are, I was immediately made to feel welcome and given a wide variety of things to do. These included contacting student volunteers, emailing universities about volunteering opportunities and collecting contact information from institutions. This provided me with a good experience of general office work, experience that will be invaluable in later life.

All in all my work experience at People & Planet was very enjoyable, I found the people there friendly, engaging and interesting and the work that I did was satisfying and provided useful skills. I would heartily recommend volunteering at People & Planet to anyone interested in the issues and with a desire to gain skills in general office work.

By Nathaniel Newman-Beckett

Maddy at The Wave

2009

September: Back from a wonderful summer spent frolicking al fresco amongst plants and such, the group meets just before term. With all the third years gone, there’s only a handful of us left. Problemo. To start some action, an army is required. So we hit the Freshers’ Fair with full enthusiastic energy and big grins to get as many new students on board as possible. We have no plans for the year yet, no idea where our campaigning adventures will take us, because these decisions are up to all of the members, including new ones.

October: At our first meeting we have tea and cake and talk about why everyone wants to get involved, a lot of people had never campaigned before, and don’t know about issues in depth, but that’s really not important. It’s the enthusiasm, the passion to make things better that keeps a campaign alive. We talk about things going on in and around Sheffield: the fact that RBS, with notoriously dirty investments, are on campus recruiting students, the lack of ethical food at uni, with so little being vegan or locally sourced, about the need for more ethical clothing ranges in the uni shop…..and plant some seeds of plans.

Some genius also has the idea of making recruitment leaflets to give out at every demo, so that everyone knows who we are and how to get involved.

November: We spend the next two months as busy little bees demo-ing nasty companies who dare to show their face on our campus, selling vegan cakes, holding talks about sweatshops, meeting with the catering staff and so on.

While our activities are all fun and good, we soon become exhausted, and we don’t have much to show for our efforts. Sure, every demo raises awareness, and is reported back to the heads of companies, and we have raised some very-much-needed funds for People & Planet, all the while having a whole lot of fun, but we wanted some visible results!!

2010

January: We organise a meeting to talk about ideas for a new campaign. We want to make a difference to the environmental impact of students. We want results that we can see. And so, inspired by Leeds students, we decide to launch a campaign to ban bottled water on campus, and to install free water fountains for everyone. It makes so much sense: bottled water is a crazy waste of everything. For 1 litre of water, 7 litres are wasted in production, 250ml of oil is consumed and 100g of carbon is released into the atmosphere. Add to that the fact that only blah in 100 bottles are recycled and you have a green disaster right there. And that’s not even mentioning all the money wasted!

March: We set to work on our ‘Bottle Out’ campaign.

Step one of our campaign is research: finding out all the niggly details about passing a motion, our university’s water policy and so on. As well as talking to people at the Union and Uni, the P&P office is a gold mine for advice and information on running a campaign…it’s what they do full time! We need to get 1000 signatures to bypass council and for our proposal to go to popular vote at the next election.

Step two is making it happen: we write the motion, design and print posters

Step three is spreading the word. Our recruitment leaflets combined with our high campus presence has been working a dream in getting new people on board and our team is strong. We start a poster campaign to raise awareness of the hidden evil behind bottled water and stick them up all around including in halls, using the same poster on all of our stalls. And, of course, we create a Facebook group to spread the word even further. 1000 signatures are gathered easy peasy.

And step four, getting the bottles out, well, we’re still working on that. Because of the way our union works it won’t be going to vote until September, but we have a great base of support so we reckon it’ll get through, and the plastic will disappear, replaced with fountains popping up everywhere. Added to that is the awesome strong group that we have built, with the skills and stuff to run a campaign.

The upcoming election to many is a premade decision: the Tories are going to come in because people are sick of Labour – which is all rather odd when you think that we’re going through a recession and usually that means a greater need for social security (and hence a shift to the left). Then again, it’s not like Labour are much to the left considering the passing of the Digital Economy Bill and the National Insurance hikes. Add that to the simple fact that the Liberal Democrats don’t really know which side of the spectrum they’re standing at (yes on green issues, no on immigration issues, etc) – and you’ve got yourself in massive conundrum. Or at least so in a country where winning an election is all about first-past-the-post and thus silences the smaller parties.

However, all conundrums have a window of opportunity to create the change people actually want to see – and on 6th May, we may begin to see the rise of a much smaller party who we won’t have to campaign against to create the change we want to see. In three major constituencies, the Green Party (which believes in all the things that us People and Planetters campaign for) has an opportunity to become MPs in Westminister: in Brighton, Caroline Lucas; in Lewisham, Darren Johnson; and in Norwich, Adrian Ramsay. These gains are not born out of a political system in crisis, but also because people do not want to waste their vote by voting for parties that do not represent their views.

The time for only voting for either two (or three) major parties is over. As students, none of them represent what we need right now:

• fair and affordable education,
• international justice,
• freedoms of speech/press/expression,
• equality & equity,
• improved national public services,
• increasing employment,
• fairer tax systems,
• cheaper and more reliable public transport, etc.

All of these are policies that the Greens are representing with fairer national and international economics which put people and sustainability before profit. It is sad that our generation sees politics as the epitome of evil and distrusts every politician. Political support is a predominant reason (but not the only one) as to why so many social reforms have occurred in the past, including the right to form unions, the right to vote, and the emancipation of slavery.

We are young, and we are those who can still have hope. We campaign and are members of People & Planet because we care and because we think that change is possible. Let us not lose hope. Let us make a political movement and shout out loud our concerns. The Green Party represents what we are as a generation of those looking for change. Thus I urge you - vote for (and join) the Greens.

Alternatively, have a look at the main election website (which is actually rather cool) .

This post was initially posted on AcaciaThorns (http://www.acaciathorns.net)

Whilst a People & Planeter in UCL, I was always rather oblivious to the way that People & Planet was run nationally. Partially this was because I didn’t really know much about the network (we had just started a group the year that I joined) and partially it was because the idea of taking part in a national decision-making group was rather daunting. Luckily, in my final year, I decided to take a little of a risk and ended up going along to the Forum in Manchester.

Forum is a strange place. It brings all of the key people and planet individuals across the network together to discuss key issues. Overall, you end up having massive discussions, debates and decisions over the future of People & Planet and students involved. It’s a fantastic opportunity to learn how campaigns work, how they are managed and how you can really build and develop your own strategy.

Too many times in university, we organise our campaigns without strategy and without order. We play the campaign by ear rather than by trying to meet deadlines. The fact is we need to put the too together and we need to do that at a national and local level. It is so much easier to influence Oxford if you say ‘well, Cambridge/UCL is doing it, and we have the opportunity to beat them too it’ or if you show how the particular changes can be implemented within a given time and resource framework. This method also shuts up the nay-sayers in the university who may say that they do not have time/money/resources to deal with these challenges.

The Forum is the place to be if you want to create effective change, now and in the future. It is the place to be to take on a campaign and make it suitable for your university. It is also the place to be if you want to have a great party and be challenged by a very relevant quiz.

If you want to take campaigning further, go to this year’s Forum - this weekend (19 - 21 March) in Camden, London. There are going to be MASSIVE decisions made, so make sure you’re there!

Book online for FREE here: http://peopleandplanet.org/forum/10