Health officials are conducting a new randomized trial approach to get parents to take their children to clinics for immunizations in developing nations.
Using a reward system based on the “randomist” economics principle, parents are given gifts for the primary and final round of immunizations their children successfully complete, raising the number of children protected against life-threatening and preventable illnesses.
Immunizations are currently one of the most cost-effective and reliable methods available to prevent childhood death and illness.
Yet, despite the fact that standard immunizations are free at public clinics throughout India, an estimated two to three million people die each year due to diseases that could have been prevented by vaccination. Vaccinating children at a young age can help significantly reduce the number of preventable deaths in India.
Currently, 70 local clinics in the Indian state of Haryana are running trials to see if gift giving will improve immunization rates. In these clinics, parents are given one kilogram of sugar for bringing their children in to start the first of a standard series of vaccinations.
Parents are given further incentives to make sure that their child completes the entire series by being promised a free liter of cooking oil if they comply.
The 70 clinic test group is a part of a larger scale experiment using randomized controlled trials, where some clinics are randomly chosen to give gifts and others are not, to see if communities with chronically low immunization rates can be improved with little incentives.
The results for the larger trial are not expected to be available until next year, but smaller trials conducted in India have already produced amazingly positive results. In 2010, a pilot program set up monthly medical camps in locations with poor immunization rates.
The establishment of these camps tripled completion rates. Taking it a step further, camps started to offer families a kilogram of lentils and a set of plates for their compliance, increasing completion rates sixfold.
Economist Esther Duflo, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, who was involved in the 2010 trial and is currently working with the Haryana trial, says that it’s not a sense of greed or lack of care for their children that creates low immunization rates.
Experts involved in the 2010 and other regional studies found that families were generally interested in vaccinating their children but, due to external factors, such as distance, cost and time commitment, could not do so.
A full course of immunizations typically requires a minimum of five visits, so many families cannot justify the effort without the incentive provided by the randomized trials.
Although randomized trials and using economics to combat poverty-related issues is a fairly new practice, the popularity of randomized trials is gaining momentum throughout the international development community due to their incredibly successful results.
According to one of the leading randomist economists, Dean Karlan, at Yale University in New Haven, CT, “We’ve changed the conversation.”
Duflo is hopeful that this shift in conversation will lead to radical strides in poverty reduction.
Through her efforts in co-creating the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in Cambridge with two fellow MIT economists, more than 600 evaluations in 62 countries have been conducted and 6,600 people have been trained to administer and measure the results of randomized trials.
– Claire Colby
Sources: Nature, Poverty Reduction Lab
Photo: United Nations
How to End Global Hunger
While we may know that families go to bed hungry every night because they cannot afford to put dinner on the table, without tangible reminders that 925 million people around the world suffer from the effects of hunger, that knowledge often gets pushed to the background.
Overpopulation has been the most frequently blamed cause of starvation and global hunger, but there is more than enough food grown each year to feed the seven billion people on the planet. Then how is it that 2.5 million children die of starvation every year?
The answer to that question is complicated and has many contributing factors, but one reason is that a vast majority of the food grown today is fed to animals. The animal agriculture business has grown dramatically in the past 40 years, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“Global meat production is projected to more than doubt from 229 million [tons] in 2001 to 465 million [tons] in 2050,” the organization states. In order to sustain the increasing demand for animal byproducts, farmers have to grow or purchase more and more feed for their growing stock of animals.
The amount of grain produced today is enough to feed the entire world twice over, but 70 percent of that grain goes towards feeding livestock. Half of the water consumed in the U.S. is used to grow grain for cattle feed.
The water necessary for meat breeding equals about 190 gallons per animal per day, which is ten times more than the average Indian family uses in a day.
Meat in general, but specifically beef, is an incredibly inefficient food source. In order to raise a cow to the necessary size for consumption, 157 million metric tons of grain and vegetable protein is used to produce a mere 28 metric tons of animal protein.
When that is scaled to the industrial scope the cattle industry is currently at, the massive amount of calories that could be consumed by humans but are instead fed to cattle, is tremendous. If these calories were redistributed to feed humans instead of animals, it could help end global hunger.
In 2010, a UN report said, “A global shift towards a vegan diet [one that does not include any animal products] is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change.” The report claims that the western meat and dairy rich diets have become simply unsustainable.
According to the same report, the meat and dairy industry account for 70 percent of global freshwater consumption, 38 percent of total land use and 19 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The vast amount of resources directed towards producing meat and dairy products is creating a food distribution issue. While there is enough food being grown, not enough of it is going directly towards feeding people, especially people in poverty.
– Brittney Dimond
Sources: Global Issues, Live58, The Guardian, Gentle World, FAO
Photo: Wikipedia Commons
Photo Credit: Taken by Sean Hayes of veganliftz.com
The Pay-As-You-Go System and Affordable Clean Energy
In the 21st century, more than 1 billion people still burn kerosene at night, a light source that is outdated, hazardous to health and pollutes the environment.
Over the course of a year, a family can spend 20 percent of its income on kerosene, which equals the total cost of a solar light.
The problem is not the access to solar options, but the barrier of upfront costs.
With the San Francisco start-up, Angaza is spreading payments out over a period of time. Now, people who cannot afford the total cost of a solar light have the option to PAYG. By working directly with manufacturers and distributors, the business model removes extra costs by selling their technology to third party manufacturers at a fraction of the cost.
This is how the PAYG solar energy system works:
Currently, Angaza is the only company that offers a PAYG system to provide affordable clean energy products to consumers. As of now, Angaza’s PAYG system will be distributed to Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, South Africa, India and Pakistan.
According to the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA), the off-grid energy and appliance market is expected to be a $50 billion per year opportunity.
– Alexandra Korman
Sources: Angaza, Tech Crunch
Photo: Flickr
Electricity Sparks Decline of Poverty Rates in India
Electricity has played a big role in the recent decrease of poverty rates in India. The country has received a lot of praise recently due to its strides in decreasing poverty.
The country has garnered attention in a lot of right ways from the rest of the world through serving as an example of progress. According to the World Bank, the success is largely due to electricity.
“India has reduced its poverty rate to 12.4% from the 2011-12 estimate of 21%, according to new data released by World Bank, which identified rural electrification as an important driving factor for everything from greater rural spending to schooling for girls.”
It is no secret that access to power is one of the key solutions to poverty. Rural electrification, the process of bringing electrical power to rural and remote areas, is one of the ways to increase that access. India has utilized rural electrification as the main solution to its power problem, and the results have been reportedly positive.
“By late 2012, the national electricity grid had reached 92 percent of India’s rural villages, about 880 million people.”
In areas that the grid was not able to reach, renewable energy has been promoted. This reflects well on India’s environmental and human consciousness, since those who rely on wood and biomass for heat end up producing air pollution, which is not only harmful to the planet, but “attributable for 4.3 million deaths each year,” according to World Bank.
This is why the UN created the Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which aims to achieve the following three objectives by 2030:
85 countries have already opted into the initiative, including India, through its CLEAN Energy Access Network. CLEAN’s goal is to grow the clean energy sector in India and improve energy access for the rural and urban poor over the next three years.
Prime Minister Modi of India has already showed his support for renewable energy, as he stated solar energy as the ultimate solution to India’s energy problem in August.
This is all a good indication that India is capitalizing on its recent success in order to increase its energy access and efficiency.
– Ashley Tressel
Sources: Indian Infoline, World Bank 1, Se4all, World Bank 2, India Times
Photo: Bloomberg
Kids are the Future: Increasing Youth Employment Rates
The youth unemployment rate in developing countries does not reflect the same trends as in developed economies. Increasing education and improving job quality are proven solutions to this trend.
Globally, youth employment rates have increased since 2012. However, the progress does not seem to be reflected in developing countries.
“The jobless rate…increased in most of Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa,” as compared to the EU, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the International Labour Organization, global youth unemployment has plateaued from 2009 to present, hovering around 13 percent. Unsurprisingly, the countries with the highest rates include North Africa (at 30.5 percent, 2014 expected) and the Middle East (at 28.2 percent, 2014 expected) and those rates are actually on the decline.
The most recent report done by the ILO, Global Employment Trends for Youth 2015, argues that the youth markets in developing countries suffer from instability and structural issues.
The report highlights a lack of participation in education, poor quality of jobs and gender gaps as key issues that need reform.
Most importantly, the report places an emphasis on education and training opportunities for youth.
“Ideally, these [findings] will shape future investments in youth employment as countries continue to prioritize youth in their national policy agendas,” says the ILO.
The ILO calls for macroeconomic policies and fiscal incentives that support employment, as well as demand-side interventions, among numerous other concrete solutions.
Yellowwood, an independent brand consultancy in South Africa, has started a project to confront local youth employment challenges. Called Harambee, the project prepares first-time employees for work through an intensive bridging program that leads to permanent jobs.
“Harambee provides a model for a long-term solution to youth unemployment, by showing the importance of business and government working together to address the problem.”
Using Harambee as an example, both developing governments and businesses should work together to find solutions to the youth unemployment crisis.
– Ashley Tressel
Sources: VOA News, ILO 1, ILO 2, McKinsey On Society
Photo: Flickr
UNICEF Sends Aid for Typhoon Victims in Philippines
“Typhoon Koppu’s slow moving path includes mountainous and hard-to-reach areas, and we are concerned about the wellbeing of all affect children,” UNICEF Philippines Representative Lotta Sylwander said.
Days before Typhoon Koppu hit, UNICEF activated its emergency preparedness measures via its Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) plan. The DRR is a systematic approach that assesses and reduces risk before, during and after a disaster.
UNICEF collaborated with the Philippine government in the pre-emptive evacuation plan which minimized casualties and property damage.
Mike Bruce, a spokesperson for Plan International, said the typhoon hit many poor communities that would struggle to rebuild their livelihoods without assistance.
“UNICEF’s first priority is to ensure children are safe and protected. Following a typhoon, children face risks from contaminated water sources, lack of food, epidemics such as cholera, hypothermia, diarrhea and pneumonia,” said Sylwander.
Save the Children estimates that 4.5 million children could be affected. In addition to restoring a safe water supply for families in the evacuation centers, UNICEF will include nutritional aid for breastfeeding mothers.
Typhoon Koppu caused floods, landslides, power outages and damaged roads and bridges, consequently isolating several towns and villages. However, the Philippines disaster agency said they have evacuated more than 65,000 people from low-lying and landslide-prone areas.
UNICEF has provided about 12,000 families with water purification tablets, hygiene kits, medicines, schools supplies, food, tents and generators.
“Secondly, we must ensure that the rhythm of children’s lives are restored and that they get back to school as soon as possible,” continued Sylwander.
DRR is also working in collaboration with Save the Children, Plan, World Vision and the Institute for Development Studies to ensure that policies recognize child safety.
Save the Children’s Country Director in the Philippines, Ned Olney, said, “From our own experience responding to other storms in the Philippines we know that children are always the most vulnerable in a disaster, in the coming days we will determine what support they will need.”
Many poor communities were destroyed many typhoon victims are attempting to return to their villages to salvage as much as possible.
UNICEF will conduct an assessment of the destruction of banana, coconut, rice and corn plantations in the most affected areas to estimate the extent of the needs of the typhoon victims. The assessment will also determine the damage done to education facilities and what will be needed to restore them as soon as possible.
– Marie Helene Ngom
Sources: Huffington Post, UNICEF 1, UNICEF 2
Photo: Flickr
Injaz is Creating the Young Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a new emphasis has been placed on teaching children about entrepreneurship. In Morocco, four out of every five young people between the ages of 15 and 34 are unemployed and not taking an active role in changing their circumstances.
The idea behind encouraging young people to become entrepreneurs is that they will eventually create jobs for themselves and others as well. Injaz is a non-profit at the forefront of this initiative.
According to their website, Injaz aims to “reveal to youth their potential and stimulate their spirit of initiative through a partnership between the corporate and the public worlds.” They have 10 offices all over MENA that are carrying out programs that teach young people about how to create a business.
Injaz has volunteers on the ground who are engaging students at all grade levels for two hours during a three-week period in each location. During their time at each place, volunteers attempt to implement Junior Achievement programs, which has been a global leader of entrepreneurship since 1919.
These programs work to get unemployed youth engaged and re-energized about their futures.
The high unemployment rate can be attributed to several factors: public sector employment preferences, lack of “high quality” jobs and a mishandling of skills and the education that is provided when it comes to what jobs are most needed in the job market.
These and other intricately interwoven factors contribute to the lack of engaged youth and the clear need for an entrepreneurial initiative.
Although the governments in MENA have recognized and attempted to enthusiastically rectify this growing problem, they haven’t been able to gain the trust and respect of its people due to their predecessors. The public is skeptical because there have been many failures on the part of past government officials when it comes to this initiative.
It is important to remember that there have been failures, yes, but also many success stories, some of which are shared on Injaz’s website.
In 2014, the efforts of Injaz helped to provide almost 11,000 students with hands-on classes on global business, practical entrepreneurial skills, financial literacy and an encouragement towards imagination and creativity.
As Sarah Alaoui, a team member of the American Moroccan Legal Empowerment Network, says, “the fairies of innovation and entrepreneurship will not magically dissipate the hurdles faced by unemployed youth in the country, [but] if cultivated properly, they are a long-term channel for Morocco’s youth to contribute to the country’s growth and development as valuable members of society… [and] the ship of entrepreneurship must be encouraged to stay afloat in Morocco.”
– Drusilla Gibbs
Sources: Al Jazeera, Injaz Morocco, Huffington Post
Photo: Morocco World News
Experts’ New Plan for Eradicating Tuberculosis
In a new study published in The Lancet, experts introduced an all-encompassing approach to achieving the Zero TB Declaration, which urges the rapid eradication of tuberculosis (TB).
The study was prompted by Salmaan Keshavjee, Director of Harvard Centre for Global Health Delivery, and co-edited by Soumya Swaminathan, Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
Currently, the strategy for treating TB is to target those in serious condition; the study done by Keshavjee and Swaminathan states that early detection is crucial to eradicating tuberculosis.
They suggest finding individuals infected with TB before they can transmit and thoroughly treat them for all strains of TB. It is also important to treat individuals in close contact and at high risk.
“The drivers of TB include poverty, poor housing, under- nutrition and HIV infection, underscoring the need to address this problem holistically,” Swaminathan said.
The study also draws attention to the importance of focusing on middle and low-income settings, as poverty and malnutrition make people vulnerable to airborne diseases. In addition to stopping transmission, the study suggests addressing “the social mechanisms that fuel tuberculosis.”
The World Health Organization’s End TB Strategy also supports the prevention aspect of the Swaminathan and Keshavjee study. The End TB Strategy also aims to treat those in close contact and high-risk individuals through collaborative tuberculosis/HIV activities.
Swaminathan stated: “We have to hit this bug hard and hit it quickly. Cutting transmission in the community is key to the control of any infectious disease. Many cities in the world are seeing worrying increases in transmission of drug-resistant tuberculosis. All of us are vulnerable and, therefore, we must all act.”
– Marie Helene Ngom
Sources: Zeenews, TheLancet, WHO
Photo: United Nations
Lighting Global Initiative and Energy Solutions for Poverty
The conference was hosted by the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA), a non-profit formed by the World Bank that works in the private sector to encourage investments in developing countries.
Anita Marangoly George, World Bank Group senior director, stated: “Lack of energy limits job creation and access to health and education. Supporting universal access to reliable modern energy is a priority. Ending poverty will not be possible without adequate energy.”
In partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank and GOGLA have launched the Lighting Global initiative which aims to expand the international off-grid lighting market to reach people not connected by grid electricity.
The Lighting Global initiative has three regional programs – Lighting Africa, Lighting Asia and Lighting Pacific.
In Kenya, the off-grid lighting market has undergone dramatic changes; there has been a shift in lighting technologies and power sources between 2009 and 2014. Incandescent lighting, dry-cell batteries and cheap plastic torches have been replaced by LED lighting, solar power and quality-verified lighting systems with warranties.
In India, the consumer awareness campaign has reached over 250 villages and almost 15,000 people in rural Rajasthan. In partnership with local solar product distributor Frontier Markets, IFC educates rural households on the benefits of clean lighting and on marketing and sales.
Frontier Markets also recruits rural women, “Solar Sahelis,” who aid in educating households on clean energy and marketing. This opportunity for employment has reached 250 women thus far and there are plans to grow the network to 20,000 in the next 4 years.
Anjali Garg, the program manager of the Lighting Asia/India program, said: “We are working on a series of interventions with manufacturers and distributors of solar lighting products to widen access to quality solar lights for rural consumers.”
In 2009, Lighting Global began providing small solar lanterns and solar lighting systems. To date, over 12 million quality verified products have been made available to over 25 million people. The program is advancing into larger home system kits that will support items like fans, radios and TVs.
– Marie Helene Ngom
Sources: The National, Lighting Global, Lighting Asia
Photo: Flickr
India Offers Rewards to Parents for Vaccinating Children
Health officials are conducting a new randomized trial approach to get parents to take their children to clinics for immunizations in developing nations.
Using a reward system based on the “randomist” economics principle, parents are given gifts for the primary and final round of immunizations their children successfully complete, raising the number of children protected against life-threatening and preventable illnesses.
Immunizations are currently one of the most cost-effective and reliable methods available to prevent childhood death and illness.
Yet, despite the fact that standard immunizations are free at public clinics throughout India, an estimated two to three million people die each year due to diseases that could have been prevented by vaccination. Vaccinating children at a young age can help significantly reduce the number of preventable deaths in India.
Currently, 70 local clinics in the Indian state of Haryana are running trials to see if gift giving will improve immunization rates. In these clinics, parents are given one kilogram of sugar for bringing their children in to start the first of a standard series of vaccinations.
Parents are given further incentives to make sure that their child completes the entire series by being promised a free liter of cooking oil if they comply.
The 70 clinic test group is a part of a larger scale experiment using randomized controlled trials, where some clinics are randomly chosen to give gifts and others are not, to see if communities with chronically low immunization rates can be improved with little incentives.
The results for the larger trial are not expected to be available until next year, but smaller trials conducted in India have already produced amazingly positive results. In 2010, a pilot program set up monthly medical camps in locations with poor immunization rates.
The establishment of these camps tripled completion rates. Taking it a step further, camps started to offer families a kilogram of lentils and a set of plates for their compliance, increasing completion rates sixfold.
Economist Esther Duflo, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, who was involved in the 2010 trial and is currently working with the Haryana trial, says that it’s not a sense of greed or lack of care for their children that creates low immunization rates.
Experts involved in the 2010 and other regional studies found that families were generally interested in vaccinating their children but, due to external factors, such as distance, cost and time commitment, could not do so.
A full course of immunizations typically requires a minimum of five visits, so many families cannot justify the effort without the incentive provided by the randomized trials.
Although randomized trials and using economics to combat poverty-related issues is a fairly new practice, the popularity of randomized trials is gaining momentum throughout the international development community due to their incredibly successful results.
According to one of the leading randomist economists, Dean Karlan, at Yale University in New Haven, CT, “We’ve changed the conversation.”
Duflo is hopeful that this shift in conversation will lead to radical strides in poverty reduction.
Through her efforts in co-creating the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in Cambridge with two fellow MIT economists, more than 600 evaluations in 62 countries have been conducted and 6,600 people have been trained to administer and measure the results of randomized trials.
– Claire Colby
Sources: Nature, Poverty Reduction Lab
Photo: United Nations
CARE Releases New “Vows of Poverty” Report
Research done by CARE found that girls in 26 countries are more likely to be forced into marriage before the age of 18 than to enroll in secondary school. The report Vows of Poverty was released on Oct. 11, 2015, the same day as International Day of the Girl.
The two stunning figures presented in the report were: 39,000 girls around the world are forced to marry each day, and 62 million girls are currently not in school, with half of them being adolescents.
The tradition of child marriage is what continues the cycle of poverty in developing countries. “Every time a girl under 18 is forced into marriage or prevented from attending school, it’s a missed opportunity to improve that girl’s life and strike at the roots of poverty,” said CARE Australia Chief Executive Dr. Julia Newton-Howes.
The U.S. Department of State initiated an Adolescent Girl Strategy in cooperation with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. The strategy focuses on enhancing American foreign policy to end child marriage.
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama encourage efforts to educate adolescent girls through the Let Girls Learn initiative, which focuses on “community-led solutions that reduce barriers between adolescent girls and their education, including the elimination of child marriage.”
On a national level, governments are reinforcing laws that prevent child marriage. The 2014 Girl Summit resulted in 43 nations signing commitments to end the practice of child marriage. Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Mali, Tanzania, Yemen and Zambia have recently initiated campaigns and legal reforms to end child marriage.
In the Amhara region of Ethiopia, communities have stopped at least 180 child marriages since 2013 thanks to the TESFA program. CARE partnered with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and the Nike Foundation to break the cycle of poverty. The program focused on improving girls’ education, health, business and financial literacy.
In Bangladesh, the local women’s empowerment group, EKATA, works to end the tradition of child marriage by discussing with parents the adverse effects of the practice and urging them not to force their daughters into early marriage.
Seeing as poverty promotes child marriage practices, in South Sudan cash incentives are given to parents who enroll or keep their daughters in school. In Senegal, community and religious leaders publicly criticize the practice of child marriage.
“We focus on women and girls because we know that empowering women is the key to ending poverty,” stated Howes.
– Marie Helene Ngom
Sources: Vows of Poverty Report, The Hill, Leadersinheels
Photo: Wikimedia