Showing posts from category development.
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“The Second Front in the War on Terror”
USAID, Muslim Separatists, and Politics in the Southern Philippines
›For some years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the existence of violent Muslim separatists on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao gave U.S. officials significant cause for concern. In 2005, for example, the U.S. embassy charge d’affaires to the Philippines, Joseph Mussomeli, told reporters that “certain portions of Mindanao are so lawless, so porous…that you run the risk of it becoming like an Afghanistan situation. Mindanao is almost, forgive the poor religious pun, the new Mecca for terrorism.” During the Bush administration, officials referred to the region as a “second front” in the War on Terror: the region was once seen as a “new Afghanistan” that “threatened to become an epicenter of Al Qaeda.” [Video Below]
Nevertheless, as noted by Wilson Center Fellow Patricio Abinales at an Asia Program event on May 11, U.S. efforts to co-opt and pacify separatist guerrillas have proven remarkably successful in some areas of the islands. Some commentators have highlighted the role of the U.S. military in bringing a relative sense of security to troubled regions, noting that Mindanao presents a “future model for counterinsurgency.” However, Abinales’s research shows the military activities have had little effect, often because troops are stationed far from potential areas of conflict. Instead, it is the civilian side of the American presence that has dampened conflict in the war zones of the southern Philippines.
Abinales specifically explored the factors behind the success of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) program in demobilizing and reintegrating 28,000 separatist guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), as well as the long-term political consequences of this accomplishment.
“Arms to Farms”
Usually, USAID programs are organized on the basis of grants for specific and limited projects. In contrast, GEM arose as a long-term umbrella organization that oversees the disbursement and management of American funding across a number of long-term projects. Coordinators are trained directly in Mindanao and are encouraged to “go native,” living in the area and becoming part of the community. GEM prioritizes cultural understanding, respect for community leaders, an appreciation of the important role that women play in local societies, and sensitivity to potential divisions within separatist groups and their security concerns vis-à-vis the Philippine government.
There has often been a general tendency for aid organizations to associate the demobilization of warring groups with disarmament. While Philippine officials on Mindanao have sometimes tried this approach, cash-for-guns amnesty schemes have opened up opportunities for corruption and have not been particularly effective. Understanding that one of the major concerns of guerrilla rebels is exploitation by corrupt government officials, GEM established an “Arms to Farms” scheme, whereby Muslim rebels are trained to engage in agriculture, but are not encouraged to put away their weapons. In this way, the program keeps potential guerrillas and Al Qaeda recruits busy with legitimate and peaceful economic activity, while it assuages their concerns about the threat from corrupt government officials, who may otherwise take the fruits of agricultural labor by force.
In fact, Abinales noted that one of the keys to GEM’s success is that the organization has never submitted to the official local authorities, and has largely been allowed a free reign by Manila to conduct its activities on Mindanao. It is precisely because the state has not been successful in delivering welfare regimes which provide stability to the area that GEM is seen as an alternate source of development and security in the region. Moreover, because of GEM’s activities, other American officials are allowed relatively free access, and are even welcomed into areas where the authority of the Philippine government holds no sway. Most of GEM’s activities are conducted with the MNLF, which has maintained its own official treaties and agreements with Manila since the 1970s. However, the American organization is beginning to enter the territory of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a splinter group of the MNLF that rejects relations with the national government outright, but one whose leaders are jealous of the development gains the MNLF has made under GEM.
Abinales was quick to point out that although GEM’s activities have been successful, they are tailor-made to specific circumstances. It is therefore difficult to present them as a generalized model that can be applied to other separatist conflicts. Nevertheless, Abinales’s work suggests that government agencies working on counterinsurgency efforts elsewhere might do well to examine the benefits of the flexible civilian approaches to conflict resolution formed with a deep understanding of the concerns of the specific communities involved.
Bryce Wakefield is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. -
Watch: Edward Carr on Delivering Development and Rethinking Assumptions
›May 13, 2011 // By Schuyler NullWhile visiting West Africa first as an archaeologist, Edward Carr, an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina and author of Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future, found that the villages in which he was working were far more resilient to the impacts of climate change than he expected. Increased frequency of drought, declines in rainfall, severe storms – these challenges are the sort of thing that can “totally destroy someone’s livelihood in a year,” he said in an interview with ECSP, “yet they were surviving and surviving really, really well.”
That experience and others challenged his understanding of “how I thought the world was supposed to work, how I’d been taught the world was supposed to work, versus what I was actually seeing happen on the ground,” said Carr. “I became so struck by what people were dealing with in the current context that my interest started to shift much more towards what they were doing now.”
Now serving as a AAAS fellow and the climate change coordinator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Carr said he is trying to change how the U.S. government does development.
“The last 13 years of my career have been trying to figure out what’s actually happening on the ground first,” Carr said, and that led to writing Delivering Development.
“One of the key arguments I have is that the world does not work the way we assume it does – we are fundamentally misunderstanding what’s happening for most people living out, especially in rural areas, in the developing world,” said Carr. “The challenges they face are significant but not necessarily the ones we’re aimed at.”
For example, said Carr, “we see rising food prices globally and…the presumption is that the poorest people in the world are going to get really hammered by this.” But, he said, “That’s not entirely true, because a lot of the poorest people in the world living in rural areas have an option to just disconnect from markets completely – they go total subsistence if they need to.”
There’s an assumption that people shouldn’t be disconnecting like that, but, Carr pointed out, when new places are integrated into larger markets, “we’re also integrating them into new sources of risk that they may not be very well equipped to manage, and that becomes a really significant challenge.”
“We’re starting with the fundamental assumption that markets can be a solution, without necessarily really looking carefully at how markets can be part of the problem,” said Carr. -
Ten Billion: UN Updates Population Projections, Assumptions on Peak Growth Shattered
›May 12, 2011 // By Schuyler Null
The numbers are up: The latest projections from the UN Population Division estimate that world population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050 – a slight bump up from the previous estimate of 9.1 billion. The most interesting change however is that the UN has extended its projection timeline to 2100, and the picture at the end of the century is of a very different world. As opposed to previous estimates, the world’s population is not expected to stabilize in the 2050s, instead rising past 10.1 billion by the end of the century, using the UN’s medium variant model.
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Family Planning as a Strategic Focus of U.S. Foreign Policy
›May 11, 2011 // By Wilson Center Staff“Family Planning as a Strategic Focus of U.S. Foreign Policy,” by Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, was an input paper for the Council on Foreign Relations report, The Role of U.S. Family Planning Assistance in U.S. Foreign Policy. Excerpted from the introduction:
Comprehensive policies that incorporate demography, family planning, and reproductive health can promote higher levels of stability and development, thereby improving the health and livelihood of people around the world while also benefiting overarching U.S. interests. U.S. foreign aid will be more effective if increased investments are made in high population-growth countries for reproductive health and family planning programs. These programs are cost-effective because they help reduce the stress that rapid population growth places on a country’s economic, environmental, and social resources.
Family Planning and Reproductive Health Programs
Family planning and reproductive health programs have successfully reduced the world’s population growth rate, propelled economic development, and improved women’s lives across the world. When people, and especially women, are given the opportunity and technology to limit their family size, they often choose to do so.
Population trends are motivated by three demographic forces: fertility, mortality, and migration. Although they can have dramatic effects on national and local populations, mortality and migration in particular have relatively little influence globally. Across the world, mortality rates have declined to a point where most children born today live to reach their own reproductive years, though much work remains to reduce the effect of communicable diseases and improve nutrition among the young. Meanwhile, three percent of the world’s population currently lives outside of their birth-countries. Therefore, while migration is increasing and an important demographic force, it does not occur at a scale large enough to significantly affect global-level demography.
Fertility rates currently are – and in the short-term will remain – the most important driver of global demographic trends. The total fertility rate, or average number of children born to each woman, has been estimated at 2.7 for the period between 2000 and 2005, a decline from 3.6 children per woman in the early 1980s. Given this decline, population projections generally assume future declines in fertility rates. For example, the widely cited “medium-fertility variant,” which is the United Nations’ projection of a world population growing from 6.9 billion in 2010 to 9.1 billion by 2050, relies upon an assumption that the global fertility rate will decline by 24 percent to two children per woman. However, if fertility rates remain constant at current levels, the world’s population would reach 11 billion by 2050. Fertility rates, whether they decline or remain at current levels, are not distributed evenly among countries and regions.
Continue reading or download the full report, “Family Planning as a Strategic Focus of U.S. Foreign Policy,” from the Council on Foreign Relations. -
Population and Environment Connections: The Role of Family Planning in U.S. Foreign Policy
›May 11, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko“Population and Environment Connections,” was an input paper for the Council on Foreign Relations report, Family Planning and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ensuring U.S. Leadership for Healthy Families and Communities and Prosperous, Stable Societies.
Current global population growth rates are not environmentally sustainable and the increasing demands of a growing global population are increasingly straining supplies of food, energy, and water. The expected consequences of climate change will stress resources further. Population growth dynamics compound challenges presented by increased resource consumption from a rising global middle class, making the world’s population, and the quality and quantity of natural resources, top priorities for governments and the public alike.
Governments and multilateral organizations must recognize the relationship between resource demand, resource supply, and resource degradation across disparate economic and environmental sectors. Formulating appropriate and effective responses to growth-induced resource complications requires both a nuanced understanding of the problem and the use of innovative approaches to decrease finite resource consumption.
Family planning and integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) approaches offer opportunities to address such concerns. These efforts recognize the importance of population-environment linkages at the macro-level. They also operate at the household, community, and state levels, empowering individuals and decreasing community vulnerability by building resilience in a wider sustainable development context. PHE approaches embrace the complex interactions of population, consumption, and resource use patterns. To paraphrase Brian O’Neill, a leading scholar on population-climate connections, PHE approaches offer a way forward that is neither a silver bullet nor a red herring. Addressing population-environment links is an essential step to tackling global sustainability crises.
Download “Population and Environment Connections” from the Council on Foreign Relations. -
Population Growth and Climate Change Threaten Urban Freshwater Provision
›May 6, 2011 // By Emanuel FeldBy 2050, more than one billion urban dwellers could face perennial freshwater shortages if major improvements are not made to water management practices and infrastructure, according to a recent study published in the journal PNAS, “Urban Growth, Climate change, and Freshwater Availability.” These challenges will arise as hydrologic changes due to climate change compound “an unprecedented wave of urban growth,” with nearly three billion additional urban residents forecast by 2050. “It is a solvable problem,” the study argues, “but one that will take money, time, political will, and effective governance.”
Using demographic data from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, as well as a variety of climate and city-level demographic scenarios, the researchers estimate per-capita water availability for cities in the developing world, where urban growth will be most rapid. They advise, however, that their findings should be taken as conservative estimates, since the study assumes cities can use all nearby water and does not account for key challenges relating to water quality and delivery to urban centers.
In 2000, 150 million people in developing countries lived in urban areas that could not support their own water requirements (i.e. less than 100 liters available per person per day). By 2050, according to the study, urban population growth alone could bring this figure to 993 million and more than three billion could face intermittent shortages at least one month out of the year. When the researchers expanded the area on which cities can draw upon to include a 100 km buffer zone, these values drop to 145 million and 1.3 billion, respectively.
However, once climate and land use change are included in the models, the aggregate number of people facing perennial shortages rises a further 100 million, if only water stores within the urban area are considered, or 22 million, for the 100 km buffer zone model.
Remarkably, these aggregate figures differ very little among the various demographic and climate scenarios. The particularities of the challenge do however vary at the regional level. Perennial water shortage will generally be limited to cities in the Middle East and North Africa. Seasonal water shortages, on the other hand, will be geographically widespread, although rapidly urbanizing India and China will be especially hard hit.
The study acknowledges the temptation to view water shortage “as an engineering challenge.” Still, the lead author, Rob McDonald of The Nature Conservancy, cautions against exclusive reliance on grey infrastructure solutions (e.g. canals and dams) in an article for Nature Conservancy, saying:Some new infrastructure will be needed, of course – that’s the classic way cities have solved water shortages. But especially in parts of the world where there’s lots of cities, just going out farther or digging deeper to get water can’t be the only solution.
Instead, McDonald and co-authors Pamela Green, Deborah Balk, Balazs M. Fekete, Carmen Revenga, Megan Todd, and Mark Montgomery, emphasize the need for cities to encourage more efficient water use by their industrial and residential sectors, as well as the potential to engage the water-intensive agriculture sector in surrounding rural areas.
“Bottom line,” McDonald said in an interview with Robert Lalasz of The Nature Conservancy’s Cool Green Science blog, “don’t think of those high numbers as a forecast of doom. They are a call to action.”
Emanuel Feld is a student at Yale University studying economics and the environment.
Sources: Cool Green Science, PNAS, The Nature Conservancy.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Chennai prayed too hard…. Part I,” courtesy of flickr user Pandiyan. -
Accessing Maternal Health Care Services in Urban Slums: What Do We Know?
›“Addressing the needs of urban areas is critical for achievement of maternal health goals,” said John Townsend, vice president of the Reproductive Health Program at the Population Council. “Just because there is a greater density of health services does not mean that there is greater access.”
Townsend moderated a discussion on the challenges to improving access to quality maternal health care in urban slums as part of the 2011 Maternal Health Dialogue Series with speakers Anthony Kolb, urban health advisor at USAID; Catherine Kyobutungi, director of health systems and challenges at the African Population Health Research Center; and Luc de Bernis, senior advisor on maternal health at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). [Video Below]
Mapping Urban Poverty
“Poverty is becoming more of an urban phenomenon every day,” said Kolb. With over 75 percent of the poor in Central Asia and almost half of the poor in Africa and Asia residing in cities and towns by 2020, “urban populations are very important to improving maternal health,” he added.
Collecting accurate data in informal settings such as slums can be very challenging, and there is often a “systematic undercounting of the urban poor,” said Kolb. Data often fails to capture wealth inequality in urban settings, and there is often a lack of attention to the significant variability of conditions between slums.
Kolb also warned about the risk of generalization: “Slums and poverty are not the same.” In practice, there is not a standardized definition of what constitutes a slum across countries, he said. “It is important to look at different countries and cities individually and understand how inequality is different between them.” Slum mapping can help to scope out challenges, allocate resources appropriately, and identify vulnerability patterns that can inform intervention design and approach, he said.
Maternal Health in Nairobi Slums
Addressing the maternal health needs of the nearly 60 percent of urban residents who live in slums or slum-like conditions will be a critical step to improving maternal health indicators of a rapidly urbanizing Kenya, said Kyobtungi.
Only 7.5 percent of women in Kenyan slums had their first antenatal care visit during their first trimester of pregnancy and only 54 percent had more than three antenatal care visits in all – rates significantly lower than those among urban women in non-slum settings.
“In some respects, [the urban poor] are doing better than rural communities, but in other ways they are behind,” said Kyobtungi. But, she said, there are many unique opportunities to improve maternal health in slums: “With these very high densities, you do have advantages; with very small investments, you can reach many more people”
Output-based voucher schemes – in which women pay a small fee for a voucher that entitles them to free, high-quality antenatal care, delivery services, and family planning – have been implemented to help poor, urban women access otherwise expensive services. But poor attitudes towards health care workers, transportation barriers, and high rates of crime still prevent some women from taking advantage of these vouchers, said Kyobtungi.
The majority of maternal health services in slums are provided by the private facilities, though size and quality vary widely. “There is a very high use of skilled attendants at delivery, but the definition of skilled is questionable,” said Kyobtungi
“Without supporting the private sector,” Kyobutungi said, “we cannot address the maternal health challenges within these informal settlements.” Combined with an improved supervision and regulation system, providing private maternal health facilities with training, equipment, and infrastructure could help to improve the quality of services in urban slums, she concluded.
Reducing Health Inequalities
“While we have evidence that health services, on average, may be better in urban areas than in rural areas, this often masks wide disparity within the population,” said de Bernis. “Reducing health inequities between and within countries is a matter of social justice.”
When it comes to family planning, total fertility rates are lower in cities, but “the unmet need…is still extremely important in urban areas,” explained de Bernis. Many poor women in cities, especially those who live in marginalized slum populations, do not have access to quality reproductive health services – a critical element to reducing maternal morbidity and mortality rates.
Economic growth alone, while important to help improve the health status of the poor in urban settings, will not solve these problems, said de Bernis. To reduce health disparities within countries, de Bernis advocated for “appropriate social policies to ensure reasonable fairness in the way benefits are distributed,” including incorporating health in urban planning and development, strengthening the role of primary health care in cities, and putting health equity higher on the agenda of local and national governments.
Event Resources:Source: African Population Research Center, United Nations Population Fund.
Photo Credit: “Work Bound,” courtesy of flickr user Meanest Indian (Meena Kadri). -
Watch ‘Dialogue’ TV on Integrating Development, Population, Health, and the Environment
›Last week on the Wilson Center’s Dialogue radio and television program, host John Milewski spoke with Geoff Dabelko, director of ECSP, Roger-Mark De Souza, vice president for research and director of the Climate Program for Population Action International, and George Strunden, vice president of Africa programs for the Jane Goodall Institute. They discussed the challenge of integrating population, health, and environmental programs (PHE) to address a broad range of livelihood, development, and stability issues. [Video Below]
“Many times that we tackle development or poverty and human well-being challenges…we do it in an individual sector – the health sector, or agriculture sector, or looking at issues of water scarcity – and it makes sense in many respects to take those individual focuses,” said Dabelko. “But of course people living in these challenges, they’re living in them together…so both in terms of understanding the challenges…and then in responding to those challenges, we have to find ways to meet those challenges together.”
De Souza noted that the drive for integrated development stems from the communities being served, not necessarily from outside aid groups. “We’ve seen that there’s a greater impact because there’s longer sustainability for those efforts that have an integrated approach,” he said. “There’s a greater understanding and a greater appreciation of the value that [PHE] projects bring.”
Strunden said that the Goodall Institute has found similar success in tying health efforts with the environment in places where previously conservation work alone had been unsuccessful.
The panelists also discussed the role of population in broader global challenges, including energy, water, and food scarcities, and women’s rights.
Dialogue is a co-production of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and MHz Networks. The show is also available throughout the United States on MHz Networks, via broadcast and cable affiliates, as well as via DirecTV and WorldTV (G19) satellite.
Find out where to watch Dialogue where you live via MHz Networks. You can send questions or comments on the program to dialogue@wilsoncenter.org.
