MALAWI: When Aging Is A Crime in Malawi

BLANTYRE, Malawi / The Times Group / Blogs / Opinion / March 19, 2012

DAILY TIMES
By George Chiusiwa


A united, tolerant and progressive nation with a populace that has a strong moral and ethical fibre can help ensure a society that cares for the social wellbeing of all its members including the elderly.

In line with the consensus made at the First World Assembly on Ageing in 1982 in Vienna, Austria, the elderly are persons aged 60 years and above. Since the adoption of the International Plan of Action on Ageing at this assembly issues on ageing have evolved and gained currency globally.

It is widely agreed that the elderly have made significant contributions to our societies. Therefore, in recognition of their past, present and future roles at all levels in society, their social well being must be ensured. From this viewpoint the status and position of the elderly as important members of the family, society and nation has to be duly recognised. Essentially, older persons must be viewed as rights holders who will often require support to claim their rights.

In the world today there is a rapidly ageing population and this presents a significant and pressing challenge to ensure the enjoyment of human rights of older persons. This trend has not spared Malawi as the 2008 Population and Housing Census showed that out of the 13.1 million people counted, 530,996 were older persons; representing 4 percent. Thus Malawi, too, has a daunting task to take care of the welfare and rights of the aged.

Lately, Malawi has seen a growing interest in the rights of special or minority groups such as persons with disabilities and homosexuals. In Malawi, old people are generally perceived in a positive way. This notwithstanding, the human rights and welfare of the elderly is a topic that is somewhat neglected and the level of awareness of the plight of the elderly is relatively low. Their plight within the social fabric manifests in exclusion, marginalisation, stigmatisation and abuse.

The most vulnerable amongst the elderly are the poor and the disadvantaged ones living in rural Malawi who are deemed as silent recipients of charity by public policy. It is worth noting that there have been commendable steps in a bid to alleviate old people's socio-economic hardship in the country. The establishment of the Ministry responsible for Persons with Disabilities and the Elderly in 1998 and the state President's Bingu Silvergrey Foundation in 2007 and the government's formulation of the social protection policy can be viewed as a milestone. However, Malawi does not have a sound and comprehensive social protection programme tailored for the old folk. The rural old people hardly benefit from such programmes as Malawi Rural Development Fund (MARDEF) and the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP), hence further debilitating their already frail socio-economic security.

There is therefore urgent need to explore the productive potential of the elderly as some are capable of investing their energies in informal economic activities thereby promoting self reliance. Otherwise these people will continue being at the receiving end of charity.

Such measures as social pension programmes and elderly cash transfers would perform wonders to our old men and women who ought to be culturally valued as repositories of wisdom. In absence of these deliberate policy measures other attempts aimed at achieving the Millennium Development Goals including that to reduce poverty by half by 2015 can be defeated.

In the health sector, the right-to-health approach is indispensable for the designing, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of health related policies and programmes to enable older persons enjoy this right. Older people religiously value traditional technical knowledge or indigenous science. In contemporary Malawi and much of Africa it is therefore a common phenomenon that older poor people consult traditional healers as their first form of medical care since modern medicine is too expensive for them. Sometimes the elderly are discriminated against at the medical institutions as they are treated with scorn and disdain ostensibly for wasting medicine meant for younger people. This seriously begs for legislation for government to recognise such traditional medicine to ensure that it works hand in hand with modern medicine.

Malawi's HIV/AIDS mainstreaming has arguably not paid due attention to the relationship between HIV and ageing. The focal target age group has been 15-49 because people of this age bracket are believed to be sexually active. As a result of this programming approach older persons are often excluded from HIV/AIDS information and prevention. However, the fact is that both old men and women are and can still be sexually active. The plight of the elderly in Malawi is further compounded by the fact that they have relatively received due attention from the criminal justice system. Witchcraft accusations are rife in Malawi and the victims have often been older people with elderly women most frequently accused of practicing witchcraft.

It is imperative therefore that Malawi revise the care, protection and support of the elderly. Proper legislation, elderly tailored social policies and rethinking our social perceptions towards the older people are core to recognising their full potential and contributions to society.

Source: Daily Times, Blantyre
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MALAWI: Trying to alleviate the burden of the old

. BLANTYRE (IRIN - Reuters Alertnet), November 11, 2008 The respect Malawi's elderly once enjoyed in society is being soured by the twin pressures of poverty and HIV/AIDS, according to a recent report, and the government is introducing social grants to alleviate the burden they carry. "In the past, the elderly in Malawi used to depend on the economic and social support of their children and the community. With increased socio-economic difficulties and changing family ties, children fail to look after their ageing parents," said the report, Social Protection and Ageing in Malawi, by Zifa Kazeze, formerly of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). "Similarly, communities are failing to provide for the needs of the elderly. The plight of the elderly is made worse with the direct and indirect effects of HIV and AIDS." More than 52 percent of Malawi's 13 million people live on less than US$1 a day; the resulting poor food security means that about 50 percent of children under the age of five have stunted growth, about 13 percent of the 7.3 million children aged under 18 have lost their parents, mainly as a result of HIV/AIDS, and more than 50 percent of children of primary school age have dropped out, the report said. According to UNAIDS, about 11.9 percent of the adult population, or 930,000 people, were living with HIV/AIDS at the beginning of 2008. "Older persons are important and have a contribution to make in socio-economic development. It is important, therefore, that the implications of ageing issues in Malawi are understood, especially the challenges older persons face, and to respond to the challenges and opportunities of ageing," the report commented. The impact of HIV/AIDS was taking its toll mainly among young adults of working age, leaving a large number of orphans to the care of their grandparents, who were not able to provide economically for their charges while also taking care of their own needs, the authors noted. According to Help Age International, a global network of NGOs working to promote the rights of older people, between 50 and 60 percent of orphans in Malawi, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe live with their grandparents. The plight of the elderly A 2003 study by the development ministry and the University of Malawi found that although most people viewed the elderly in a positive light, some regarded them as witches or wizards, while 48 percent of respondents knew about or had heard of some abuse of old people. Undule Mwakasungura, executive director of the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, told IRIN it was worrying that an increasing number of the elderly, particularly women, were being condemned as witches. "If you look at statistics, a majority of people who have been accused of witchcraft are women – and not men. In general, women are historically more vulnerable to violence due to their traditionally subordinate position in most cultures." Mwakasungura said elderly people were also being abandoned by their children, who migrated from the rural areas to live and work in the towns and cities and did not remit money. Malawi does not have a comprehensive social protection programme, although there is a pension fund for retired state employees, but most of the rural population, constituting about 83 percent of the total, "has no form of social protection. They are income insecure. There is therefore a need for a non-contributory pension as a significant component of old age income security," the report commented. "I think the Social Protection Policy, which is still in draft form, is bound to protect elderly persons in Malawi. This policy is designed to ensure that the most vulnerable people, with limited factors of production, are sufficiently cushioned. This raises the hope for improved standards of living for elderly people in Malawi, particularly those who have no pensions or anyone to look after them," Mwakasungura said. Grants for the poorest households The government has embarked on a social cash transfer scheme, aimed at the poorest 10 percent of households, piloted in July 2006 in Mchinji District, about 100km north of the capital, Lilongwe, where 3,094 people were provided a monthly cash transfer that benefitted about 14,332 people. Most of these households were headed by elderly people with young dependents, with no household members between the ages of 19 and 64, an indication of the impact HIV/AIDS has had on Malawi's family composition. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria provided $371,000 for the pilot project, with the assistance the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). The amount of the monthly cash transfer depended on the family size and the number of children attending school, and was paid to the beneficiaries by staff from the District Assembly (DA), a local government body, escorted by local police officers. Targeted households received $4 for a single-person household, $7 for a two-person household, $10 for a three-person household, and $13 for a household with four or more members. In addition, a $1.30 bonus per month was provided for each child of primary school age in the household, and $2.60 for each child of secondary school age, as an enticement to school attendance. According to the report, by the end of March 2008 about 12,000 households were receiving social cash transfers. http://www.IRINnews.org © IRIN Source: Reuters AlertNet

MALAWI: 75-year-old to cycle to Chitipa from Nsanje

BLANTYRE, Malawi (The Daily Times), April 4, 2008:

Seventy five-year-old William John Kambalame has teamed up with 28-year-old Manuel Steven Gushe to cycle from Nsanje to Chitipa in a bid to raise over K5 million for Mwala Woyera Community-based Organisation, which is situated in Salima.

Kambalame and Gushe are expected to embark on their two-month adventure on April 15.

“We plan to complete the exercise on June 15,” Kambalame said. “We could have taken few days, perhaps less than 10 days to complete the exercise but we will be stopping in different areas to plead for sponsorship for our organisation.”

He said they decided to embark on the exercise after realising that their organisation, which looks after over 200 elderly people and feeds over 60 children among others, was in dire need of money.

“Apart from that we also help people that are affected or infected by HIV and Aids,” he said.

Kambalame, who claimed to have cycled from Salima to Blantyre within a day, appealed to people to help them in cash or kind.

“We need material and financial support for our journey and organisation,” he said. “The money which we will raise we are going to share it with other organisations within the district.

Mwala Woyera Community is situated at Bwanje in Salima.

Kambalame’s partner Gushe, who bought the two mountain bikes from Botswana, said they were prepared for the adventure.

“We are physically prepared but we just want kind people to help us. People should not doubt us. We cycle from Ntcheu to Blantyre in six hours only,” he said.

The two also disclosed that after the Nsanje to Chitipa adventure they would then cycle to South Africa later in the year.

In January, top cyclist Jonathan Kaiya rode his bicycle for eight days from Blantyre to Kalonga to raise money in aid for Malawi Prison Missionary reform. He covered about 1,500 km and for a start he raised K169,000.

Last year, South African missionary Felix Starker also cycled for 30 days to his home country to raise funds for Blantyre-based Streek Kids Awareness, an NGO that rehabilitates street children.

By Mphatso Malidadi

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