2013-05-20T11:18:49-04:00 Alastair Stewart http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=alastair-stewart Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Alastair Stewart Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1657697 2012-07-08T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-07T05:12:12-04:00

Alastair Stewart http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-stewart/
Worldwide, 2.5billion people are excluded from financial security and the fruits of sound advice on how to better their material condition.

The partner is Barclays, beset by problems at home yet doing amazing work here and elsewhere.

The link is logical: small farmers group together into village savings and loans groups, from self-support and self-sufficiency, they progress to setting up a group bank account; as individuals progress they then create private and business accounts.



Alastair Stewart in Uganda copyright CARE International

The amounts are modest - a few hundred pounds equivalent from the group - but the transformation, phenomenal. I met Suzan, a woman who had a tiny flock of chickens and now has hundreds. She sells her eggs widely and generates surplus income for herself and her family.

Hasan farmed his father's smallholding and now runs a successful mobile phone business in Iganga, the local market town. He is also putting himself through university doing, not surprisingly, a bachelors degree in Business Studies. And so it goes on.

Two thoughts are already drilled into my mind: having one's money secure, however much or little, is a universal good; coupling it with sound advice from the charity sector is truly transformational in a country like Uganda.

The second is this: whatever happened on LIBOR and in the esoteric derivatives markets, when banks stick to basics, with good people in control, they can change lives for the better. They have their commercial motives and I don't begrudge them those.

But for Suzan, Hasan and many others, it is an offer they are happy to embrace and, patently, for the better.

Without this programme, poverty and fear would remain enshrined. With it, there's a real chance of financial security, liberty and progress from a bleak condition to a better place.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1426500 2012-04-15T19:00:00-04:00 2012-06-15T05:12:01-04:00

Alastair Stewart http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-stewart/
In July 2010 I left a green and pleasant UK and went to Niger with Care International UK. Niger is a little known and desperate land, literally dying from the impact of a full-on drought. The people I met would have risked a £1000 fine, if that sort of money they had, to apply a hose, if hose they had, to restore life to dying seedlings and restore hope to threatened lives.

They had little money; I didn't see any hosepipes. I saw acre after acre of dry, dusty, dead soil. The fields, once fecund, were barren. Rivulets, as dry as the bones of the dead cattle that littered the roadsides we drove past.

I live on a farm where we grow grass to feed our horses. My children ride: two, purely for sport; one, professionally. Our barn remains half-full after a kind and gentle winter. If we run short we can always buy bails, albeit at a steep price.

In Niger I saw beautiful mud grain stores as empty as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. No grain, just dust and debris swirling around their empty bases, whipped-up by a light breeze. I met people whose herds of cattle were diminished by death and by 'distress' sales of livestock to buy grain to survive. I met people who couldn't find food even when they had sold their stock. I saw prices inflated by a 'black-market'. And I saw fields, not for producing the means to maintain a hobby and a professional sport, but for producing the difference between life and death. And death was beginning to win. Those fields were sand-pits and dust-bowls.

It hasn't improved. It has got worse. Little or no rain has fallen in the near two years since I was there.

These once desperate people are now on the brink of a deadly catastrophe.


My children will ride and play this spring: many more of the children of Niger will die.

Nothing you or I can do will bring the rains: that is nature's brutal power. In the long-term we might alter our behaviour to give the world's eco-system a better chance; but that is for next year, or for the next decade.

Today and tomorrow, the people of Niger need water and food. Hope is not a commodity we can package up, stamp with CARE, and despatch to them. But money, food, water and medicines we can and must send them, and urgently.

You may or may not bemoan the hosepipe ban, but, as you inevitably sip a glass of water with lunch or luxuriate in a bath or take a shower tomorrow, spare a thought for those for whom a fraction of that water could be the difference between life and death; and then do what you can to help.]]>