Showing posts from category development.
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Nobel Pursuits: Linking Climate Efforts With Development, Natural Resources, and Stability
›December 11, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoThe only mention of climate change in President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech falls squarely in the climate and security context. He introduces the climate imperative by highlighting natural resources and development connections to stability and human well-being.
In these two paragraphs, the President identifies the key communities that must come together, first in dialogue and then in cooperation, but who so commonly don’t: development, natural resources, health, climate, peacebuilding, and security.It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can’t aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.
Photo: President Barack Obama looks at the Nobel Peace Prize medal at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).
And that’s why helping farmers feed their own people — or nations educate their children and care for the sick — is not mere charity. It’s also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement — all of which will fuel more conflict for decades. For this reason, it is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action — it’s military leaders in my own country and others who understand our common security hangs in the balance. -
VIDEO – Integrating Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) in Ethiopia
›December 4, 2009 // By Sean Peoples“Incorporating environment, population, and health is a timely issue. Unless we focus on integrated approaches, our Ethiopian Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved,” says Negash Teklu, executive director of the Consortium for Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE), in this short video.
I interviewed Teklu and three other members of CIPHE in Yirgalem, Ethiopia, where they spoke of the importance of PHE integration; why it is vital to involve the community in development projects; and practical steps for implementing integration at the grassroots level.
Everyone agrees that Ethiopia faces serious challenges. Much of the economy is based on agriculture, but drought is all too common, and the land is exacerbated by continual overuse. High rates of population growth coupled with limited resources and uncertain crop yields leaves many people vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. In addition, the country’s health system struggles to provide comprehensive care.
To combat these interconnected problems, the members of CIPHE truly believe that an integrated PHE approach that uses multi-sectoral interventions will best serve the needs of their fellow Ethiopians.
“If we follow the integrated PHE approach, economically we can be beneficial,” Mogues Worku of LEM Ethiopia told me. “We can share a lot of resources among the different sectoral organizations. At the same time with limited resources we can attain our goal by integrating the different sectoral offices and organizations, even at the grassroots level.”
This video will be the first of many on population, health, and environment problems and solutions in Ethiopia. Subscribe to our ECSP YouTube channel or the New Security Beat blog to see the latest videos. -
Ethiopia: A Holistic Approach to Community Development Blossoms Two Years After Taking Root
›November 12, 2009 // By Sean PeoplesAs evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the Furra Institute for the second annual General Assembly of the Consortium for the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE). -
The Future of Family Planning Funding
›November 3, 2009 // By Kayly Ober“Family planning is one of the biggest success stories of development cooperation,” said Bert Koenders, Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation, via video at a Wilson Center roundtable discussion on the future of family planning funding. Koenders was followed by representatives of three of the field’s largest donors, Musimbi Kanyoro, director of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Population and Reproductive Health Program; José “Oying” Rimon, senior program officer for Global Health Policy and Advocacy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and Scott Radloff, director of USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health.
Celebrating Family Planning SuccessRadloff said his organization has “success stories in every region of the world.” USAID’s family planning and reproductive health programs have shown positive gains over the last few years, especially in Latin America where “most countries have graduated from bilateral assistance or are in the process of graduating,” he added.
Rimon lauded the strides made within developing societies where contraceptive use has become the norm. Since the 1960s, the contraceptive prevalence rate in developing countries has increased from ten per cent to about 55 per cent; which, in turn, has prompted the total fertility rate to fall from fall from six children to about three in the same time frame, he said.
Rimon was even more hopeful about the future of the field, as he claimed that “the decline for family planning/reproductive health resources, which has been happening since the mid 1990s, has been reversed.” Since 2006, the amount of resources allocated to family planning has steadily risen.
Facing Current Challenges
While funding for family planning has been gaining momentum in recent years, it still faces enormous obstacles. “The biggest challenge,” said Koenders, is investing in youth—more than half the world’s population. “We should acknowledge the needs and rights of adolescents and young people—married and unmarried—in the field of sexual and reproductive health,” he said.
Koenders also stressed the need to find common strategies to “counterbalance…growing opposition to sexual and reproductive health and rights,” as it is “not only about abortion.” The reproductive rights of women and girls are “closely linked to the deeply rooted imbalance in power relations between women and men, and the increasing sexual violence against women.”
Nowhere is this challenge more acutely observed than in “the poorest countries of the world, in Africa and South Asia,” said Radloff. If “you look across the countries of Africa, the countries that are lagging behind in terms of increasing contraceptive use and availability of contraceptives, it’s largely Francophone West Africa.”
By 2050, Africa’s population is projected to double. “India would be around 1.7 billion and stabilizing. China would be around 1.5 billion stabilized. And Africa would be at two billion and still growing, in some of the most fragile countries which have very serious economic and development issues,” said Rimon.
Kanyoro said the Packard Foundation will “take a good look at what is happening in sub-Saharan Africa so that we can be able to address some of those areas that are the weakest in the link.” The foundation’s plans include high-level advocacy “to make sure that these messages go across not just one country but several countries and even, if possible, benefit from inter-regional work.”
Opportunities in the Obama Era“I’m an optimist,” said Rimon, who sees opportunities amid these myriad challenges. Not only has the long decline in funding being reversed, but there is a “major trend towards more effective and better policies, and I think here in the U.S. we have seen that: rescission of the Mexico City policy, the new guidelines in PEPFAR, and some with the new changes and policies that are also seen in Europe.”
Radloff agreed that USAID has seen “positive engagement of the administration on reaffirming U.S. support for the MDGs, including MDG 5b and improving access to reproductive health information and services and reaffirming support for the ICPD [International Conference on Population and Development] program of action.” He also found it encouraging that “many bilateral donors, multilateral donors, and foundations are now very interested in working closely with USAID in advancing these programs…the environment, in general, is much better than it’s been at least since 1992, and perhaps even ever.”
“We have, in addition to having strong support in our administration, both a president and a secretary of state that speak out passionately about the need to reduce unintended pregnancies and to make family planning more widely available,” Radloff continued.
“We have family planning and reproductive health included as a priority under the Global Health Initiative which was announced by the President back in May. That initiative encompasses family planning, reproductive health, maternal-child health, and various infectious diseases, including HIV, TB, and malaria. The fact that he placed these under a single initiative, rather than creating two new initiatives for family planning and maternal-child health signals his interest in ensuring that we integrate these programs to the extent practical.”
Sustaining Progress Over the Long Term“I come from Africa, and I know that we can literally grow anything. We can have every small project. But the really big difference is when those problems are brought to big scale,” said Kanyoro. Developing the capacity of local leaders—particularly women—is necessary to make sustainable gains in the field, she said, as well as collaboration between government donors and private funders to drive innovation. “I think private money is really good for paving the way, but I think that private money and government money [are] really what makes the biggest difference in scale.”
Radloff agreed that we should not view the sectors “as independent of each other, but interrelated.” Governments should partner with the private sector to “develop strategies that incorporate the contributions of private sector and public sector, and acts in ways that improves the environment for private sector investments and involvement,” he said. Such collaboration will lead to success: “Almost uniformly, where we graduate countries, is where there is a strong private sector providing services to those who can pay.” -
VIDEO: Scott Radloff on Family Planning Under the Obama Administration
›November 3, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“We have a new administration that places a priority on family planning and reproductive health,” Scott Radloff, director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko after a discussion on the future of family planning at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
The Obama administration has rescinded the Mexico City Policy and announced an expanded Global Health Initiative. Radloff credits these new policies with opening opportunities “to work with key organizations in international family planning.”
The new family planning and reproductive health programs will address the large unmet need for family planning services in the developing world, particularly in Africa and South Asia. New programs will focus on reaching people in rural communities far from health clinics. “We expect to have great success,” he said. -
Missives From Marrakech: Growing and Slowing, and a Letter From the King
›October 5, 2009 // By Gib ClarkeHere in Morocco, where I am attending the IUSSP conference on population, if you never went to elementary school or if you married at a young age, you are likely to have more children.
A Bangladeshi couple is more likely to have a third child if they have 0-1 sons, but a European couple is increasingly likely to prefer daughters because they take better care of their aging parents.
Globally, a forthcoming Harvard study shows that the “Reproductive Health Laws Index”—which includes the legal framework governing abortion, condoms, IUDs, and birth control pills—can predict fertility (more liberal laws = fewer children) and potentially increase female participation in the labor force.
Such causes of population growth are favorite topics for demographers and family planning experts here at the conference, and were quite well attended. However, perhaps due to the large number of European attendees, the panels on this popular topic were empty in comparison to those examining aging, fertility decline, and migration—issues at the forefront of European policymakers’ agendas.
A Message From His Majesty
“One of the characteristic features of our population policy stems from our firm belief that [its] impact … cannot be determined in isolation from economic, social, cultural and political factors,” wrote Morocco’s King Mohammed VI in a welcome letter delivered to the conference, which also discussed aging, climate change, food security,natural resource scarcity, the economic crisis, and growing levels of income inequality.
Morocco is taking steps to tackle this complicated set of problems. The government has launched a National Initiative for Human Development to fight poverty and social inequalities, and help Morocco meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). He also notes that the country’s “political and social reforms aimed at increasing the scope of democratic participation and ensuring the advancement of women.”
Like all leaders, Morocco’s will be measured not by his words—eloquent as these may be—but by his deeds and the country’s progress. Morocco has some work to do to reach the MDGs and other social and economic goals. -
Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation Bert Koenders on the Future of Family Planning
›September 22, 2009 // By Gib Clarke“I think everybody…will agree that family planning is one of the biggest success stories of development cooperation. I also consider the paradigm shift in this field from top-down family planning (FP) to programs of reproductive health (RH) and rights for couples and individuals adopted in Cairo in 1994 to be a success story,” said Bert Koenders, the Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation, in a statement prepared for a roundtable discussion at the Wilson Center on future strategies in FP and RH.
Looking beyond the successes of the past, Koenders identifies a series of opportunities and challenges facing the RH community. He cites as the first opportunity the potential to “join forces” with the United States to meet Millennium Development Goal #5 (which focuses on maternal, sexual, and reproductive health, and family planning). He calls MDG 5 “the mother of all MDGs” and says that if it is not met, “then the other MDGs will not be attained either. It is smart economics to invest in MDG 5.” Other opportunities include public-private partnerships and the “growing awareness” in developed and developing countries alike.
The challenges, however, are significant. Youth, he notes, account for half of the world’s population and face barriers in access to reproductive health information and commodities. To overcome these barriers, we must first identify what adolescents and unmarried women and couples need, and recognize their rights to the same quality services as older and married women and couples. Koenders also says there is a growing opposition in many parts of the world to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and that programs must address this in order to be successful.
The roundtable discussion, to be held on September 22 at the Wilson Center, features Musimbi Kanyoro of the Packard Foundation, José “Oying” Rimon of the Gates Foundation, and Scott Radloff of the U.S. Agency for International Development. -
Combating Climate Change with Condoms
›September 17, 2009 // By Meaghan ParkerMountains of reports and studies have proposed expensive technological responses to climate change. But the scientists and policymakers working to protect the planet may have overlooked one of the easiest, cheapest ways to reduce carbon emissions: contraception.
A recent study commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust estimates contraception would be almost five times cheaper than conventional green technologies. “Each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO2 emissions by more than one ton,” researchers conclude, while low-carbon technologies would add an extra $25 per ton.
Slowing population growth could not only cut emissions, but also help poor families in vulnerable areas adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as land degradation, drought, and loss of food security. However, while governments of the poorest countries often cite population growth as a factor in environmental catastrophes, few address family planning as part of their adaptation strategies, IPS reports from a recent NGO forum in Berlin.
Enabling women to plan their families is not only climate-friendly, it’s also right. Currently, more than 100 million women worldwide want—and can’t get—modern methods of family planning. Better reproductive health care is “an end in itself,” with climate mitigation being the “side effect,” rather than the primary goal, Barbara Crossette writes in The Nation.
While many policymakers shy away from getting population in their environment, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said, “It’s rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning.” At the Berlin forum, UNDP Administrator Helen Clark linked the goals of education, equality, and environmental sustainability in a “virtuous cycle.”
As the world’s largest per-capita emitter, the United States has a special obligation to examine its growth and consumption patterns. While the lives of Bangladesh’s 140 million people are acutely threatened by climate change, each new U.S. child and its descendants will be responsible for 160 times the carbon emissions of a Bangladeshi infant according to Oregon State University researchers writing in Global Environmental Change.
Unfortunately, condoms are unlikely to become heroes at Copenhagen. Some populous developing countries like India object to bringing population into the climate change debate without more focus on reducing consumption in developed countries. The Washington Post called the connection “unpopular,” and compared its odds to another “long shot”: geoengineering. Anti-contraceptive groups, development “silos,” sexism, and old-fashioned squeamishness are also formidable barriers to an open and nuanced discussion of how family planning can contribute to mitigation and adaptation.
Too bad, because as Suzanne Petroni writes in the latest issue of the Environmental Change and Security Program Report, “A careful discussion of the ways in which voluntary family planning can further individual rights, community development, and, to some extent, climate change mitigation, could increase awareness not only of the outsized contribution of developed nations to global emissions, but also of their appropriate role in the global community.”
A shorter version of this post will appear in the October issue of Centerpoint.
Photo courtesy Flickr user OsakaSteve.
As evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the 
Radloff said his organization has “success stories in every region of the world.” USAID’s 
“I’m an optimist,” said Rimon, who sees opportunities amid these myriad challenges. Not only has the long decline in funding being reversed, but there is a “major trend towards more effective and better policies, and I think here in the U.S. we have seen that: 
“I come from Africa, and I know that we can literally grow anything. We can have every small project. But the really big difference is when those problems are brought to big scale,” said Kanyoro. Developing the capacity of local leaders—particularly women—is necessary to make sustainable gains in the field, she said, as well as collaboration between government donors and private funders to drive innovation. “I think private money is really good for paving the way, but I think that private money and government money [are] really what makes the biggest difference in scale.”
Here in Morocco, where I am attending the 
Mountains of reports and studies have proposed expensive technological responses to climate change. But the scientists and policymakers working to protect the planet may have overlooked one of the easiest, cheapest ways to reduce carbon emissions: contraception.
