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Do you want to know about Folk Media in West Africa, its origin, how it came to existence and various ways of communication? Well, read on.

PMC and MPF are strengthening the Fistula voices in the Northern part of Nigeria. This was possible through the empowering of women that are one time living with it.

Get to know the outcome of the annual mobilization against Gender Violence.

With the 2007 Business Year Review Meeting, MPF staffs are now more committed to work, which indicate that Year 2008 will achieve more.

We thank you for your valued support and promise better information in the cause getting back to you through this experience sharing instrument.

- Folk media

- African Women and Domestic Violence

This was the topic MPF presented at the Conference organized by the Development Alternative and Resource Center (DARC), funding from the Ford foundation titled: Untapped Resources; Nigerian Arts and Cultural Traditions. It was held at the International Conference Center, Abuja on Nov.13-16, 2007. The aim of the conference was to bring to limelight, Arts and Culture of Nigeria in all its magnificence.

Multi Sector Projects Foundation with her wealth of experience in using the media to promote behavioral change through the media presented a paper on how folk media has been used to preserve culture not only in the traditional way, but also using the technology.

Folk or Traditional Media is a means of communication handed down through evolving traditions to the people of this present age. These massages are passed across through ancient style observances and customs, superstitions, beliefs, sign languages and prejudices amongst people with common understanding and traditions. It is a continuity or long term practice in the day to day activities of a community which stands it out from other communities or gathering of peoples.
 
Folk Media varies from country to country and from race to race with unique features in every society and inhabited regions of the earth. Folk media can be described as a creative dissemination of information through cultural and performance arts.

In traditional or rural societies, folk media such as drama, skits, poems, stories, riddles, songs and dance, have been successfully used to disseminate messages or information and even pass the wisdom of older generations, to the present day youth.

Before the invention of the mass media, old folks in Africa and else where would gather children to themselves (mostly after the evening meals) either in the open by a tree shade with the moon radiating its glow or they would sit together in a semi-lit shed away from the rainfall or harsh wind and tell them tales of the past. These tales were filled with moral teachings, local logic, wise sayings, jokes, courage, bravery, and so much more. They have been dutifully passed down from generation to generation and serve as historic references to the present day cultures. Such tales often inspired the youth of the day helping them to see the necessity in protecting their traditional ways of life (culture) and the need to jealously guard the community’s history.

Folk media continues to play an important role in the African society and Nigeria in particular. The electronic media is often used to popularize some of the folk arts that needed to go beyond the shores of one tradition/culture to another. Music and dance are the most popular folk form in Nigeria. The various types of music include; Ballad or love songs, devotional songs, community songs, war songs/dance, masquerade display and chants, victory songs and many more.

 Folk media is used by traditional leaders (village chiefs and kings) to communicate to their subjects. Folk media is known to maximize perception since information is received in a social context. It is adopted because: It overcomes the barriers of illiteracy as it does not depend on printed words. It does not use complicated technology and can be understood by the people easily and holds maximum attention of the mind as it stimulates and sustains interest.

Finally, folk media provides immediate feedback and impute assessment by audience reaction. It has been proven that folk media, when used to disseminate development messages as an entertainment module and a community get-together, is by far more successful than the use of mass media.

Some of the outcome on the importance of cultural perseverance was seen when MPF used this to address the need to preserve the culture of widowhood in the Okon community of Akwa Ibom state. This made it possible for MPF to use traditional theater with technology to help preserve tradition and improve the lives of widows and orphans. The Okon widows who benefited from the empowerment programs were also at the conference to show their appreciation through their dance.

Other key note presenters at the conference were; Prof Ekpo Eyo, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Steve Rhones, who delivered the opening plenary: Untapped Resources: Nigerian Arts and Cultural Traditions. Breadth of Arts and Culture in the African Diaspora by James Early and Prof. Olatunde Babawale.

Based on the success of the Ruwan Dare serial radio drama, a workshop was organized in Kano (Northern Nigeria) to train spokesperson for fistula from October 29 – November 6, 2007.

Ten women were trained and each of them had at one time been living with fistula. These women were selected by UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) to be trained to acquire Interpersonal Communication (IPC) skills, Advocacy and skills on Community Mobilization under UNFPA Population and Communication program.

The goal of the workshop was to use the power of the media and community mobilization to change attitudes and behaviors that lead to fistula. The trainees were able to learn the importance of communication and media skills, how to mobilize men and other community groups to advocate for fistula prevention and treatment. They were given the opportunity to see themselves as powerful “fistula voices “for awareness and education.

The aim of UNFPA was to:

• Postpone marriage and pregnancy for young girls to minimize the risk of complication from childbirth.
• Increase access to education and family planning services for women and men.
• Provide access to adequate medical care for all pregnant women and emergency obstetric care for all who develop complications
• Repair physical damage through medical intervention and emotional damage through counseling.

The outcome of the “fistula Voices” newly trained community educators brought about:

• Identifying more than 180 fistula patients from local communities in Kano and Katsina.
• Connecting more than 300 pregnant women with local health centers in these states.
• Women were able to benefit from free fistula surgery and post-operative care.
• More than 700 men, including 70 religious leaders have been educated about ending fistula.

Also, a spokesperson for the Campaign to End Fistula, Natalie Imbruglia, leading over 20 International journalists during her visit to two communities in Kano and Katsina was amazed with the level of awareness to end fistula and improve maternal health.

The training was organized by PMC-Nigeria Country Representative Tony Asangaeneng, with administrative and logistical support from the country office staffs.

Four persons conducted the training;

• Dr. Scott Connolly, Population Media Center, Vermont.
• Daour Wade, Africa Consultants International (ACI) Senegal
• Dr. Ibrahim Sane, Africa Consultants International (ACI) Senegal
• Dr. Anita Omoboya, Multi Sector Projects Foundation

             Dr. Ademola Olajide of UNFPA also attended the sessions and was very instrumental in helping to focus the sessions.

African Women and Domestic Violence

The experience of using law to address the issue of domestic violence in Africa contains both positive and negative lessons for gender- equality campaigners, says Takyiwaa Manuh.

The annual mobilisation of women around the world around the theme of "16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence" from 25 November - 10 December 2007 represents a tremendous global effort to increase awareness of violence against women in all its forms. In light of the 2007 theme - demanding implementation, challenging obstacles - this
article looks at the issue of domestic violence from the perspective of African experience, and examines the impact of attempts to address it by legal means. It poses three questions:
This article is the first in a series on openDemocracy marking the "16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence" from 25 November - 10 December, an annual mobilisation aimed at heightening global awareness of violence against women. Also in openDemocracy on the 16 Days theme, part of our overall 50:50 coverage, a multi-voiced blog where women around the world contribute:
* what are the similarities and differences in the experiences of African countries that have attempted to pass domestic-violence legislation?
* what lessons have been learned in the process?
* how do attempts to pass such laws connect to the lived realities of ordinary women?

A new agenda

The past two decades have witnessed heightened activity by women's organisations and movements in several African countries to promote women's rights by redressing a range of discriminatory practices against women and unequal gender relations in public and domestic life, which work to prevent women from exercising their full rights as citizens. The link between the public and domestic arenas is important here, for (as Amina Salihu and her colleagues noted in a 2002 memorandum on women's citizenship rights in Nigeria), women's experience of citizenship is multilayered and interconnected: what
happens at the level of the domestic arena is in turn carried over to what is generally called the public space.

The phenomenon of violence is only one aspect of the discriminatory practices and unequal relations women in Africa face, but it is a significant and widespread one. This is most shockingly on display in conditions of war, where (as in the current conflict in North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example) women have been subjected to systematic assault and abuse. It is also apparent in more "normal" circumstances, such as the campaign for the presidential elections in Kenya in December 2007, where several women candidates have been targeted in an effort to prevent their campaigns from penetratating the largely male spaces of decision-making and national life.
Also on openDemocracy, listen to a podcast interview with Faustina Fynn Nyame, a midwife carrying out inspiring work in Ghana to help women gain access to safe abortion.
The African Platform for Action (Dakar declaration) of 1994 was a landmark document in highlighting the problem of violence against women on the continent. Before and since, however, such violence has often gone unreported, and until recently there were across Africa few supporting pieces of legislation or official practice that could be used to challenge it. True, several states had signed and/or ratified international conventions and treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) of 1979 or the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, but these had not been incorporated into domestic law.
The protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa was ratified by the required fifteen member-states, and came into force on 26 November 2005. It places an obligation on state-parties to take measures to address not only violence against women but also other aspects of women's rights: in public or private life, in peacetime and during periods of war or conflict. It also explicitly includes marital rape and other forms of forced or unwanted sex.
Women activists have been emboldened by these developments to push states as far apart as Mauritania and Rwanda to enact legislation addressing gender-based violence; Sierra Leone is the latest country to have successfully enacted legislation (although the practice of female genital mutilation has not yet been outlawed). Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana have also attempted to pass domestic-violence laws; here, however, the experience has been disparate.

Four countries, four experiences
In Nigeria, a draft domestic-violence bill prepared by the Legislative Advocacy Coalition on Violence against Women has been lodged in the house of representatives (the lower house of parliament) since 2003, but has not even been listed in the order paper for hearing. The provision on marital rape, which some view as "western" and "against the culture of Nigeria" has been invoked to explain the slow progress of the bill; settling it would, it is claimed, allow the bill to be passed into law. The contradiction here is that Nigeria has already ratified the protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, which prohibits marital rape without any reservations.

The Kenyan experience highlights a different face of misogyny. A sexual-offences bill that seeks harsher penalties for perpetrators of sexual violence became mired in controversy when a legislator (male, as were 204 of the 222 expected to vote on the bill) alleged that some provisions would criminalise men's advances towards women. Civil-
society groups demanded that their votes should be transparent; when gun-toting policemen blocked activists from entering parliament to press this demand, they chanted anti-rape songs and chanted at the police: "Kill us today so that we do not get raped tomorrow!"

The Ugandan situation represents a further interesting contrast. In December 2003, a domestic-relations bill was tabled before parliament, containing a host of provisions to deal with discriminatory laws and practices in marriage, divorce, inheritance, property ownership, and violence and equality within marriage and the family. Sylvia Tamale charts what happened next: the bill reached the committee stage in early 2005, only to generate massive controversy that stretched beyond parliament to the media and the streets (see "The Right to Culture and the Culture of Rights: A Critical Perspective on Sexual Rights in Africa", Feminist Legal Studies [forthcoming]). A scathing attack on the bill's contents by the legal and parliamentary affairs committee was echoed in a demonstration on 29 March 2005 by hundreds of women (the majority of them wearing the hijab) in the streets of Kampala. They described the bill as a "coup against family decency", and swore to oppose its passage. A few weeks later, parliament shelved the bill for "more extensive consultations." When President Yoweri Museveni declared during the election campaign in February 2006 that "it (the domestic-relations bill) was not urgently needed", the debate was effectively closed. It was a severe setback for Uganda's women's movement.
A more positive legislative outcome was witnessed in Ghana. Here, a domestic-violence bill was subject to more than three years of extensive national consultations led by the government ministry of women's and children's affairs; the Domestic Violence Coalition, formed to support the passage of the bill, also played a key role in the process. There was early resistance from a surprising source, the then minister of women's affairs (who argued that the law would "destroy families"); and the coalition's demand for the repeal of S42 (g) of the criminal code (the so-called "marital-rape exemption" also caused bitter acrimony. Those opposed to the bill portrayed it and its gender-activist supporters as purveying "foreign" ideas that threatened Ghanaian cultural beliefs and practices - in particular, the sanctity of marriage and men's rights within it.

This reaction highlighted the lack of understanding of gender-based violence as an equality issue that surrounded the debate over the proposed legislation in Ghana. Even within the state and among the general public, fixed and regressive attitudes remained prevalent - that women in social life and within marriage had an inferior status, and that women were to blame for provoking acts of violence by the way they dressed or for being unfaithful.
In the event, the Domestic Violence Act was passed on 21 February 2007, without the express repeal of S42(g), although with the provision that "(the) use of violence in the domestic setting is not justified on the basis of consent." However, within a few weeks of
the passage of the law, the statute law commissioner, acting on his own initiative, removed the offending S42(g) from the statute-book.
This new legislation has been hailed as a triumph, but much work remains to be done to ensure that it is fully implemented. This will require - so activists and human-rights advocates in Ghana argue - a comprehensive, nationwide domestic action plan and the provision of necessary human and budgetary resources (partly in light of the fact governments have in practice relied on donors to fund gender work in Ghana). Some aspects of the social environment - in which most Ghanaian women still live in poverty, depend on men, and are surrounded by attitudes and codes that tolerate oppressive behaviour or allow serious violations of women's rights to be "settled" without justice or accountability - reinforce the argument that implementation mechanisms are vital.

The next stage
Violence, including domestic violence, deprives women of their ability to achieve their full potential by threatening their safety, freedom and autonomy. This variety of African experiences shows that the formulation of laws is an important instrument in countering this threat; but it is not enough to eliminate gender-based violence or (as in the Ugandan case) to ensure its general acceptability, even among women. Rather, multiple strategies and approaches are needed that recognise the differing interests, lived realities and contradictions among women of different class, religious and cultural backgrounds; and to find ways to express proposed changes in language and practices that better approximate women's lived realities and experiences.

* Pambazuka News 330, November 29, 2007
* This article was originally published in the independent online
magazine http://www.opendemocracy.net, as part of their coverage of
16 Days Against Gender Violence. It is republished by kind permission
of the author, and openDemocracy.
* Takyiwaa Manuh has been the Director of the Institute of African
Studies, University of Ghana, Legon since 2002 and is an Associate
Professor at the University of Ghana.

We convince ourselves that life will be better once we are married, have a baby, then another.

Then we get frustrated because our children are not old enough and that all will be well when they are older. Then we are frustrated because they reach adolescence and we must deal with their rebellion as they move from dependency to freedom. . Surely we’ll be happier when they grow out of the teen years.

We tell ourselves life will be better when our spouse gets his/her act together, when we have a nicer car, when we can take a vacation, when we finally retire.

The truth is that there is no better time to be happy than right now. If not, then when?

Your life will always be full of challenges, it is better to admit as much and to decide to be happy in spite of it all.

But there was always some obstacles along the way, an ordeal to get through, some work to be finished sometime to be given, a bill to be paid, and then life would start. I finally came to understand that those obstacles were LIFE.

That point of view helped me see that there isn’t any road to happiness. Happiness is the road.
So enjoy every moment. Stop waiting for school to end, for a return to school, to lose ten pounds, to gain ten pounds, for work to begin, to get married, for Friday evening, for Sunday morning, waiting for a new car for your mortgage to be paid off, for spring, for summer, for fall, for winter, for the first or last month to be paid, for your song to be played on the radio, to die, to be reborn---- before deciding to be HAPPY.

Happiness is a voyage, not a destination.
There is no better time to be happy than------
NOW  !