Rafters to help organisations reach out to communities on the Nile

An expedition to navigate the whole length of the White Nile was launched on Sunday, as the seven-strong team of rafters, sponsored by the humanitarian organisation CARE International, set off from the Nile’s source at Lake Victoria, Uganda. "We’re hoping this will bring publicity to communities living along the banks of the Nile and to some of the challenges they face, particularly in northern Uganda and southern Sudan," CARE Uganda's country director, Phil Vernon, told IRIN. The trip is the first such attempt for over 30 years and, if successful, will be the first time ever that anyone has completed the 6,690-km journey down the world’s longest river to the Mediterranean. The crew plan plan to "meet the people who live along the river and depend on it. The explorers will learn of the communities’ challenges and what they are doing to improve their quality of life", according to a CARE press statement. Vernon told IRIN that CARE already had outposts along the river and that much of its work involved improving the communities' access to health care, with the provision of essentials like mosquito nets and basic medicines. The outposts would now serve to help support the Nile expedition with food and fuel supplies. He said a number of poverty-related issues were affecting communities living along eastern Africa’s waterways that the expedition could help to highlight. "Fishing is one," Vernon told IRIN. "They’ll [the expedition members] be making contact with communities already trying to manage their resources in a sustainable manner." "There are also issues of equitable distribution of the profits from fishing. In Uganda, fish is one of its biggest exports, yet very little of that money goes to the primary producers," he added. The rafters will meet fishers on Lake Kyoga in Uganda, Dinka riverbank farmers in Bor County in southern Sudan, and the Monythany, traditionally cattle herders, but who now living in the Sudd swamp, foraging and fishing. Dr Ian Clarke, an Irish doctor of tropical medicine, has joined the expedition "to carry out medical research on disease" in these remote parts of Africa. "There’s very little information coming out of some of these places, so it would be good to throw some light on them. There are a lot of mosquitoes which spread diseases like dengue fever. Then, of course, there’s the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness," he told IRIN. Clarke also said he would investigate types of skin infection thought to be endemic in some parts of southern Sudan.