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Lisa Dabek on How Papua New Guinea’s Tree Kangaroo Conservation Project Does More Than Conserve
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“All through Papua New Guinea, in every province, there is logging and mining, but we are the first conservation area,” says Lisa Dabek in this week’s podcast.
Dabek is the director of the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Project (TKCP), an effort of the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo that works to protect tree kangaroos while empowering communities in Papua New Guinea’s YUS Conservation Area to manage their natural resources, health care, and food security.
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Is Resilience Too Accurate to Be Useful?
›Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away. Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.
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Midwives, the Frontline and Backbone of Maternal Health, Face Insecure Working Environments
›Midwives play a critical but unheralded role in maternal health. Their skills are sometimes marginalized in otherwise well-meaning discussions about professionalizing care, or even worse, they are subject to abuse, as was discussed at the Wilson Center earlier this month. So when I found the room overflowing at a Women Deliver panel yesterday on the disempowerment of midwives and how much it undermines global efforts to increase access to care, I took that as a good sign that midwives will not be overlooked much longer.
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It’s Not a Drug, It’s Not a Device – It’s Women Working Together
›“Cooperative nurturing is the natural state of humans,” said Anthony Costello, director of the University College London’s Institute for Global Health, during a side event yesterday here at the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur. Children and mothers are healthier when they have a support network, so the Institute for Global Health has partnered with a number of NGOs over the last two decades to form thousands of community-based women’s groups in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Malawi.
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Measuring Community Resilience: Implications for Development Aid
›A staggering amount of development dollars – one in three, in fact – are lost due to natural disasters and crises. Certain communities are less affected than others by such disasters; they are more resilient. Knowing where vulnerability and strength exist and how to bolster them could help avoid these losses. Yet, today, very little data exists to help development practitioners understand which adaptive capacities are lagging in a given community.
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Joan Castro on Engaging Youth to Create Change in the Philippines
›“Exposing young people to information about PHE [population, health, and environment] and food security dynamics can be a powerful tool to steer their interests and commitment to care for the environment and become sexually responsible individuals,” says PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. (PFPI)’s Joan Castro in this week’s podcast.
PFPI’s Youth EMPOWER project has trained close to 300 “youth peer educators” in the southern Philippines to promote environmentally sustainable livelihoods, clean up the environment, raise awareness of reproductive health, and encourage participation in local government.
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Facing the Future: Empowering Youth to Protect Their Health and Environment in Ghana and the Philippines
›In the Philippines, there are health and development programs that specifically target children, senior citizens, and adults, said Joan Castro, but adolescents are underserved. Nineteen percent of the population is between the ages of 15 and 19, but “they can’t even go to health centers to get the family planning commodities [they desire],” she said. [Video Below]
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Leslie Mwinnyaa: Young People Drive Integrated Development in Ghana’s Ellembelle District
›“I have been amazed and inspired by the youth that I’ve worked with, with their dedication and motivation to help their countrymen and to try to make their communities better places,” says Leslie Mwinnyaa in this week’s podcast.
When Mwinnyaa arrived in the Ellembelle district of coastal Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer she found a multitude of development challenges. Fishermen routinely use illegal techniques like chemicals, lights, and dynamite that decimate fish stocks; “sand winning” and mangrove clearing increases erosion, leaving communities vulnerable to flooding and reducing breeding grounds for local fish; poor waste and refuse management contributes to disease and poor health; and teenage girls have twice the national rate of pregnancy.
Showing posts from category community-based.
