Showing posts from category Rwanda.
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From the Wilson Center:
What Does It Take to Cooperate? Transboundary Water Management Around the World
›By Carolyn Lamere // Monday, May 6, 2013
Water is the foundation of human society and will become even more critical as population growth, development, and climate change put pressure on already-shrinking water resources in the years ahead. But will this scarcity fuel conflict between countries with shared waters, as some have predicted, or will it create more impetus for cooperation?
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From the Wilson Center:
Wilson Center Premieres ‘Healthy People, Healthy Environment’ and ‘Transcending Boundaries’ at Environmental Film Festival
›By Maria Prebble // Wednesday, April 17, 2013Environmental security and international development aren’t typical movie-going fare, but at the 2013 DC Environmental Film Festival, ECSP premiered two short documentaries with unique environmental stories: Healthy People, Healthy Environment: Integrated Development in Tanzania shows how improving health services and environmental conservation can empower coastal communities in Africa; and Transcending Boundaries: Perspectives from the Central Albertine Rift Transfrontier Protected Area Network explores the opportunities for “peace parks” along the shared borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Dot-Mom / From the Wilson Center:
Linking Governance and Positive Maternal Health Outcomes in Africa
›By Derek Langford // Thursday, April 11, 2013
Sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps the riskiest place for a woman to give birth. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), African women comprise approximately 56 percent of the maternal deaths and 91 percent of HIV-related maternal deaths worldwide every year. In order to bring life into this world, women in Africa literally must put their own lives on the line.
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Reading Radar:
Population and Environment in Saadani National Park, and Repositioning Family Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa
›By Payal Chandiramani // Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Tanzania’s Saadani National Park is a hotbed of biodiversity and, like other national parks in the region, it’s surrounded by human activity. A report by the BALANCED Project, “Population, Health, Environment Situational Analysis for the Saadani National Park Area, Tanzania,” provides a snapshot of the population, health, and environment situation inside the park to serve as a baseline for future activities of the Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership (TCMP) – a joint initiative of the government of Tanzania, USAID, and the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center. A behavioral monitoring system implemented in June 2009 used surveys that reached a total of 437 respondents (54 percent women) from eight villages to analyze the “behaviors that positively and negatively influence the utilization and condition of natural resources.” The surveys found that arable land is scarce, fisheries are being depleted, and people have inadequate access to healthcare, water, sanitation, fuel, and family planning resources. The results suggest a strong case for expanding TCMP’s existing integrated approach – combining HIV/AIDS, conservation, and livelihoods goals – to include promotion of positive behavior changes, particularly as they relate to family planning and the effects of population growth on biodiversity loss and resource depletion.
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From the Wilson Center:
Africa on the Move: The Role of Political Will and Commitment in Improving Access to Family Planning
›By ECSP Staff // Friday, June 15, 2012Excerpted below is the adapted abstract, by lead authors Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu and Violet Murunga. The full report is available for download from the Wilson Center’s Africa Program.
Despite commitments to the program of action for the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and Millennium Development Goal 5 (focused on maternal and reproductive health), little progress has been made in improving access to family planning and slowing rapid population growth in Africa. Lack of political will has been highlighted among the key factors behind the lackluster performance in addressing these sensitive development issues. However, the situation is changing with some African governments embracing family planning as a key tool for improving child and maternal health, slowing population growth, preserving the environment, and enhancing broader efforts to alleviate poverty.MORE
This study examines factors that have propelled the change in attitudes of some political leaders to champion family planning, assesses how such political will has manifested in different contexts, and explores how political will affects the policy and program environment. Mixed policy analysis methods were employed, including desk review of policy and program documents and stakeholder interviews conducted in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Rwanda – three countries that have made phenomenal progress in increasing contraceptive use in the recent past.
Lessons from this study will help galvanize efforts to improve access to reproductive health services in countries where little progress is being made. The results provide useful insights on the dawn of a new Africa where strategic political leadership is playing an increasingly valuable role in overcoming the continent’s longstanding development shackles. The study shows that political will is mainly changing due to increased availability of evidence showing that high population growth undermines efforts to alleviate poverty and hunger as well as investments in the quality human capital that least development countries desperately need in order to transform their economies.
The high sensitivity about childbearing and suspicions regarding the intentions of western development partners in promoting family planning in order to slow population growth are dissipating as more Africans are opting to have fewer children and demanding family planning. This study points to the need for global development partners to be much more cognizant of the drivers of Africa’s emerging success and focus their development assistance on enhancing, nurturing, and highlighting local leadership traits, capacities, and systems that are producing positive results, as well as support governments that have embraced family planning to ensure that no woman has an unwanted pregnancy due to lack of family planning.
Download the full report from the Wilson Center. -
Guest Contributor:
Poor Land Tenure: A Key Component to Why Nations Fail
›By Tim Hanstad // Thursday, May 24, 2012The murder of five land rights campaigners during the last two months – one in Colombia, three in Brazil, and one in Cambodia – have not captured many headlines, but they are a reminder of the central role land tenure plays not just in rural economic development but also in sparking broadly distributed economic gains throughout a society.MORE
Violence has often been threatened against those around the world who advocate for the land rights of the world’s poor. Even for those who aren’t on the front lines, but rather, like my organization, quietly partner with governments to bring about fundamental and structural change to a country, the hazards can be real.
When I started this work more than two decades ago after graduating from the University of Washington School of Law, a bulletproof vest was as essential as a notebook and pen to conduct fieldwork in certain places.
In fact, three colleagues of Landesa’s founder, Roy Prosterman (including a fellow University of Washington alum, Mark Pearlman), were assassinated while meeting to discuss land rights reform legislation in El Salvador in 1981.
To understand why people continue to risk life and limb to help the poor gain control over the land they depend on and why people are willing to kill to stop them, it helps to review the big picture.
Subsistence Without Investment
Around the world there are more than one billion people who are desperately poor. The vast majority of these poor share two traits: one, they rely on agriculture to survive; and two, they don’t legally control the land they till.
Many are sharecroppers, indentured servants, or informal possessors who struggle to climb out of poverty because they don’t have incentives to invest in their land to improve their harvest and their lives. Their lack of legal control over the land is a huge stumbling block not just for their immediate families, but also for the development of their communities and nations, as highlighted in the wonderful new book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
The authors, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, of MIT and Harvard, respectively, make clear that even in the most dysfunctional nations, money is being made – often lots of it – but it is not being distributed widely. These “extractive systems,” they argue, are designed specifically to take wealth from a broad class of people (slaves, farmers, mine workers, etc.) to benefit a much smaller subset (the ruling elite, the landed gentry, etc). Sierra Leone’s diamond mines, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt mines, and Burma’s vast timber and mineral resources are all examples of systems that exploit not just labor but sovereign natural resources and funnels those proceeds to a small group with the goal of continually extracting more wealth.
In these settings, the opposition to democratic land-rights reform rarely stems from fears that compensation won’t be fair. Instead the elite fear that giving the poor ownership gives them power and leverage: the power of economic opportunity and to not be exploited, and the leverage to pull children out of the fields and send them into the classroom, to start home businesses, and to be innovative.
The inherent power in land rights, when multiplied by hundreds of thousands or millions of families, can be exploited during critical junctures to dramatically change the trajectory of a nation’s history to eliminate the extractive systems.
Moving Growth ForwardDespite frequent opposition from powerful vested interests, there are governments around the world who are trying to move toward more inclusive economic systems that offer opportunity to all. Given the current global rush for land, these efforts are particularly timely and critical.
Among the countries currently undertaking such efforts are India, China, Kenya, and Rwanda.
India, with little fanfare, has launched a variety of promising new programs that aim to provide millions of poor rural families with secure titles. In West Bengal, the government is providing landless families with micro-plots of land and training their daughters in organic agriculture. In Odisha, the government is providing indigenous tribes with title to the land their families have farmed for generations without legal control. Because of these initiatives, hundreds of thousands of families across India are now, for the first time, able to send their children to government residential schools, obtain agricultural training, and defend their investments in their own land.
China is gradually rolling out the implementation of documented, 30-year property rights for farmers as well as considering legislative changes that will more effectively protect those rights from later expropriation. While the stand-off in the fishing village of Wukan last year garnered headlines and is certainly not an aberration, the central government is putting together a framework to try to minimize violations of farmers’ land rights.
Kenya just last month adopted land legislation to fulfill the new constitution’s promise to secure land rights for millions of poor farmers. And Rwanda is in the process of formalizing land rights for rural families throughout the country.
Such reforms have been even more effective when women’s land rights are specifically targeted.
Efforts like these should be celebrated and expanded. And new UN guidelines on land rights endorsed last week can provide direction on the necessary national policies, legislation, and programs. Let’s hope that the deaths of so many who have dared to stand up in defense of the lands rights of the poor do not stop brave officials in governments around the world from making progress in the fight against poverty.
As Acemoglu and Robinson note, “Growth moves us forward only if not blocked by the economic losers who anticipate that their economic privileges will be lost and by the political losers who fear that their political power will be eroded.”
Tim Hanstad is president and CEO of Landesa, a global development non-profit that works to secure land rights for the world’s poor. Follow us on Twitter at @Landesa_Global.
Sources: Acemoglu and Robins (2012), Arlington National Cemetery, Columbia Reports, Common Dreams, Food and Agriculture Organization, Landesa, Prosterman et al. (2009), The New York Times, Voice of America.
Video Credit: Landesa Global; Photo Credit: New land rights-holders in India, used with permission courtesy of Deborah Espinosa/Landesa. -
Dot-Mom / From the Wilson Center:
Learning From Success: Ministers of Health Discuss Accelerating Progress in Maternal Survival
›By Calyn Ostrowski // Wednesday, May 9, 2012“The gains we have made [in reducing maternal mortality rates] are remarkable; however, gains are fragile and donor resources are declining. Substantial investments must be maintained to safeguard these hard-wins,” said Afghan Minister of Health Suraya Dail at the Wilson Center on April 23.
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As part of the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative, the Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health series partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development to co-host Minister Dail, along with Honorable Dr. Mam Bunheng, Minister of Health, Cambodia; Honorable Dr. Bautista Rojas Gómez, Minister of Health, Dominican Republic; and Dr. Fidele Ngabo, Director of Maternal and Child Health, Ministry of Health, Rwanda.
These ministers spoke about the lessons learned in countries where there has been tremendous progress under challenging circumstances.
In the Dominican Republic, Bautista Rojas Gomez said the first challenge was to address the “Dominican paradox,” where maternal mortality rates were high despite the fact that 97 percent of women received prenatal care and delivered in hospitals. The government created a zero tolerance policy that included a comprehensive surveillance system, mandatory maternal death audits, and community oversight of services, which assured better quality services.
Similar political commitment improved indicators in Cambodia, where maternal mortality rates dropped from 472 to 206 per year from 2005 to 2010. “It takes a village…and the prime minister has inspired the country to act,” said Mam Bunheng. Through increased access to contraception the number of children per woman went from seven to three and commitment to family planning, education, technology, infrastructure, and community have been the key drivers of success.
“In Rwanda, the big challenge we are having is education,” said Fidele Ngabo. “Many of the maternal health indicators depend on education.” When women and girls are educated they are twice as likely to utilize modern contraception. The efforts of Rwanda’s government have been instrumental in facilitating positive change, he said, particularly the efforts of First Lady Jeannette Kagame, who he called a “champion” for women and girl’s health.
As witnessed throughout the Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health series – and reiterated by the ministers of health – the interventions to improve maternal mortality rates exist, what’s left is to generate the needed political willpower.
Event Resources
Photo Credit: David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
One Country, Two Stories: Marc Sommers on Rwandan Youth’s Struggle for Adulthood
›By Stuart Kent // Thursday, March 29, 2012
Almost an entire generation of Rwandans is confronting the prospect that they are going to be failed adults, said Marc Sommers, a fellow with Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program and visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center.MORE
Sommers explains in this interview how, almost two decades after garnering attention for the international failure to intervene in one of modern history’s greatest human tragedies, the Great Lakes state is the site of two competing narratives: Rwanda as a model of success, in classical development terms, and Rwandan government policies as controlling and constraining its young people.
Sommers launched Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood, on these and other challenges facing Rwandan youth, in February at the Wilson Center.
“There has been some really innovative development work that has been…spearheaded by the President of Rwanda and by his government,” said Sommers. Government efforts to limit corruption, ensure efficiency in governance, and attract private investment suggest, at one level, a bright future for the state. But the government has also instituted restrictions that limit the social and economic options of a wide swath of the country’s youth.
The regime in Rwanda before the genocide was also seen as a model of development, said Sommers. Clearly, “we know that assessment was not accurate,” and it’s troubling that we have to make a human rights qualification about the progress made today as well, he said.
“The prerequisite for a male youth to become a man is…to build a house,” Sommers explained. But, “there is a housing emergency and it’s fueled, it’s exacerbated, by the policies of the government.” All new houses are required to be built on specific plots of land – “imidugudu” – which specify a minimum size requirement.
The impact of these restrictions is not limited to men either. In Rwanda, “a female youth can’t become a woman unless she has someone to marry, and if a male youth can’t finish his house, who’s she going to marry?” Sommers said. To further complicate matters, those young people who attempt to escape traditional prerequisites for adulthood by migrating to the rapidly growing capital of Kigali face “very severe constraints” on informal market activities such as street vending.
Sommers suggested that government restraints on the construction of housing and on informal economic activities need to be reformed and loosened if Rwanda’s young men and women are to have a chance to become full, socially accepted, and economically productive members of society. -
From the Wilson Center / Guest Contributor:
Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (Book Preview)
›By Marc Sommers // Wednesday, February 22, 2012This excerpt is from Marc Sommers’ Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood, published by the University of Georgia Press. The book was launched at the Wilson Center on February 28 (webcast available here).
Several years ago, I wrote that the central irony concerning Africa’s urban youth was that “they are a demographic majority that sees itself as an outcast minority.” Since that time, field research with rural and urban youth in war and postwar contexts within and beyond Africa has led me to revise this assertion. The irony appears to apply to most developing country youth regardless of their location.MORE
Research for this book underscores the relevance of this unfortunate irony. Youth who felt overlooked and misunderstood ran like a deep, wide river through the field data for this book. The irony surfaced in many ways, including in a theme linking the plight of urban and rural youth in an immediate and concrete fashion: 200 francs ($0.37). Amafaranga magana abiri was a common way of highlighting the plight of a youth’s immediate situation. In rural Rwanda, 200 francs is the most common daily payment for cultivating another person’s farmland. That wage rests at the core of the plans of many if not most rural youth. For male youth, those earnings are how they buy roof tiles for a house they hope to complete. For female youth, the earnings go toward personal care products and perhaps savings that might attract a male youth. In Kigali, Rwanda’s mushrooming capital, 200 francs is what it costs to buy one plate of food in a simple restaurant. This was the daily focus of many urban youth: to somehow get enough money to eat one hot meal a day (most lacked cooking facilities in their residences).
These activities circumscribe the central findings in this book: the exacting adulthood requirements in Rwanda’s countryside and the desperation of city life for its urban youth. Stuck is offered as a contribution toward a more accurate picture of contemporary Rwanda and toward a deeper understanding of the powerful influence of two dynamic forces in youth lives across the world: masculinity and urbanization.
The two forces are linked. The first step to socially recognized manhood in Rwanda is to build a house. This sets the stage for a formal, legal marriage (as opposed to an embarrassing and illegal informal arrangement) and then children. Once a man can do this, and protect and support his children and wife, manhood is achieved. Yet research for this book revealed that attaining manhood is exceedingly difficult. Many male youth are caught on a treadmill toward the first step – building a house – which they know they may never complete. Rwanda, already among the world’s highest ranked in population growth, population density, urban growth, and poverty, also has a traditional culture that is both demanding and unrelenting toward its own young people. Male youth drop out of school to start working in order to save to build their house. Then they get stuck. The fallout from this housing crisis is breathtakingly severe, and a common result is for male (and female) youth to escape adulthood requirements by migrating to an urban area, usually Kigali, where their main pressure is not obtaining adulthood but sheer survival.
The impact of this situation on female youth is profound. Because male youth get stuck, female youth get stuck too, since they cannot attain womanhood without having a formal, legal marriage and then giving birth to children. Rwanda’s infamous genocide of 1994 (and its far lesser known civil war of 1990-94) has compounded this female youth challenge, since it is estimated that there may be 88 men for every 100 women in the land. With polygamy outlawed, and if the above estimate is accurate, then perhaps 12 percent of female youth cannot marry because there aren’t enough men to wed.
A much more immediate fact is that so few male youth are able to marry because they are unable to complete their houses. In addition, the clock is ticking: while male youth strain to construct a house and consider the prospect of a life of public failure, female youth must marry before society considers them failures as well. Once unmarried women reach the age of 28, but perhaps just 24 or 25 (male youth and men debate the cutoff age), they are labeled “old ladies” or “prostitutes” and permanently forced onto the margins of society. Since no one can legally marry before the age of 21 in Rwanda, the window of marriage opportunity for female youth may be as narrow as four years. A male youth, by contrast, has more time to marry than female youth, but it’s far from forever: by his early 30s, a single male youth faces public embarrassment if his house is not completed and he still isn’t married.
The widespread inability of most male and female youth to become adults in Rwanda results in an array of negative social and economic concerns. These include illegitimate children, prostitution, the spread of HIV/AIDS, crime, a high urban growth rate, and an increase in school drop-out rates. Rwanda’s government, together with some of its largest international donors, engages with youth concerns mainly through efforts to expand access to secondary and vocational education. Its disconnect from youth priorities is stark. Even after the government and donors doubled access to secondary education, few Rwandan youth are able to attend, and many youth drop out of primary school to start wage work aimed at becoming adults. Vocational education is available to even fewer youth. Meanwhile, as we see in chapters five and seven, government restrictions on house construction and on income generation make the task of attaining adulthood, and a stable economic existence, significantly more difficult. National and international institutions in Rwanda are focused on what they think youth should be doing, not on what youth priorities are.
The importance of masculinity in the minds of Rwandans shone through the research for this book and brought forth a challenging proposition: if one wants to help young women in countries such as Rwanda, one probably has to help young men first. The traditional dependence of womanhood on manhood appears to make this necessary. Clearly, this is a troubling suggestion, since exacting a measure of independence for and direct assistance to women often seems appropriate if not absolutely urgent. But not helping male youth may prove dangerous and destructive for female and male youth alike by undermining their prospects for becoming adults. Many youth, and nonelite youth in particular, may lack the ability, and sufficient agency, to escape adulthood mandates without risking harsh and perhaps devastating repercussions.
Marc Sommers is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program and visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center. Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood is published by the University of Georgia Press.
Photo Credit: Marc Sommers/University of Georgia Press. -
What Would It Take To Help People ‘and’ the Planet?
›By Geoff Dabelko // Wednesday, February 1, 2012The original version of this article first appeared in the “Scientist’s Soapbox” column of Momentum magazine’s special issue on “what would it take” to craft solutions to some of the Earth’s toughest challenges.
People living in the most biodiverse areas of the world tend to be poor, isolated, and dependent on natural resources. They often lack reliable access to alternative livelihoods and health services and thus can place stress on these ecologically unique regions.MORE
Conservation efforts will merely slow habitat loss if they don’t fundamentally address the living conditions of the human residents as well as the flora and fauna. But programs to assist these communities have commonly focused on one problem at a time, reflecting the interests of the funders: Environmental groups focus on conservation, while health organizations concentrate on disease. We must ask whether investments to protect biologically rich areas are effective and sustainable if they don’t respond to the many needs of the people who live there.
But the problems faced by people in these remote areas don’t fit our traditional sectors. The way we disburse our funds, divide our bureaucracies, demarcate our disciplines, and measure success ignores the reality of intersecting needs. Such stovepiping can disrespect the communities’ scarce resources, especially their time. It can waste development aid on duplicate supplies and staff. And it can lead us to miss how the solution to one problem (e.g., providing antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS) can be undercut by another (e.g., lacking access to safe water with which to take the pills).
So, what would it take to help particularly vulnerable populations while protecting particularly important ecological systems?
We need to strategically target our help by addressing HELP – health, environment, livelihoods, and population – through a truly integrated approach to sustainable development in these areas. Evidence suggests tackling problems concurrently can be more efficient and effective. Key donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development are increasingly prioritizing integrated responses, providing some funding for sustainable development innovators and supporting evaluation of the results. But we need more evidence that these efforts can achieve results that match or exceed the outcomes of single-sector projects. To rigorously test this approach, more projects must be funded, implemented and analyzed, over longer periods of time and at bigger scales.
To date, some promising projects and research in diverse locations – Ethiopia, Nepal, Madagascar, Rwanda, the Philippines, and Uganda – suggest that the HELP approach offers greater benefits than traditional programs.
In the Philippines, for example, the PATH Foundation Philippines’ Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management (IPOPCORM) program addresses pressing needs for both family planning services and sustainable environmental stewardship in densely populated coastal communities, where local fisheries have been depleted because of increased demand for food. IPOPCORM helps create marine protected areas and promotes alternative economic livelihoods such as seaweed harvesting, thus allowing critical local fish stocks to recover. Concurrently, the initiative mitigates human-induced pressures on the environment and lowers the vulnerability of this underserved population by providing voluntary family planning services. Since its launch in 2001, the IPOPCORM program’s approach has yielded measurable benefits, simultaneously reducing program costs and improving health and environmental outcomes – and outperforming compartmentalized, side-by-side sector interventions.
How can we bring HELP to biodiversity-rich communities? First, we can encourage scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers to step outside their stovepipes by producing and distributing manuals, for example, based on lessons learned from existing cross-disciplinary projects. Second, we must bridge the gap between analysis and field-based programs by developing new metrics that better assess the impact of integrated programs. Third, we must open up bureaucratic funding structures by demonstrating not only the short-term savings but also the synergies that bolster long-term sustainability.
The challenges are significant, but I see promising new opportunities for overcoming them. For example, the new Pathfinder International-led projects around Lake Victoria in Uganda and Kenya mark the entry of a respected health organization into the environmental arena and the return of a leading private funder – the MacArthur Foundation – to HELP programs. With some of Africa’s highest population densities, poverty, ethnic diversity, and biodiversity, the Great Lakes region is one of the most volatile intersections of human development and environmental change.
Through these and other community-based, integrated projects, we can truly help people and the planet at the same time.
Photo Credit: “Boy on road east of Addis,” courtesy of Geoff Dabelko/Wilson Center. -
Assessing Africa’s Youth Bulge
›Marc Sommers, Woodrow Wilson Center
By ECSP Staff // Monday, January 9, 2012The original version of “Governance, Security, and Culture: Assessing Africa’s Youth Bulge,” by Marc Sommers, first appeared in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, Vol. 5 (2), 2011.
Although Africa has a youth-dominated population, African government policies are often not youth-centered and African governments and their international supporters are frequently under-informed about the priorities of most youth. Reliance on the “youth bulge and instability thesis” leads to distorted assessments of everyday realities. Examination of the lives, priorities, and cultural contexts of African youth, and the cases of youth in Rwanda and Burundi in particular, shows that the nature of relations between the state and massive populations of young, marginalized, and alienated citizens directly impacts the governance, security, and development prospects of African nations.MORE
Learning from Liberia
If ever there was a youth-dominated conflict in modern times, it was Liberia’s long and grueling civil war (1989-1996 and again in 2000-2003). Ignited by Charles Taylor’s Christmas Eve incursion from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire late in 1989, together with perhaps one hundred other men, the conflict soon took the form of youth-led chaos. “What initially was seen as a revolution…fought with sticks and cutlasses,” Mats Utas writes, “was eventually transformed into a war of terror where young people started fighting each other” (2005: 55). In fact, some youth continued to view the war as their revolution, for as long as they were able to take advantage of the opportunity that armed conflict afforded. The civil war provided them with “a chance to become someone in a national system that had marginalized them, but also a chance to get rid of the load of work and expectations that the parental generation had laid on them” (65). Some of the more successful young soldiers, sometimes goaded by their girlfriends, “felt so affluent that they could wash their cars in beer – a beverage most could not even afford to drink prior to the war – and that they could drive a car until it ran out of gasoline and then just dump it for another one” (66). The result was a war that wreaked colossal destruction. By 1997, civil war had already left a nation of perhaps two and a half million with up to 200,000 dead, 700,000 refugees, and much of the remaining population internally displaced (Utas 2008: 113).
The region of sub-Saharan Africa has the most youthful population in the world. Of the 46 countries and territories where at least 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30, only seven are not in sub-Saharan Africa. With this in mind, one of the most striking aspects of contemporary Africa is how male African youth have so frequently been viewed as threats to their own societies. However, the view from below differs dramatically from the largely quantitative analyses from above and from outside the continent. Again, the Liberian example is illuminating. A nation long renowned for grasping leaders and withered government institutions has more recently provided truly upbeat signs of forward movement. That said, most youth continue to be left far, far behind. Fieldwork in rural Liberia uncovered a widespread fear of “rebel behavior youth” – youth who had assumed the attitudes of wartime combatants and became socially sidelined. Liberia’s post-war youth unemployment has been estimated at the astonishing rate of 88 percent. Taking all of this into account – a widespread sense of estrangement and social distance felt by many youth and an economic recovery that is passing most of them by – one could certainly argue that Liberian youth are among the world’s most peaceful populations.
Continue reading in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence.
Marc Sommers is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program and visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center.
Sources: Government of Liberia, Population Action International, Sommers (2007), Utas (2005 and 2008).
Photo Credit: “RPF rally in Gicumbi, Rwanda,” courtesy of flickr user noodlepie (Graham Holliday). -
On the Beat:
IRP Editors Cover Rwanda’s Population, Health, and Environment Challenges
›By ECSP Staff // Monday, December 26, 2011The original version of this article appeared on the International Reporting Project website.
The International Reporting Project (IRP) and 12 senior editors and producers from across the United States traveled to Rwanda this year to learn about issues affecting Rwanda and other countries in Africa and to help them improve their news organizations’ international coverage. Some of the editors focused on Rwanda’s extensive population, health, and environmental challenges:MORE
Nicholas Aster, founder and publisher of San Francisco’s Triple Pundit, covered sustainable development in Kigali, coffee’s empowerment potential, and eco-tourism sites like Volcanoes National Park. Aster also became interested in Rwanda’s efforts to avert disaster by corralling Lake Kivu’s CO2 reserves into a power supply. At the close of his trip, Aster reflected on Rwanda’s sustainability goals in a photo essay.
Tom Paulson, host and reporter for KPLU’s Humanosphere, discovered the positive side of aid and development in Rwanda, including girls’ education initiatives and coffee farming improvements. Moreoever, Paulson documented the Gatekeepers’ trip to Volcanoes National Park, including a visit from a mountain gorilla who became a little too friendly. Paulson has also posted several questions the Gatekeepers asked President Paul Kagame when they met with him, including his policies on restricting free speech, curbing population growth, and preventing another genocide. At the close of the trip, Paulson composed a photo slideshow that shows a growing, vibrant Rwanda, and he also outlined 10 reasons why the complex and sometimes contradictory country can’t be described in a sound-bite.
Sue Horton, op-ed and Sunday Opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, began chronicling her trip with a survey of Rwanda’s history on genocide, governance, and gorillas. On the road to meet Rwanda’s famed gorillas, Horton noted Rwanda’s strengths and challenges: its ambitious vision for the future encourages a growth in infrastructure and the country has showed impressive gains in healthcare provision and access, but Kigali is relocating residents who don’t fit the image.
The deputy managing editor of Global Post, Andrew Meldrum, also found a note of optimism in witnessing how far Rwanda has come since the genocide, particularly after hearing the testimonies of the genocide’s youngest victims: children born of sexual violence during the genocide. And his Global Post colleague Jon Rosen delves into the country’s population growth and the government’s approach to family planning.
In addition to the Gatekeeper Editor Trips, the IRP offers individual Fellowships to U.S. reporters to travel overseas on five-week reporting trips. In 2009, IRP Fellow Perry Beeman discovered a Rwanda similar to that which the Gatekeepers encountered: a country that has made much progress, but still has many challenges ahead. Beeman, who also was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, created a multimedia series, “Renewal in Rwanda”, for The Des Moines Register; his reporting garnered him an Overseas Press Club citation for Best Reporting in 2010.
Rwandans, Beeman found, are dedicated to conservation. President Kagame is committed to the environment and is driven to develop clean, sustainable power and to convert from subsistence agriculture to a stronger, more diversified economy. But everyone has a hand in this effort, including schoolchildren who report on conservation in song, dance, and dramatic arts. Beeman also examined efforts to preserve the Gishwati Forest, including gorilla and chimpanzee preservation efforts from villagers to businessmen to researchers. Beeman emphasized the importance of immersing oneself in an environment in order to report on it, and he did so by, among other things, tracking wild chimpanzees in the forest.
For more information about IRP’s Fellowships and Gatekeeper Editor trips, visit their website at InternationalReportingProject.org.
Photo Credit: “The Broadsheet in Kyovu, Kigali,” courtesy of flickr user noodlepie (Graham Holliday). -
Reaching Rural Rwandans With Integrated Health and Livelihood Messages
›Jeanne Nyirakamana, PHE Champion
By ECSP Staff // Friday, December 2, 2011This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.
Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, with more than 11 million people in one of Africa’s smallest countries, most of whom depend on the land as subsistence farmers. The country has diverse mountain, lake, and savannah landscapes, and the Virunga Mountain chain in the northwest part of the country is home to one-third of the world’s threatened mountain gorilla population. At the same time, the population throughout the country suffers from high rates of unmet need for contraception, and three percent of the adult population lives with HIV/AIDS. In a land under such intense pressure on natural resources, rural livelihood initiatives are critical to ensuring people have options for meeting their daily health and well-being needs.MORE
For the past three years, Jeanne Nyirakamana has served as head of the health program for the Sustaining Partnerships to Enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development (SPREAD) Project. Supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development through Texas A&M; University, the SPREAD Project is integrating a dynamic coffee production and quality improvement program in Rwanda with health outreach to improve community well-being. The health component works to improve the lives of coffee farmers and cooperative members by providing them with health information and services related to family planning, maternal and child health, prevention of sexually-transmitted infections (including HIV), and water and sanitation.
Training Peer Educators
Working closely with the coffee program, Nyirakamana’s team has trained more than 540 men, women, and youth peer educators who have reached more than 95,000 coffee farmers with education and services. Key communication messages highlight the links between sound decision-making and health-seeking behaviors, productive farms and agribusinesses, and strong and healthy families.
The program also leverages and supports local health resources through referrals to existing public health services, organization of mobile clinics, and community-based distribution of a socially marketed water purification solution (Sur Eau) and condoms (Prudence). According to Nyirakamana, one of the project’s greatest successes is the increased acceptance of family planning by farmers and their families and the more than 7,500 farmers who have been tested for HIV. In order to draw in as many coffee farmers as possible, many of the health and livelihood activities take place at the stations where the coffee beans are washed, at other buildings used by the coffee farmer cooperative, or during combined community meetings or home visits. At the washing stations, Nyirakamana’s team supports local health center staff to provide voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) and de-worming services while at the same time SPREAD-trained peer educators and coffee/health extension agents disseminate family planning information.
The cooperatives’ buildings have clean water, hand-washing stations, and small kiosks where condoms and Sur Eau are sold. These community health agents work with SPREAD to ensure that the greater community, not just the coffee farmers, has access to health knowledge and services. They learn how to teach the community about a range of health issues and each month they submit reports showing how many people they reached and with what kinds of messages. They are also becoming increasingly engaged in coffee and agribusiness activities. Through the success of their health activities, these agents are seen as vital community resources.
Integrated Results
By implementing this integrated population, health and environment (PHE) approach, the SPREAD Project staff is ensuring the health of the people and environment and success of the agribusiness. “You cannot care for the environment without first caring for the people who live and use that environment, so when you transmit dual messages [agriculture and health] you are able to hit two birds with one stone,” said Nyirakamana.
According to a 2010 evaluation of the project, farmers and their families reported improvements in personal and household hygiene; an increase in understanding and acceptance of family planning; uptake of HIV and VCT services; and use of condoms and other local health services. As well, they noted shifts in gender norms affecting household revenue use, alcohol, and reproductive health. The agribusiness stakeholders value the integrated approach as a means to more holistically meet farmers’ goals of increased incomes and improved lives and livelihoods.
This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project. A PDF version can be downloaded from the PHE Toolkit. PHE Champion profiles highlight people working on the ground to improve health and conservation in areas where biodiversity is critically endangered.
Photo Credit: BALANCED Project. -
Building Commitment to Family Planning:
Rwanda: Dramatic Uptake in Contraceptive Use Spurs Unprecedented Fertility Decline
›By Elizabeth Leahy Madsen // Tuesday, November 8, 2011This post is the first in a series profiling the process of building political commitment in countries whose governments have made strong investments in family planning.
With over 400 people per square kilometer, the highest rate on the African mainland, population density is perhaps the most widely-discussed factor of Rwanda’s demography. Some scholars, notably Jared Diamond, have argued that it played a primary role in sparking the 1994 genocide through competition for land (although others present a more complex theory based in policies and governance). Now, less than 20 years after the genocide, the country is experiencing demographic change of another sort, thanks to the government’s emerging reputation as one of the most committed to family planning on the African continent. Newly released preliminary data show a fertility decline that is unprecedented in its magnitude for sub-Saharan Africa. In 2010, Rwanda’s fertility rate was estimated at 4.6 children per woman, which represents a decline of 1.5 children per woman from the rate measured in 2005.MORE
The Post-Conflict Years
In the early 1990s, Rwanda’s government stated support for family planning, publishing a National Population Policy that aimed to increase contraceptive use from two to 48 percent and consequently lower the average number of children born to each woman by more than half. However, fertility remained high (over six children per woman) and contraceptive use, low.
The 1994 genocide had a radical effect on Rwanda’s health system and skewed its demographic trajectory for several years. After nearly one million people were killed and even more displaced or fled, the population fell from 7.1 million in 1990 to 5.6 million in 1995.
This decline was short-lived. Use of modern contraceptives among married women fell from an already-low 13 percent before the genocide to just four percent by 2000. In addition to the practical challenges presented by a decimated health system and widespread poverty, traditional cultural and religious preferences for large families were accompanied by a strong desire to rebuild the population in the face of tragic losses. Rwanda’s population grew by 90 percent in 15 years, to 10.6 million in 2010.
Innovative Approaches Help Renew the Health SectorIn the second half of the 1990s, efforts to rebuild health services after the devastating toll of the genocide began gradually, and family planning was not a primary focus. However, in response to declining use of health services following the introduction of user fees, the Ministry of Health in 2001 implemented a national network of mutuelles, innovative community-based health insurance schemes supported by member premiums and government funding. Over the past decade, mutuelles have been a major factor in improving Rwandans’ access to and use of health services, including family planning.
In the 2000s, projects targeting the health sector were scaled up and international donors began implementing family planning projects, including service delivery and logistics and technical support. USAID’s contributions to family planning more than tripled, from less than $3 million in 2004 to $9 million in 2009. By 2005, increased demand for family planning was evident in the results of a Demographic and Health Survey. Although women were having an average of 6 children each, the reported desired family size was 4.3. Nearly 40 percent of married women did not wish to become pregnant but were not using contraception.
Government Commitment to Family Planning
In May 2005, the USAID-supported RAPID model, which was developed by Futures Group and quantifies the implications of family planning on other sectors, was presented to Rwandan parliamentarians, an event cited by many as pivotal in building support for family planning. The RAPID presentation served as a wake-up call, but with a positive message: besides making poverty reduction easier, having smaller families also increases health and education opportunities.
Parliamentarians were not the only political leaders who became interested in family planning. Ministry of Finance officials – whose influence over budgets is crucial in translating rhetoric to funding – also became convinced that high rates of population growth would inhibit their poverty reduction efforts. Rwanda’s current Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy describes high population density as a pressure on the environment and on land use reforms.
The strategy establishes a target of reducing total fertility rate to 4.5 children per woman by 2012 (which preliminary survey results for 2010 indicate has nearly been achieved). The strategy also sets a bold goal to increase the rate of use of modern contraceptives to 70 percent among women of reproductive age. In addition, the strategy focuses on raising the proportion of the population with access to health centers and to improving the breadth of health care services offered at such facilities.
Dramatic Demographic Changes
In the past five years, concerted efforts have met much of this need, and are reflected in remarkable changes in demographic and reproductive health indicators. The five-year fertility decline of 25 percent is noteworthy for being the first decline of such magnitude in the region. (Similar fertility declines of 25 to 30 percent over five-year periods have occurred elsewhere since 1980 – Algeria, Cuba, Iran, the Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Spain, and parts of East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf – but never in sub-Saharan Africa.)
Even more striking is the rapid increase in the share of married/partnered women using modern contraception, from 10 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2010. Improvements in the country’s health system are also reflected in other indicators: The share of mothers delivering in health facilities has increased from 45 percent in 2007-08 to 69 percent in 2010, and mortality rates have correspondingly improved. Infant mortality has fallen from 86 to 50 deaths per 1,000 live births, and the maternal mortality rate dropped by half between 2000 and 2008.
Rwanda’s centralized political hierarchy has been described as a key factor in the transmission of pro-family planning policies. As the most detailed study of political support for family planning in Rwanda has explained, “The government recognized the need to address population issues, so the policies were not imposed from the outside but were embraced and supported internally.”
The continuity of political support for family planning extends all the way to President Paul Kagame. After declaring the issue “priority number one” in 2007, he told an interviewer, “We recognize we are late on this.” Reflecting on the goal of increasing contraceptive prevalence from 10 to 70 percent in just four years, which many observers might judge unrealistic, a UN official observed, “Here you don’t say never when there is government commitment.”
An Emerging Success Story, But Not Yet Complete
While the recent trends indicating improved access to and utilization of health services are a major triumph for Rwanda, development challenges remain for the densely populated, agriculture-dependent economy. Only 21 percent of men and 16 percent of women have attended school beyond the primary level. And although Rwanda has made concerted efforts to rebuild social cohesion since the genocide, it remains at the center of a region where simmering conflicts flare up regularly across borders. Former perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide continue to drive conflict and attack civilian populations in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition, international observers are raising increased concerns about authoritarian tendencies and limits on political opposition within Rwanda’s government.
Within the health sector, staffing levels have reportedly been low, and though progress so far has been remarkable, government funding for contraceptives must grow dramatically to meet rising demand. Despite the recent rapid decline in fertility rates and increased use of family planning, Rwanda remains a high-fertility country, and demographic momentum will drive continued population growth. Even if average family size falls below four children per woman, the population is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years.
Rwanda’s government has shown extraordinary interest in demographic issues and health system improvements, but as this is sustained, it must be matched with provision of education and jobs for the still-growing youthful population.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group. She was previously a senior research associate at Population Action International.
Sources: Boudreaux (2009), Brookings Institution, Freedom House, Health Policy Initiative, Hewlett Foundation, MEASURE DHS, National Geographic, The New York Times, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Rwanda Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Solo (2008), UN Population Division, USAID, Washington Post, World Health Organization.
Image Credit: Adapted from “Rwanda: Population Density, 2000,” courtesy of flickr user SEDACMaps; chart by Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. -
Beat on the Ground:
Coffee Farmer and Extension Manager Promotes Improved Health and Livelihoods in Rwandan Coffee Communities
›Pascal Gakwaya Kalisa, PHE Champion
By ECSP Staff // Thursday, November 3, 2011This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.
Mr. Pascal Gakwaya Kalisa has produced coffee in the densely populated country of Rwanda for the past nine years. A proud member of the 1,200 member Maraba Coffee Cooperative in Huye District in the Southern Province of Rwanda, Kalisa knows that a larger income alone does not ensure a better quality of life for his fellow coffee farmers and their families. He also knows that a successful coffee growing/exporting enterprise depends on preserving the fragile Rwandan soils, as well as on the health and well-being of farming families and communities. Therefore, Kalisa and other cooperative members treat the land and trees with a level of personal care that is necessary for optimum organic production and soil preservation.MORE
Kalisa and the community have set up small, garden-sized coffee farms that are more productive than usual. Cooperative washing stations have enabled the small-scale farmers to improve product quality, and the cooperatives themselves are learning to negotiate better coffee prices with international buyers. Through such efforts and the support of many international donors and industry partners, Rwanda has become a producer of high quality specialty coffee since 2005, and its coffees are being marketed through renowned coffee roasters and importers in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In just six short years, Rwandan farmers have doubled their incomes and created 2,000 jobs, and the first renowned specialty coffee competition Cup of Excellence in Africa was held in Rwanda in 2008.
SPREAD: A Community Partnership
Recognizing the broad-based health, social, and economic needs of coffee farmers and their families in this part of East Africa, the U.S Agency for International Development initiated the Sustaining Partnerships to Enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development project (SPREAD) to provide rural cooperatives and enterprises involved in high-value commodity chains with both appropriate technical assistance and access to health-related services and information. It is this combination of technical assistance and health-related outreach and services that has resulted in increased and sustained incomes and improved livelihoods.
Kalisa and other members of various cooperatives that SPREAD supports recognize that not only should farmers and their families preserve the land, but they must also preserve their own health in order to perform the labor needed to farm the crop that will produce the steady stream of high quality coffee upon which their livelihoods depend. Initiating community dialogues around issues such as protected sex, gender roles, and how coffee revenue is spent within households has also been crucial to project success among both youth and adults.
In his role as coffee zone coordinator for the SPREAD project, Kalisa works with coffee cooperatives to implement improved agricultural practices that improve the quality of their crop. This includes using cleaner environmental practices during coffee processing, such as introducing composting of coffee cherry pulp. Kalisa also helps disseminate integrated health and coffee messages through a weekly coffee talk-show produced by the National University of Rwanda’s Radio Salus, called Imbere Heza (“Bright Future”). In one show, for example, a man explained to a fellow farmer that to get good coffee cherries, he should thin his trees to renew his plantation.
Integrating Healthy Lives
Kalisa has also helped the SPREAD project’s health team deliver integrated messages on family planning, maternal and child health, alcohol, nutrition, gender issues, and the linkages between these. He uses examples such as the one about tree thinning to explain that families that space their children tend to be healthier, as they can plan the number of children to better fit with the financial and natural resources at hand.
Kalisa sees the benefits of using community agents to deliver integrated health, environment, and livelihood messages. This includes training extension agents to discuss environmental and human health issues in the context of coffee growing. Also, having coordinators from the coffee program and the health program go hand-in-hand to the field saves time, fuel, and other project costs. Kalisa believes that this campaign to educate coffee farmers and their families on the linkages between human health, a healthy environment, and strong livelihoods will lead to long-term change in their behavior, attitudes, and knowledge – change that will help them live better lives today and into the future.
This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project. A PDF version can be downloaded from the PHE Toolkit. PHE Champion profiles highlight people working on the ground to improve health and conservation in areas where biodiversity is critically endangered.
Photo Credit: “Rwanda photos 060,” courtesy of flickr user counterculturecoffee.
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