Frontlines of My Life

I spent parts of my childhood in Minembwe, a small and remote village in High Plateaus of Eastern Congo. It takes about three days of walking to get to the nearest dirt road in Uvira - a small city perched on the shore of Lake Tanganyika I call my hometown. One of my vivid memories as a teenager while in these remote parts of Congo is seeing women and girls pound maize with bare hands to produce corn flour for Ugali, a staple food there. I pounded maize too. It’s a “women’s work”.

Women in these remote areas drive the economy and do virtually all the household chores, while men take care of cattle. Women do much of the work of cultivating the land to feed their families. They gather firewood, a task increasingly difficult as weather patterns change. They haul jerry cans of water on their heads from streams nearby. They take care of the children, clean houses and cows’ shelters.

In 2016, I co-founded Jimbere Fund precisely to help women in Congo’s most remote communities. Women like my grandmother and aunties who still live in Minembwe. I want to enable them and others like them to create a better life for themselves and their families. Our approach blends community organizing and development interventions. Communities identify their most pressing needs and we work with them to find solutions and co-implement them.

So my first project consisted of surveying women’s groups in four villages in Minembwe and Tulambo areas to hear their top concerns. Overwhelmingly, women told us that the support they needed most was a milling machine. To produce corn flour, a woman spends about 20 hours per week grinding and pounding maize with bare hands on traditional wooden tools, watering it, filtering it and drying it up, while a milling machine would take half an hour or less to do the task. One process takes about two weeks to complete so women are always working on this task, with a day-long pounding as the culmination of it and the most difficult part of it. It’s a physically strenuous activity and time-consuming. This activity affects women in many ways.

First, with so much time consumed in this task women do not have enough time left to focus on other important things. Fields may go unattended and most importantly, children are not taken care of as they should.

This project will allow girls to spend more time in school. One of the casualty of “guhura”, as the task of pounding maize is known locally, is that girls from the age of about 10 are supposed to do this task. So for days of pounding maize, young girls skip school to take part in the activity. And by the time they are 14, they have dropped out of school altogether to take care of the household chores and be married off. In rural Congo, it’s estimated that 74% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 are already married, usually arranged by their families without their consent.

Second, with so much time consumed in this task, women don’t have enough time left to focus on other important things. So fields may go unattended. Children are not taken care of as they should. Freeing women from this task with a provision of a $3,000 milling machine will mean more food and time for their families and children. One milling machine can serve about 12 villages and hundreds of households in close proximity.

Third, this project aims at reducing gender inequities in high plateaus where women’s rights are in dire situation and their labor is not appreciated. It will increase productivity of women’s labor and support women’s groups take center stage in community development, which further improves their status. Supporting women’s groups acquire and use milling machines is one simple solution to make corn flour in half an hour or less. It’s a smart intervention.