In Britain, hunger hurts while in Africa, hunger kills - but we single mums try to do our best

Food poverty campaigner, single mum and blogger Jack Monroe visits Tanzania and finds some surprising similarities with her own situation

Here To Help: Jack in Tanzania with Irene and daughter

Mora McLagan/Oxfam UK

She is 24 years old, a single mother to a two-year-old girl. She lost her job in 2012 and has moved house at least four times since. Unable to find work, she is living in a friend’s bedroom in a shared house, borrowing food from neighbours.
Her name is Irene and she lives in Tanzania but her story feels immediately familiar to me.
I’m a British single mum aged 25 with a three-year-old son.
I was forced to give up my job in the UK fire service because I couldn’t make my childcare fit around the unpredictable hours. I fell into severe poverty.
I have also borrowed food from friends and food banks. I’ve moved house five times since I become unemployed and my son has moved eight times in his short life.

A blog I kept about my experiences is being made into a book called A Girl Called Jack, and because of that, Oxfam invited me to visit Tanzania.

The post that sent my blog viral was called Hunger Hurts. In Africa, hunger kills.
But although poverty in Africa and the UK are different, our experiences share deep similarities too.
I have recently appeared in adverts for Sainsbury’s, along with three other people, and was criticised for it by some of the press.
But all I took was the equivalent of the living wage for six weeks’ work. The rest I donated to my local food bank and an Oxfam project.

Mora McLagan/Oxfam UK

Welcome: Children greet Jack on her Tanzania trip

Oxfam suggested I see some of their work in Tanzania. And I want to donate some of my fee to a project that could make a real difference to other mothers’ lives across the world.
On Kenya Airways, the in-flight magazine boasts of the rising middle class in Africa, defined by having a fridge or a mobile phone. But the people I see are struggling.
“You should meet Irene”, says Marc Wegerif, Oxfam’s economic justice manager in Tanzania. “You two have very similar stories.”
Irene is around 5ft, slightly built, with a big smile. “Karibu, welcome!” she says, clasping my hands.
We sit on a ripped – if immaculate – sofa wedged between the wall and the bed which she shares with her two-year-old daughter, who peers at us with large black eyes and a closely shaved head, bunching up her pink Dora The Explorer dress and chuckling every time we say her name.

“I cooked for you,” Irene says with a bashful grin. “It’s not much.” In fact it’s a small bowl of tiny fried fish – dagaa – with stewed green leaves and a maize dish called ugali which everyone eats.

“My friend used to live here,” she says. “She has gone to Rwanda for work. I am not sure when she is coming back.”

In Tanzania, many tenants pay rent a year in advance. It is a system skewed in favour of landlords. Here, the landlord would not return five months’ rent already paid, but let Irene stay there.

“When the rent runs out in April I will have to find somewhere else. I will need the year’s rent in advance,” she tells me.

A small unfurnished room costs 45,000 shillings a month. I think of Maria, a single mother I met the night before. She makes a living selling fish at around 1,000 shillings profit each. A year’s rent in advance would mean selling 5,000 fish.

Irene wants to be a trader, selling at the side of the road. “I would like to sell charcoal,” she says. “Most people are cooking on charcoal. If I can get help I would buy the charcoal and a frame (a shelter). You have to try your own business, put money aside, and try to buy your own place. You cannot wait for the government to help.”

Irene was working at a restaurant in 2012 but the owner sold the land and it was closed. Since then, her life has been insecure and transient.
She stays where she can with her few belongings and little girl in tow, at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords, poorly maintained properties and opportunist thieves.

Mora McLagan / Oxfam UK

Hospitality: Jack is given food by her hosts

Work is hard to find here, especially as a young woman with a baby. Rights for workers seem non-existent, and exploitation is rife.
“I got a new job at a well-known restaurant, and the boss did not pay me,” Irene says.
“He said I must sleep with him to get my pay. I told him I can’t do that. If that is what he is doing with all of the girls that work there, I could get AIDS. I could get sick. I decided it would be better to be at home than to do that.”
I ask where her daughter’s father is. She quietly replies that he ran away.
“In Tanzania, there is a legal requirement to pay maintenance for their children,” she says. “In practice it does not happen. The men run away. Sometimes they rape the women. Some will kill you, or take away the child, rather than pay support for it.”
Irene relies on friends and neighbours for help: “Sometimes there is no food. You can borrow from people, but if you are not able to return that assistance, they stop helping.
"You can go to a friend's to cook together if you bring something, like the maize flour or the vegetables. But with nothing to contribute it is difficult.”
Poverty and inequality aren’t the only problems in Tanzania. Farmers say that the weather is changing.
Anna, a Masaii woman who left her abusive husband and lives alone with her children, said: “The rains just don’t come any more. More and more cattle are dying, and we have long periods of drought every year.”
I asked Irene about the economy, which the Tanzanian government boasts achieves 8% growth year on year, and about poverty, which is getting worse nevertheless.

“Tanzania is a rich country, but the wealth of the country is not for the ordinary people,” she says. “You just carry on.”

She could have been speaking of South­end-on-Sea where I live. I think millions of people in the UK share the same view – that the country is getting richer, but ordinary people are not feeling it.
I left Tanzania proud to be compared with Irene. Our experiences of hunger and poverty are different, but we need to see the similarities too. With her help, I think I’ve found a project to support – and I look forward to returning soon.