“By reducing population growth, we are going to have a better chance of sustaining the gains of an environmental conservation project,” said Leona D’Agnes in this interview with ECSP. D’Agnes, a technical advisor to PATH Foundation Philippines, served as lead author on a research article published late last year in Environmental Conservation titled, “Integrated Management of Coastal Resources and Human Health Yields Added Value: A Comparative Study in Palawan (Philippines).” The study provided concrete statistical evidence that integrated development programming incorporating population, health, and the environment (PHE) can be more effective in lowering population growth rates and preserving critical coastal ecosystems than single-sector development interventions.
“What set this research apart from earlier work on integrated programming was the rigorous evaluation design that was applied,” said D’Agnes. “What this design aimed to do is to evaluate the integrated approach itself. Most of the previous evaluations that have been done on integrated programming were impact evaluations — they set out to evaluate the impact of the project.” This most recent research project, on the other hand, sought to evaluate the effectiveness of cross-sectoral interventions based on “whether or not synergies were produced,” said D’Agnes.
Although it took her team six years to generate statistically significant findings in Palawan, D’Agnes reports that the synergies of PATH Foundation Philippines’ PHE intervention took the form of reduced income poverty, a decreased average number of children born to women of reproductive age, and the preservation of coastal resources, which helped bolster the region’s food security.
Going forward, D’Agnes said, an integrated approach to environmental conservation should also prove appealing because of its cost effectiveness. “This has huge implications for local governments in the Philippines, where they are struggling to meet the basic needs of their constituents in the face of very small internal revenue allotments that they get from the central government,” she said. “They can really pick up on this example to see that at the local level, if somehow they can do this integrated service delivery that was done in the Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management (IPOPCORM) model, that they’ll be able to achieve the objectives of both their conservation and their health programs in a much more cost-effective way, and, in the process, generate some other [positive] outcomes that perhaps they didn’t anticipate.”
D’Agnes expects the study’s results will prompt a fresh look at cross-sectoral PHE programming. “I hope that this evidence from this study will help to change the thinking in the conservation community about integrated approaches to conservation and development,” she said.
The integrated PHE Allience Project in Nepal has the similar experience in Western Terai. This project has been imlemented in biological corridor and bottleneck of three districts of Western Nepal by WWF Nepal. Youth mobilization in conservation,public health and sexual & reproductive health awareness is the successful approach of the project. The project helped the local community forest users group and their umbrell organization to coordinate with the District Public Health Office (DPHO) and local health institution. The local agencies working solely in conservation are now raising voices for public health and RH right. Gender issues are first time discussed in such CBOS.
The overall effect of PHE project is that the community people feel their responsibility to contribute in conservation as WWF Nepal is contributing in improving their health. Now they are happy that WWF always do not think for wild animals but the healthy community is also its prime concern.
Thanks Bhaskar for your comments about the WWF Nepal PHE project. New Security Beat readers can learn more about it in the ECSP brief, "Forests for the Future: Family Planning in Nepal's Terai Region," coauthored by Leona D'Agnes, Judy Oglethorpe, and WWF Nepal staff. http://www.issuu.com/ecspwwc/docs/focus_18_nepal_terai_region
Bhaskar Bhattarai
Thanks Meaghan, For your concern and suggestions.
Readers can see the map of Terai Landscape Program area in Leona's article. PHE project was initially piloted in Khata corridor only which was described and evaluated successful in Leona's article with the title "Forests for the Future: Family Planning in Nepal's Terai Region" We are very happy to share that with the success of project in Khata, it was replicated in two more biologically important areas of Basanta corridor and Lamahi bottleneck of western Terai in October'2008.
The PHE is very much popular in new sites too and adding value in conservation. We are very much thankful to USAID and Johnson & Johnson for their financial and technical support to the project.
Meaghan Parker
Many thanks Bhaskar for the clarification, and congratulations on your expansion! I look forward to hearing more about your efforts to replicate the successful model in other regions of Nepal.
