Shuga – an MTV production in collaboration with UNICEF and other partners, including the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) – is a hard-hitting drama series based in Nairobi, Kenya. The six-part series follows the lives, loves and sometimes complicated sexual relations of young Kenyans. The show depicts the characters struggling to realise their dreams while attending university, living in slums and enjoying Nairobi’s nightlife.

The series illustrates how, in Nairobi’s rapidly changing social environment, some kinds of behaviour (including sex with multiple partners, sexual exploitation and alcohol abuse) can make young people more vulnerable to HIV and AIDS. ‘Shuga is a mirror of Nairobi’, proclaims Nick Ndeda, who plays Angelo, one of the main characters in the programme who is struggling with the idea of his girlfriend also having a ‘sugar daddy’, as well as being with him. ‘This is what is happening in the real world’ sighs Ndeda, ‘and we show it in Shuga’.

Series 2 of the popular drama began this month in Kenya (February 2012), but this time dealing with an even trickier sexual issue than before – homosexuality – when one of the male characters, Rayban, casually reveals that he is looking for a male soul mate.

The series’ creators and producers admit that popular dramas such as ‘Shuga’ will not end the HIV epidemic, nor will it gain immediate acceptance for homosexuals, but one thing it DOES do, is get people talking about the issues. It leads to open dialogue about the issues and, hopefully, will begin to challenge the stigma attached to them – especially considering characters within the show are seen having HIV tests themselves and openly discussing homosexual relationships.

So, is this a move forward for young Kenyan people, or more of a move towards Western values? The actors argue that they are, in fact, stuck in the middle. ‘We are copying the West but we also want to remain African’ claims Kenyan actress Avril, who plays Miss B’Have in the series. She states that she will still show respect to elders, as tradition demands, but will ‘…maintain the right to individual choice’.

Some members of the cast claim that change has already begun, due to the issues explored in the drama stating

A revolution is taking place…and the best way to stimulate change is through soups and music.

The effectiveness of ‘Shuga’ in changing behaviour of young Kenyans is currently being assessed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For individual cast members such as Lupita Nyong’o (who is also a film director), the series has even inspired personal change – ‘This is real – and I need to make a change in my life’.

Episodes 1, 2 and 3 from season 1 can be watched below:

Shuga Episode 1 from mtv staying alive on Vimeo.

Shuga Episode 2 from mtv staying alive on Vimeo.

Shuga Episode 3 from mtv staying alive on Vimeo.

Explore more…

• Interviews with some of the cast http://allafrica.com/view/resource/main/main/id/00030644.html

• MTV site, more info http://mtvshuga.com/

Photo source: Truly Zambian

The story of the weekend goes to Zambia: the once written-off underdog of African football – the Chipolopolo Boys** or Copper Bullet Boys – upset the clear favourites of the Africa Cup of Nations tournament (AFCON) by beating the Ivory Coast in the final in an 8-7 penalty shootout.

On a continent that has been waging some of the most embittered, entrenched and bloody conflicts in recent decades, the AFCON tournament has the potential to bring Africans together in a way that only the power of sport can inspire.

The 1992 winners of the tournament – the Ivory Coast – showed in 2006, for instance, that after months of bloodshed, their 20 million-strong population reached a truce between both factions of the civil war that was taking place so that the nation would be well supported in the 2006 World Cup. This is the power of football in Africa.

This year’s final, typical of professional football at this level, reached beyond Africa. It was an opportunity for players signed to the richest clubs in Europe to showcase their talents at Africa’s premier tournament. Manchester City, Chelsea, Barcelona, Arsenal, Manchester….these kinds of club names have been as synonymous with AFCON as the unbearable heat of the competition.

Here are some statistics to chew on thanks to research done by the European Club Association:

Take another look at the numbers.

Is there an equivalent term out there for “brain drain” when it comes to football? The “foot drain”, if it can be called that, is staggering. Others may be more familiar with the term “football imperialism” as it was named during the World Cup recently in South Africa 2010.

No surprises then that commentators have been penning this years’ final as a “Europe” vs Africa battleground. Prior to the final, Carlos Amato of the Mail & Guardian newspaper (South Africa) believed that watching the match neutrally was never an option for fans:

the cream of African football’s Europe-based aristocracy will meet with a robust Africa-based challenge. Of the Chipolopolo squad [Zambia], only the superb young goalscorer, Emmanuel Mayuka of Young Boys Berne, plays his club football in Europe.

With only one European club player kicking for Zambia, this stands out against the 22 out of 23 players released from European clubs to play for the Ivory Coast team.

These kinds of balance sheet statistics are undeniable: the final should have been nothing more than a 90 minute formality for the Ivory Coast before collecting their medals.  Ivory Coast boss Francois Zahoui has shrugged this kind of criticism already, telling his players that the Africa Cup of Nations is more important than playing for their clubs and to “forget the luxury of Europe”. The issue of overpaid “elite” footballers has not gone unnoticed by African commentators.  This, after all, has been a normal way of life for people outside looking in on the tournament.

Co-hosts of the competition, Equatorial Guinea, are no strangers to the extreme commercial wealth that has funded development projects existing alongside gross mass poverty, with more than 70% of the population living below the poverty line. The story in Zambia is not dissimilar: 68% of Zambians live below the poverty line in the midst of a deficit of long term economic and political incentives to move Zambia forward. For the powerful then, it seems, corruption is but a way of life.

Modernisation projects across Africa may carry their own share of challenges, but celebrating football has never been one of them. If anything, it has been the social glue on a fractured, vastly diverse continent that is still coming to terms with its colonial past.

That Zambia reached the final at all has been looked on as a generous spate of good luck. That they beat the best of Africa is, well, something else entirely.

Today’s editorial from popular Zambian newspaper The Post speaks directly to this spirit that has captivated the entire country, looking to a future inclusive of all Zambians. It is a hopeful message, and one well worth taking note of and sharing:

We must not lose ourselves, in everything that we do, including our politics, to cynicism, pessimism and despair. We can win and we have won. Wherever you are today, we challenge you to hope and to dream of a better future, a better country, a more just, fair, humane and prosperous Zambia. Don’t submerge your dreams.

Even in the gutter, dream of the day that you will be upon your feet again. You must never stop dreaming. It is said that today’s dreams are tomorrow’s reality; yesterday’s dreams are today’s reality…

…Dream of a peaceful and prosperous Zambia. Dream of a Zambia where every child who wants to kick a ball has access to a ball. Dream of a Zambia where every child has the possibilities or opportunities of making themselves what they want to be – a Chris Katongo, an Emmanuel Mayuka, a Kennedy Mweene, and so on and so forth.

Dream of a nation where the political leadership is honest and incorruptible, is caring and loving, is hard working and thrift. Dream of a nation in which teachers teach for life and not for a living. Dream of a Zambia with medical doctors who are concerned more about public health than private wealth. Dream of lawyers more concerned about justice than money. Dream of preachers who are concerned more about prophecy than profiteering. Dream on the high road of sound values.

Dream of a Zambia that refuses to surrender to corruption, abuse of power, intolerance and other vices. Go forward in the Chipolopolo way. Zambia must never surrender to malnutrition. We can feed the hungry and clothe the naked. We must never surrender.

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Explore more…

• ** Chilolopolo Boys or Copper Bullet Boys is the name given to the Zambian national football team after Zambia’s primary export, copper. For many years the saying “Copper is king” symbolised how Zambia depended on copper for most of its foreign earnings and as a result the national economy suffers when copper prices decline.

• Chipolopolo, iyeee; Chipolopolo iyeee… by Editorial Comment | 13/02/12 | The Post | Inspirational editorial from Zambian national newspaper on Zambia beating Ivory Coast in the final of the Africa Cup of Nations

• Best photos of from the Chipolopolo Boys Return with the Zambia Africa Cup of Nations by Truly Zambian | 13/02/12 | Truly Zambian newspaper

• Is Brain Drain Good for Africa? by Stephanie Hanson | 21/08/08 | Council on Foreign Relations

• South Africa World Cup reinforces “football imperialism” by G. Pascal Zachary | 03/06/10 | Africa Works blog

Has it been 200 years already?

This week marks two centuries since the birth of the great English novelist and social campaigner Charles Dickens, in 1812. One of the best known and popular writers of his time, Dickens dedicated his life to producing social commentaries on poverty, hunger, exploitation, cruelty and injustice through his many novels and articles.

For many of us, first contact with the themes and issues of Dickens’s time takes place in secondary school. Hard Times, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House… these are just some of his familiar works that have typically been exiled into the dusty realms of ‘classics’ sections on book shelves, not to be disturbed for fear of waking the outdated.

Liberate Charles Dickens!

We think its time to reclaim his works and return to the issues he lived and breathed in London. Are they so different from the struggles and social problems experienced by the millions of people across the world today living below the poverty line, under rising inequality, in urban slums or faced with continued gender discrimination?

The many themes and stark realities that Dickens fictionalised include abuses of industrial workers; the status of women; the punitive divorce laws of the time all come in for consideration; gratitude and suffering; the rise in social class. In his own life Dickens even helped to run and to finance a house for “fallen women”, offering prostitutes a fresh start away from their old lives in a large house in London.

A journalist by trade, Dickens was a masterful storyteller who challenged the Victorian elites and aristocracy by making them consider these kinds of social problems by bringing readers on literary journeys into the workhouses and slums, and into the homes of layers and aristocrats.

Take A Tale of Two Cities, for example. Set during the French Revolution, Dickens explores the limits of human justice by levelling a social evaluation with all of the poverty and injustice it displays for an examination of conditions that will persist just as long as violence and inequity continue to flourish.

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Chapter 15

If Charles Dickens were alive today would he be found at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London (or elsewhere) camping with the other anti-capitalist and Occupy movement protesters?

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Explore more…

• Charles Dickens’s Inner Child by Christopher Hitchens | Vanity Fair | In the last article he wrote before his death in 2011, Hitchens pays tribute to Charles Dickens and his legacy (published February 2012)

• Dickens 2012 | The Dickens 2012 initiative is a useful place for educators, teachers and students alike to explore the social issues he raised during his own lifetime. The initiative, is committed to following Dickens’s educational mission by “supporting learning activities around the world, from teachers’ conferences and family workshops to creative writing master classes and writing competitions”.

• Wikipedia | Charles Dickens reference page

• The Life of Charles Dickens | BBC Drama| Here is a short BBC animation on The Life of Charles Dickens that is well worth watching for those interested in what informed Dickens’s writing that is brief, classroom friendly and accompanied by a ‘Can you survive Dickens’s London?’ interactive game:

Shocking statistic of the week: Consumers in rich countries dispose of 220 million metric tons of food waste every year, equal to the entire food output of sub-Saharan Africa. Director General of The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) takes issue with global trends of countries becoming increasingly reliant on processed foods and the astonishing facts about collective food waste, saying

We cannot limit sustainability to food production, we need to also look at our food consumption.

Over at The Guardian development blog Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, draws attention to the structural links of food, famine and human failure as he gets noticed as the most read article of the week with this brilliant piece on Famine isn’t an extreme event, it’s the predictable result of a broken system.

Bill Gates writes his third annual letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, focusing on aid generosity.

In the lead up to 2015 – the date when most of the Millennium Development Goals are due to expire – Duncan Green continues the debate initiated by Alex Evans on establishing ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ or SDGs over at his From Poverty to Power blog. Kick started by the Columbian government and everyone from Canada to Botswana weighed in on them, the US and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have yet to step up and take notice.

Lastly,  Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and others look back on 10 years of the Global Fund:

Drought and famine are not extreme events. They are not anomalies. They are merely the sharp end of a global food system that is built on inequality, imbalances and – ultimately – fragility. And they are the regular upshot of a climate that is increasingly hostile and problematic for food production across huge swathes of the developing world.

This is the view of Olivier de Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. This follows on from his earlier statement:

Globalization creates big winners and big losers. But where food systems are concerned, losing out means sinking into poverty and hunger. A vision of food security that deepens the divide between food-surplus and food-deficit regions, between exporters and importers, and between winners and losers, simply cannot be accepted.

De Schutter challenging the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) outdated stance on food security (2011)

These are just a part of a vigorous debate underway about the scale, nature, causes and solutions around world hunger.  There have been fundamental questions about the figures so often quoted and taken for granted and on the impact of recent food price hikes on the poor.

A recent research report by Duncan Green and Naomi Hussain Living on a Spike: How is the 2011 food price crisis affecting poor people? argues that:

…shocks of this kind work to increase and perpetuate inequality, producing consistent patterns of ‘weak losers’ and ‘strong winners’. Key findings show that poor people do not merely cope by working harder, eating less, living more frugally, drawing down resources and assets, and managing on a day-to-day basis. They also respond politically: they contest official explanations of the causes, and they roundly criticize their governments for failing to act effectively.

The 48 page report can be downloaded now.

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Explore more on www.developmenteducation.ie

Feel free to check out our hunger module that includes a case study on Somalia, debates, statistics, historical examples of famines and a 2010 infographic on the geography of hunger.