“We chose the Philippines because we really wanted to do a story that looked at population growth,” reporter Sam Eaton says of his two-part contribution to the Food for Nine Billion project, which aired last year on PBS’ NewsHour and American Public Media’s Marketplace. Eaton recently visited the Wilson Center to discuss his experiences in the Philippines, describing the heavy toll overcrowding and poor resource management is taking on the country’s ecosystems and highlighting how access to family planning may hold the key to a better future.

“My income is just right to feed us three times a day,” Jason Bostero told Sam Eaton in the rural Philippine village of Humayhumay. “It’s really, really different when you have a small family.” Eaton traveled to the Philippines to report on the connections between food security and population for Homelands Productions, creating a short film and radio piece that ran on NewsHour and Marketplace as part the Food for Nine Billion series last year. [Video Below]

The original version of this article, by Kagondu Njagi, appeared on Thomson Reuters’ AlertNet.

By the time the violence had died down, more than 80 people lay dead and hundreds were left homeless.

Yet there was scarcely enough water – the resource the Maasai and Kikuyu tribes were fighting over – to wash away the blood that had stained this part of Kenya’s Rift Valley.

Despite progress over the years, Ethiopia’s Guraghe zone, located in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region, faces many development challenges. As senior monitoring and evaluation officer in the Guraghe People’s Self-help Development Organization (GPSDO), I have been working in this region for more than five years trying to reduce poverty and improve socio-economic development. The organization as a whole has been here for more than 50.

Since the integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) approach is relatively new in international development, donors, partners, and implementers want to know how it’s improving people’s lives. In the PHE community, we believe that combining efforts to address natural resource management, reproductive health, and livelihoods is making a difference in places where rapid population growth combines with poverty and environment degradation. But to know for sure and be able to convince others, we need to have data to support those beliefs.

It is well known that public health issues that affect the world’s most vulnerable populations – food insecurity, maternal and child health, water- and sanitation-related disease, and resource scarcity – are inextricably linked. Where these linkages are strongest, experience on the ground has shown that community-based integrated approaches to development provide more effective and sustainable solutions over vertical, sector-based programs. But so far, there are very few comprehensive evaluations providing strong quantitative evidence of this advantage.

As recently discussed by the National Intelligence Council, sub-Saharan Africa is home to both the most rapidly growing populations in the world and its fastest expanding cities. Save the Children’s recent report, Voices From Urban Africa: The Impact of Urban Growth on Children, explores the challenges faced by the continent’s youngest age cohort, revealing what forces are driving children and families to migrate to urban areas and the poverty many are experiencing upon getting there. In response to the report’s findings, the authors recommend training and deploying more health care workers, facilitating public-private dialogue to identify long-term water and sanitation solutions, improving access to jobs and skills training, expanding access to early childhood care, and strengthening the education system to ensure widespread attendance. Compiled from 1,050 interviews, the report is unique for its first-hand accounts of the daily lives of children, their families, and community members.