Showing posts from category *Blog Columns.
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Stephanie Hanson Reports on PHE in Agricultural Development and Rwanda’s ‘One Acre Fund’
›Driving from Kigali into rural Rwanda, the hills that flank either side of the paved road are covered with bananas, maize, coffee, and beans under cultivation. Most Rwandans are farmers, using any bit of available land to feed their families and generate income. In this country—the most densely populated in Africa—little arable land is left untended.
My organization, One Acre Fund, offers loans and education to smallholder farmers in Kenya and Rwanda. We work with 18,000 farmers in three districts in the southwestern and western part of Rwanda, where we are know as Tubura, which means “multiply” in Kinyarwanda.
Though One Acre Fund is not a traditional population, health, and environment (PHE) project, agricultural development work inherently is PHE work, particularly in Rwanda, which faces significant population and environment challenges.
Our farmers have small plots of land because Rwanda’s population density is so high—375 people per square kilometer, higher than Japan—leaving only .13 hectares of arable land per person. They struggle to grow enough food because it’s difficult to support a big family on a small piece of land, especially without access to high-quality seed and fertilizer.
When farmers don’t grow enough to ensure basic food security for their families, their children are malnourished, which makes them more susceptible to illness.
Finally, agriculture both depends on and affects the environment. Farmers need favorable growing conditions—good soil and adequate rainfall—for a good harvest. Sustainable agriculture practices, such as composting and preventing soil erosion, ensure the environment remains healthy to support future farming.One Acre Fund is acutely aware of the challenges that our farmers face due to high population density, food insecurity, and environmental degradation. We offer a service model that addresses all the needs of a smallholder farmer: financing, farm inputs, education, and market access.
When a farmer enrolls with One Acre Fund in Rwanda, she joins as part of a group of 6-15 farmers. She receives an in-kind loan of seed and fertilizer, which is guaranteed by her group members. One Acre Fund delivers this seed and fertilizer to a market point within two kilometers of where she lives. A field officer provides in-field training on composting, techniques to prevent soil erosion, land preparation, planting, fertilizer application, and weeding.
Over the course of the season, the field officer monitors the farmer’s fields. At the end of the season, he trains her on how to harvest and store her crop. One Acre Fund also offers a harvest buyback program that farmers can choose to participate in.
On average, One Acre Fund farmers double their farm income per acre in one growing season. Ninety-eight percent of our farmers repay their loans, which are due several weeks after harvest.
With their increased harvests, One Acre Fund farmers are able to feed their children, which reduces malnutrition. Anecdotally, we also know that One Acre Fund children experience less illness; this year, we are working to incorporate health indicators into our monitoring and evaluation work.
At a harvest buyback last month, I met many farmers who had benefited from One Acre Fund’s services. One woman, Tamar, had sold 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of beans at the previous season’s buyback, which earned her roughly 132,000 Rwandan francs ($235 USD). She told me that she was using the money to build a bigger home for the six of her ten children who lived at home.However, Tamar really wanted to buy a cow, but she knew that she would not earn enough money this year to afford one. With so many children, she struggled to earn enough money to invest in something that might generate additional income for her and her family.
Another woman, Medeatrice, had also made $235 USD from the sale of her beans. With that income, she had opened a small shop with her husband in a nearby market. Unusually for Rwanda, where the average woman has 5.5 children, Medeatrice only had one, a three-year old boy named Prince. I asked her if she planned to have more children.
“I only want one more child,” she told me. “If I only have two children, it is easy to educate and to take care of them.”
The Rwandan government has invested in educating its population on family planning, but it will take time for birth rates to drop. For now, families with five, six, or nine children are not uncommon.
However, research shows that when women have increased access to economic opportunities, birth rates drop. One Acre Fund is focused on helping Rwanda’s families increase their harvests so that they not only have enough to eat, but they can start investing in their futures.
Guest Contributor Stephanie Hanson is the director of policy and outreach at One Acre Fund.
Photo Credit: Rwanda’s hills and Medeatrice, courtesy of Stephanie Hanson. -
WomanStats Maps Gender-Linked Security Issues
›The WomanStats Project has published an array of maps depicting the challenges and conditions facing women worldwide today. The maps, which serve as a visual representation of the project’s database, cover gender-linked security issues such as: son preference and sex ratio, physical security, inequity in family law, human trafficking, polygamy, maternal mortality, discrepancy in education, government participation, intermingling between the sexes in public, and required dress codes.These maps help researchers visually see correlations between two or more map themes. For example, Women’s Physical Security is moderately correlated to fertility rate, while Sex Ratio/Son Preference is not highly correlated to any other measures tested, such as women in the labor force, democracy, political rights, and economic rights. In addition to maps, the WomanStats Project’s database was used to create graphs that compare the scale values of Physical Security Clusters and Son Preference/Sex Ratio Distributions to the number of countries the scale level affected.
Some of the maps would benefit from additional functionality. For example, the “Women’s Physical Security” map broadly categorizes states based on high, medium, and low levels of security, but the legend is not linked to the definitions of these classifications. Another useful addition would be data tables that rank the countries for each theme. Such enhancements would better enable the viewer to perform empirical and spatial analysis of the status of women.
Overall, the WomanStats Project maps offer the viewer engaging visual depictions of how women’s lives vary across the world, and how countries compare to each other in terms of women’s security.
Josephine Kim is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.
Map and graph used courtesy of the WomanStats Project. -
Local Case Studies of Population-Environment Connections
›“The role of intergenerational transfers, land, and education in fertility transition in rural Kenya: the case of Nyeri district” in Population & Environment by Karina M. Shreffler and F. Nii-Amoo Dodoo, explores the reasons for a dramatic and unexpected decline in fertility in rural Kenya. In one province, total fertility rate (TFR) declined from 8.4 to 3.7, from 1978 to 1998. The study found numerous contributing factors for this decline, which occurred more quickly and earlier than demographers expected, but land productivity seemed to be the primary motivator. A growing population and the tradition of dividing family land among sons made continuing to have large families unrealistic for these Kenyan families. “Family planning is, therefore, not the primary causal explanation for limiting the number of children, but rather serves to help families attain their ideal family sizes,” the authors conclude.Also in Population & Environment, “Impacts of population change on vulnerability and the capacity to adapt to climate change and variability: a typology based on lessons from ‘a hard country,’” by Robert McLeman, explores the potential for human communities to adapt to climate change. The article centers on a region in Ontario that is experiencing changes in both local climatic conditions and demographics. The study finds that demographic change can have both an adverse and positive effect on the ability of a community to successfully adapt to climate change and highlights the importance of social networks and social capital to a community’s resilience or vulnerability. McLeman also presents a new typology that he hopes will “serve the purpose of drawing greater attention to the degree to which adaptive capacity is responsive to population and demographic change.”
SpringerLink offers free access to both these articles through August 15. -
‘Dialogue Television’ Interviews Paul Collier
›Watch below or on MHz Worldview
According to last week’s guest on Dialogue, restoring environmental order and eradicating global poverty have become the two defining challenges of our era. The environmental horror unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates just how difficult it is to balance economic progress and protection of the planet. It provides an alarming example of how the search for resources and profit can lead to the plunder of nature. Host John Milewski speaks with Oxford University economist Paul Collier on his latest book, The Plundered Planet: Why We Must and How We Can Manage Nature for Global Prosperity. Scheduled for broadcast starting June 30th, 2010 on MHz Worldview channel.
Paul Collier is professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. Formerly, he served as director of development research at the World Bank. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning The Bottom Billion.
Note: A QuickTime plug-in may be required to launch the video. -
Rear Admiral Morisetti Launches the UK’s “4 Degree Map” on Google Earth
›Having had such success with the original “4 Degree Map” that the United Kingdom launched last October, my colleagues in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office have been working on a Google Earth version, which users can now download from the Foreign Office website.
This interactive map shows some of the possible impacts of a global temperature rise of 4 degrees Celsius (7° F). It underlines why the UK government and other countries believe we must keep global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial times; beyond that, the impacts will be increasingly disruptive to our global prosperity and security.
In my role as the UK’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy I have spoken to many colleagues in the international defense and security community about the threat climate change poses to our security. We need to understand how the impacts, as described in this map, will interact with other drivers of instability and global trends. Once we have this understanding we can then plan what needs to be done to mitigate the risks.
The map includes videos from the contributing scientists, who are led by the Met Office Hadley Centre. For example, if you click on the impact icon showing an increase in extreme weather events in the Gulf of Mexico region, up pops a video clip of the contributing scientist Dr Joanne Camp, talking about her research. It also includes examples of what the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and British Council are doing to increase people’s awareness of the risks climate change poses to our national security and prosperity, thus illustrating the FCO’s ongoing work on climate change and the low-carbon transition.
Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti is the United Kingdom’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy. -
New Film Looks at Sub-Saharan Africa’s Unmet Need for Family Planning
›A new documentary film released recently by Population Action International brings attention to the plight of women across sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to basic reproductive health supplies, such as condoms and contraceptives. Funded with the support of the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, “Empty Handed” documents the unmet need for family planning services in the region, which has some of the world’s highest fertility rates.
PAI filmmaker Nathan Golon shot the film in Uganda earlier this year. The film’s focus on Ugandan women’s struggles in particular is with good reason, as the country has a well-documented history of providing insufficient family planning services. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, Uganda has the world’s second highest total fertility rate at 6.73 children per woman.
“Empty Handed” examines how a lack of family planning tools and services can lead to a slippery slope of unintended consequences, from unplanned pregnancies to the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The film revolves around interviews conducted with women who share common hardships as they try to access family planning from under-resourced local healthcare clinics, often traveling long distances only to find upon arrival that no contraceptives or condoms are available.
In addition to identifying past and current issues with reproductive healthcare access in sub-Saharan Africa, “Empty Handed” also puts forward some ideas for better meeting family planning needs of the more than 200 million women throughout the world without access to even basic contraception.
To watch the full film online, visit the “Empty Handed” website.
Sources: C.I.A., FHI, Population Action International, Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition -
Rough Waters Ahead: Our Changing Ocean
›From the ocean-themed June issue of Science comes “Sea-Level Rise and Its Impact on Coastal Zones“, by Robert J. Nicholls and Anny Cazenave. While sea-level rise will “almost certainly accelerate through the 21st century and beyond because of global warming,” Nicholls and Cazenave state that its magnitude remains uncertain. Small islands as well as the coasts of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and China are identified as vulnerable areas because of their “dense populations, low elevations, appreciable rates of subsidence, and/or inadequate adaptive capacity.” Nicholls and Cazenave call for more research and analysis into adaptation, which “remains a major uncertainty.”“Ocean Acidification: Unprecedented, Unsettling,” by Richard A. Kerr, also appears in the June issue of Science. “Humans are caught up in a grand planetary experiment of lowering the ocean’s pH, with a potentially devastating toll on marine life,” begins Kerr, who aims to convince climate change-focused readers to also look at the world’s oceans. Rising pH levels, caused by ocean waters absorbing higher levels of carbon dioxide, are damaging shelled creatures, coral, and the organisms that rely on them for sustenance (which includes people, especially coastal populations dependent on the oceans for protein). An Australian survey recently found that calcification in the Great Barrier Reef had declined 14.2 percent since 1990 – a severe decline that has not been matched in the last 400 years. Kerr claims that “aside from the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact, the world has probably never seen the likes of what’s brewing in today’s oceans.” -
Top 10 Posts for June 2010
›Women Deliver and conflict minerals top the Beat this month:
1. Dot Mom: Women Deliver in Climate Change Debate
2. Copper in Afghanistan: Chinese Investments in Aynak
3. Rare Earth: A New Roadblock for Sustainable Energy?
4. Guest Contributor Caitlyn L Antrim, Rule of Law Committee for the Oceans: Trillions of Dollars of Minerals? Misuing Geology and Economics to the Detriment of Policy
5. Guest Contributor Michael Kugelman, Wilson Center: Look Beyond Islamabad To Solve Pakistan’s “Other” Threats
6. Afghanistan’s Mineral Wealth: Gold Mine, Curse, or Illusion?
7. Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation
8. VIDEO: Peter Gleick on Peak Water
9. The Plundered Planet: A Discussion With Paul Collier
10. Eye on Environmental Security: Natural Resource Frontiers at Sea
