Showing posts from category funding.
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From Cancun: Roger-Mark De Souza on Women and Integrated Climate Adaptation Strategies
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“When you look at the negative impacts of climate change, the impacts on the poor and the vulnerable – particularly women – increase, so investing in programs that put women at the center is critical,” said Roger-Mark De Souza, vice president of research and director of the climate program at Population Action International (PAI), speaking to ECSP from the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. “There are a number of missed opportunities here in Cancun and in climate change deliberations overall that are not including women and are missing an opportunity to have a bigger bang for the buck, or power for the peso, as we say in Mexico.”
PAI hosted a side session with five panelists from Denmark, Ethiopia, Kenya, Suriname, and Uganda on “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet: Women’s Empowerment, Family Planning, and Resilience.” The session attracted more than 100 attendees and prompted incisive, informative questions, said De Souza.
“There was a call for additional research that is policy relevant that identifies some of the key entry points and added benefits at a country level,” said De Souza. “And there is a very strong call for youth partnerships from a number of youth advocates who are looking at medical and public health interventions and are desirous of including reproductive health programming as part of that.”
“One concrete next step for Cancun is to work with other civil society partners who are here who are tracking how gender is being integrated into the negotiating language, particularly with regard to financing mechanisms,” De Souza said.
Besides financing and the need for more research, De Souza said the key issues that emerged from the panel were: the importance of linking programs of different scales; ensuring women’s empowerment and ownership; and recognizing and replicating effective partnerships.
For more from Roger-Mark De Souza, see ECSP Focus Issue 19, “The Integration Imperative: How to Improve Development Programs by Linking Population, Health, and Environment.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Climate-Proofing Development: An Interview With Karen Hardee
›November 29, 2010 // By Hannah Marqusee
While expectations are deflated for broad international consensus at the UN Climate Change Convention in Cancun, the need to “climate-proof” development efforts has been gaining ground in recent years as a necessary preventative measure to help developing countries adapt to the adverse effects of climate change.
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Mapping World Bank-Funded Projects
›The World Bank recently released their interactive “Mapping for Results Platform” that allows users to see where and how World Bank funding is being spent. Users can view project costs and expenditures by sector at sub-national levels and overlay this with human development data such as poverty, population, and health indicators. In the current beta version, interactive maps and downloadable data are available for Kenya, Bolivia, and the Philippines.
The example map shown above shows all of the World Bank’s 38 active water and sanitation, health, and agricultural projects in Kenya, as well as malnutrition rates by district. Clicking on any of the projects on the map displays the project name, financing amount, and exact location of the program.
Presumably, in the final version, all 2,669 active World Bank projects and 15,246 project locations – accounting for $136.91 billion – will be included.
Image Credit: World Bank Mapping for Results Platform. -
Ethiopian Case Study Illustrates Shortcomings of “Land Grab” Debate
›The lines have been drawn in the “land grab” debate: Will foreign investors displace small, local land-holders, damaging the environment with exploitive practices? Or will a combination of infrastructure investment and employment opportunities lead to a virtuous development cycle?
Recent reports suggest that the former is more likely than the latter (e.g., see the Oakland Institute, GRAIN, and the Food and Agriculture Organization). In each case, the proposed antidote is the typical wish-list: Boost institutional capacity to ensure that agreements are honored, environmental and labor regulations are observed, and local populations are given a stake in the process.
While it incorporates a broader swath of data and country case studies, the recent World Bank report, “Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Results?” largely recycles this tired diagnosis, as noted recently by Michael Kugelman on The New Security Beat.
But the two months we spent in the Amhara and Oromia regions of Ethiopia, surveying smallholders and profiling large-scale commercial farms, left us with a different impression. After completing 1,200 pages of surveys on smallholder livelihood strategies and farm management practices with 120 local farmers, as well as six profiles of private investors’ farms, we identified several key points that these reports missed.
Strong Laws Don’t Always Scare Investors Away
The World Bank report focuses on the belief that countries with weak institutions attract predatory investors, who use lack of oversight to their advantage by exploiting local populations, abusing regulations, etc. Ethiopia, however, has high institutional capacity relative to other African nations, yet still receives enormous land investment.
Every commercial farm we profiled received yearly visits from multiple regional and federal agencies investigating regulatory compliance. Moreover, two of the farms had been sold to their current owners because the previous business ventures failed to observe the terms of their business proposals. These terms included bringing certain amounts of foreign exchange into the country and hitting export targets.
Ethiopia attracts investors for other reasons. Official documents tout the diversity of its micro-climates, but we suspect investors are more likely drawn by a lease rate roughly 100x lower per hectare than the African average.
Given the emphasis on boosting institutional capacity as a means to ensure positive development outcomes, it’s too bad that the World Bank didn’t choose to conduct one of its case studies on Ethiopian commercial farms. Such a study could provide grounds for discussing what investment governed by stronger institutions would look like.
An Incomplete Paradigm
The potential for population displacement (with or without compensation), job creation, and infrastructure development is a well known and well studied paradigm. The World Bank report investigates the occurrence of these phenomena in its case studies, and the results are unsurprising: Sometimes things go OK and sometimes they go badly. This same story emerges in studies of foreign investments of all stripes: logging, oil and natural gas extraction, precious mineral mining, among others.
A more inventive analysis of land grabs could yield meaningful findings, however. Investors and smallholders are engaged in the same activity — farming — and in the case of cereal farms, they are producing the same crops. The resulting overlap allows for a multitude of creative interactions between smallholders and investors that should receive more attention.
Two of the investors we interviewed used these creative interactions to promote their business plans to regional development authorities. One farm sold certified seed to local farmers; another imported an irrigation system new to the region and plans to introduce it to the broader community. They each rented farm equipment to smallholders and held demonstration days to discuss farming techniques and new crop types with community members. One had already introduced new crops to the adjacent village via an “outgrowing” scheme and was exporting smallholder products from the farm, thus diversifying livelihoods for local farming households.
These are, of course, anecdotal accounts. But they suggest a broader point: More attention must be given to “secondary” benefits like technology and knowledge transfers, outgrowing or renting schemes, and informal interactions. Given the unique attributes of large-scale commercial investment in the agricultural sector, which continues to provide most Ethiopians’ livelihoods, these secondary benefits are the mechanism through which livelihoods seem most likely to be transformed. In this case, the preoccupation with displacement, formal compensation, jobs created, and infrastructure development only leads to generalized and ineffective analysis.
Our smallholder surveys and commercial farm profiles point to one conclusion: The commercial farms in our sample that engaged most fully in those creative interactions will generate substantial benefits for local populations over the next 5-10 years (quantitative analysis to be published in our final report this spring). The particular interactions taking place between these smallholders and commercial farms directly alleviate the primary constraints to smallholder livelihoods identified by our survey, such as lack of mechanization, lack of access to inputs, and inability to generate cash through sale of crops.
It’s far from clear that the World Bank analysis would have captured this reality in Ethiopia given its limited focus. Ideas like outgrowing receive scant attention, and are usually only discussed in hypothetical terms or in parentheticals – a trend the World Bank report unfortunately continued.
Incorporate Case Studies and Put Livelihoods First
So while our limited analysis may not enable us to speak broadly about the effects of commercial farming, we can offer two observations.
First, the creative arrangements that accompany the introduction of commercial farming must be front and center of any study. The study should be grounded in an understanding of the livelihood constraints faced by local populations, followed by an analysis of the types of interactions between commercial farms and smallholders that may affect those constraints, including not only traditional effects, such as displacement and employment, but also atypical impacts, such as improved seed distribution and technology demonstration.
Second, since Ethiopia has enough institutional capacity to be selective when choosing commercial investors (and to ensure they adhere to the terms), it embodies a number of principles the promoted by the World Bank report. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi views large-scale private farms as one piece of a broader commercialization effort to revolutionize smallholder agriculture, as described in the government’s development plan, PASDEP. This effort is in keeping with the report’s basic recommendation that host governments ensure that investment is compatible with domestic needs.
Understanding the phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions should be at the top of the international research agenda. The effects on livelihood security and food security (in both developed and developing countries), as well as the potential contributions to resource conflicts, place such land deals among the most consequential recent trends in the international arena.
We believe a new framework must be brought to the analysis of land grabs. To effectively implement this framework, important but overlooked cases, such as we found in Ethiopia, should be included in future studies.
Nathan Yaffe and Laura Dismore are students at Carleton College, who just returned from researching commercial farming in Ethiopia. They can be reached at yaffen@carleton.edu and dismorel@carleton.edu.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “P8060261,” courtesy of flickr user Ben Jarman. -
Flooded With Food Insecurity in Pakistan
›The floods sweeping across Pakistan have caused widespread destruction, ruined livelihoods, displaced millions, and sparked a food crisis. Food prices have skyrocketed across the country as miles of farmland succumb to the deluge, including 1.5 million hectares in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket and agricultural heartland.
Food insecurity is now rife across the country — yet even before the floods, millions of Pakistanis struggled to access food. Back in 2008, the UN estimated that 77 million Pakistanis were hungry and 45 million malnourished. And while many developing nations have begun to recover from the global food crisis of 2007-08, Pakistan’s food fortunes have remained miserable. Throughout 2010, Pakistan’s two chief food staples, rice and wheat, have cost 30 to 50 percent times more than they did before the global food crisis. Drought, rampant water shortages, and conflict have intensified food insecurity in Pakistan in recent months.
A new edited book volume published by the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, Hunger Pains: Pakistan’s Food Insecurity, examines the country’s food insecurity. The book has already been the subject of a news story and an editorial in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. The book, edited by Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway, is based on the 2009 Wilson Center conference of the same name. It assesses food supply challenges, access issues, governance constraints, social and structural dimensions, gender and regional disparities, and international responses.
The book makes a range of recommendations. These include:- Declare hunger a national security issue. Since some of Pakistan’s most food-insecure regions lie in militant hotbeds, hunger should be linked to defense, and food provision projects should be given ample public funding.
- Diversify the crop mix so that Pakistan’s agricultural economy revolves around more than wheat and rice. The country should accord more resources to crops that are less water-intensive and more nutritious.
- Give schools a central focus in food aid and food distribution. Using schools as a venue for food distribution gives parents powerful incentives to send their children to school.
- Tackle the structural dimensions. Strengthening agricultural institutions, improving infrastructure and storage facilities, and injecting capital into a stagnant farming sector are all key to making Pakistan more food-secure. Yet unless Pakistan deals with poverty, landlessness, and entrenched political interests in agriculture, food insecurity will remain.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Photo Credit: “Chitarl, Pakistan” where floods damaged the way over Lawari pass and killed five in August 2006. Courtesy of flickr user groundreporter -
Reform Aid to Pakistan’s Health Sector, Says Former Wilson Center Scholar
›August 5, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffExcerpt from op-ed by Samia Altaf and Anjum Altaf in Dawn:
WE must state at the outset that we have been wary of, if not actually opposed to, the prospect of further economic assistance to Pakistan because of the callous misuse and abuse of aid that has marked the past across all elected and non-elected regimes.
We are convinced that such aid, driven by political imperatives and deliberately blind to the well-recognised holes in the system, has been a disservice to the Pakistani people by destroying all incentives for self-reliance, good governance and accountability to either the ultimate donors or recipients.
Even without the holes in the system the kind of aid flows being proposed are likely to prove problematic. Over half a century ago, Jane Jacobs, in a brilliant chapter (Gradual and Cataclysmic Money) in a brilliant book (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), showed convincingly how ‘cataclysmic’ money (money that arrives in huge amounts in short periods of time) is a surefire way of destroying all possibilities of improvement. What is needed, she argued, is ‘gradual’ money in the control of the residents themselves. While Jacobs was writing in the context of aid to impoverished communities within the US, she concluded with a remarkably prescient concern: “I hope we disburse foreign aid abroad more intelligently than we disburse it at home.”
Continue reading on Dawn.
For more on U.S. aid to Pakistan, see New Security Beat‘s coverage of the recent U.S.-Pakistani Strategic Dialogue.
Photo Credit: A U.S. Army Soldier with 32nd Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, hands out medical supplies to Pakistani refugees outside an International Committee of the Red Crescent aid station in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, October 23, 2009. Courtesy of flickr user isafmedia. -
Wilson Center’s Michael Kugelman Finds the Real Culprit in Pakistan’s Water Shortage
›July 28, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffExcerpt from Dawn:
ON Jan 15, 2006, the Karachi Port Trust (KPT) inaugurated its new fountain – the Rs320m lighted harbour structure that spews seawater hundreds of feet into the air.
Also on this day – as on most others in Karachi – several million gallons of the city’s water supply were lost to leakage, some hundred million gallons of raw sewage oozed into the sea, and scores of Karachiites failed to secure clean water.
Over the next few years, the fountain jet would produce a powerful and relentless stream of water high above Karachi. Meanwhile, down below, tens of thousands of the city’s masses would die from unsafe water.
After several fountain parts were stolen in 2008, the KPT quickly made the necessary repairs and re-launched what it deems “an extravaganza of light and water”.
In an era of rampant resource shortages, boasting about such extravagance demonstrates questionable judgment. So, too, does the willingness to lavish millions of rupees on a giant water fountain, and then to repair it fast and furiously – while across Karachi and the nation as a whole, drinking water and sanitation projects are heavily underfunded and water infrastructure stagnates in disrepair.
Continue reading on Dawn.
For more on Pakistan’s water crisis, see the Wilson Center report, “Running on Empty.”
Photo Credit: Adapted from UN map of South Asia, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. -
Improving Transportation and Referral for Maternal Health
›“Referral has been called an orphan cause,” said Patricia Bailey, public health specialist for Family Health International and Columbia University, because it is “everybody’s responsibility and therefore nobody’s responsibility.”
As part of the Maternal Health Dialogue Series the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Global Health Initiative convened a small technical meeting on May 19, 2010, with 25 experts from five countries to discuss their experiences and share lessons, challenges, and recommendations for improving transportation and referral for maternal health. Following the technical meeting, a public dialogue was held on May 20, 2010, to share the knowledge gaps and recommendations identified. The formal report from the technical meeting will be available in the near future.
Mobilizing District Communities in Rural GhanaTo improve maternal health care in Ghana, “we needed to shift [services] to the community level, where 70 percent of our population lives,” said Dr. John Koku Awoonor-Williams, the east regional director of Ghana Health Service. The “Community-based Health Planning and Services” (CHPS) program was created to galvanize local leadership and empower communities to engage in health outreach activities.
Through this approach, “community health officers and nurses are trained and delegated to distant village locations called CH[I]P zones, in which they are responsible for health education, treatment of minor illnesses, maternal and antenatal care, and referral to district hospitals for emergency care,” said Awoonor-Williams. Community health officers use two-way Motorola walkie-talkies to communicate with traditional birth attendants and referral centers. Pregnant women are given the phone numbers so they can call in the event of complications.
1-0-8 Emergency Number for Improving Maternal Health in IndiaMany parts of the developing world do not have a 911-style emergency response service. To address this gap, the GVK Emergency Management & Research Institute in India developed the toll-free 1-0-8 telephone number for all medical, police, and fire emergencies.
“We assure every citizen that wherever you are, [if] you call us we will be there,” said Subodh Satyawadi, chief operating officer of GVK. In order to reach the 433 million people covered by GVK, they have:
“Although we address all kinds of emergencies, we heavily focus on maternal health…31 percent of emergencies are pregnancy-related,” said Satyawadi, who said that GVK’s emergency response system has helped save more than 200,000 mothers. Institutional deliveries have increased in the state of Gujarat by 92 percent. “We have been able to reduce maternal mortality by 20-25 percent in different geographies,” he said.- 19,623 EMTs and 10,000 doctors and other healthcare professionals
- 2,710 ambulances
- 16,300 call-center employees
Pre-Hospital Barriers: Reducing Maternal Morbidity in BoliviaWomen in Bolivia receive free maternal care. In cities like La Paz, emergency obstetric care is often available within a short distance. However, “37 percent of our maternal deaths [occur] at our hospitals,” said Víctor Conde Altamirano, OB/GYN of CARE Bolivia.
To better understand this mortality rate, Altamirano evaluated whether pre-hospital barriers and routine antenatal care are associated with near-miss morbidity. He found that women who are older, have lower levels of education, lack antenatal care, are pregnant for the first time, or live in rural areas are at a greatest risk of illness or death
“We are trying to organize our communities and service facilities, and promote improved health management by the municipalities. If our authorities can be sensitive and invest in health; invest in fuel, drugs, and human resources; we can improve near-miss morbidity rates,” said Altamirano.
Strategies and Recommendations for Improving Transportation & ReferralThe workshop participants agreed on six key topic areas for improving transportation and referral:
1. Multi-sectoral collaboration
The group called for improved multi-sectoral engagement and continuous dialogue among key ministries: Health, Finance, Communication, Social Welfare, Security and Defense, Transportation, and Public Works.
2. Mobile phone technology
3. Public-private partnerships
4. Referral for newborns
5. Indicators for referral
6. Sharing evidence
Private-public partnerships, such as those demonstrated by GVK in India and the CH[I]P program in Ghana, create opportunities for collaboration. “Cell-phone technology can reduce delays in transport and treatment by identifying which facilities might be the most appropriate for referral,” said Bailey.
The final recommendation by the group calls for increased pooling and use of existing evidence to move the transportation and referral agenda forward. Updated synthesis papers on existing evidence are needed, said Bailey. “We have a lot of data that is perhaps less than perfect, but this should not be a barrier for further action,” she said.
