Daily dispatches: blogging from a village in Africa

In the first such project by 'The Irish Times', graduate journalist Ciara Kennyis moving to Zambia, where her multimedia blog will chronicle daily life in a small rural village

JUST OUTSIDE THE city of Chipata in eastern Zambia, close to the border with Malawi, lies a cluster of mud huts, home to about 200 people of the Ngoni tribe. This village, Makwatata, will be my home for the next four weeks.

As I was struggling to begin my master’s thesis last April, and end-of-term assignments were choking the pages of my diary, an e-mail dropped into my inbox that was to change the course of the rest of my year.

The development aid agency Self Help Africa was advertising for a graduate journalist to travel to Zambia to spend a month blogging from a rural village. The project aimed to give a voice to the people of that community, to bring their stories to an international audience using multimedia and social-networking platforms.

After interviews, countless meetings and months of preparation I’m flying out to Zambia next week, laden down with a backpack of the highest of high-tech equipment, a bag of nerves and, most essentially, a sense of adventure.

Through a series of short articles, photos, video clips and audio reports, which will be hosted on the blogs section of irishtimes.com, I hope to build a portrait of day-to-day life in the village.

Makwatata is just one of hundreds of thousands of rural villages across Sub-Saharan Africa that could have been chosen to host this project. Zambia was selected because it has a strong Irish connection, as it is one of the nine priority countries supported by Irish Aid. As it’s a former British colony, most of the population speak English as well as their own tribal language. This not only makes my job much easier, but means the voices of the people can be heard without the filter of an interpreter.

The village of Makwatata itself was ideal as it is rural yet close to the city of Chipata where Self Help Africa has an office. There are a number of interesting development initiatives operating in the area, and the internet signal is relatively strong.

The stories of the residents of the region will form the spine of the project’s content, and the focus will be on the everyday lives of ordinary people. I will be looking to find out who does the most work in the village, who gets to go to school and who dreams of going to college, whether farmers work to feed their families or sell their produce at market, and how people go about sending a letter, getting a loan or seeing a doctor.

My reports will also provide a forum for the people of Makwatata to express their views on the issues that affect their lives: education, healthcare, politics, environmental sustainability and climate change.

It will also offer them a chance to describe to an international audience how new development initiatives are improving their lives, and to speak out about issues they feel are not being adequately addressed.

ONE OF THEworld's poorest countries, Zambia stands 165th in the United Nations Human Development Index. More than two-thirds of the population survive on less than $1 a day, and one in seven people between 15 and 49 has HIV.

The statistics seem bleak, but advances are being made to improve conditions for the Zambian people. A 2008 report on the progress of the millennium development goals in Zambia showed that the targets relating to hunger, primary education, gender equality, maternal health, and HIV and Aids are likely to be achieved by 2015.

The challenges that face the villagers in Makwatata are typical of the difficulties rural farmers experience all over the African continent. Like the majority of rural Africans, these people are utterly reliant on agriculture for survival. They are also particularly vulnerable to climatic and economic shocks.

The focus of international development aid has shifted back to smallholder farmers, after a steady decline in funding for African agriculture since the early 1980s. NGOs such as Self Help Africa are helping to drive economic change among smallholder farmers across the continent through the introduction of co-operatives, local credit facilities and women’s groups, and and by giving farmers the knowledge to optimise agricultural production in a sustainable way.

I will be looking at how these initiatives work and their impact on this community.

A VILLAGE IN AFRICAis the first dedicated multimedia project to be carried by 'The Irish Times'. It will be able to capture each angle of a story in the medium most appropriate to that angle, the one which can present it in the most compelling and informative way.

Bringing an innovative, internet-based project like this to a rural African village that currently has no electricity poses a major logistical challenge. My kit bag contains a laptop, a large fold-out solar panel, three solar batteries, a digital camera, a high-definition video camera, a tripod, a mobile phone, an audio recorder, a microphone, memory cards, a USB memory stick, a mobile internet dongle and countless packets of batteries.

Should these fail, I have also packed a notebook and pen.

I can only imagine how alien all this technology will seem to a community that not only lives without artificial light, but may rarely have encountered a white person before.

Chief Nzamane, senior chief of the Ngoni people, has invited me to his home on my arrival, and he will introduce me to the people of Makwatata. They have been told about the project, and I can imagine they will be curious, and slightly wary, about the work I will be doing.

I am conscious that my presence will be felt in Makwatata, and I hope to involve the people of the village in the production of the content so their stories can be heard as directly as possible, and to convince them of the value of the project in giving rural communities a voice.

Having spent several years working as a travel writer, I have backpacked my way around the world, but I have never strayed too far from the well trodden tourist trail, especially for such a long period of time. I have never slept on the ground in a mud hut before, or lived without running water for more than a few days, or eaten nshima, the Zambian staple food made from ground maize.

The project poses not only a technical challenge but also a personal one. My preconceptions will be challenged and, with luck, replaced with a greater understanding of what life is like for the millions of smallholder farmers struggling to make a living from the African land.

I hope to share this understanding with a wider audience through the blog.