Showing posts by Kate Diamond.
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PBS ‘NewsHour’ Reports on Reasons for Optimism Amid Niger’s Cyclical Food Crises
›Set in the middle of the arid region between the Sahara desert and the equatorial savannas of Africa known as the Sahel, Niger is no stranger to drought. In recent years, however, droughts have hit more often, started earlier in the season, and lasted longer, creating a cycle of food insecurity that is becoming more difficult to break.
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Linking Water, Sanitation, and Biodiversity Conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa
›July 25, 2012 // By Kate DiamondWater, poverty, and the environment are “intrinsically connected,” and the development programs targeting them should be as well, writes David Bonnardeaux in Linking Biodiversity Conservation and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene: Experiences From sub-Saharan Africa, a new Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group briefing. In a review of 43 programs across sub-Saharan Africa, including four in-depth case studies, Bonnardeaux finds that natural synergies between water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programming and conservation work provide opportunities for greater effectiveness in addressing both.
Integrating WASH and Conservation: A Natural Match
“WASH interventions are generally reliant on natural resources and processes, whether indirectly or directly,” he writes, and “WASH services produce outputs that are potentially detrimental to the environment if not managed properly.” At the same time, poor ecosystem management can “threaten biodiversity and jeopardize the vital services that these ecosystems in turn provide to humanity, in the form of regulation of stream flow, erosion prevention, water filtration, aquifer recharge, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, and flood abatement.”
Given the connections between the two, WASH and conservation efforts would benefit from programmatic integration, according to Bonnardeaux. To bring the two closer together, he recommends three tools for policymakers and development programmers: integrated river basin management and basin planning; payments for watershed services (also known as payments for environmental services); and population, health, and environment (PHE) programming.
A Whole-of-Basin Perspective
“The causal link between WASH and ecosystem health and integrity is most accentuated when
dealing with freshwater ecosystems,” writes Bonnardeaux.
In Tanzania’s Pangani River Basin, one of his in-depth case studies, a growing reliance on hydropower, urbanization, and increased agricultural demand is altering a valuable ecosystem marked by endemism and iconic landscapes, including Mount Kilimanjaro.
In response, the government and international organizations are partnering through the Pangani River Basin Management Project to developing a greater understanding of the basin’s hydrology and ecosystem, how local populations interact with that ecosystem, and how potential development scenarios could impact the basin in the future. That knowledge, paired with an intensive training program for local water officials, is enabling stronger integrated resource management, which in turn could lay the groundwork for integrating WASH and conservation interventions, writes Bonnardeaux.
Economic incentives – in this case, payments for watershed services – offer another valuable tool for building support for conservation efforts, especially when upstream communities bear a disproportionate burden of safeguarding watersheds.
In South Africa, another case study country, “increased economic development and urbanization have taken its toll on” the country’s wetlands, while unemployment and poverty have remained a persistent problem in slum areas, writes Bonnardeaux. Through the government-run Working for Wetlands program, both the environmental and socioeconomic problems of development are being targeted for improvement. The program hires “the most marginalized from society” to clear wetlands of invasive plants in order to improve its natural filtration capabilities and, in turn, improves the quality of water feeding the burgeoning urban areas.
Although Working for Wetlands, now 17 years old, has been “hugely successful,” Bonnardeaux warns that such economic incentive programs are, more often than not, extremely difficult to carry out effectively. “While there is great potential for this incentive-based conservation approach,” Bonnardeaux notes, “the reality is there are many barriers to its effective implementation.”
Building Long-Term Support for Conservation With Near-Term PHE Successes
Building support for conservation can be a difficult task. The impacts of conservation programming are “often undervalued,” Bonnardeaux writes, in part because results tend to become apparent only over the longer term. By pairing conservation efforts with nearer-term programming, like PHE efforts targeting immediate health needs, development workers can foster the kind of local support that is essential for pursuing long term goals.
The Jane Goodall Institute’s Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education Project (TACARE), in northwest Tanzania, offers a case in point. Established in 1994, TACARE began as a conservation program meant to protect the areas around Gombe National Park, where Goodall first began her chimpanzee research in the 1960s. Local communities, however, were more interested in better health, “with an emphasis on clear water and reduction in water-borne diseases like cholera,” writes Bonnardeaux.
By adopting local health and poverty priorities, he writes, TACARE was able to establish trust and goodwill with the communities it served, which in turn enabled it to pursue longer-term conservation goals aimed at protecting the region’s natural biodiversity.
Bonnardeaux’s work shows that regardless of how policymakers choose to combine WASH and conservation goals, well-implemented integration can yield immense benefits for practitioners, funders, and local communities.
“Linking various sectors such as WASH, forestry, agriculture, population, and community development,” he writes, “can result in cost and effort sharing which in turn can increase the effectiveness of the project including improved conservation and improved livelihoods and health.”
Sources: Bonnardeaux 2012.
Photo Credit: “Intaka Island towards Table Mountain,” courtesy of flickr user Ian Junor. -
In Mongolia, Climate Change and Mining Boom Threaten National Identity
›July 23, 2012 // By Kate DiamondMongolia, a vast, sparsely populated country almost as large as Western Europe, is at once strikingly poor and strikingly rich. Its GDP per capita falls just below that of war-torn Iraq, and Ulan Bator has some of the worst air pollution ever recorded in a capital city. At the same time, Mongolia sits atop some of the world’s largest mineral reserves, worth trillions of dollars, and its economy, already one of the world’s fastest growing, could expand by a factor of six by the end of the decade as those reserves are developed.
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An Update on PRB’s Population, Health, and Environment Project Map
›As reproductive rights advocates reflect on their disappointment with the outcome of last week’s Rio+20 summit, it is encouraging to see that population, health, and environment (PHE) projects – which fundamentally connect women’s health with sustainable development – continue to sprout up around the world. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) launched their community-supported PHE Project Map in March 2010, and since then, the map has grown to include 76 projects across three continents, and has been viewed more than 82,000 times.
The goal of the map is to show which organizations are doing what PHE work where and when. While the map highlights expected hotspots like Ethiopia, Madagascar, and the Philippines, it also brings into focus countries that may not necessarily come to mind when thinking about PHE – South Africa, Venezuela, and Vietnam being among them. The map is updated on a rolling basis, and has grown substantially during its first two years.
These numbers should offer encouragement to reproductive rights and sustainable development advocates. Even if world leaders are still struggling to integrate these issues into a global development framework, NGOs, local nonprofits, and development agencies across the world are moving full-speed ahead to improve healthcare, strengthen ecosystems, and empower women and men across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
To add a project to the map, contact PRB’s Rachel Yavinksy at ryavinsky@prb.org. -
Royal Society Launches ‘People and the Planet’ Study
›“This is a time of rapid and multifaceted change in both population and the planet,” said Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue, a member of the U.K. Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group and contributing author to the report of the same name launched at the Wilson Center on June 4. “The question that the report is trying to address is whether we can actually envision a world in which we can sustainably and equitably meet the consumption needs of seven billion people, and the more to come.” [Video Below]The Royal Society is a self-governing fellowship of scientists that fosters research to address pressing social issues and better inform policy on a global scale. Eloundou-Enyegue, also an associate professor of development sociology at Cornell University, was joined by fellow working group member and African Institute for Development Policy Director and Founder Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu to discuss their assessment of growing population and consumption pressures on global wellbeing.
Current Trends Are Unsustainable
“The current trends of global population growth and material consumption and the concomitant changes in the environment are unsustainable,” said Zulu.
On the population side, “you have changes that are affecting not just the size, the growth of the population, but also changes in family structure, in the population distribution, [and] population movement,” said Eloundou-Enyegue.
On the consumption side, “beyond the increase in consumption itself, there’s also a dramatic rise in aspiration,” he continued. “People are in greater contact and this tends to encourage…an increasing aspiration to mimic or to emulate the consumption standard of the more industrialized countries.”
Limits to Equitable Growth
When measuring consumption, which itself tends to be a misplaced barometer of wellbeing, according to Eloundou-Enyegue, there is a “disproportionate focus on GDP.”
Using GDP growth as a measure of consumption and wellbeing both “misses a lot of the economic production that’s not mediated through the market,” and “counts as positive things that are damaging to the planet,” he said.
The People and the Planet report marks a departure from the traditional consumption framework by asking “about the relevance of growth – is growth what we ought to be after?”
“The report tried to make a distinction between two types of consumption – the consumption of material resources and the consumption of goods and services – that are all relevant to wellbeing but have different implications for the environment,” Eloundou-Enyegue said. “So there is a need to think about how to shift or to favor consumption that is less damaging to the environment.”
Not an “Either-Or” Proposition
There is “a tendency to look at population and consumption when you’re addressing the impact of the environment in an either-or format, as if you had to choose either population as being the main culprit or consumption,” said Eloundou-Enyegue. “The reality is that they all have to be integrated and considered jointly.”
At the same time, there is “a tendency to shy away from population issues when you set development goals because they tend to be controversial,” he said. And yet, said Zulu, “there’s no question about it, the global population growth needs to be slowed down and ultimately stabilized for both people and the planet to flourish.”
The vast majority of future population growth is expected to come from Africa. Based on the United Nation’s medium variant projection, 70 percent of global population growth over the rest of the century will come from the continent.
That projection, however, belies a big assumption: “that the high fertility countries now will follow the same pattern in decline in fertility as the countries that have [already] achieved lower fertility had [in the past],” said Zulu, which “may actually not be the case.”
“You might actually find a situation where fertility might stabilize around three to four children in some of the…least developed countries,” he said, “and if that happens, it means that actually we stand a much, much bigger chance of getting to the high variant [of 15.8 billion by 2100] than we often tend to assume.”
In spite of that dire warning, however, Zulu said that “we should recognize that demography is not destiny, that through…appropriate socioeconomic and health policies and investment, we can actually slow down population growth.”
The report concludes that voluntary and non-coercive “reproductive health and family planning programs are urgently required,” said Zulu. “There is also a need for strong political leadership and financial commitment to make sure that these programs and services reach out to all women around the world who need them.”
Have We Missed the Boat Again?
Part of the urgency from the working group is because, so far, commitments to reproductive health appear to be falling short. It is the international community’s responsibility “to make sure that women have the contraceptives that they need in order to achieve their fertility aspirations,” said Zulu, but some of the most important agenda-setting events in global development over the past 20 years have sidelined population, reproductive health, and family planning.
The Millennium Development Goals, for instance, “tried to stay clear of population,” said Eloundou-Enyegue, even though “all the indicators that I see are either intrinsically demographic or have a strong demographic component.”
“If you think about stratification and the reproduction of inequality and poverty across generations and the role that differential fertility and reproduction plays, there’s no way you can sidestep population,” he continued. “If you’re talking about maternal mortality and child mortality…it doesn’t make sense to set population aside.”
Now, as the international community prepares for the upcoming Rio+20 summit, “there’s been a big struggle to get…consideration of population issues” on the agenda, said Zulu.
“Population is at the peripheral of all those discussions,” said Zulu. When in Nairobi for a preparatory conference earlier this year, Zulu said UNFPA Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin “told me that he was quite alarmed that there was hardly any mention of population in all those discussions. And he asked me the question, ‘have we missed the boat again?’”
That concern reinforces the main argument of People and the Planet, said Zulu: there is an “urgent need to reduce material consumption of the richest, and increase consumption and healthcare for the poorest 1.3 billion people.”
“We’re talking about having the majority of people in the world being able to flourish, being able to lead decent lives.”
Event Resources:Photo Credit: “Market_Kampala, Uganda,” courtesy of the Hewlett Foundation. -
Family Planning and Results-Based Financing Initiatives
›“Family planning means healthier moms and kids – and it’s good for development too,” said Lindsay Morgan, a senior health analyst at Broad Branch Associates, a healthcare advocacy group. But any number of hurdles can keep women from accessing family planning services. Morgan spoke at a May 21 discussion about results-based financing (RBF) programs, which aim to address hurdles on both the supply and demand sides of the equation in developing countries by incentivizing the provision of a variety of quality services while removing barriers to access for women in need of those services.
Removing Barriers to Providing and Using Family Planning Services
Incentives in RBF programs can come in a variety of forms – like subsidies or fees paid to clinics or vouchers sold to women, said Morgan. In Burundi, for example, under a pilot program rolled out across three provinces in 2006, health facilities receive payments for each patient that uses a modern method of contraception. In 2009, the government and international partners began scaling up the program to a nationwide level. In addition to expanding the program’s geographic reach, the scale-up incorporated new payment criteria to better incentivize quality of care (as opposed to just quantity) and longer-lasting methods of contraception.
Since the RBF pilot began, maternal and child health indicators have improved. The number of children being fully immunized is up, as is contraceptive prevalence, said Morgan. Additionally, those immediate results can lead to a slew of additional benefits down the line. For instance, improving modern contraceptive prevalence is one of the most cost-effective interventions available for reducing maternal death, she said.
In nearby Kenya, the health ministry leads a voucher system across four districts and two Nairobi slums to help some of the country’s poorest women afford maternal healthcare, family planning, and gender-based violence services.
The program is “written into large policy documents [and] strategic pieces,” including Vision 2030, a long-term government-wide strategy document “unveiled in 2008 as a way to reach middle-income country status by 2030,” said Ben Bellows, a reproductive health associate at Population Council Kenya. The government’s emphasis on the voucher program as more than just a health initiative is an acknowledgment of the downstream impact that improved maternal and reproductive health can have on the country’s development, he said.
“An Equity Gap in Family Planning”
However, the fact that the voucher program is needed at all is evidence of “an equity gap in family planning,” Bellows said. Access to family planning services can be significantly skewed depending on a woman’s income level, he said, pointing to a recent article in The Lancet assessing health inequalities in 12 different maternal and child health services across 54 priority Millennium Development Goal countries.
The equity gap reflects “an interesting problem with development,” said Bellows: Though low-income countries are converging with higher income countries, in terms of economic growth rates and income levels “the benefits of growth aren’t being evenly distributed.” The Africa Progress Panel’s annual report, released last month, echoes that point, he said.
“Governments are failing to convert the rising tide of wealth into opportunities for their most marginalized citizens,” the report concludes, and “unequal access to health, education, water and sanitation is reinforcing wider inequalities.”
Kenya’s voucher system is designed to help shrink that gap. Among the poorest of the poor – those benefitting from the system – inequalities are dropping, even if on a broader scale, inequity still exists between poor and wealthy Kenyans. “We’re seeing lower inequalities of service in areas exposed to the voucher,” said Bellows.
“RBF supports progress on a path towards universal health coverage,” said Beverly Johnston, the senior policy advisor at USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health. And within the context of family planning “the whole idea is to level the playing field” so that all contraceptive methods are equally readily available to the women seeking them.
“A Catalyst for Change” in Family Planning
In addition to addressing equal access concerns, RBF programs can serve as “a catalyst for change…to stimulate quality of care and quality of family planning counseling in particular,” said Johnston.
A commonly cited hurdle to better family planning access is social norms that support large family sizes or otherwise limit a woman’s ability to space or limit her pregnancies. Given community health workers’ unique roles within their communities – “often on the front lines…where many of these social taboos and barriers exist,” as Morgan described – simply strengthening their training, and in turn improving the quality of care that women receive, can help counter norms that might otherwise prohibit access to family planning.
As more women receive higher quality care, norms dissipate even further, said Morgan. “There is evidence that [quality of care] is strongly associated with a woman’s decision to choose a method to use, to continue to use it, and to recommend it to others.”
“Rights Are Tantamount”
One trap RBF programs need to be aware of is over-incentivizing expansion of coverage to the detriment of quality or individual women’s concerns about what makes sense for them, said Johnston.
“Rights are tantamount,” she said. In order to ensure that rights are upheld, programs must reflect and be sensitive to local histories and local needs – particularly given the fact that some countries have had “a history of coercive programs and policies.”
Ultimately, “we really look at RBF as just one tool,” said Johnston. “RBF is not for every place and every context,” and neither is family planning’s place in RBF programming.
As one tool of many, RBF programs are gaining prominence as a way to meet MDGs related to maternal and child health. Bellows sees RBF’s importance lasting long past that 2015 deadline, though.
“The high inequity that we witness across many low-income countries, and the ability of targeted mechanisms [like Kenya’s voucher program] to address that, suggest that this may be a kind of generalized solution,” he said. “Obviously it will be context specific in the way in which it is rolled out, but the strategy of incentivizing clients and providers suggests that there’s some sort of globalized solution that could be considered for this widespread challenge.”
Event Resources
Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
Valerie Hudson and Chad Emmett: Women’s Well-Being Is the Best Predictor of State Stability
›May 22, 2012 // By Kate Diamond“The best predictor of a state’s stability and security is the level of violence against women in society,” said Texas A&M University’s Valerie Hudson in this interview with ECSP. That link is “based on rigorous empirical analysis,” she said. “There’s something to it. It’s not just political correctness.”
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Improving Food Security Through Land Rights and Access to Family Planning
›“In a future world affected by climate change, population growth is one lever that can be addressed to ameliorate the impacts of climate change, particularly in the area of food security,” write Scott Moreland and Ellen Smith in “Modeling Climate Change, Food Security, and Population,” a recent study for MEASURE Evaluation and USAID. Moreland and Smith combine demographic changes, food needs, and economic capacity into a single aggregate model to assess how family planning and climate change might affect food security from now until 2050. Using Ethiopia as an example, the model finds that if access to family planning services were increased to meet existing needs, the subsequent decrease in demand for food would reduce child malnutrition and effectively counteract a projected 25 percent shortfall in caloric availability from climate change’s impact on agriculture. Programs designed to increase access to family planning should therefore be incorporated into national adaptation and food security strategies, they conclude. “Family planning, especially in countries with high unmet need, provides a potential solution not only for women’s reproductive health, but also for adapting to the effects of climate change.”The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on World Food Security recently endorsed a set of voluntary guidelines for land tenure governance in the context of food security that aims to strike a balance between encouraging productive investment and ensuring equitable and sustainable development. Population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation are putting pressure on the legal and cultural systems that govern land rights, resulting in “inadequate and insecure tenure rights” which can “increase vulnerability, hunger and poverty, and can lead to conflict and environmental degradation when competing users fight for control of these resources.” The guidelines, drawn from consultations with hundreds of people from both the private and public spheres and representing more than 130 countries, emphasize the need to safeguard access to land, fisheries, and forests – as well as the resources they provide – in a way that respects customary tenure systems, which are not always reflected in official tenure policies or records. They also emphasize strengthening the ownership rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups in order to enhance food security and minimize the risk of instability and conflict in the future.
