Yearly archive for 2009.
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The Future of Family Planning Funding
›November 3, 2009 // By Kayly Ober“Family planning is one of the biggest success stories of development cooperation,” said Bert Koenders, Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation, via video at a Wilson Center roundtable discussion on the future of family planning funding. Koenders was followed by representatives of three of the field’s largest donors, Musimbi Kanyoro, director of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Population and Reproductive Health Program; José “Oying” Rimon, senior program officer for Global Health Policy and Advocacy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and Scott Radloff, director of USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health.
Celebrating Family Planning Success
Radloff said his organization has “success stories in every region of the world.” USAID’s family planning and reproductive health programs have shown positive gains over the last few years, especially in Latin America where “most countries have graduated from bilateral assistance or are in the process of graduating,” he added.
Rimon lauded the strides made within developing societies where contraceptive use has become the norm. Since the 1960s, the contraceptive prevalence rate in developing countries has increased from ten per cent to about 55 per cent; which, in turn, has prompted the total fertility rate to fall from fall from six children to about three in the same time frame, he said.
Rimon was even more hopeful about the future of the field, as he claimed that “the decline for family planning/reproductive health resources, which has been happening since the mid 1990s, has been reversed.” Since 2006, the amount of resources allocated to family planning has steadily risen.
Facing Current Challenges
While funding for family planning has been gaining momentum in recent years, it still faces enormous obstacles. “The biggest challenge,” said Koenders, is investing in youth—more than half the world’s population. “We should acknowledge the needs and rights of adolescents and young people—married and unmarried—in the field of sexual and reproductive health,” he said.
Koenders also stressed the need to find common strategies to “counterbalance…growing opposition to sexual and reproductive health and rights,” as it is “not only about abortion.” The reproductive rights of women and girls are “closely linked to the deeply rooted imbalance in power relations between women and men, and the increasing sexual violence against women.”
Nowhere is this challenge more acutely observed than in “the poorest countries of the world, in Africa and South Asia,” said Radloff. If “you look across the countries of Africa, the countries that are lagging behind in terms of increasing contraceptive use and availability of contraceptives, it’s largely Francophone West Africa.”
By 2050, Africa’s population is projected to double. “India would be around 1.7 billion and stabilizing. China would be around 1.5 billion stabilized. And Africa would be at two billion and still growing, in some of the most fragile countries which have very serious economic and development issues,” said Rimon.
Kanyoro said the Packard Foundation will “take a good look at what is happening in sub-Saharan Africa so that we can be able to address some of those areas that are the weakest in the link.” The foundation’s plans include high-level advocacy “to make sure that these messages go across not just one country but several countries and even, if possible, benefit from inter-regional work.”
Opportunities in the Obama Era“I’m an optimist,” said Rimon, who sees opportunities amid these myriad challenges. Not only has the long decline in funding being reversed, but there is a “major trend towards more effective and better policies, and I think here in the U.S. we have seen that: rescission of the Mexico City policy, the new guidelines in PEPFAR, and some with the new changes and policies that are also seen in Europe.”
Radloff agreed that USAID has seen “positive engagement of the administration on reaffirming U.S. support for the MDGs, including MDG 5b and improving access to reproductive health information and services and reaffirming support for the ICPD [International Conference on Population and Development] program of action.” He also found it encouraging that “many bilateral donors, multilateral donors, and foundations are now very interested in working closely with USAID in advancing these programs…the environment, in general, is much better than it’s been at least since 1992, and perhaps even ever.”
“We have, in addition to having strong support in our administration, both a president and a secretary of state that speak out passionately about the need to reduce unintended pregnancies and to make family planning more widely available,” Radloff continued.
“We have family planning and reproductive health included as a priority under the Global Health Initiative which was announced by the President back in May. That initiative encompasses family planning, reproductive health, maternal-child health, and various infectious diseases, including HIV, TB, and malaria. The fact that he placed these under a single initiative, rather than creating two new initiatives for family planning and maternal-child health signals his interest in ensuring that we integrate these programs to the extent practical.”
Sustaining Progress Over the Long Term“I come from Africa, and I know that we can literally grow anything. We can have every small project. But the really big difference is when those problems are brought to big scale,” said Kanyoro. Developing the capacity of local leaders—particularly women—is necessary to make sustainable gains in the field, she said, as well as collaboration between government donors and private funders to drive innovation. “I think private money is really good for paving the way, but I think that private money and government money [are] really what makes the biggest difference in scale.”
Radloff agreed that we should not view the sectors “as independent of each other, but interrelated.” Governments should partner with the private sector to “develop strategies that incorporate the contributions of private sector and public sector, and acts in ways that improves the environment for private sector investments and involvement,” he said. Such collaboration will lead to success: “Almost uniformly, where we graduate countries, is where there is a strong private sector providing services to those who can pay.” -
VIDEO: Scott Radloff on Family Planning Under the Obama Administration
›November 3, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“We have a new administration that places a priority on family planning and reproductive health,” Scott Radloff, director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko after a discussion on the future of family planning at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
The Obama administration has rescinded the Mexico City Policy and announced an expanded Global Health Initiative. Radloff credits these new policies with opening opportunities “to work with key organizations in international family planning.”
The new family planning and reproductive health programs will address the large unmet need for family planning services in the developing world, particularly in Africa and South Asia. New programs will focus on reaching people in rural communities far from health clinics. “We expect to have great success,” he said. -
VIDEO: Carol Dumaine on Energy and Environmental Security in the 21st Century
›November 2, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“[W]e’re facing unprecedented challenges, literally things that have never happened in the history of human kind, and that should give us some pause… Not only rising temperatures but dramatic changes in precipitation, possibility of millions of people having to be relocated, and challenges to governance on scales that we perhaps haven’t seen before,” says Carol Dumaine, deputy directory of energy and environmental security at the U.S. Department of Energy, in a conversation with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
Dumaine emphasizes that tackling the 21st century’s broad energy and environmental security challenges requires study by experts from a range of fields, including zoology, virology, and information science. To this end, the Department of Energy hopes to leverage its years of investment and research with “the expertise that exists in the private sector and academia and think tanks.”
Looking toward the future, Dumaine identifies global cooperation as key. “The paradigm is a very diffuse, globally distributed risk, and the response must be very diffuse, globally distributed intelligence.” -
VIDEO: José G. Rimon on Key Trends in Funding Family Planning
›October 29, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“The downward trend, in terms of donor funding for international family planning, since the middle of the 1990s to around 2006 has been reversed,” José Rimon II, senior program officer for global health policy and advocacy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko following a discussion on the future of family planning at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
“There is a lot of scientific evidence that if we don’t revitalize the family planning/ reproductive health agenda, it will be very difficult to achieve the health Millennium Development Goals, especially in the area of reducing maternal mortality,” said Rimon. “Just by addressing the unmet need [for contraceptives] and the unintended pregnancies which result from it, you can reduce maternal mortality by 31 percent.”
Rimon said the Gates Foundation is working closely with donors and partner organizations to exchange information on strategy and funding priorities, which, he says, is “not happening in other issues, but it’s happening in the family planning and reproductive field.” -
VIDEO: Cleo Paskal on How Climate Change Will Destabilize Energy Supplies
›October 26, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“Climate change is going to have a very large effect on the ability to extract, distribute, [and] refine energy—in every sector,” says Cleo Paskal, associate fellow for the Energy, Environment, and Development Programme at Chatham House. “You’re going to very likely see increasing instability,” she tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in this video interview.
When hydroelectric dams are built, Paskal explains, planners inspect the site to determine the river flow, precipitation levels, and similar measures. But with climate change, “those constants have now all become variables, so your hydro generation is going to be severely affected.”
Last year, India “had an 8 percent decline in the ability to generate hydroelectricity because of changing precipitation patterns. This year…it looks like it’s going to be 12 percent because the monsoon is failing.”
Coastal nuclear power plants will face rising sea levels, increasing storm surges, coastal erosion, while those on rivers will find their supply of cooling water declining and warming. “In the summer of 2003, over a dozen French nuclear plants, because it was so hot, had to power down or shut off,” greatly disrupting the country’s energy supply, Paskal explains. “The predictions are that the temperatures that we saw in 2003 will be a one-in-two year event by 2040.”
Offshore oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are now subject to increasingly strong hurricanes. “Katrina and Rita destroyed over 400 platforms, as well as refining capacity onshore. That creates a global spike in energy prices apart from having to rebuild the infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, offshore rigs in the Niger Delta are vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges, while infrastructure built in the Arctic could be at risk as the permafrost continues to melt. -
Bringing the Climate Fight to New Battlefields
›October 23, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoThis picture brings the 350 ppm carbon dioxide message to another kind of battlefield. It illustrates the increasing role of the military in bringing non-traditional voices to the political debates over action against climate change. There are plenty of ties, if one scratches the surface and gets into the climate-security field.
The CNA Military Advisory Board, a group of distinguished retired flag officers, has been the most prominent manifestation, but this picture suggests it isn’t just the senior officers with an opinion on climate. President Barack Obama gave a shout out in his MIT speech to Operation Free, a group of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans currently on a bus tour campaigning for energy independence.
Equally important, if not as prominent in this political season, are the present or anticipated impacts of climate on the availability of certain resources (sometimes too much, sometimes too little) and how they might affect economic and political stability. And there are a wide range of reasons for the military to adopt the precautionary principle approach to climate change.
Right now, there is a strong focus on climate-security links in both the research and policy arenas. The challenge is to raise attention, perhaps most productively in a risk framework, without resorting to hyperbole that ultimately produces a backlash.
Photo courtesy of 350.org and Agent Slim. Thanks to Andy Revkin for flagging the picture. -
Send in the Scientists: Finnish MP Calls for Assessing Toxic Waste Threats in Somalia
›October 22, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko“If there are rumors, we should go check them out!” declared Finnish MP Pekka Haavisto about barrels of toxic waste that supposedly washed ashore in Somalia after the 2004 tsunami. I spoke with Haavisto in Helsinki last month as he took a break from marathon budget meetings.
“I think it is possible to send an international scientific assessment team in to take samples and find out whether there are environmental contamination and health threats. Residents of these communities, including the pirate villages, want to know if they are being poisoned, just like any other community would.”
In April this year, Haavisto flew commercial to Mogadishu to meet with Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed (who narrowly escaped assasination today), and African Union (AU) peacekeepers. In August Haavisto visited Puntland state to speak with President Abdirahman Mohamed Mohamud and other government representatives.
“Parliamentarian” is only one of Haavisto’s jobs. He also works as Finland’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa and, after playing a similar role within the EU as special representative for Sudan. From 1999-2005, he headed the UN Environment Programme’s Disaster and Conflicts Programme (then called the Post-Conflict Assessment Unit), which specializes in objective scientific environmental assessments in war-torn countries.
Haavisto is an enthusiastic advocate for environmental missions that may improve the desperate conditions resulting from violent conflicts. “We should be talking with all the factions,” he told me, to investigate the toxic waste charges. Such a thorough and objective assessment could provide a rare and potentially valuable avenue for addressing underlying suspicions and grievances some Somalis hold against those whom they claim dump waste off shore and overfish their waters.
Using environmental dialogue to build confidence is a top objective of Haavisto’s former colleagues at UNEP—and an idea that is gaining more traction within the wider UN family. For example, UNEP is now working directly with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) to provide “green advisors” to their blue helmets, lowering their environmental bootprints and establishing green, self-sufficient bases, including one in Somalia for AU troops.
Assessing the tsunami’s possible toxic legacy in Somalia may provide an avenue for dialogue by addressing first-order concerns for local populations. The dialogue could ultimately support action on front-burner problems outside Somalia, such as piracy, poverty, internal conflict, and terrorism.
Photo: IDPs outside Mogadishu, courtesy of Flickr user Abdurrahman Warsameh and ISN Security Watch. -
Video: Laurie Mazur on Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge
›October 21, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“It’s fairly well known that we’re at a pivotal moment environmentally . . . but I think it’s less well known that we’re also at a pivotal moment demographically,” Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project, tells ECSP’s Gib Clarke.
“Half the population, some three billion people, are under the age of 25,” Mazur says. “Their choices about childbearing will determine whether world population grows from 6.8 billion to as many as 8 or even almost 11 billion by the middle of the century.”
Mazur’s new book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge, launches at the Woodrow Wilson Center on October 27. Mazur will be joined by contributors John Bongaarts of the Population Council, Jacqueline Nolley Echegaray of the Moriah Fund, and Roger-Mark De Souza of the Sierra Club.
“These issues, population growth and the environment, are connected in ways that are very complex,” says Mazur.
“Population growth is not the sole cause of the environmental problems we face today, but it does magnify the impact of unsustainable resource consumption, harmful technologies, and inequitable social arrangements. It’s a piece of the pie. Slowing population growth is part of what we need to do to ensure a sustainable future.”
Radloff said his organization has “success stories in every region of the world.” USAID’s 
“I’m an optimist,” said Rimon, who sees opportunities amid these myriad challenges. Not only has the long decline in funding being reversed, but there is a “major trend towards more effective and better policies, and I think here in the U.S. we have seen that: 
“I come from Africa, and I know that we can literally grow anything. We can have every small project. But the really big difference is when those problems are brought to big scale,” said Kanyoro. Developing the capacity of local leaders—particularly women—is necessary to make sustainable gains in the field, she said, as well as collaboration between government donors and private funders to drive innovation. “I think private money is really good for paving the way, but I think that private money and government money [are] really what makes the biggest difference in scale.”
