Rosemary Nyerere Mwamakula, member of parliament, Tanzania

My name is Rosemary Nyerere Mwamakula. I'm a newly–elected member of parliament in Tanzania. I represent women from minor regions in the Northern parts of Tanzania. Prior to becoming a parliament member, I was a lecturer in an impoverished town, so I thought I really knew about the poverty in my country. But during my campaign, when I was running for the MP seat, I went back to the rural area in Mara(29) and realized that I had a lot to learn.

One child I saw in Mara was so thin with such a big head it appeared as though his head was just a skull covered with skin. His legs were half the size of my wrist. My group and I asked who the child's mother was, thinking perhaps she had died of AIDS, and that the child was suffering from AIDS as well. An older woman replied, "That is how it is ... they go there, get children and leave them with us." We discovered that this woman was the suffering child's grandmother; her daughter, like many others, visits town, becomes impregnated, and upon childbirth, abandons the child to its grandmother in the village.

Women are free to come in and tell me their problems. One woman told me, "I have five children and I cannot afford to take care of them or send them to school. I need 3000 shillings per child annually; 9000 shillings all together." 9000 shillings amounts to roughly 10 dollars a year, an amount this woman cannot even afford to pay. Another woman said, "I need 1000 shillings for medication in order to treat my ailing son." 1000 shillings is about 1 dollar and 35 cents, an unaffordable figure for the mother.

Another woman told me how the recent TB epidemic had affected her family: "I don't come from a rich family, relatively speaking, but I am not poor by Tanzanian standards. I was in the village two weeks ago when somebody told me that my first cousin was sick and in the hospital. I said I would visit him when I had time. Shortly after, another cousin told me he was dying, so I rushed to the hospital to find my brother sitting in a hospital bed beside a large bowl full of blood. He'd been vomiting, he had TB.'

This example refers to a middle class family – can you imagine what other families experience? In Dakar 2000, we are trying to create alternatives to the HIPCs and the PRSPs. We are planning to gain the support of various grassroots organizations. Before we can do this we must become more familiar with the debt problem as well as educate our citizenry on how it affects our communities. Nonetheless, the immediate problems these people face are the main priority. It is unrealistic to expect people to learn about globalization when, as exemplified, they may lack the 10 dollars necessary to fund the education of their three children for an entire year.

I believe that with time we could try to tackle both the immediate needs of our people as well as our goals on the international scale. I see the SAPs, HIPCs and the PRSPs and the conditionalities as one in the same. The international community often purports to have created new programs but in reality they all have similar objectives. For example, we are told that we will receive debt relief if we privatize some of the para–statal organisations and public owned firms, such as water, electricity, telephones, communications etc. 'Give me your airports,' they say, 'then we'll consider'. They say they will help us, and that they will not ask for the money they've lent – but in return they want everything that is ours. Is that relief?