“Most of the actual violence around water today is not occurring with armies marching out on the field of battle…[it] is more diffuse, more at the community level, more small scale, but quite real and quite important for us to try to address,” says Ken Conca, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland during this conversation with ESCP Director Geoff Dabelko. Though the world remains fixated on future “water wars,” we “should not forget the actually existing violence in the world today,” he says.

“National security often means cyber security, it means energy security, it means homeland security, and more and more…it means environmental security,” says retired U.S. Army Captain James Morin in the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate’s recently released video short, “Climate Patriots.”

“Much of the conversation about the global environment, frankly, is an elite conversation,” says Ken Conca, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. “But at the same time there are community-level voices, there are voices of indigenous people, there are voices of the powerless, as well as the powerful…. I think it’s important to capture them and not just limit [the conversation] to the most easily accessible voices.”

“The poor face a triple whammy,” Daryl Collins, senior associate at Bankable Frontier Associates and co-author with of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko. The Woodrow Wilson Center hosted Collins and her co-author, Jonathan Morduch, for presentations at the Center and on Capital Hill last September. “They not only have low incomes, they also have very irregular and unpredictable incomes…. The $2 doesn’t come every day. If you did have $2 every day, you’d be solving half of your problems.”

Whether farmers challenged with seasonal incomes or small entrepreneurs fighting to cope with irregular daily wages, Collins has found that the poor strive to actively manage their financial lives. Households, however, often lack the regulated financial tools necessary to do so, sometimes leading to creative, local solutions.

In Portfolios of the Poor, lessons from the field uncovered a social grant system in South Africa that provides old-age pension holders and people with young children dependable monthly income supplements. Through comparison studies with countries without similar grant systems, Collins and her co-authors found the importance of dependable cash-flows staggering. “There was a whole financial engagement that could take off around that regularity,” she said. “You didn’t see [that] in India and Bangladesh.”

“Training is probably one of the biggest interventions in terms of making human resources available,” says Pape Gaye, President and CEO of IntraHealth International, to ECSP’s Gib Clarke in this interview on improving maternal health services in developing countries. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems associated with training.”

Gaye says obstacles to scaling up maternal health services in rural areas include employee gender inequalities, poor coordination of supplemental training, and a tendency to only offer in-service training in urban areas. Properly emphasizing pre-service education, he underscores, could remedy some of the problems associated with service provider training.

Increasing retention of medical practitioners is also critical to improving maternal health services in developing countries, Gaye explains. In his experience, however, attempts to address perceived security and financial compensation inadequacies produced mixed results. Instead, Gaye suggests that positive recognition may be one of the best methods for retaining health care workers. “We’re seeing some very good successes in places where we have just simple ways to recognize the work… because if people feel valued in a community, then they are likely to stick it out.”

In our latest video interview about PHE programs in Ethiopia, Zuna–a village elder from the Mettu Woreda region of Ethiopia—describes how an integrated intervention by the Ethio-Wetlands and Natural Resources Association (EWNRA) has benefited her community.

Bill Gates gave the PHE community a much-needed upgrade in his foundation’s 2nd Annual Letter, released this week. Unfortunately it still has a few bugs.

“In the long run, not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment,” concludes Gates.

This statement could dramatically raise awareness of and funding for population-environment programs. Any time Bill Gates talks, the world listens, as evidenced by the barrage of coverage from Reuters, AFP, and top IT newswires. For the public, it offers a rare glimpse into development strategy, so Gates’ thoughts (and financial commitments) could be seen as representative of the foundation community’s approach to global health problems.

Although it may seem obvious that fewer people place less strain on the environment, this connection has been largely absent from the environmental agenda, including the efforts to combat climate change. Some environmental leaders and organizations have dismissed population as an unimportant distraction from the real business at hand. Others have noted that population growth’s impact on climate change is far greater in the rich world than in poor countries, whose per capita emissions are a fraction of developed countries’.

Gates’ comment may cause those in the first camp to re-evaluate the importance of family planning, and it is likely to energize the converted. But it will have less impact on those focused on consumption. But if it encourages the environmental community to put population and family planning issues back on the table, it will have gone a long way.

However, Gates could have gone further, by explaining that family planning is a relatively inexpensive way to mitigate climate change, compared to complex and emerging technological solutions. He also could have pointed out that climate change is expected to increase the prevalence of vector-borne diseases such as malaria, or that sick or malnourished individuals may be forced to mismanage natural resources.

Because Gates didn’t make these explicit connections, many in the media missed his point. The wire headlines pit health against environment, when Gates was in fact pointing out how interdependent they are. This distortion is symptomatic of the media’s tendency to highlight the horserace. But maybe they would pay closer attention if the Gates Foundation put its money where its mouth is—and funded programs that integrate family planning and the environment.

Perhaps several years from now, we will look back and say that this letter marks the start of the Gates Foundation’s integrated approach to development. But we may need to wait for Letter 3.0 for a complete install.

Photo: Courtesy Flickr User World Economic Forum

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According to the United Nations, 74 million acres of farmland in the developing world were acquired by foreign governments and investors over the first half of 2009 – an amount equal to half of Europe’s farmland.