The U.S. has treated Russia like a loser since the end of the Cold War.

Dismissive actions by the United States, met with overreactions by Russia, have poisoned the relationship.

By Jack F. Matlock Jr., E-mail the writer Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the U.S.S.R. from 1987 to 1991, is the author of “Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.”

One afternoon in September 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz settled in a chair across the table from Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in a New York conference room. Both were in the city for the United Nations General Assembly.

As he habitually did at the start of such meetings, Shultz handed Shevardnadze a list of reported human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze’s predecessor, Andrei Gromyko, had always received such lists grudgingly and would lecture us for interfering in Soviet internal affairs.

This time, though, Shevardnadze looked Shultz in the eye and said through his interpreter: “George, I will check this out, and if your information is correct, I will do what I can to correct the problem. But I want you to know one thing: I am not doing this because you ask me to; I am doing it because it is what my country needs to do.”

Shultz replied: “Eduard, that’s the only reason either of us should do something. Let me assure you that I will never ask you to do something that I believe is not in your country’s interest.”

They stood and shook hands. As I watched the scene, with as much emotion as amazement, it dawned on me that the Cold War was over. The job of American ambassador in Moscow was going to be a lot easier for me than it had been for my predecessors.

I thought back to that moment as talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s top diplomat this past week failed to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. It’s striking that the language being used publicly now is so much more strident than our language, public or private, was then. “It can get ugly fast if the wrong choices are made,” Kerry declared Wednesday, threatening sanctions.

I don’t believe that we are witnessing a renewal of the Cold War. The tensions between Russia and the West are based more on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and posturing for domestic audiences than on any real clash of ideologies or national interests. And the issues are far fewer and much less dangerous than those we dealt with during the Cold War.

But a failure to appreciate how the Cold War ended has had a profound impact on Russian and Western attitudes — and helps explain what we are seeing now.

The common assumption that the West forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus won the Cold War is wrong . The fact is that the Cold War ended by negotiation to the advantage of both sides.

At the December 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush confirmed that the ideological basis for the war was gone, stating that the two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies . Over the next two years, we worked more closely with the Soviets than with even some of our allies. Together, we halted the arms race, banned chemical weapons and agreed to drastically reduce nuclear weapons. I also witnessed the raising of the Iron Curtain, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the voluntary abandonment of communist ideology by the Soviet leader. Without an arms race ruining the Soviet economy and perpetuating totalitarianism, Gorbachev was freed to focus on internal reforms. Because the collapse of the Soviet Union happened so soon afterward, people often confuse it with the end of the Cold War. But they were separate events, and the former was not an inevitable outcome of the latter.

Moreover, the breakup of the U.S.S.R. into 15 separate countries was not something the United States caused or wanted. We hoped that Gorbachev would forge a voluntary union of Soviet republics, minus the three Baltic countries. Bush made this clear in August 1991 when he urged the non-Russian Soviet republics to adopt the union treaty Gorbachev had proposed and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” Russians who regret the collapse of the Soviet Union should remember that it was the elected leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who conspired with his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts to replace the U.S.S.R. with a loose and powerless “commonwealth.”

Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, Gorbachev maintained that “the end of the Cold War is our common victory.” Yet the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser.

“By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,” Bush said during his 1992 State of the Union address. That rhetoric would not have been particularly damaging on its own. But it was reinforced by actions taken under the next three presidents.

President Bill Clinton supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia without U.N. Security Council approval and the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. The effect on Russians’ trust in the United States was devastating. In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view.

Vladi­mir Putin was elected in 2000 and initially followed a pro-Western orientation. When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, he was the first foreign leader to call and offer support. He cooperated with the United States when it invaded Afghanistan, and he voluntarily removed Russian bases from Cuba and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

What did he get in return? Some meaningless praise from President George W. Bush, who then delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; invasion of Iraq without U.N. Security Council approval; overt participation in the “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; and then, probing some of the firmest red lines any Russian leader would draw, talk of taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.

President Obama famously attempted a “reset” of relations with Russia, with some success: The New START treaty was an important achievement, and there was increased quiet cooperation on a number of regional issues. But then Congress’s penchant for minding other people’s business when it cannot cope with its own began to take its toll. The Magnitsky Act , which singled out Russia for human rights violations as if there were none of comparable gravity elsewhere, infuriated Russia’s rulers and confirmed with the broader public the image of the United States as an implacable enemy.

The sad fact is that the cycle of dismissive actions by the United States met by overreactions by Russia has so poisoned the relationship that the sort of quiet diplomacy used to end the Cold War was impossible when the crisis in Ukraine burst upon the world’s consciousness. It’s why 43 percent of Russians are ready to believe that Western actions are behind the crisis and that Russia is under siege.

Putin’s military occupation of Crimea has exacerbated the situation. If it leads to the incorporation of Crimea in the Russian Federation , it may well result in a period of mutual recrimination and economic sanctions reminiscent of the Cold War. In that scenario, there would be no winners, only losers: most of all Ukraine itself, which may not survive in its present form, and Russia, which would become more isolated. Russia may also see a rise in terrorist acts from anti-Russian extremists on its periphery and more resistance from neighboring governments to membership in the economic union it is promoting.

Meanwhile, the United States and Europe would lose to the extent that a resentful Russia would make it even more difficult to address global and regional issues such as the Iranian nuclear program, North Korea and the Syrian civil war, to name a few. Russian policy in these areas has not always been all the United States desired, but it has been more helpful than many Americans realize. And encouraging a more obstructive Russia is not in anyone’s interest.

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Why America does not understand Putin

By Angela Stent, Published: March 14

Angela Stent directs the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University and is the author of “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.”

In 1974, I spent several months in the dusty main reading room of Moscow’s Lenin Library, studying the troubled Soviet-German relationship. It was a thrill to glimpse the closed world of the Soviet Union, yet I soon found myself spending lots of time explaining the United States to incredulous Soviet students at Moscow State University. Yes, I said, Americans were outraged that President Richard Nixon’s White House was listening to people’s phone conversations. And no, The Washington Post was not in the hands of a capitalist-Zionist cabal out to destroy detente by fabricating Watergate. On the day Nixon resigned, I left Moscow, having failed to convince my fellow students about how America really works.

For four decades as a graduate student, professor and policymaker, understanding how the Soviet Union and Russia really work has been my vocation. Unfortunately, America’s focus on Russia comes and goes with news cycles and academic fads. Over the past decade or so, growing interest in China and the Arab world sidelined Russia; at most, it was one-fourth of the BRIC acronym of emerging markets — and the least enticing. But now, the trifecta of Edward Snowden, the Sochi Olympics and the Ukraine crisis has prompted talk of a newCold War and how hard Vladimir Putin will play “great power” politics. My inbox and voicemail run over with producers and reporters seeking quotes and insights. Why did Nikita Khrushchev give Crimea to Ukraine in 1954? And who is Vladimir Putin, really?

Sovietology may be as defunct as the Soviet Union itself. But the need for a dedicated and deep understanding of Russia — especially the motives and machinations emanating from the Kremlin — is as critical as ever. Otherwise the United States is doomed to repeat cycles of “resets,” great expectations of better relations with Russia followed by serial disappointments. President Obama’s reset was only the latest of four since the Cold War ended.

I began my life as a Sovietologist at Harvard in the heyday of the 1970s, when interest in the U.S.S.R. was high, the United States and the Soviet Union were caught in the embrace of mutually assured destruction, and support for graduate students studying Soviet politics was abundant. The discipline had been established in the late 1940s as Washington came to realize how dangerously little it knew about its new Cold War adversary. The government funded area studies for the Soviet Union — and for other regions, from East Asia to Latin America — because it recognized the importance of training people who could bring together an understanding of the region and its languages, history, culture, economy and politics.

My timing was good. I began to teach in the 1980s, a great decade for Soviet experts. Ronald Reagan proclaimed the “evil empire.” One after another, three geriatric Soviet leaders died (giving rise to a popular Moscow joke about who had a season ticket to state funerals). And then, of course, came the dynamic and young Mikhail Gorbachev.

I was a professor in Georgetown University’s Russian area studies program, which trained dozens of students every year in the Russian language and social sciences. Many found employment in various branches of the federal government, some in academia and the odd one or two in business. Debates about whether Gorbachev was “for real” and how far his reforms would go consumed my colleagues and the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

In Moscow in 1989, I attended the first meeting of Soviet and American experts on Eastern Europe. The Soviets shocked us by suggesting that the political situation in the satellite states of Eastern Europe was far worse than we appreciated. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — long reviled in the Soviet press as the ultimate Cold Warrior — lectured a standing-room-only crowd at Moscow’s Diplomatic Academy. He received a standing ovation. Clearly the times were changing, and rapidly.

And when Gorbachev announced, in an 11-minute speech in December 1991, that the Soviet Union was no more, times changed for us Soviet experts as well.

Most of us transitioned to being Russian and Eurasian experts. In my case, that meant throwing away my lecture notes on Marxism-Leninism and how the Politburo functioned, and talking instead about elections, political parties and public opinion influencing foreign policy. And it meant approaching the former Soviet republics as independent nations. It was a challenge to comprehend how Russia and its neighbors would throw off the legacy of the Soviet system.

The 1990s were a tough decade for the field. With the Soviet enemy gone and a free-market and democratic Russia supposedly about to emerge, why bother devoting government and foundation funds to Russia and Eurasian studies and graduate student exchanges? Ironically, just as it became possible to travel freely around Russia and discuss previously taboo subjects, the demand for our knowledge plummeted. Experts in democracy and economics — not necessarily Russia scholars — flocked to Moscow, believing that it would become a major emerging market, with competitive political parties and enormous business opportunities after decades of Soviet deprivation.

Too soon, the expectations faded, and questions about how the new Russia was evolving and why anti-Americanism was growing started to dominate discussions. I began my first government job, in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, just after the 1999 Kosovo war had taken U.S.-Russian relations to a breaking point. Moscow said Washington was ignoring Russian interests and trying to ruin its relationship with a traditional ally (in that case, Serbia). The rhetoric was eerily similar to what we hear today. The Clinton administration’s attempts to reset relations with Russia were over.

When the George W. Bush administration came into office, it also sought to revamp ties with Russia. At State, we worked on a plan to offer Russia NATO membership, hoping to give Moscow a stake in Europe’s post-Cold War security system — the same system it seeks to upend today with its occupation of Crimea. After some promising months when Russia was a partner in the war in Afghanistan, that reset also foundered over the Iraq war and the revolutions in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, popular movements that toppled governments and seemed to augur a new era of democracy.

The Kremlin had assumed that, in return for supporting the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Washington would recognize what Moscow claimed as its “sphere of privileged interests” in the post-Soviet space. Then, as today, the Kremlin felt betrayed when the United States supported groups in Ukraine that wanted closer ties with the West. The complexities of the post-Soviet region, as made clear by the 2004 and 2014 Ukrainian crises, are vast, but the ranks of people working on Russia, in government and academia, have thinned.

One culprit is academia, where area studies have become devalued and their budgets slashed. Instead of embracing a deep understanding of the culture and history of Russia and its neighbors, political science has been taken over by number-crunching and abstract models that bear little relationship to real-world politics and foreign policy. Only a very brave or dedicated doctoral student would today become a Russia expert if she or he wants to find academic employment. Foundations, which rarely support area studies these days, also share some blame.

Even though the Cold War is long gone, the new Russia can at times look a bit like the old Russia; we still need the Kremlinology skills that we gained decades ago to figure out Putin’s endgame in Ukraine, for instance. Sustained expertise is essential if we are not to be whipsawed by one crisis after another. We have the opportunity to train a new generation of scholars who can develop in-depth knowledge of contemporary Russia, in ways that were not possible when we were first studying it.

My doctoral adviser at Harvard, Adam Ulam, was a brilliant student of Soviet foreign policy, but he did most of his research sitting in his Cambridge office, trying to get inside the heads of Kremlin decision-makers. When I was in Moscow during the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, a Western broadcast reporter called me to ask, “What does the man on the street in Moscow think?” The answer was that the “man on the street” did not exist, at least in Western terms. He had not been told about the accident and would not have dared talk to a random American asking questions on that street, anyway.

But today, it is possible to meet for hours with Putin, as I have done every year over the past decade, and challenge him with questions. And it is possible to learn what a wide variety of Russian men and women think — both on the street and in the square.

There is much work to be done. In my latest book, I explain how the deteriorating relationship between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War can be traced to the fundamentally mismatched worldviews and expectations of the two sides, going back to 1991. Indeed, the Crimea crisis is rooted in the Soviet breakup, when the Soviet republics became independent states, based on borders drawn by Stalin. It has proved very difficult for a good part of the Russian population to accept that Ukraine is an independent country and that Crimea — a part of Russia since 1783 — was “given” to Ukraine by Khrushchev on a whim. Indeed, Putin went so far as to tell Bush in 2008 that Ukraine was not really a country.

So for the moment, let’s forget about resets. Unless we effectively manage the current crisis and prevent it from becoming even more dangerous, it will become more difficult to concentrate on the concrete areas where Russia and the United States have overlapping interests: Iran, Syria, transit to and from Afghanistan, and the Arctic. For after the Ukraine crisis is over and all the Russia experts like me have faded from the TV screens and airwaves, there may still be room for a working relationship with Russia, based not on resets but rather on realism.

When that time arrives, who in American universities and government will have the expertise, interest and passion for all things Russian? Unless we commit to educating a new generation about this onetime rival and possible partner, we won’t be prepared to deal effectively with Russia’s post-Putin generation, with all the risks and challenges — but also the opportunities — it will present.

A Brief Profile of Mumiramira Village in Kabanga, Ngara District

Introduction and Location

Kagera Region: the region lies in remote north western region bordering Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Road access to the region is difficult, while social services are scarce in most of its rural areas. The region has relatively good climate and land for crop production. Important agro-ecological zones in the region are: the Highland; High/Medium Rainfall Perennial Banana/Coffee Production Zone and the Lowland, Medium/Low Rainfall Annual Crop Production Zone. The indigenous population is 1.6 Million people in 290,000 households, dispersed in 550 villages with densities varying from 25 to 100 persons per square Kilometer. Smallholder subsistence farming dominates the economy. Poverty and welfare data indicate that Kagera Region is among the poorest in Tanzania. Over 40 percent of the households face frequent deficiencies in staple food supply and over 80 percent are classified as poor. Major causes of poverty are: distance from the road; lack of farm inputs, credit and extension; low prices, especially for coffee; inadequate access to safe water; scarcity of fuel wood and lack of transport. 

     

The rural district of Kagera Region [Karagwe; Bukoba Rural; Muleba; Bihalamulo and Ngara] have a joint population of approximately 2,000,000 individuals living in 375,000 households. Although all live in rural districts, 20 percent of these people live in areas classified as peri-urban, with the remainder living in rural areas. Rural Kagera has a poverty rate of 31 percent; a little less than one out of three households live below the basic needs poverty line. However, as poor households are generally larger, 40 percent of the Kagera population lives in a poor household. Twenty six percent of the household in the region have access to health facility, i.e. live within 30 minutes travel from one health facility. In urban areas this proportion is significantly higher at 57 percent. In contrast in rural areas it lies very low at 19 percent.

Access to social service differs substantially between rural and peri-urban areas, the proportions of individuals using health facilities in rural areas and urban are almost identical at roughly 15 percent. Almost 57 percent of children born in the last five years were delivered at home and 43 percent in a hospital or a maternity ward. Children are more likely to be born at home in rural areas, in poor households and if they are born in Karagwe District.  

Ngara District: the district comprises of 13 percent of all households in Kagera region. The poverty rate in the district is the highest in rural Kagera after Bihalamulo and Muleba. The district is a home of 15 percent of the poor households in the region and most Ngara’s households have and average of 5.3 inhabitants. Level of livestock and land possession are comparable to the rest of the rural region. Ngara District has the second highest rate of access to health facilities in Kagera Rural. Over 30 percent of its households are located within 30 minutes of travel from the nearest health facility. Here about 40 percent of the births are delivered in the hospitals or maternity wards, while the remainder is delivered at home, which is the second lowest percentage of hospital births in Kagera rural after Karagwe.

Ngara has the best access rate to drinking water facilities. Seventy percent of the households are located within 30 minutes of travel from the nearest source of drinking water. About a third of households in Ngara District live under the basic needs poverty line. Ngara is a district with a high poverty rate compared to the rest of the region. In absolute number Ngara has 16,700 poor households. 

Mumiramira Village  

Mumiramira village form part of Rulenge Division, Bugarama ward in Ngara District, bordered by Nyarulama village, Bugarama and borders Burundi in South and West of the village, approximately half of the village land is surrounded by Burundi (Figure 2.1). Mumiramira village is formed by a total of six hamlets, namely: Murusenge; Kabanga; Mumiramira; Maragara; Mukivumu and Karamba.

Demographic Characteristics

Mumiramira village had a total of 3,629 residents, comprising of 59 percent female, the active population is less than half of the total population of which 60 percent is again women. This indicates that women form the backbone of the village economy. Now with this proportion where are the other men? This question can be answered by another study. However, the location of the village sharing border with Burundi might have impact on this, it should be known that since 1993 there was an influx of refugees in the village and this might have impact to the current population. For example some people might have left to other areas of Tanzania. More than half of the population is dependents under 17 years old, formed by 59 percent of women; however the village had only three disabled. There is a total of 122 [3 percent] ophans in the village; this is an alarming rate looking on the village population and the general economic situation. Half of the orphans are the most vulnerable children in the village, vulnerability is a situation where children have lost both parents, and they do not have any reliable relative to take care of them. 

  

Table 1. Population in Mumiramira Village

Population Group	Men	Women	Total	Percentage of Women
Total Population	1488	2141	3629	59%
Active population	491	750	1241	60%
Dependants [below 17 years old]	902	1296	2198	59%
Disabled	3	3	6	50%
Orphans	65	57	122	47%
Most Vulnerable Children	27	35	62	56%

Source: Mumiramira Village Council January 2008

  

Village Administration

According to the Local Government Authority regulation of the United Republic of Tanzania, every village is supposed to have its own government headed by the Village Chairman and the Village Executive Officer. They are responsible to the Village Council with 25 members representing all hamlets in the village (Table 2). 

Table 2. Members of the Village Council

Description	Men	Women	Total	Percentage of Women
Total Number of members	18	7	25	28%
Elected members	18	7	25	28%
Members under special seats	-	-	1	-
Committees’ Chairpersons	3	-	3	-
Committee’s Secretaries	3	-	3	-

Source: Mumiramira Village Council January 2008

The Village Council had a total of 25 members as per Local Government Regulations, where by women comprise only 28 percent, which is below the required standard of 30 percent for each and every policy and legal body in Tanzania. None of the women is either a chairperson person or a Secretary of one of the Village standing committees. Different from other village and urban centres of Tanzania, there is no other political party in Mumiramira, other than the ruling party Chama cha Mapinduzi [CCM].   

 Education in Mumiramira Village

Despite the fact that the total area of the village is not known, it is beyond reasonable doubt that general the village is relatively big. In this line Mumiramira has two primary schools namely Mumiramira Primary School located at the centre of the village and Mukivumu Primary school in the respect hamlet, but saving other hamlets around. Mumiramira primary school has a total of 9 teachers, comprising one female teacher. There are more girls than boys among the pupils by 53 percent and only four pupils passed for form one in 2007. Registration for standard one for 2008 intake was 71 pupils comprising 51 percent girls. Mukivumu Primary school in the Table 2.3 has a more or less similar situation. Here there are 6 teachers one of them is a female; female students comprise 50 percent of the total, less to that of Mumiramira, and it is encouraging that 23 pupils passed standard seven examinations in 2008, among them 78 percent were female. The total registration for standard one stood at 51 percent for girls.

Making comparison between the two schools it is encouraging that Mukivumu primary school had a better performance in 2007, against Mumiramira. It is unfortunate that the reasons behind this good performance are not known. All in all the general situation of the school and number of teachers need special care since the ratio of student per teacher is 1:80 for Mumiramira and 1:88 for Mukivumu Primary school. This shows that almost another half of teachers is required to satisfy the required needs of 1 teacher for 45 pupils (1:45) [Table 3].   

Table 3. Primary Education in the Village

MUMIRAMIRA PRIMARY SCHOOL
Description	Men	Women	Total	Percentage of women
Number of Teachers	8	1	9	11%
Number of pupils	341	380	721	53%
Number of pupils passed 2007	3	1	4	25%
Registration of standard one 2008	35	36	71	51%
MUKIVUMU PRIMARY SCHOOL
Number of Teachers	5	1	6	17%
Number of pupils	263	264	527	50%
Number of pupils passed  2007	5	18	23	78%
Registration of standard one 2008	28	23	51	45%

Source: Mumiramira and Mukivumu Primary Schools

In addition to the present education situation in the village it is important to look on the vital statistics in education. In total for both schools the deficit is extremely high as opposed to the availability.  The deficit in classrooms is by 61 and 69 percent for Mumiramira and Mukivumu Primary Schools, while for teachers the proportional of deficit is 89 percent for Mumiramira and 85 percent for Mukivumu. The only item with relatively low deficit compared, is a number of desks for both primary schools [standing at 46 and 48 percents for Mumiramira and Mukivumu respectively], at the same time Mumiramira also had a lowest deficit on pit latrines 10 percent compared to deficit of 83 percent for Mukivumu. In this line there is a need of supporting this village in one way or another for the aim of improving education situation and facilities in the village.

Table 4. Vital Statistics in Education Mumiramira Village                  

MUMIRAMIRA PRIMARY SCHOOL
Description	Requirement	Available	Deficit	Percentage of Deficit
Number of classrooms	18	7	11	61%
Number of teachers’ houses	18	2	16	89%
Number of desks	240	130	110	46%
Number of pit latrines [toilets]	84	8	76	10%
MUKIVUMU PRIMARY SCHOOL
Number of classrooms	13	4	9	69%
Number of teachers’ houses	13	2	11	85%
Number of desks	157	81	76	48%
Number of pit latrines [toilets]	23	4	19	83%

Source: Mumiramira and Mukivumu Primary Schools

 Health Situation in the Village

Outpatient services in the village are provided at the dispensary, located within the village, it was reported that the dispensary is vital in the village, specifically for Mother and Child Health, children less than five years old, pregnant mothers and vaccination.  The dispensary had only two staff, a clinical officer and a nurse attendant may be a guard even if it is not mentioned in the Table 2.5. The average number of outpatient per day was mentioned to be 15 persons, excluding pregnant mothers and children less than five years coming for vaccination and weighing services.

The main cause of deaths in the village is Malaria; according to available statistics the disease at the dispensary had caused 9 deaths in 2007.  This figure is only for the reported cases they might be other deaths caused by the same but not reported to the health facility. The most killer disease of children less than five years old is malnutrition, where it was shown as causing deaths to a total of 50 children half female and male in 2007 alone. The general health can be said to be not so good because Malnutrition is killing many kids in the village, the figure of 50 children in the area with a population of less than 4,000 people is real significant. More girls have given vaccination than boys; 199 girls compared to only 36 boys; this is incredible, under normal circumstances it can not be possible. There is a need of looking on this matter. If this is the case, therefore many boys are not brought to the health facility for vaccination and why is so? Or more than three quarters of the village new born are girls! There is a need of looking in details on this information, otherwise misconception is created. This is important because, this CNA exercise aim to study opportunities and problems associated with provision of water and health services and the economic situation and activities; therefore, a clear understanding of any doubt is relevant.

Table 5. Health Statistics the Village

Descriptions	Female	Male	Total
Number of Clinical Officers	1	-	1
Number of nurses and or Attendants	-	1	1
Number of outpatient per day	-	-	15
Vital Statistics in Diseases [Causes of Deaths in order]
Malaria	5	4	9
Coughing	-	-	-
Diarrhea	-	-	-
Malnutrition  ( deficient)	25	25	50
Health and Children
Malnutrition (deficient)	25	25	50
Vaccination	36	199	235

Source: Mumiramira Dispensary January 2008

Religious Institutions

There are four religious institutions in the village, namely: Roman Catholic; Seventh Day Adventists; Pentecostal and Islam. No mention was made in relations to the proportional of this believers to the total village population or which denomination or sects has more believers, compared to the either the village population or the total number of believers in the village.   

  Livestock in the Village

Villagers at Mumiramira are mixed farmers cultivating crops and keeping livestock. Village data base at Mumiramira shows that there are 221 Cattle in the village, in 2007. However, there is no data on Sheep; Chicken and Goats which for sure can be seen all over the village. According to village data no dairy cattle are available in the village; common diseases for animals were also not mentioned. 

  

 Microfinance and Non-Farming Activities

Despite the fact that majority of villagers are farmers growing crops and sometime keeping livestock, some of them are involved in other non farming activities. However, there is no any type of microfinance institution in the village in whatever form.  For those few involved in businesses, hence the village has as a result there are three small shops; one weekly market and a total of 8 local beer bars and pubs, commonly known as Club or Pombe Shops.  

[SOURCE: Extracted from a consultancy report titled " Water, Health and Economic Activities Profile. Profile for Mumiramira Village". KNCL and GAD Consult. 2008]

February – March 2008