Showing posts from category development.
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Reality Check: Challenges and Innovations in Addressing Postpartum Hemorrhage
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Heavy bleeding after childbirth, also known as postpartum hemorrhage (PPH), is one of the leading causes of maternal deaths worldwide. Globally, approximately 25 percent of all maternal deaths are caused by postpartum hemorrhage, and many mothers bleed to death due to delays in seeking health care services. On January 25th, 100 representatives from the maternal health community – a majority working directly in developing countries – convened for an all-day meeting at the Wilson Center to discuss experiences in the field and perform “reality checks” on the challenges and successes of PPH programs.
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First Steps on Human Security and Emerging Risks
›The 2010 Quadrennial Development and Diplomacy Review (QDDR), the first of its kind, was recently released by the State Department and USAID in an attempt to redefine the scope and mission of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. Breaking away from the Cold War structures of hard international security and an exclusive focus on state-level diplomacy, the QDDR recognizes that U.S. interests are best served by a more comprehensive approach to international relations. The men and women who already work with the U.S. government possess valuable expertise that should be leveraged to tackle emerging threats and opportunities.
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A Lens Into Liberia: Experiences from IRP Gatekeepers
›The International Reporting Project (IRP) gives “editors – the ‘gatekeepers’ – a chance to get out of the newsrooms and to see for themselves the importance of international affairs,” said John Schidlovsky, director of IRP, at a Wilson Center event about the independent journalism organization’s recent two-week trip to Liberia with 11 U.S. news editors. [Video Below]
Schidlovsky stressed the importance of providing international opportunities for journalists in the face of news industry budget cuts. IRP fills the gap by sending gatekeepers, who help determine what news items will be selected for publication or broadcast, to countries that are often underrepresented and neglected in mainstream media.
Three of the gatekeepers, Sunni Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR Baltimore; Ed Robbins, a video journalist; and Teresa Wiltza, senior editor for The Root, shared their observations from their Liberia trip, as well as their insights into the challenges of international reporting.
Economic Challenges and Opportunities
Liberia is slowly beginning to rebuild its economy after a 14-year civil war with more than 200,000 casualties, but there are still “tremendous challenges,” said Khalid. “How do people survive? What kind of jobs do they have? How do they feed their families?”
According to World Bank figures, 84 percent of Liberians earn less than $1 a day, and more than 94 percent earn less than $2 a day. The government’s annual budget is only $369 million, the official unemployment rate is 85 percent, and corruption and lack of infrastructure remain major concerns.
Despite these problems, “Liberia has a lot of good points going for it,” said Khalid. Investment in the country’s raw materials is growing; most recently, the country signed a $7 billion deal with China and a European consortium to continue iron-ore mining.
Initially expecting to “write an obituary for Liberia,” Khalid said he “came out of this trip fairly optimistic about Liberia’s future.” With its “small population, great location, and mineral wealth,” as well as “competent political leadership,” Liberia can take advantage of its potential, he said.
“Capturing the Flavor” of Liberia
Robbins hopes to paint a multidimensional picture of Liberia and “capture the flavor of the country beyond Monrovia,” with his series of short films, which will be available on the websites of both Time and the International Reporting Project,
Robbins previewed one of these films, a profile of the chair of the Liberian Women’s Initiative, Etweda “Sugars” Cooper, who he says “embodies a certain power of a lot of Liberian women in her dedication and also her love for the country.”
At the local level, “the problems of recovery and development are all there in miniature,” said Robbins. But with dedicated leadership from people like Cooper, communities are slowly beginning to rebuild the schools, roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure that was destroyed in the civil wars.
“When you read books and articles, it tends to be really focused on the war and the devastation,” said Robbins. But there is also a sense of optimism among Liberians: “you can see hope in these people, a sense there is something there,” he said.
Empowering Women and Ending Rape
Wiltz pointed out that, “there is a prevailing sense of hope,” particularly among the older generation of women. After years of violence, these female “peace warriors” led the movement that ended Liberia’s civil war. But seven year later, “for women there, the biggest issue is that of economic empowerment,” said Wiltz. “They’re feeling empowered, but they’re broke.”
Sexual violence has become “part of the national psyche,” Wiltz said. During the civil war in Liberia, it has been estimated that more than 60 percent of the female population was raped. Today, “everyone seems sensitized to the issue, and yet it’s still a huge problem,” she said. Sexual violence is still common despite the prevention efforts of radio campaigns, NGOs, and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
“You’re in a country where families were destroyed by war,” Wiltz said. In the process of rebuilding Liberia, the new challenge is to engage and empower a new generation of young women and girls. “Underneath the surface there is all this pain and this legacy of extreme cruelty, but they very much want to overcome this.”
Much of the gatekeepers’ coverage is available online: Sunni Khalid produced a week-long series of radio pieces for WYPR, an NPR affiliate; Ed Robbins produced a series of short films for Time; and Teresa Wiltz published several articles on The Root.
Sources: CIA World Factbook, U.S. State Department, World Bank, World Health Organization, WYPR.
Photo Credit: “Liberia Will Rise Again,” courtesy of flickr user Jason Judy. -
Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?
›The much-anticipated Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review(QDDR) demands to be taken seriously. Its hefty 250 pages present a major rethink of both American development policy and American diplomacy. Much of it is to be commended:
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Mapping the “Republic of NGOs” in Haiti
›One year after the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti, InterAction has teamed up with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Civic Leadership Center and FedEx to launch the Haiti Aid Map, an interactive visual mapping platform of individual aid projects being conducted in Haiti. The goals of the map are to increase aid transparency, facilitate partnerships, and help NGOs and others better coordinate and allocate resources to aid relief and reconstruction efforts.
With an estimated 10,000 NGOs operating on the ground – the second largest per capita in the world – Haiti has been referred to as “a republic of NGOs.” The Haiti Aid Map is an effort to help the humanitarian community – which has been criticized for lack of accountability, poor transparency, and corruption – better coordinate its response.
The map features 479 projects being operated all over the country by 77 local and international NGOs, most of which are InterAction members. Projects can be browsed by location, sector, or organization and include information on project donors, budgets, timelines, and the number of people reached by the project.While InterAction’s map covers their donors’ response, it leaves out the thousands of government and other NGO projects being conducted in Haiti. USAID recently released a map of U.S. government projects in Haiti (see right) by sector and location.
“The goal is not to rebuild Haiti but to build a different Haiti,” said Sam Worthington, President and CEO of InterAction, speaking exactly one year after the earthquake struck at the map’s formal launch this month. “The relief effort will still be here a year from now.” The goal of the map will be to help coordinate activities as reconstruction continues in the future.
The map is the first part of a larger mapping platform, called the NGO Aid Map, which will include not only the Haiti aid map but also projects working on food security in other developing countries. The food security map is due to be launched in March 2011.
Sources: Clinton Foundation, InterAction, NPR, ReliefWeb, USIP.
Image Credit: Adapted from Haiti Aid Map. -
National Geographic’s Population Seven Billion
›The short feature above and accompanying cover article in the January 2011 issue launch National Geographic’s seven-part year-long series examining global population. The world is set to hit seven billion this year, according to current UN projections, and may reach nine billion by 2045.
The authors point out that today, 13 percent of people don’t have access to clean water globally and 38 percent lack adequate sanitation. Nearly one billion people have inadequate nutrition. Natural resources are strained. Is reducing population growth the key to addressing these problems?
Not according to Robert Kuznig, author of National Geographic’s lead article, who writes that “fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future…the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation.”
“The most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea-level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems,” writes Kuznig. Speaking on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week, he reiterated this message, saying global problems “have to be tackled whether we’re eight billion people on Earth, or seven, or nine, and the scale for them is large in any case.”
Instead, the challenge is simultaneously addressing poverty, health, and education while reducing our environmental impact, says Kuznig.
“You don’t have to impose prescriptive policies for population growth, but basically if you can help people develop a nice, comfortable lifestyle and give them the access to medical care and so on, they can do it themselves,” said Richard Harris, a science correspondent for NPR, speaking with Kuznig on Talk of the Nation.
Kuznig’s article highlights the Indian state of Kerala, where thanks to state investments in health and education, 90 percent of women in the state can read (the highest rate in India) and the fertility rate has dropped to 1.7 births per woman. One reason for this is that educated girls have children later and are more open to and aware of contraceptive options.
Whither Family Planning?
In a post on Kuznig’s piece, Andrew Revkin, of The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, points to The New Security Beat’s recent interview with Joel E. Cohen about the crucial role of education in reducing the impact of population growth. Cohen asks: “Is it too many people or is it too few people? The truth is, both are real problems, and the fortunate thing is that we have enough information to do much better in addressing both of those problems than we are doing – we may not have silver bullets, but we’re not using the knowledge we have.”
Although the National Geographic article and video emphasize the connections between poverty reduction, health, education, and population growth, both give short shrift to family planning. It’s true that fertility is shrinking in many places, and global average fertility will likely reach replacement levels by 2030, but parts of the world – like essentially all of sub-Saharan Africa for example – still have very high rates of fertility (over five) and a high unmet demand for family planning. Globally, it is estimated that 215 million women in developing countries want to avoid pregnancy but are not using effective contraception.
Development should help reduce these levels in time, but without continued funding for reproductive health services and family planning supplies, the declining trends that Kurznig cites, which are based on some potentially problematic assumptions, are unlikely to continue.
As Kuznig told NPR, “you need birth-control methods to be available, and you need the people to have the mindset that allows them to want to use them.”
At ECSP’s “Dialogue on Managing the Planet” session yesterday at the Wilson Center, National Geographic Executive Editor Dennis Dimick urged the audience to “stay tuned – you can’t comprehensively address an issue as global and as huge as this in one article, and within this series later in the year we will talk about [family planning] very specifically.” Needless to say, I look forward to seeing it, as addressing the unmet need for family planning is a crucial part of any comprehensive effort to reduce population growth and improve environmental, social, and health outcomes.
Sources: Center for Global Development, Dot Earth, NPR, Population Reference Bureau, World Bank.
Video Credit: “7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine,” courtesy of National Geographic. -
In FOCUS: To Get HELP, Add Livelihoods to Population, Health, and Environment
›January 20, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffProponents of integrated development have always faced significant barriers, but with a new focus on international aid from the Obama administration, the tide may be turning. To fully harness this momentum, Gib Clarke argues in a new ECSP brief that the population-health-environment (PHE) community must solidify its research base, reach out to new partners, and push for flexible funding and programming.
In “Helping Hands: A Livelihood Approach to Population, Health, and Environment Programs,” he writes that PHE programs should also add livelihoods (i.e., ways to make a living) as a critical element. He suggests such programs adopt a new moniker: “HELP” – Health, Environment, Livelihoods, and Population.
“Helping Hands” comes at a time when the integrated approach is being touted at the highest levels:“We cannot simply confront individual preventable illnesses in isolation. The world is interconnected, and that demands an integrated approach to global health,” said President Barack Obama in May 2009, echoing what population-health-environment (PHE) practitioners have long argued: Integrated lives with integrated problems require integrated solutions. Proponents of integration face significant barriers: lack of funding, programmatic silos, and policy disinterest.
While the Administration’s newest development efforts (see, e.g., Feed the Future Initiative, Global Health Initiative, and release of the QDDR) all recognize the power of integration, the degree to which these initiatives will operate across sectors remains to be seen. Drawing on interviews with leading experts, Clarke outlines the continuing challenges to implementing more integrated PHE programs and offers four recommendations for overcoming them:
“Given the strong base of existing and recent PHE programs, the PHE community is well-positioned to work with lead partners in Obama’s Global Health Initiative, climate change adaptation efforts, food security programs, and other upcoming crosscutting work,” concludes Clarke, who is currently director of planning and development at Interfaith Community Health Center in Bellingham, Washington. For example, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah stated that the Feed the Future program would be closely integrating its objectives with the Global Health Initiative – a potential opportunity for PHE programs that offer both health benefits and food security.- The PHE community should adopt a new name that highlights the all-important livelihood component, such as “HELP Plus.”
- PHE programs need to gather data and conduct operational research to justify the claims of the PHE field.
- The PHE community needs to “agree to disagree” on the issue of scaling up integrated programs.
- PHE programs should seek funding from a diverse array of donors.
“This increased interest in integration may also be the best opportunity for finding new funding, fostering replication, and scaling up. It is a promising moment for integrated approaches, whether we call them PHE, HELP Plus, or some other acronym,” writes Clarke.
“Helping Hands: A Livelihood Approach to Population, Health, and Environment Programs” along with previous FOCUS issues are available on ECSP’s publications page.
Image Credit: From the cover of “Helping Hands: A Livelihood Approach to Population, Health, and Environment Programs,” courtesy of the Wilson Center. -
Watch: Cynthia Brady on Natural Resources, Climate Change, and Conflict at USAID
›“While we know that natural resources alone are neither necessary nor sufficient to drive conflict, we do know that competition over resources and their revenues often helps to drive conflict and to sustain it over time,” said Cynthia Brady, a senior conflict advisor at USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation. “We also know that climate change impacts are going to interact with those dynamics, so we need to better understand how, in order to really program effectively against it in the future.”
Brady spoke to an audience of peacebuilding professionals at the 2010 Alliance for Peacebuliding Conference in Annapolis, Maryland, this fall. She noted that the issue of climate security is a relatively new one and when talking about the risks of climate-related conflict, it’s important to avoid hyperbole.
“The science of analyzing both the risks of climate impacts and the risks of conflict is pretty uncertain – they’re both still evolving,” Brady said. “There’s a very limited evidence base of real-world analysis from which we draw about this intersection.”
“I think it’s really important that we avoid over-simplification and we really focus, as peacebuilding and conflict practitioners, on the reality that conflict is such a complex phenomenon, and that opens a lot of opportunities for various points of intervention,” said Brady.
