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Child Poverty Reduction South Sudan is just about to launch its operations in two out of six counties of Warrap State, Tonj East and Gogrial East. There will be two teams, each lead by a program officer.

Akuecbeny Marek will lead the Tonj East team. He hails from this area and knows it very well in terms of the complex cultural, historical and demographic make-up. The most common feature that has added to the level of poverty in the area is communal violence, and we wish to have our staff chronicle the violence there and document how it contributes to poverty. The area has suffered extreme communal violence for nearly two decades, mostly triggered by competition over cattle pasture. It is also linked to identity politics and political feuding between political elite who compete for power at the national level in Juba. This violence is facilitated by widespread use of firearms by civilians. Civilian possession of weapons is a phenomenon that has roots in the many decades of civil war between north and south of the old Sudan before the split of Sudan into two. The communal feuds and the vicious violence in Tonj have shocked everyone, even the people who engage in this violence. Tonj East communities have inflicted unspeakable violence on each other and have destroyed the little that was there by way of health services, educational facilities and have made it nearly impossible for the government to build road infrastructure, provide clean water, telecommunication and any welfare system to intervene in times of dire needs. They have also frustrated government security agencies that have tried to demilitarize and disarm the civilians who sometimes outgun the army.

This has meant that the local people have not been able to produce sufficient food due to displacement and insecurity. Trade has also been curtailed and livestock, the backbone of the local economy, have become the main reason for violence and become more of liability than the resource it should be. Schools have shut, food markets destroyed, health centers are deserted by the International NGOs that used to operate in the area, leaving many people, especially children extremely vulnerable and without any sense of investment into their futures. Vaccination coverage has declined, infant mortality rose, maternal health has worsened. These vulnerable children are likely to add to the size of the population that is already living in poverty. It means the area will not have future skilled workforce, so poverty will endure and increase.

It is the goal of CPR-South Sudan Tonj East Program to try to fill this health, educational gap as much as possible, to give this region a chance of being on par with the rest of the country in terms of child survival and over all development.

For Gogrial East, our program officer there will be Kuel Madut Jok, who is from that region and trained in social work in Canada. Kuel will bring his expertise working with refugees in Calgary, Alberta, as a counselor in the Catholic School District in Calgary. As the United Nations has been warning the world about the “desperation and hopelessness” of children of South Sudan, we are all called upon to try to help them come to terms with the violence, crises of want, neglect and abuse. Gogrial East Country, home to Jieng (Dinka) borders Western Upper Nile, home to Nuer, and the two communities have been competing over grazing land for decades and have carried out attacks on each other. Their ethnic relations have been politicized by their elite as a way to draw them into their political rivalries. It is the children that bear brunt of this raiding and counter raiding. They face abduction, communal conflict, displacement, political violence, gender-based violence. In the recent years, this region has also experienced massive flooding and the two crises, violence and extreme weather conditions have contributed to high levels of childhood malnutrition. It will be extremely important for our team in Gogrial East to carefully study these two issues, to help CPR make plans for the type of intervention needed to reduce childhood poverty. The area has very low level of birth registrations and CPR programs in this area will start with a campaign to register every child under 5 years of age and all the newborns. Pregnant women will also be registered. This is the foundation of our campaign to urge the government to allocate bigger budgets for programming around this category of population.

Many communities in Tonj East and Gogrial East are still drinking from open pools that they share with animals. Others draw water from deep wells, requiring a lot of physical exertion from women and girls to get water long distances. Our Water and Sanitation Program will essentially give life, reducing water-born infections and will minimize the amount of labor young girls require to put into fetching water from distant well.

Children who move with cattle camps during the dry season are deprived of education, as they have to follow herds to grazing areas far away from residential areas for up to 4 months a year. These don’t access healthcare and nutrition is often poor in the dry season camps. Our program would drive around to check on the children in cattle camps, see how they can be taught through mobile education and reading program. It is actually not very expensive to do this; it just requires thinking, care, planning and commitment from dedicated teachers. Our educational program provides some incentives for teachers to go where they are need the most.

Food deficits born of violence and weather conditions means that thousands of children in Tonj East and Gogrial East rely on humanitarian aid provided by the UN and International NGOs.

Even children living in their own villages are often hungry most of the time and diseases such as kwashiorkor are common as seen in this photo below.

As youth unemployment becomes ever more consuming in South Sudan, it is easy to find young people and children congregate in nearly barren markets and tea parlors to idle away their times, greatly affecting household incomes and leaving children without adequate food on a daily basis.