Now the work begins: to help people rise to daunting challenges

Here in the dull, fag-end days of January, there is time to think. I was looking through ready-to-be-discarded Christmas cards the other day. We had put them up in a hurry in the last days of December and taken them down in a flurry of back-to-work activity when festivities ended. Only now was there time to inspect them properly.

One struck me because it bore no picture or image. Only words, written by Howard Thurman, the grandson of a slave who became the early American civil rights leader who so inspired Martin Luther King. They said:

"When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, Then the work of Christmas begins ..."

Yesterday we got the final total of this year's Independent Christmas Appeal. Hope for Africa, we called it, and asked you for money for three charities: the continent's largest indigenous medical agency, Amref, run almost entirely by Africans; a tiny environmental and forestry group called Tree Aid; and perhaps the most thoughtful of all the Western charities in Africa, Oxfam.

You raised an astonishing £356,269.38. Astonishing not just because it more than quadrupled the amount raised in previous years, but also because of the generosity revealed in Independent readers.

There were extraordinary donations. One, which came with no covering letter, was for £14,000. And there were several others of more than £1,000, some as bids in our Christmas auction of the services of Independent journalists (which raised a total of £26,213), some accompanied only by ticks in a box on the appeal coupon. But perhaps most striking, in an across-the-board way, was the size of the average donation, £81.55. Thank you for your inspiring generosity.

But, as the Howard Thurman card says, now the work of Christmas begins. So how will the money be spent? There were clues in the 24 reports we ran on Africa in the month-long appeal. The aim was not simply to tug at the heartstrings to raise money but to take readers on a journey through Africa.

It was not merely a geographical survey. It was a conceptual one, which tried to give an inkling of the breadth, depth and complexity of the problems facing this largely forgotten continent, and the extraordinary way its ordinary people, out of view of the world's television cameras, are responding to these challenges.

Some of those problems are obvious enough, hunger, disease, war, corruption and the increasingly cruel vagaries of the weather in our age of global warming. Others are less immediately evident to those of us without the time, resources or imagination to venture into the darker recesses of the African condition.

We began in Mauritania with Michael McCarthy. He sent a moving report from the edge of the Sahara on a forgotten famine, the worst at present in Africa in the impact it is having on malnourished children, with many long and stomach-aching months to go before the next harvest, even if the rains this year are good.

What haunted many readers was his account of the crying of a group of children waiting for food, and in particular the disjuncture of his image that they sounded like flock of bleating lambs on a Welsh hillside in spring. But most unnerving was the eerie silence when the children had been fed by aid workers. Their crying had ceased, for now, he wrote.

We ended the appeal with another story from Mauritania. It too had a memorable sound. It was of women, laughing, women who ran their small savings-and-loan bank, kick-started with cash from Oxfam. It had brought just not immediate help but a new self-esteem and confidence to 600 local women who use the tiny sums they borrow to set up enterprises selling fish or making dresses. Tiny sums, but enough to turn desperation into hope.

The journey from crying to laughter is a long one. There were the obvious needs, such as the swift disaster response of Oxfam to new emergencies, getting supplementary food out to Mauritania. There were the clean water and primary healthcare programmes of Amref in which a medical service set up decades ago to take flying doctors to rich white folk is now giving basic medical care to ordinary Africans in the remote Kenyan bush.

As Declan Walsh reported in vivid dispatches, they use the most basic of technologies: "leaky cans" to provide trickles of water for children to bathe their eyes to avoid trachoma, or needles and thread to mend mosquito nets, which helped cut malaria by 80 per cent.

And there was hi-tech stuff, including the Amref research programme in co-ordination with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which reduced Aids transmission by 40 per cent in Tanzania. That is the biggest single on-the-ground advance against the problem, perhaps the greatest scourge of modern Africa, as Basildon Peta's heart- rending account of Aids orphans in Malawi revealed.

Then there were the scores of basic development projects, typified by the nurseries sponsored by Tree Aid all over west Africa which, as the leading environmentalist Jonathon Porritt reminded us, partly explain why – for the first time in a quarter-century – the southward advance of the Sahara has been halted. Tree Aid's mango orchards, and other projects, provide better nutrition and help to generate income for poor people in places such as Burkina Faso. Many readers sent donations to buy a second Christmas tree, one that would live far longer than their own.

But what our tour through the continent also showed was that Hope for Africa does not just come from the rich West providing for the poor South. Oxfam programmes on conflict resolution in strife-torn communities in Mali, and building organisations to campaign for better government policies in countries such as Uganda, were visited. They showed that building the capacity of Africans to operate at a different level is vital.

So, too, is sophisticated lobbying here in the West. Bob Geldof wrote powerfully on the problems we cause for ordinary Africans through policies that raise trade barriers against their goods. These policies subsidise EU and American farmers so they compete unfairly with poor Africans, showing an insufficient sense of responsibility for our role in encouraging them to build Third World debt. Change is needed.

Oxfam revealed how the rich world manipulates commodity prices. And Basildon Peta reported graphically from Mozambique on how ordinary sugar cane workers there suffer because of the Common Agricultural Policy subsidising excess sugar beet. Rectifying such problems is vital for Africa.

Through our appeal, we hope we have taken you a few small steps on the long journey facing the people of Africa. The quote from Thurman goes further. The real work of Christmas, which begins only now, he says, is:

"To find the lost, to heal the broken,

To feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, to bring peace among brothers and sisters, To make music in the heart."

Thank you, on behalf of our three charities and the African people they work with, for the generosity of your response. Music indeed.