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Measuring Community Resilience: Implications for Development Aid
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A staggering amount of development dollars – one in three, in fact – are lost due to natural disasters and crises. Certain communities are less affected than others by such disasters; they are more resilient. Knowing where vulnerability and strength exist and how to bolster them could help avoid these losses. Yet, today, very little data exists to help development practitioners understand which adaptive capacities are lagging in a given community.
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In Kuala Lumpur, U.S. Congressional Staffers Briefed on Maternal Health Challenges in India
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It’s funny when you bump into your neighbors on the other side of the world. Today I spoke about the Global Health Initiative’s recent collaboration with the Population Foundation of India at a regional briefing on health in South and Southeast Asia before the 2013 Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The special roundtable was part of a week-long study tour for a group of U.S. Congressional staffers that work on foreign affairs.
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Joan Castro on Engaging Youth to Create Change in the Philippines
›“Exposing young people to information about PHE [population, health, and environment] and food security dynamics can be a powerful tool to steer their interests and commitment to care for the environment and become sexually responsible individuals,” says PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. (PFPI)’s Joan Castro in this week’s podcast.
PFPI’s Youth EMPOWER project has trained close to 300 “youth peer educators” in the southern Philippines to promote environmentally sustainable livelihoods, clean up the environment, raise awareness of reproductive health, and encourage participation in local government.
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Environmental Security: Approaches and Issues (Book Preview)
›A little over a decade ago when I first became interested in the subject of environmental security, it took me ages to understand what I have since been eager to stress: environmental security is not a concept but rather a debate.
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Facing the Future: Empowering Youth to Protect Their Health and Environment in Ghana and the Philippines
›In the Philippines, there are health and development programs that specifically target children, senior citizens, and adults, said Joan Castro, but adolescents are underserved. Nineteen percent of the population is between the ages of 15 and 19, but “they can’t even go to health centers to get the family planning commodities [they desire],” she said. [Video Below]
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Leslie Mwinnyaa: Young People Drive Integrated Development in Ghana’s Ellembelle District
›“I have been amazed and inspired by the youth that I’ve worked with, with their dedication and motivation to help their countrymen and to try to make their communities better places,” says Leslie Mwinnyaa in this week’s podcast.
When Mwinnyaa arrived in the Ellembelle district of coastal Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer she found a multitude of development challenges. Fishermen routinely use illegal techniques like chemicals, lights, and dynamite that decimate fish stocks; “sand winning” and mangrove clearing increases erosion, leaving communities vulnerable to flooding and reducing breeding grounds for local fish; poor waste and refuse management contributes to disease and poor health; and teenage girls have twice the national rate of pregnancy.
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Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation (ECSP Report 14)
›Amid the growing number of reports warning that climate change could threaten national security, another potentially dangerous – but counterintuitive – dimension has been largely ignored. Could efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and lower our vulnerability to climate change inadvertently exacerbate existing conflicts – or create new ones?
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Combining Health and Food Security in Mozambique: Interview With Pathfinder International’s SCIP Project
›Pathfinder International’s Strengthening Communities Through Integrated Programming (SCIP) is part of a new push towards integrated development – looking at communities as a whole and addressing multiple, traditionally-siloed sectors at once. SCIP integrates both its activities and its funding to great effect in Mozambique.
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