Showing posts from category gender.
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Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health
›“Throughout the 2009-2011 Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health lecture series, we always heard the same good news: we know how to save the lives of women and girls. But more political will is needed,” said Calyn Ostrowksi, program associate for the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative on December 15 for the launch of the series’ culminating report, Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue To Improve Maternal Health.
Joining Ostrowski were co-author Margaret Greene, director of GreeneWorks; Luc de Bernis, senior advisor on maternal health at the UN Population Fund; Tim Thomas, interim director for the Maternal Health Task Force; and Chaacha Mwita, director of communications at the African Population and Health Research Center.
One of the few forums dedicated to maternal health, the series brought together senior-level policymakers, academic researchers, members of the media, and NGO workers from the United States and abroad. The series consisted of 21 separate events, with hundreds of experts sharing their experiences and thousands of participants and stakeholders providing their expertise. The final report captures, analyzes, and synthesizes the strategies and recommendations that emerged from the series.
Promoting Social Change
Unlike other health issues, said Green during her presentation on the findings of Delivering Solutions, the field of maternal health requires a holistic and multi-faceted approach; that is, an approach that looks not only at health systems, but also at underlying social factors. The report divides maternal health into three broad categories: social, economic, and cultural factors; health systems factors; and research/data demands.
Looking first at the social, cultural, and economic issues, Greene highlighted the need to improve nutrition and educational opportunities for young women in developing countries. Policymakers must be convinced that investing in women is not just good for women but good for families and children, she said. The participation of male partners and other male family members is also needed to increase access to maternal health services, such as family planning, and promote gender equality. The report pointed to a number of recommendations to promote male engagement:- Target interventions that educate men about danger signs and pregnancy complications.
- Address pressures that many young married men feel to prove their fertility.
- Inform men about sexual rights and how they relate to the health and wellbeing of their partners.
Health systems and medical resources play an equally pivotal role in reducing maternal mortality as social factors. The report highlights several key areas for strengthening the health system including the expansion of healthcare workers, health finance schemes, technology, and commodity distribution.
One key recommendation is to integrate reproductive health and maternal health supply chains. Four key medicines, oxytocin misoprostol, magnesium sulfate, and manual vacuum aspirators, target the three leading causes of maternal mortality (post-partum hemorrhage, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion). Efforts to improve the distribution of these commodities should be more widely dispersed in developing countries and supported by community-based interventions. Women in urban slums, for example, face unique challenges that are not being adequately addressed.
Additionally, new technologies should be more creatively and effectively used, in particular the use of mobile phones in rural communities.
Many of the policy recommendations offered by the report, as Greene pointed out, are low-cost and highly effective. Yet three significant challenges remain for the field in general:- Six countries – Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan – account for over half of the maternal deaths worldwide. The unique problems of each of these countries must be addressed and solved.
- Integration of maternal health with existing health services along with an over-reliance on community health workers can overburden weak infrastructure.
- Unnecessary cesarean births are on the rise as more women deliver in private sector facilities. These births cost 2 to 18 times as much as vaginal births and create unnecessary risks for mothers.
Chaacha Mwita of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), located in Nairobi has seen firsthand the result of an overburdened and inadequate maternal health system in both his personal and professional life. Mwita endorsed the findings of the series report, emphasizing in particular the focus on transportation systems, male involvement, stakeholder dialogue, and education.
Mwita said that collaboration at all levels is the key to improving maternal health. Policymakers must communicate with researchers, who, in turn, must communicate with doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators in the field. The collaborative in-country dialogue series between the Wilson Center and APHRC, he believes, was a highly useful and easily replicable way of encouraging dialogue among relevant stakeholders in the field.
The Big Picture
”Our hope is that we’ve been able to seed discussions,” said Tim Thomas of the Maternal Health Task Force, one of the co-sponsors of the maternal health series. “We hope those seeds will take root and flourish.” Luc de Bernis, senior maternal health advisor of UNFPA, echoed Thomas’ sentiments, emphasizing the need for continued dialogue.
While maternal health has drawn increased international attention, creating political agreement among policymakers is a complex and often difficult process. There has been marked, though uneven, progress in improving maternal health across the globe, but more must be done. The Delivering Solutions report provides a state of the field assessment as well recommendations for existing, easy-to-implement solutions.
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Iran: A Seemingly Unlikely Setting for World’s Fastest Demographic Transition
›January 11, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThis is the second post in a series profiling the process of building political commitment in countries whose governments have made strong investments in family planning. Read the first post, on Rwanda’s recent rapid demographic changes, here.
To date, only 11 countries outside of the developed world, China, and a handful of small island states have reached the end of the demographic transition, with fertility rates declining from more than four children per woman to replacement level or lower.* Of these, only two countries have completed the transition in 15 years or less – and both might surprise you. One is Cuba, whose government dispensed family planning services to its relatively small population in the 1970s through accessible primary health care facilities and legalized safe abortion eight years before the United States did. The other: Iran.
Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s new theocracy adopted a socially conservative, pro-natalist outlook. Half of the population lived in rural areas, which typically constrains access to health services. In addition, abortion was illegal in most circumstances. According to the UN, Iranian women had an average of 6.5 children each in the early 1980s and the population was growing nearly four percent annually, a rate high enough for it to double in 19 years.
But, by the early 2000s, Iran’s fertility rate had dropped below two children per woman. The swift changes can be attributed to the efforts of government officials concerned about meeting the employment needs of a growing population, supported by public health experts who wanted to rebuild the eroded family planning program.
A Dramatic Policy Shift
The turning point came after the end of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in 1988. With military demands high – several hundred thousand people were killed during the war – population growth was viewed positively. But as the war ended, policy directives did an about-face.
Although public health officials had framed the need for reinvigorated family planning programs in health-related terms for years, the motivation for government officials to change policy appears to have been economic. The national budget agency informed the prime minister that after nearly a decade of conflict, the country lacked adequate funding to both rebuild and to meet the needs of its people. The prime minister responded quickly, directing that demographic factors be integrated into the new development plan and stating that “Iranians’ standard of living was being eroded by the growth of the country’s population.”
“Pragmatism Has Prevailed Over Pure Ideology”
After convincing their superiors, Iranian government officials who supported family planning faced the added challenge of garnering the backing of the influential religious establishment. Shortly after the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini officially sanctioned the use of contraception, though his perspective was not universal among clerics. Once the prime minister decided to introduce a national family planning program, officials sought support from additional religious authorities. Opposition was minimal after two key institutions offered endorsements. The High Judicial Council determined that there was “no Islamic barrier to family planning” in late 1988, and the Expediency Council approved the government’s plans soon after.
By late 1989, a new family planning program had been officially introduced. The program’s aims were to lengthen spacing between births; limit pregnancies in the early and late reproductive years; and lower fertility by educating the population and ensuring access to free and diverse contraceptive methods. By the mid-1990s, the government had fully integrated family planning into the existing primary health system.
Iran thus followed the example of other majority-Muslim countries where religion was not an impediment to family planning, including Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Oman. Just as in countries where highly Catholic populations have low fertility rates (Italy, Poland, Spain, and many others), religious guidance has been interpreted in varying ways in different settings and is not necessarily a central factor in individual fertility decisions. As Akbar Aghajanian and Amir H. Merhyar write in a summary of Iran’s family planning program, “Pragmatism has prevailed over pure ideology when necessary.”
The Contributions of Women’s Education and a Strong Health System
A new policy orientation was the critical first step, but successful implementation was necessary for Iran’s demographic trajectory to change in response. Fortunately, the government had some advantages in rolling out its new program, namely a strong existing health system, a history of past efforts to promote family planning, and an educated female population among whom demand for contraception was high.
Rural development became a priority of the government after the revolution and resulted in improved access to an array of services. In rural areas, community health workers receive two years of training to provide family planning services along with other preventative care and treatment. Services are also available at rural health “houses,” urban clinics, and higher-level centers around the country.
The status of women has also played a major role. A research exercise conducted by IIASA estimated that improvements in educational attainment among women were responsible for about one-third of Iran’s fertility decline between 1980 and 2005. Women’s literacy was already rising during the period of the revolution and reached 74 percent by 1996, while attitudes toward female employment became more supportive. By the late 1990s, new classes of university students included more women than men. The response to the 1989 program indicated that women clearly had an unmet demand for family planning. Use of modern contraception jumped from 31 percent in 1989 to 51 percent just five years later, then rose more slowly over the subsequent decade.
A Dividend Squandered?
The rapid changes in Iran’s age structure, thanks to declining fertility, have opened a window of opportunity for the country to boost economic growth through lower dependency ratios – a phenomenon called the demographic dividend. However, the dividend is not an automatic bonus, and Iran’s capacity to capitalize on its demographic change is questionable.
The unemployment rate among young people today is over 20 percent, indicating that the economy is not generating sufficient jobs, which is a prerequisite to improving productivity. This inopportune climate may even contribute to a further decline in the fertility rate: Some observers have suggested that the country’s economic troubles and rising costs of living have motivated young people to delay marriage and have smaller families. “Unemployment and high costs of living, coupled with social and political restrictions, have made [life] increasingly difficult for young Iranians,” Farzaneh Roudi of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) explained in a blog post last year.
Given Iran’s challenges in producing adequate jobs and other economic benefits for its population, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent unusual pronouncements on population issues are especially puzzling. Last year, Ahmadinejad introduced a pro-natalist policy offering direct payments to each child born, continuing until they reach adulthood, and later suggested that girls should marry at age 16 or 17.
But despite a high level of international media attention, most observers expect the policy to have little impact. Widespread adoption of family planning has become entrenched in society: 60 percent of Iranian women now use a modern contraceptive method. As PRB’s Roudi wrote in response to Ahmadinejad’s proposal, “Iranian women and men have gotten used to exercising their reproductive rights and would expect to be able to continue to do so.”
*The 11 countries that have achieved replacement fertility or lower outside of developed regions, China, and small island states are Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Myanmar, Thailand, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Look for related analysis on the political implications of Iran’s changing age structure by Richard Cincotta on New Security Beat soon.
Sources: Abbasi-Shavazi, Lutz, Hosseini-Chavoshi and Samir (2008), Abbasi-Shavazi (2002), Aghajanian and Merhyar (1999), Christian Science Monitor, GlobalSecurity.org, The New York Times, Noble and Potts (1996), Population Reference Bureau, Roudi-Fahimi (2002), UN Population Division, World Bank.
Image Credit: “بیست و پنجم خرداد ۸,” courtesy of flickr user Recovering Sick Soul (Nima Fatemi); charts arranged by Sean Peoples and Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. -
Migration and Environmental Change, Minority Land Rights and Livelihoods
›Migration and Global Environmental Change: Future Challenges and Opportunities, from the UK Government Office for Science’s Foresight Programme, looks at how environmental change, including climate change, land degradation, and the degradation of coastal and marine ecosystems, over the next 50 years will affect migration trends. The report emphasizes that migration is a complex and multi-causal phenomenon, which makes it difficult to differentiate environmental migrants as a distinct group. Nevertheless, research suggests that global environmental changes will affect the drivers of migration, particularly economic forces, such as rural wages and agricultural productivity.
Though Foresight finds that many will use migration as an adaptation strategy that improves resilience to environmental change, they also point out that some affected individuals may become “trapped” in vulnerable situations, lacking the financial capacity to respond to environmental changes, while others may be able to move but will inadvertently enter more exposed areas, particularly, at risk urban centers. For recommendations, they stress the importance of strategic, long-term urban planning, and recognition within adaptation and development policies that migration can be part of the solution.
A study, released on December 5 by Minority Rights Group International, finds that minority communities in Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan face significant challenges around access to and control of critical natural resources. The report, Land, Livelihoods, and Identities: Inter-Community Conflicts in East Africa, shows how rapid population growth, climate change, and globalization are increasing competition for land, water, and forest and mineral resources in territories traditionally occupied by minority groups. These pressures can undermine livelihoods and trigger multiple and overlapping conflicts, especially where ownership has not been formalized in law. The study also notes that women are doubly vulnerable as their access to land and resources is frequently mediated through customary law, which depends on their communities retaining control over traditional territory. Although the report makes national-level legal and policy recommendations, the authors note that some of the most effective resource management and conflict resolution strategies adapt traditional cultural practices to the current circumstances of communities. -
Engaging Faith-Based Organizations on Maternal Health
›“Faith-inspired organizations have many different opportunities [than non-faith-based NGOs]. The point that is often reiterated is that religions are sustainable. They will be there before the NGOs get there and will be there long after,” said Katherine Marshall, executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue at the Wilson Center on November 16. Marshall noted in her opening remarks that maternal health should be an easy issue for all groups, regardless of religious tradition, to stand behind. Yet, in reality, maternal health is a topic that “very swiftly takes you into complex issues, like reproductive health, abortion, and family planning,” she said.
As part of the Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health series, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Global Health Initiative collaborated with the World Faiths Development Dialogue and Christian Connections for International Health to convene a small technical meeting on November 15 with 30 maternal health and religious experts to discuss case studies involving faith-based organizations in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen. The country case studies served as a springboard for group discussion and offered a number of recommendations for increasing the capacity of faith-based organizations (FBOs) working on maternal health issues.
Engaging Religious Leaders in Pakistan
“When working with religious leaders to improve maternal health there are some do’s and don’ts,” said Nabeela Ali, chief of party with the Pakistan Initiative for Mothers and Newborns (PAIMAN). Ali described a PAIMAN project that worked with 800 ulamas (religious leaders) to increase awareness about pregnancy and promote positive behavior change among men.
One of the “do’s” highlighted by Ali was the need to build arguments for maternal health based on the Quran and to tailor terminology according to the ulamas preferences. The ulamas who worked with PAIMAN did not want to utilize the word “training,” so instead they called their education programming “consultative meetings.” More than 200,000 men and women were reached during the sermons and the strategy was been picked up by the government as one of the best practices written into in the Karachi Declaration, signed by the secretaries of health and population in 2009.
Despite the successes of the program, Ali warned against having unrealistic expectations for religious leaders interfacing with maternal health. She stressed the importance for having a long-term “program” approach to the issue, as opposed to a short-term “project” framework.
Behavior Change in Yemen
“Religion is a main factor in decisions Yemeni people make about most issues in their lives and religious leaders can play a major role in behavior change,” said Jamila AlSharie a community mobilizer for Pathfinder International.
Eighty-two percent of Yemeni women say the husband decides if they should receive family planning and 22 percent say they do not take contraception because they belief it is against their religion and fertility is the will of God, said AlSharie. Therefore, the adoption of healthy behavior change requires the involvement of key opinion leaders and the alignment of messages set in religious values. Trainings with religious leaders included family planning from an Islamic perspective, risks associated with early pregnancy, nutrition, education, and healthcare as a human right.
Male Participation a Key Strategy
“As a faith-based organization we believe it is a God-given right to safe health care and delivery so we mobilize communities to support pregnant women to address their needs, educate families about referrals and existing services in the community,” said Elidon Bardhi, country director for the Bangladesh arm of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).
Through female-run community organizations, ADRA educates men and women about the danger signs of labor and when to seek care. For example, many men in Bangladesh hold the belief that women should eat less during pregnancy to ensure a smaller baby is born, thereby making delivery easier, said Bardhi. ADRA addressed such misconceptions through a human rights-based approach and emphasized male participation as a key strategy, ensuring there were seven male participants for every one female.
A Culturally Nuanced Approach in Nigeria
The Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI) is a public-private partnership that identifies and creates strategies for integrating family planning with maternal health. According to Kabir Abduallahi, team leader of NURHI, “family planning” is not as acceptable a term as “safe birth spacing” in Nigeria, so the project highlighted how family planning can help space births and save lives.
Religion and culture play an important role in the behavior of any community. The introduction of a controversial healthcare intervention (such as family planning) in a religiously conservative community requires careful assessment of the environment and careful planning for its introduction, said Abduallahi. Baseline surveys and formative research data helped NURHI understand the social context and refine intervention strategies.
Ten Ways to Increase the Capacity of FBOs
Faith-based organizations’ close links to communities provide them with an opportunity to promote behavior change and address other cultural factors contributing to maternal mortality rates such as early marriage and family planning.
Working in collaboration with FBOs and other stakeholders is critical to promoting demand for maternal and reproductive health services; however, there is limited knowledge about faith-based maternal healthcare and FBOs are often left off the global health agenda. In conclusion, Marshall noted 10 areas the group identified as areas to focus on:- Move projects to programs: Projects are often donor driven and limited in scope and duration. Donors and policymakers should move from project-oriented activities to local, regional, and national-level advocacy programs to build sustainable change.
- Coordinate, coordinate, coordinate: Significant resources are wasted due to a lack of coordination between FBOs and development agencies. A country-level coordinating mechanism should be developed to streamline efforts not only between agencies but also across faiths.
- Context, context, context: A thorough understanding of the local culture and social norms is imperative to successful program implementation.
- Terminology is important: In Pakistan, religious leaders redefined sensitization meetings around family planning and maternal and child health as “consultative meetings” not “trainings.” In Nigeria, the culture prefers “child birth spacing” over “family planning.” In Yemen, it’s “safe age of marriage” instead of “early childhood marriage.”
- Most religious leaders are open and with adequate information can produce behavior and value changes. Utilizing the Quran, Hadith, and Bible can support arguments and emphasize the issue of health and gender equity.
- Relationship building: Winning the trust of religious leaders can be difficult and time-consuming but is necessary for opening doors to patriarchal societies.
- Rights-based approach: A human rights-based approach can be a very powerful agent of change for addressing negative social structures such as violence against women, but it can also create controversy. In Bangladesh, ADRA utilized the approach to educate men about nutrition, dowry and child marriage, and education of women.
- Networks: There is a significant need to create forums that bring together the various FBO and global development communities in order to share knowledge and enhance advocacy messages. Networks are needed to streamline resources and inventory existing research, projects, and faith-based models that work.
- Monitoring and evaluation systems: There is a striking lack of data about the impact and outcomes of FBOs. Increasing the monitoring and evaluation skills of FBO workers can improve evaluation systems and meet the demand for new data.
- There needs to be greater political will for engaging the faith-inspired community.
Event ResourcesPhoto Credit: David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
IRP Editors Cover Rwanda’s Population, Health, and Environment Challenges
›The original version of this article appeared on the International Reporting Project website.
The International Reporting Project (IRP) and 12 senior editors and producers from across the United States traveled to Rwanda this year to learn about issues affecting Rwanda and other countries in Africa and to help them improve their news organizations’ international coverage. Some of the editors focused on Rwanda’s extensive population, health, and environmental challenges:
Nicholas Aster, founder and publisher of San Francisco’s Triple Pundit, covered sustainable development in Kigali, coffee’s empowerment potential, and eco-tourism sites like Volcanoes National Park. Aster also became interested in Rwanda’s efforts to avert disaster by corralling Lake Kivu’s CO2 reserves into a power supply. At the close of his trip, Aster reflected on Rwanda’s sustainability goals in a photo essay.
Tom Paulson, host and reporter for KPLU’s Humanosphere, discovered the positive side of aid and development in Rwanda, including girls’ education initiatives and coffee farming improvements. Moreoever, Paulson documented the Gatekeepers’ trip to Volcanoes National Park, including a visit from a mountain gorilla who became a little too friendly. Paulson has also posted several questions the Gatekeepers asked President Paul Kagame when they met with him, including his policies on restricting free speech, curbing population growth, and preventing another genocide. At the close of the trip, Paulson composed a photo slideshow that shows a growing, vibrant Rwanda, and he also outlined 10 reasons why the complex and sometimes contradictory country can’t be described in a sound-bite.
Sue Horton, op-ed and Sunday Opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, began chronicling her trip with a survey of Rwanda’s history on genocide, governance, and gorillas. On the road to meet Rwanda’s famed gorillas, Horton noted Rwanda’s strengths and challenges: its ambitious vision for the future encourages a growth in infrastructure and the country has showed impressive gains in healthcare provision and access, but Kigali is relocating residents who don’t fit the image.
The deputy managing editor of Global Post, Andrew Meldrum, also found a note of optimism in witnessing how far Rwanda has come since the genocide, particularly after hearing the testimonies of the genocide’s youngest victims: children born of sexual violence during the genocide. And his Global Post colleague Jon Rosen delves into the country’s population growth and the government’s approach to family planning.
In addition to the Gatekeeper Editor Trips, the IRP offers individual Fellowships to U.S. reporters to travel overseas on five-week reporting trips. In 2009, IRP Fellow Perry Beeman discovered a Rwanda similar to that which the Gatekeepers encountered: a country that has made much progress, but still has many challenges ahead. Beeman, who also was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, created a multimedia series, “Renewal in Rwanda”, for The Des Moines Register; his reporting garnered him an Overseas Press Club citation for Best Reporting in 2010.
Rwandans, Beeman found, are dedicated to conservation. President Kagame is committed to the environment and is driven to develop clean, sustainable power and to convert from subsistence agriculture to a stronger, more diversified economy. But everyone has a hand in this effort, including schoolchildren who report on conservation in song, dance, and dramatic arts. Beeman also examined efforts to preserve the Gishwati Forest, including gorilla and chimpanzee preservation efforts from villagers to businessmen to researchers. Beeman emphasized the importance of immersing oneself in an environment in order to report on it, and he did so by, among other things, tracking wild chimpanzees in the forest.
For more information about IRP’s Fellowships and Gatekeeper Editor trips, visit their website at InternationalReportingProject.org.
Photo Credit: “The Broadsheet in Kyovu, Kigali,” courtesy of flickr user noodlepie (Graham Holliday). -
Ambassador Melanne Verveer, U.S. Department of State
Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues on Durban and the Role of Women in Combating Climate Change
›December 23, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Ambassador Melanne Verveer, appeared on the White House Council on Environmental Quality blog.
Last week I traveled to Durban, South Africa to participate in the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to highlight the critical and largely untapped potential of women to combat climate change. Studies have shown that it is often women who are on the frontlines of, and suffer disproportionately from, the impacts of climate change. This is certainly important. But we must remember that women are also a powerful force for finding solutions to climate change across the board, including in areas such as agriculture, sustainable forest management, and energy access.
Agriculture, which accounts for approximately 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and is a sector that can be particularly sensitive to climate variability and change, is one key area where women can play a major role. A recent FAO report shows that women, in many places, are the main producers of the world’s staple crops, particularly in developing countries and regions likely to be adversely affected by climate change impacts. However, globally, only a small minority of women farmers have access to land tenure. This is a problem for many reasons – including that it limits women’s potential to combat climate change. Studies have shown that women with the right to property are significantly more capable of investing in climate-smart agricultural productivity; we have a lot of work to do to unlock women’s potential in this area.
Women also have untapped potential for increasing energy access, which directly relates to climate change. For example, nearly three billion people globally still rely on traditional cookstoves and open fires to prepare food for their families. In most instances, women are responsible for cooking – not to mention also spending many hours per week collecting fuel, which often puts women at risk of gender based violence. The resulting smoke exposure causes an estimated two million premature deaths annually, with women and young children the most affected. Cookstoves also impact the climate through emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived particles such as black carbon. Engaging women is critical to tackling this problem. As we work to build a global market for clean cookstoves, integrating women into the cookstoves supply chain will help increase clean cookstove adoption rates while also creating new economic development opportunities. And as Secretary Clinton has noted, women create a multiplier effect in local communities because they disproportionately spend more of their earned income on food, healthcare, home improvement, and schooling.
The United States recognizes the power of women’s potential in these areas and many others, and is investing in major initiatives including Feed the Future and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, where women’s role in generating transformative change is front and center.
I went to Durban to highlight the critical role of women in combating climate change. While there, I worked with U.S. negotiators on the Durban texts and participated in public engagement events. Our efforts to build on the gender equality and women’s empowerment language in the Cancun agreements are reflected in several crucial institutional developments, including language on gender balance related to the composition of the board of the new Green Climate Fund, the Standing Committee, and the Adaptation Committee. We also worked to reflect gender considerations in the mission of the Climate Technology Center and Network. USAID Assistant Administrator Eric Postel and I solicited input during a meeting with leading non-governmental organizations working on gender and climate issues, and I hosted a high-level side event at the U.S. Center focused on unlocking women’s potential to combat climate change. The level of enthusiasm among my fellow panelists and the audience at the event was inspirational.
We made progress in Durban, but we can’t stop here. To achieve the future we all seek, we must do more. As the late Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and ground-breaking advocate on women and the environment said, “We must not tire, we must not give up, we must persist.” The future of not only women, but our planet, depends on it.
Ambassador Melanne Verveer is U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues.
Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The White House.
Photo Credit: “Melanne S. Verveer,” courtesy of the U.S. Embassy, Kabul. -
Can “Climate-Smart Agriculture” Help Feed Africa’s Growing Population?
›December 13, 2011 // By Brenda ZuluFood production needs to increase 70 percent by 2050 to meet the demands of a growing world population, said former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a keynote address on “climate-smart agriculture” at a COP-17 event hosted by the World Bank and African Union. Annan, who is now chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), said this was a particular concern in Africa, where four out of five citizens are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods.
One in seven people in the world do not have enough food to eat, Annan said, and climate change is expected to make this challenge more difficult to overcome. Climate-smart agriculture includes a wide variety of techniques that help increase the resilience of communities and protect them from extreme weather events, such as terracing to prevent soil erosion, improving weather forecasting, managing water runoff, and developing irrigation systems.
“Climate change affects us by undermining our resource base through water and soil degradation,” said Prime Minister of Ethiopia Meles Zenawi at the event. “There is need to protect the resources and to rehabilitate green areas of our land.” He said that since 70 percent of Africans are small-scale farmers and that most of the poor in Africa were farmers, there is no better way to fight poverty on the continent than through agriculture.
South African President Jacob Zuma said at the event that given that the UN projects a population of more than nine billion people in the world by 2050, agriculture should be a priority as it is more vulnerable to climate change than any other sector.
“Climate-smart agriculture includes proven practical techniques such as mulching, intercropping, conservation agriculture, integrated crop management and agro forestry, improved grazing, and innovative better weather management,” he said, all of which have the potential to help increase crop yields.
Mary Robinson, chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health, said there could be no smart agriculture without integrating women’s issues, because climate change affects women disproportionately. “Women make the connection between climate-smart agriculture, food security, and gender,” she said.
“Our ability to feed the growing population under climate variability and change will require new expertise and harmonized efforts,” said Robinson.
Annan agreed, saying African women should be fully involved in early action that can support technical assistance, such as screening agriculture plans to ensure they are “climate smart” as well as integrating climate resilience and mitigation into ongoing poverty-reduction programs and testing new approaches.
But according to Brylyne Chitsunge, a farmer from Pretoria speaking on the panel, things will need to change considerably from the status quo. “The small-scale farmer remains very much marginalized in institutions,” she said. “They exist on paper but they really don’t exist.”
Brenda Zulu is a member of Women’s Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the “From Durban” series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.
Sources: World Bank, World Food Programme.
Photo Credit: “Cultivated hillsides,” courtesy of flickr user coda (Damien du Toit). -
Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Conflict in the Niger River Basin
›New research on the Niger River Basin finds that the effects of climate change in the region are pervasive and that “latent conflict” between groups – disagreements and disputes over damage to farmland and restricted access to water, but not physical violence – is common.
“You’ve got vulnerable people, vulnerable households, vulnerable communities living within…fragile systems – governance systems [and] environmental systems,” said Phil Vernon, International Alert’s director of programs for Africa and peacebuilding issues, at “Climate Change, Water, and Conflict in the Niger River Basin,” an event hosted by the Wilson Center on November 17. [Video Below]
Together with his colleagues Lulsegged Abebe and Marisa Goulden of the University of Anglia, Vernon examined how communities in Mali, Nigeria, and Niger have been impacted by climate change, how they have adapted to those impacts, and whether these changes spurred conflict.
Competition Over Dwindling Resources
Climate change destabilizes communities by adding uncertainty and stress, Vernon said, and when a community is already vulnerable, the impacts of those uncertainties and stresses are amplified and the potential for conflict is greater. In every community examined in the study, climate-induced vulnerability led to some kind of conflict. More often than not, however, that conflict took the form of disagreements, or “latent conflict,” rather than violent conflict – a reason for optimism in the face of dire predictions that an era of climate wars is upon us.
Throughout the basin, river flows and rainfall have been decreasing since the 1970s, said Goulden, creating tension between two of the major communities living in the basin – farmers and pastoralists. Pastoralists are forced to travel farther to bring their herds to water, while farmers are expanding their cropland to feed growing populations, reducing the pathways available to herders and their livestock.
Unfortunately, poor policy decisions have made tensions worse in some places. In Lokoja, Nigeria, for example, the government began dredging the Niger River in 2009 to improve commercial shipping. Officials said the dredging would reduce flooding, but in 2010, farmers suffered immensely from floods. The government’s false promises increased the farmers’ vulnerability, said Goulden, because, expecting to be protected from flooding, they were not adequately prepared, making the damage worse.
As a result, farmers are now building homes and developing cropland further away from the river, reducing land available to pastoralists and increasing the potential for conflict between the two communities.
Increased Resilience Is a “No-Brainer”
Climate in the Niger River Basin is marked by a high degree of variability – rainfall, river flows, and temperature already fluctuate a great deal and could become even more variable in the future, said Goulden.
That uncertainty has important implications for how people think about responding to climate change, said Abebe. “Development and adaptation policies must be flexible enough to cope with extreme variability both in the wetter and the dry conditions in the Niger River Basin,” he said.
Boosting resilience will be key to ensuring that vulnerable communities have the flexibility they need to respond to future crises, Vernon said.
“If the interaction of stress and vulnerability is the problem…it’s somewhat of a no-brainer that increased resilience is part of the answer,” said Vernon. And decisions on how to increase resilience “should be made at the lowest appropriate level…from high policy down to household and individual decisions.”
Different People, Different Levels of Resilience
Vernon’s emphasis on making decisions at the “lowest appropriate level” reflects the reality that various communities – and individual community members – experience climate change in different ways. Fostering adaptation strategies that take these variations into consideration will be an essential strategy for avoiding climate-driven conflict in the future.
In Mali, the Niger River flooded downstream of the Selingué Dam in 2001 and 2010, and in each case, researchers found divergent responses to the crises.
In the lead-up to the 2001 flood, dam operators had been intentionally keeping reservoir levels high in anticipation of increased demand for hydroelectric power during an upcoming soccer championship match. When heavy rains hit the area, though, the operators were forced to release huge amounts of water over a short period of time, causing massive flooding downstream.
In the flood’s aftermath, downstream farmers were able to successfully sue the power company for their losses, but downstream pastoralists had no comparable option. The pastoralists were therefore more vulnerable to the flood’s long-term impacts.
Responses differed within communities as well, often breaking down along gender lines. In 2010, when floods hit Mali again, men “were trying to help people move away from the flood water, and then afterward with rebuilding of homes,” said Goulden, “whilst women are concerned with finding shelter, cooking, and caring for the sick, elderly, and children.”
No “Massive Risk of Violence” in the Near Future
Policymakers are left with an urgent crisis – climate change – and a solution that is inherently time-intensive: building resilience in vulnerable communities down to the individual level, said Vernon.
“There is a risk of undermining the elements of resilience which exist already in responding too rapidly and too urgently based on the anxieties we have to the problem of climate change and insecurity,” he cautioned.
Fortunately, although the threat of climate change is urgent, Vernon said that the risk of that threat spilling over into violent conflict is still a long way off. “I think policymakers have got to be thinking about where might this lead,” he said, “but at the moment, in terms of this research, there was no evidence that there’s a massive risk of violence happening any time soon.”
Event Resources
Sources: AlertNet, BBC, International Alert.
Photo Credit: “Cattle manure millet field in Niger,” courtesy of flickr user ILRI (International Livestock Research Institute).