Information and stories on development news.

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New Proposals for Development in Haiti

New Proposals for Development in Haiti
In an ambitious goal to help other nations help themselves and possibly shift the paradigm of foreign aid forever, Canadian aid worker Hugh Locke has started a forestry program aimed at fostering a sense of independence in the Haitian citizenry. Lock, critical of the current state of NGO and government involvement in projects, is employing his aptly titled “exit strategy aid” to change the scope of development in Haiti.

The country of Haiti, still emerging from the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy and previous natural disasters, has had no shortage of challenges involving their crippled infrastructure and forecasted food shortages. However, Lock, armed with his forestry background, noticed that the Caribbean nation was lacking key ecological resources and decided to embark upon a re-forestation program dependent upon native farmers to encourage development in Haiti. When questioned about the efficacy of such a program, Lock remarked: “A road that is built by donor money using foreign contractors is never going to be fully a part of the national transportation system,” before clarifying that such a project, because of its foreign ownership, would need foreign aid to maintain it, which is neither sustainable nor helpful to empowering local projects.

Lock, along with his Haitian counterpart Timote Georges, were able to bring together a group of farmers in a forestry cooperative whose primary goal is both the growth and sales of trees. The Haitian forests, a natural resource that once afforded certain energy and topsoil advantages, has since been stripped from much of the countryside, devastating crop and charcoal production levels.
Subsequently, by having farmers plant trees, Lock hopes to encourage greater internal participation in the development of Haiti. Thus, by establishing a strong ecological and agricultural foundation, the people of Haiti can look forward to a much brighter, more independent future for years to come.
– Brian Turner

Source: World News
Photo: Trees for the Future

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Who is Benefiting From Land and Water Grabbing?

Who is Benefiting From Land and Water Grabbing?It is assumed that the already existing gap between developed and developing nations is large and apparent enough that wealthier nations would try and fill this gap and bring these opposite ends closer together. According to an ABC Environmental article, however, wealthy nations are instead competing over ‘land’ and ‘water grabbing’ to appease their growing populations and the “stressed” supply of basic necessities such as food and water. Investors in a foreign land, or better yet, the land-grabbers, are countries and investment firms from biofuel producers to large-scale farming operations (agricultural investors).

Since 2000, the major countries that have contributed to this land purchasing are the U.S., Malaysia, the U.K., China, and the U.A.E. Experts aren’t sure of these investors’ motives but it is clear that they are only focusing on buying land where there is clear access to water.

‘Land grabbing’ is defined by Paolo D’Odorico, a professor at the University of Virginia, as “a deal for about two km2 or more that converts an environmentally important area currently used by local people to commercial production.” According to an environmental study, 454 billion cubic meters sums up the ‘water-grabbing’ per year by corporations on a global scale, which is about 5 percent of the world’s annual water consumption. According to the public database Land Matrix “1,217 deals have taken place, which transferred over 830,000 square kilometers of land” since 2000, with 62 percent of such deals happening in Africa alone.

From 2005 to 2009, during a major food price crisis, land purchases, which fall under a very low level of regulation, skyrocketed. In 2011, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the U.N. released guidelines that advise investors to consider the people and communities whose land is being used. However, such guidelines are viewed as humanitarian concerns and have little enforcement, meaning that they aren’t strict enough to have corporations and investors abide by them or even care for them.

Governments who are interested in and have been leasing and selling land to foreign countries and investors are mainly those in Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia. They are interested in these sales because they want to modernize their farming and believe this is the way to do it. However, the reality is that the resulting development from such ‘land and water grabbing’ depends on the investors’ terms and conditions, as well as their sense of morality.

The main problem is that the majority of these sales are happening in poor countries in which there are high rates of hunger and where resources valuable to the local populations are being purchased by wealthier developed nations or even by private corporations. The main question of the matter is this: Who is benefiting from land and water grabbing? Are these sales helping the local people since it is their land? Or are these purchases only concerned about foreign benefits and the population concerns of developed nations?

– Leen Abdallah

Source: ABC
Photo: Water Governance

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Broadband – A Basic Human Right

Broadband – A Basic Human RightMost technology is limited in Mfangano, a fishing community off the Kenyan shore of Lake Victoria. The first time a car drove around the entire island was in 2007. Islanders only receive spotty coverage from cell providers due to the difficulties of building cell towers on Mfangano. Providers face difficulty constructing links from the mainland, and islands perceive key construction platforms as sacred.

Worst of all is the lack of internet access.

Chas Salmen, the director of the Organic Health Response (OHR), a small Kenyan NGO that provides HIV/AIDS-related services, noted the Islanders’ repeated desire for internet at community meetings. OHR started the meetings as a means to educate the public about HIV/AIDS and encouraged feedback in order to understand the lives of the islanders.

One of OHR’s primary difficulties was getting a substantial proportion of the community to attend the meetings. This was solved when OHR built the Ekialo Kiona Center (EK). The EK has a computer center, library and training facility. “Ekialo Kiona” means “Whole World” in the Suba language; the name refers to the OHR’s policy of allowing anyone access to the EK and the internet in exchange for maintaining a schedule of HIV tests every 6 months.

Participation in OHR’s programs has grown rapidly with the internet incentive. Now over 2,000 participants, or 10 percent of the population, use the EK and attend the regular meetings.

“The timing of the project was just perfect,” said Salmen. “It went live just before schools closed for a one-month break and we had 250 secondary students enroll right away. 75 percent of our new enrollment has been young people, under 25. They engage with us in a way that wasn’t possible before.”

The OHR also set up a network-connected radio transmitter to broadcast, which has greatly increased the amount of the population on the receiving end of their educational messages.

Salmen said, “When we broadcast we get SMS messages from a huge area, including Kisumu, 90km away. EK Radio fan pages have started appearing on Facebook without any prompting on our side. It’s a total game changer to start those conversations and have everyone listening at once.”

Broadband connectivity is not a high priority for those aiding developing communities. But, as Cisco’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs Tae Yoo noted, it creates jobs, higher productivity and ultimately enables economic and social development.

The United Nations now classifies broadband as a basic human right because it helps developing communities advance economically and socially. Yet, UNESCO estimates that 90 percent of communities in developing areas are without access to broadband.

Inveneo has launched the Broadband for Good Initiative (BB4G) to speed up access to broadband throughout the developing world. BB4BG uses low-cost technologies to deliver broadband into urban and rural areas. BB4G currently provides broadband access to 20 percent of rural Haiti, and certain areas of Micronesia, Kenya, Uganda and the West Bank of Palestine.

“Mfangano is a great pilot for building sustainable broadband networks,” said Eric Blantz, senior program director for Inveneo. “The challenges we’ve seen here are not unique, but the solutions we’re finding are innovative and replicable across the developing world.”

– Kasey Beduhn

Source: The Huffington Post

Photo: Organic Health Response

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Food Security in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Food Security in the Democratic Republic of CongoSometimes a little goes a long way. This principle guides the idea of investments when one hopes that an initial effort or resource will somehow profitably pay off at some point in the future. Institutionally and globally, this is how education has come to be understood. The power of education has recently begun to change the lives of farmers around the village of Buganda in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). There are programs that improve food security in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In a project facilitated through World View, 2,000 farmers had been brought into classes of 30 for a farmer field school meant to teach new and innovative agricultural techniques to farmers, including simple but extremely valuable practices such as drip irrigation and proper seed spacing. These techniques help to stretch valuable and limited resources and increase harvests to unprecedented yields.

The program also involves empowering women in their local communities, trying to make sure that equal and efficient work is understood by everyone and that no one is disadvantaged in the future.

The farmers in this project plan to form collectives and resource pools for the betterment of their community; after all, there is strength in numbers.

“Learning about improved techniques has enabled them to increase yields: where once they harvested two bags of cassava, now they get 15,” writes The Guardian.

The optimistic outlook for this project is that it will significantly help alleviate poverty for more subsistence farmers. As far as food security in the DRC goes, ongoing military conflict undermines the gains from improved methods because harvests and resources are taken by militias from both the DRC and Rwanda.

Thus, the prospects for food security in the DRC are uncertain. Societal innovation and destruction are continuously at odds but hopefully, when the violence ends, the farmers will be ready to produce sustainable quantities.

– Nina Narang

Source: The Guardian
Photo: Catholic Relief Services

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Panel Discusses the Millennium Development Goals

Panel Discusses the Millennium Development GoalsLast Friday, a high-level United Nations panel met in Liberia to discuss the UN Millennium Development Goals, one of the few successful international efforts aimed at addressing poverty, beyond 2015. Co-chaired by President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron, the panel made up of 27 world leaders is part of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s post-2015 initiative to discuss international development targets and advise on how to focus the international community’s efforts to end extreme poverty.

Started in 2002, the eight Millennium Development Goals of the UN Millennium Campaign are: End Poverty and Hunger, Universal Education, Gender Equality, Child Health, Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Environmental Sustainability, and Global Partnership.

The objective of last Friday’s discussion was to renew, replace and replenish these goals and their sub-targets.  Present at the conference was Save the Children advocate Brendan Cox who commented that the members of the panel mostly differ on the foci of the new framework. “In our view, the framework can do lots of things: advance debates, encourage a normative shift, start to redefine development – but at its core must be abolishing absolute poverty in all its forms. That’s both because we think ending absolute poverty and focusing on the world’s poorest people is the most important thing, but also because we’re worried that without clear prioritization the panel and the ultimate framework will flounder, be unable to prioritize and unable to get specific. Such a framework would remain at 30,000 feet and struggle to gain political purchase if it could even be agreed.”

Prior to attending the panel, Prime Minister Cameron along with President Sirleaf visited a local school in need of books and computers. Cameron asked the children what they wanted to be when they grew up, to which many answered doctors and lawyers. “That is very impressive. In my country, they all want to be footballers or pop stars,” joked Cameron. Cameron made mention that he hopes to include higher quality education to be included in the world poverty goals.

Cameron has also emphasized the need to focus on extreme rather than relative poverty. “Liberia is a country that was absolutely devastated by conflict and civil war,” he said. “It is now recovering but there is still desperate poverty. I think it is very important we keep a focus on eradicating extreme poverty.

“Here in Liberia, one in 10 children do not make it to the age of five. But I also think it is important we look at those things that keep countries poor. Conflict, corruption, lack of justice, lack of the rule of law. These things matter, as well as money,” he said.

Key documents, reports and ongoing research on the post-2015 agenda are available on post-2015.org.

– Rafael Panlilio

Source: Post2015, UN, UN Millennium Goals, The Guardian, The Guardian
Photo:DFID

 

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Bill Gates on “Why Measurement Matters”

Bill Gates on "Why Measurement Matters"

Bill Gates currently leads one of the most successful and far-reaching humanitarian organizations. Despite constant criticism on his attempts to maximize investments, Bill Gates’ focus on ‘Why Measurement Matters’ in his 2013 Letter may be the perfect question to “help drive global change”.

Every year Bill Gates writes a letter on behalf of his and his wife Melinda’s foundation. Inspiring stories, powerful words, and optimism fill up several pages along with photos of villagers. This year however, Mr. Gates sounded more similar to a business consultant than a humanitarian. His campaign “Why Does Measurement Matter” discusses the need to think in the most basic terms: quality over quantity. Instead of asking governments to increase their funding for foreign aid, organizations must begin training their volunteers and workers to begin thinking like business owners. Collecting data, mapping progress, accepting failures, and brainstorming for solutions all need to be incorporated into the daily tasks for health clinics, schools, and centers around the world.

Mr. Gates illustrates that keeping records, enforcing strict organization, and creating a comfortable environment for workers are key to ensuring the effectiveness of a non-profit humanitarian organization. In a business, financial analysts track the rising and falling of stock prices over decades; marketing directors report successful or failing advertisement techniques; CEOs receive reports on company losses and gains. These techniques must become commonplace within humanitarian organizations not only to ensure their donors that their money is being put to good use, but be able to guarantee successful projects.

But does mimicking a business model go against the basic purpose of a non-profit? A business’ goal is to make profit while an NPO or NGO focuses on increasing the well-being of individuals or a community. So then why do most people automatically associate the word ‘profit’ with money? Business models work for for-profit companies not only because they are designed specifically to help increase the company’s sales and worth but because they incorporate common sense and basic administrative work to achieve set goals.

One of the examples in Bill Gates 2013 Annual Letter of how new measuring techniques can bring about efficiency is the increase of children’s immunization in Ethiopia. Even with health clinics spread out in the most rural areas, accurate record keeping of birth certificates and simple organization helps clinic workers collect a significant amount of data. These records identify which areas need focus, as well as mapping the appearance and disappearance of diseases.

Bill Gates does not suggest a dramatic increase in funding or introduce expensive materials. He does not suggest holding conferences with major donor countries or criticizing local organizations for failing to meet their goals. The simple solution comes down to “quality monitoring…setting clear goals, picking the right approach, and then measuring the results to get feedback”. Yet as simple as this approach may be to a business manager, this solution is much harder to achieve naturally in poorer countries. Heads of organizations must create a work environment in which volunteers and employees will feel comfortable reporting negative results. Therefore, it is important understand the necessity of not cutting corners when taking down vital information of patients who come into the clinics.

Through simple and realistic propositions, Bill Gates 2013 Annual Letter offers: a focused resolution for revitalizing humanitarian organizations, to debunk the myth that foreign aid is a waste, and to encourage organizations around the globe that defeating extreme poverty, child mortality, and the spread of diseases is an obtainable goal.

– Deena Dulgerian

Source: Gates Foundation
Video: Gates Foundation

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Rebuilding Haiti’s Rubble

Rebuilding Haiti's RubbleIn 2010, a vicious earthquake rocked the nation of Haiti. Thousands were killed, and untold destruction was wrought upon countless homes and families. Despite its representation of the rampant destruction that once occurred, the remaining rubble is now re-purposed to provide a pathway forward for those who need it most. This is a crucial and hopeful step for the Haitian government to accept help from the United Nations (UN), to focus on rebuilding Haiti’s rubble of the 2010 earthquake.

Thus far, over 80 percent of the rubble is off the streets. Over 20 percent of what has been cleared has been recycled to provide materials for reconstruction. Essentials like stairs and tiles are created with the help of over 20,000 temporary UN and Haitian government workers and Haitian government workers. Construction is focused on making homes that have the capacity to withstand future disasters, including flooding and additional earthquakes.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has provided Haitian citizens grants to purchase repairs and construction materials through monetary transfers via mobile networks. UNDP has trained thousands of Haitians on subjects ranging from home repair to urban planning.

As these projects go on, the Haitian government continues to pursue its “16/6” program, which seeks to close six camps of Internally Displaced Persons and have those people rehabilitate 16 neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. Recently, over ten thousand families have returned to their homes.

– Jake Simon

Source: UNDP
Photo Source: Christian Science Monitor

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UK Labour’s Plan for International Development

UK Labour’s Plan for International DevelopmentBritish Shadow Secretary for International Development Ivan Lewis presented Labour’s plan for development scheme after 2015 when the general election in the UK will be held. The UN Millennium Development Goals are also due for reassessment in 2015. Lewis proposed that the new framework will be based on equal partnership, claiming, “Gone are the days when G8 governments could impose their views on the rest of the world.”

Lewis acknowledged that many of the Millennium Development Goals will not be met by 2015 but cited its significant impact on raising global awareness. Labour’s “One Nation: One World” goal will focus on promoting social justice and dealing with inequality through stimulating economic growth that is sustainable. As Lewis wrote, “Ending aid dependency is the right objective for the dignity, independence and self-determination of nations and their citizens.” Lewis recognized that global issues impact the security of Britain and that globalization in this interconnected world is “a reality, not a choice, both in Europe and the wider world.”

Lewis went on to cite Labour’s accomplishments in establishing the Department for International Development on the cabinet-level, as well as committing to spending 0.7% of the gross national income on aid. Labour leader Ed Miliband is dedicated to building on Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s legacy for working towards a “fairer and sustainable” world. He also faulted Prime Minister David Cameron, who is now a co-chair of the UN high-level panel on development, for having “an ideological reluctance to focus on inequality.”

Lewis ended with an optimistic aspiration, “Our generation can and should be the generation which ends absolute poverty, reduces inequality and safeguards the planet.”

– Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana

Source: Guardian
Photo: Guardian