Showing posts from category *Blog Columns.
-
‘Blood in the Mobile’ Documents the Conflict Minerals of Eastern Congo
›With Blood in the Mobile, Danish director Frank Poulsen dives into the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to document a vicious cycle of conflict that has claimed millions of lives, produced rampant humanitarian abuses, and is driven in part (though not entirely, it should be noted) by the area’s rich mineral resources – all under the noses of the world’s largest peacekeeping operation.
The minerals extracted in the eastern DRC – tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, mainly from North and South Kivu provinces – are used in cell phones around the world. The trailer shows Poulsen gaining access to an enormous tin mine in the area – the biggest illegal mine in the Congo, he says – capturing powerful footage of the squalid and dangerous conditions that thousands of often-teenage workers labor under for days at a time.
“Four years ago this place was nothing but jungle,” narrates Poulsen. “Today, 15,000-20,000 people are working here [and] different armed groups are fighting to gain control over the mine.”
Though Poulsen is pictured making dramatic phone calls to Nokia (the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world), the issue of conflict minerals from the DRC and places like it is in fact more than just a blip on the radar screens of most leading technology companies. The NGO the Enough Project in particular has been championing the cause and bringing it to tech companies’ doorsteps for quite some time. Their efforts have helped produce an action plan for certifying conflict-free supply chains (complete with company rankings) and also helped lead to passage of the United States’ first law addressing conflict minerals this fall.
However, Poulsen’s message of the developed world taking responsibility for sourcing is commendable. Efforts like this that have led to the adoption of corporate responsibility initiatives like the Cardin-Lugar amendment, a similar measure in the works for the European Union, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and the Kimberley Process for diamonds.
Blood in the Mobile premiered this fall at the International Documentary Film Festival and the producers are “in dialogue with different U.S. distributors,” according to their Facebook page, where those interested are advised to stay tuned.
Sources: BloodintheMobile.org, Enough Project, EurActiv.
Video Credit: Blood in the Mobile Official Trailer. -
Mapping Muslim Population Growth
›Recent unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere across the Middle East has led to a resurgence of interest in the region’s demography, just in time, it turns out, for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s 2011 refresh of its report on Muslim population growth, which this year includes a new interactive feature, “The Global Muslim Population.”
According to the report, current security hot-spots such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Nigeria will continue to grow considerably faster than the mean.
On the flip side, the report also found that the median age in the Middle East-North Africa region is rising – a generally agreed upon good indicator for the prospects of more liberal, democratic regimes – and though global Muslim population will continue to grow faster than the world’s non-Muslim population, this growth will be slower than in decades past.The accompanying interactive feature allows users to select a region (the Americas, Europe, Middle East/North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia-Pacific), a specific country, and a decade (1990-2030) in their search. In the example above, Egypt will add 25 million Muslims to its population over the next two decades, representing a 30 percent increase. Comparatively, from 1990 to 2010, Egypt’s Muslim population increased by 48.5 percent.
The user is able to see the estimated Muslim population of the country, the percent of the total population that is Muslim, and the country’s percent share of the world’s total Muslim population (as seen in the example above of Egypt in 2010 and 2030). In addition, these variables can be sorted in tables.
It’s important to note though, write the authors of the report, that projections are not predictions:This report makes demographic projections. Projections are not the same as predictions. Rather, they are estimates built on current population data and assumptions about demographic trends; they are what will happen if the current data are accurate and the trends play out as expected. But many things – immigration laws, economic conditions, natural disasters, armed conflicts, scientific discoveries, social movements and political upheavals, to name just a few – can shift demographic trends in unforeseen ways, which is why this report adheres to a modest time frame, looking just 20 years down the road.
Image Credit: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Sources: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. -
Albert Lotana Lokasola, PHE Champion
Improving Health and Preserving Ecosystems in the Democratic Republic of Congo
›This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.
In the remote forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Albert Lotana Lokasola is helping improve livelihoods by bringing much-needed health services to the communities living in and around the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve. Officially recognized by the DRC government in May 2009, the reserve is a high biodiversity wilderness area covering an area about the size of Rhode Island (4,785 square kilometers).
Located 300 miles southwest of Kisangani, the reserve contains bonobos, a rare and highly endangered great ape species that is as closely related to humans as chimpanzees. In addition, the reserve is highly valued for its biodiversity, including several other flagship species such as leopards, elephants, Congo peafowl, Tshuapa red colobus, and Salonga monkeys.
Lokasola founded a nationally recognized organization called Vie Sauvage, or “Wild Life” in English. He serves as the president of the organization and works with international organizations to foster conservation and rural development in an integrated, holistic approach. As a native of Kokolopori, he believes that “the forest, men, and wildlife live together and should be protected together.”
In partnership with local residents and supported by the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, Lokasola and Vie Sauvage established the first medical clinic in the area in 2006. They garnered support for a doctor, nurses, and supplies from the Indigo Foundation in Australia and the Kokolopori-Falls Church Sister City Partnership.
Before the clinic was founded, community members had to walk or bicycle more than 50 miles to get to the nearest hospital in the territorial capital of Djolu. Now the Kokolopori clinic serves the 8,000 people who live in 30 villages along a 40-mile road in the reserve. One of the clinic’s goals is to help improve women’s health by training and equipping midwives and by providing access to other health services. Malaria and poor nutrition contribute to high maternal and child mortality, and women in Kokolopori do not yet have access to reproductive health services such as family planning.
Vie Sauvage articulates integrated health and conservation messages through their community education projects. They are also working with the community to prevent malnutrition by planting fruit trees in agroforestry fields to produce supplemental food supplies. At the same time, these trees will create corridors for wildlife movement and protect the genetic flow. They also create a sound micro-climate for people, sequester carbon dioxide, and filter the air. Through these efforts, Vie Sauvage and the people of Kokolopori are demonstrating the critical links between human well-being and conservation.
Vie Sauvage has garnered resources and participation from diverse partners (like the Kokolopori-Falls Church Sister City Partnership and the Indigo Foundation, mentioned above) which work together to support the clinic and fund medical staff salaries, training, supplies and equipment, and infrastructure improvements.
According to Lokasola, Vie Sauvage and partners are currently exploring potential partnership opportunities to integrate family planning and reproductive health into existing activities. His hope is that by providing these much-needed services, the community will be healthier and critical ecosystems will be sustainably preserved.
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: Building along the road in Kokolopuri village serves as a messsage drum for sending messages from one village to the next, courtesy of Ingrid Schulze and the BALANCED Project. -
Top 10 Posts for January 2011
›January 2011 was an eventful month to say the least. Richard Cincotta’s political-demographic analysis on Tunisia’s chances of achieving democracy took top place, followed by a landmark PHE technical study, Joel Cohen on education and population growth, coverage of the first ever QDDR, and India’s continuing conflict with Maoist insurgents:
1. Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us
2. Quantifying the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment in Development: When the Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts
3. Watch: Too Few or Too Many? Joel E. Cohen on How Education Can Address Both
4. India’s Maoists: South Asia’s “Other” Insurgency
5. Guest Contributor Frederick M. Burkle: Reading the QDDR: Civil-Military Interface Still Lacks Operational Clarity
6. Reading the QDDR: Women and Youth in 21st Century Statecraft
7. New Insights Into the Population Growth Factor in Development
8. Turning Up the Water Pressure, Part One: How Population Growth Is Straining the World’s Most Vital Resource
9. Restrepo: Inside Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley
10. Pop Audio: From Cancun: Roger-Mark De Souza on Women and Integrated Climate Adaptation Strategies -
Environment, Development, and Growth
U.S.-Mexico Cooperation in Renewable Energies
›Mexico has vast untapped reserves in wind, solar, and geothermal and represents a natural power supplier for U.S. markets, especially those located along the country’s northern border. The renewables sector represents a growth industry in Mexico, where oil production has dropped off because of dwindling reserves and prohibitions exist on private investment in hydrocarbons. The Mexican government also appears to be charting a lower-carbon future for the country, setting ambitious renewable portfolio standards and reorienting the public policy focus toward alternative energy development – sometimes in partnership with the private sector, both foreign and domestic.Environment, Development, and Growth: U.S.-Mexico Cooperation in Renewable Energies – The Mexico Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
For U.S.-Mexico relations, advances in renewables demonstrate the success of bi-national cooperation – a bright spot that security challenges threaten to overshadow. For example, technical studies by USAID have enabled the charting of wind patterns in southern Oaxaca state, holding the potential to benefit both countries, by enhancing rural electrification in Mexico and providing a new energy source for the North American grid.
This new report from the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, Environment, Development, and Growth: U.S.-Mexico Cooperation in Renewable Energies, provides a comprehensive overview of the Mexican sector, placing special emphasis on the business challenges facing enhanced investment along the U.S.-Mexico border. -
A Lens Into Liberia: Experiences from IRP Gatekeepers
›The International Reporting Project (IRP) gives “editors – the ‘gatekeepers’ – a chance to get out of the newsrooms and to see for themselves the importance of international affairs,” said John Schidlovsky, director of IRP, at a Wilson Center event about the independent journalism organization’s recent two-week trip to Liberia with 11 U.S. news editors. [Video Below]
Schidlovsky stressed the importance of providing international opportunities for journalists in the face of news industry budget cuts. IRP fills the gap by sending gatekeepers, who help determine what news items will be selected for publication or broadcast, to countries that are often underrepresented and neglected in mainstream media.
Three of the gatekeepers, Sunni Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR Baltimore; Ed Robbins, a video journalist; and Teresa Wiltza, senior editor for The Root, shared their observations from their Liberia trip, as well as their insights into the challenges of international reporting.
Economic Challenges and Opportunities
Liberia is slowly beginning to rebuild its economy after a 14-year civil war with more than 200,000 casualties, but there are still “tremendous challenges,” said Khalid. “How do people survive? What kind of jobs do they have? How do they feed their families?”
According to World Bank figures, 84 percent of Liberians earn less than $1 a day, and more than 94 percent earn less than $2 a day. The government’s annual budget is only $369 million, the official unemployment rate is 85 percent, and corruption and lack of infrastructure remain major concerns.
Despite these problems, “Liberia has a lot of good points going for it,” said Khalid. Investment in the country’s raw materials is growing; most recently, the country signed a $7 billion deal with China and a European consortium to continue iron-ore mining.
Initially expecting to “write an obituary for Liberia,” Khalid said he “came out of this trip fairly optimistic about Liberia’s future.” With its “small population, great location, and mineral wealth,” as well as “competent political leadership,” Liberia can take advantage of its potential, he said.
“Capturing the Flavor” of Liberia
Robbins hopes to paint a multidimensional picture of Liberia and “capture the flavor of the country beyond Monrovia,” with his series of short films, which will be available on the websites of both Time and the International Reporting Project,
Robbins previewed one of these films, a profile of the chair of the Liberian Women’s Initiative, Etweda “Sugars” Cooper, who he says “embodies a certain power of a lot of Liberian women in her dedication and also her love for the country.”
At the local level, “the problems of recovery and development are all there in miniature,” said Robbins. But with dedicated leadership from people like Cooper, communities are slowly beginning to rebuild the schools, roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure that was destroyed in the civil wars.
“When you read books and articles, it tends to be really focused on the war and the devastation,” said Robbins. But there is also a sense of optimism among Liberians: “you can see hope in these people, a sense there is something there,” he said.
Empowering Women and Ending Rape
Wiltz pointed out that, “there is a prevailing sense of hope,” particularly among the older generation of women. After years of violence, these female “peace warriors” led the movement that ended Liberia’s civil war. But seven year later, “for women there, the biggest issue is that of economic empowerment,” said Wiltz. “They’re feeling empowered, but they’re broke.”
Sexual violence has become “part of the national psyche,” Wiltz said. During the civil war in Liberia, it has been estimated that more than 60 percent of the female population was raped. Today, “everyone seems sensitized to the issue, and yet it’s still a huge problem,” she said. Sexual violence is still common despite the prevention efforts of radio campaigns, NGOs, and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
“You’re in a country where families were destroyed by war,” Wiltz said. In the process of rebuilding Liberia, the new challenge is to engage and empower a new generation of young women and girls. “Underneath the surface there is all this pain and this legacy of extreme cruelty, but they very much want to overcome this.”
Much of the gatekeepers’ coverage is available online: Sunni Khalid produced a week-long series of radio pieces for WYPR, an NPR affiliate; Ed Robbins produced a series of short films for Time; and Teresa Wiltz published several articles on The Root.
Sources: CIA World Factbook, U.S. State Department, World Bank, World Health Organization, WYPR.
Photo Credit: “Liberia Will Rise Again,” courtesy of flickr user Jason Judy. -
Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?
›The much-anticipated Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review(QDDR) demands to be taken seriously. Its hefty 250 pages present a major rethink of both American development policy and American diplomacy. Much of it is to be commended:
-
ASRI’s Integrated Health and Conservation Programming in Borneo
›If you have a fever in the town of Sukadana in Indonesian Borneo, the locals might suggest you go to the ASRI clinic. It’s in a little house whose front yard is crowded with bicycles and motorbikes. In the waiting room, you examine a whiteboard that explains your payment options. ASRI accepts cash. But it looks like you can also pay with labor in the clinic’s organic garden or its reforestation site. If you own a goat, you can bring in its manure and pay with that. You can even pay with durian tree seeds!
Doctoring both humans and the environment is the raison d’etre of Alam Sehat Lestari (“healthy life everlasting” in Bahasa Indonesia, or ASRI for short), an NGO dedicated to the idea that human health is so intertwined with that of the environment that trying to fix one must include trying to fix the other. Located beside Indonesia’s Gunung Palung National Park, ASRI aims to protect the park’s irreplaceable rainforests by offering health care incentives to local people to stop illegal logging. We’re supported by our sister NGO in the United States, Health in Harmony.
For both people and the forest, the task is urgent. The island of Borneo was once famously covered by rainforest. But now only half of that canopy exists, and less than one-third will remain by 2020. Beginning in the mid-20th century, loggers, palm-oil plantation companies, and farmers logged, burned, and clear-cut their way through the island. Horrifyingly, much of this destruction has taken place in “protected” areas like national parks. The relentless loss of forest has devastated biodiversity in Borneo and severely reduced habitats for many organisms, including one of humanity’s closest relatives, the orangutan – as of 2005, there were about 55,000 left, a tenth of which live in Gunung Palung. Some experts predict the orangutan will be extinct within a few decades. Despite their protected status, Gunung Palung’s forests are continually threatened by illegal logging for valuable hardwood, poor implementation of management practices, and forest fires, many of which are started to clear land for new uses. Over 50,000 hectares of the 90,000-hectare national park’s forest cover are damaged or gone.Contributing is the fact that Borneo’s economy is based largely on extractive industries; there simply aren’t many other job options. An ASRI survey found that in the Gunung Palung area the average cost of an emergency visit to the district or regional hospital was $460 – more than the average annual income. In fact, one-third of interviewees had faced a choice between health care and food. Financial pressures like that are what drive people to illegal logging. A four-meter board can go for R110,000, or about $10 – a little less than the average villager’s monthly income of $13. Working in a rice field, by contrast, pays about a dollar a day.
Sukadana, located so close to Gunung Palung, is a boom town for these industries. It was recently made a seat of the local regency. We watch new buildings go up every week – most of them built using illegal wood chopped straight out of the national park – and workers and money are flowing in.
As forest is converted to plantations, however, pesticides and fertilizers enter the watershed, which damage water and soil quality as well as human health. Watershed destruction from logging and land conversion leads to flooding which makes it harder to raise rice and can increase rates of flood-related diseases. Logging itself is dangerous work, and there are few or no worker protections. As well, seasonal, man-made forest fires, which this ecosystem is not adapted to and which can last for months, devastate both the natural habitat and respiratory health.
Enter ASRI: Our Sukadana clinic offers high-quality, low-cost medical care to all comers, with discounts for people living in villages that do not contribute to illegal logging (which the National Park office determines using air and ground patrols). This incentive system was devised in consultation with local leaders and is intended to take advantage of powerful social ties in this rural area. But given the complexity of the connections between poverty, health, and the environmental degradation here, ASRI also attacks these problems from other angles.
For one, patients and families can pay by eco-friendly, non-cash means – some of which actually end up providing further benefit to the patients. Many choose to do a stint of labor for ASRI in our organic garden. There they learn techniques that they can apply to their own crops. Some farmers have reported making a considerable profit selling their own organic produce with the skills they learned at ASRI, and some have sworn off traditional slash-and-burn agriculture, because as organic farmers they earn more money for less work. Others decide to work at ASRI’s reforestation site, which aims to restore several hectares of burned-over, degraded grassland to its original forested state. Patients can also bring in compost or manure; rainforest seeds and seedlings; or handmade grass mats, which are snapped up by clinic staff and volunteers.
ASRI’s other programs include Goats for Widows, in which impoverished widows receive a goat and give back its organic manure and one kid. Clinic staff teach townspeople and villagers about the links between the environment and health and include information about diseases like tuberculosis during “movie nights,” when they set up a projection screen and show educational videos. Crucially, ASRI also engages in capacity-building through its trained medical volunteers, who serve as consultants for Indonesian staff doctors who are fresh out of medical school.
On the horizon is a new eco-friendly “super-clinic” that will allow us to perform major surgery and house many more inpatients. We hope that as it goes up, people will learn ways to build with less wood, and that by offering even better health care to people living around the national park, we will gain enough leverage to slow or even stop illegal logging. For the community – everyone from the next generation of Sukadanans to the gibbons and durian trees – that would be a healthy change for all.
Jenny Blair, M.D., is a physician, writer, and long-term volunteer at ASRI, along with her husband, Roberto Cipriano, a LEED-accredited professional and architect who is helping to design ASRI’s newest clinic.
Sources: Center for International Forestry Research, Food and Agriculture Organization, Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program, Mongabay.com, Rainforest Action Network, Tropics, World Rainforest Movement, World Wildlife Foundation
Video and Image Credit: “Conservation – Part 1,” courtesy of AlamSehatLestari, and “Ibu Nurdiah,” used with permission, courtesy of Roberto Cipriano.
