Archive for category: USAID

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USAID Helps Vietnam Boost Rice Yields

USAID Helps Vietnam Increase its Rice YieldsAs climate change affects agriculture across the developing world, food security is a painful reality for farmers who depend on their crops to eat and eke out a meager living. Every grain of rice they grow is valued — USAID is helping farmers in Vietnam to bolster their harvest yields.

USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, implemented the Vietnam Forests and Deltas Program in 2012, aimed at promoting rice production practices that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve livelihoods with Vietnam’s agricultural extension services.

The program is focused on enhancing climate change resilience and working with all echelons of the Vietnamese society, from the community level up to the national level. Farmers are learning new agricultural techniques and are putting into practice climate-smart livelihoods in order to improve quality of life. They are applying new national policies and strategies in response to rising temperatures and changing weather pattern concerns. The program mainly concentrates on environmental conditions in Vietnam’s vulnerable forest and delta landscapes.

The Thanh Hoa and Kon Tum provinces have been selected by pilots for moving green growth strategies. With the implementation of innovative land use planning and training programs including local government, civil society and the private sector are demonstrating measurable improvements in carbon stocks and environmental services.

The Mekong and Red River Delta areas are increasingly falling victim to climate-related hazards such as storms, flooding, drought, salinity and sea level rise. These deltas are home to some of the most heavily populated and economically productive areas of Vietnam, making the region especially important as well as vulnerable to the country’s stability. USAID is working with the government and communities of the Long An and Nam Dinh provinces to help the population identify climate-related risks and how to take action in order to provide long term resilience.

USAID is working in partnership with several organizations including Winrock International, Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, provincial governments, the Netherlands Development Organization, American Red Cross, Vietnam Red Cross and the Center for Sustainable Rural Development.

In Long An province, with training provided by USAID, farmers across the region have boosted rice yields dramatically, in many cases up to 25 percent more. This means that families once struggling with food insecurity and little to no profit from rice sales are eating better and making a better living, improving quality of life.

Before The Vietnam Forests and Deltas Program went into effect, farmers with minimal agricultural experience suffered preventable crop losses due to ignorance such as overuse or imbalance of fertilizers. As a result of the program, people learned how to apply new techniques including development of internal drainage lines and favoring conditions that lead to stronger and healthier rice plants such as rice paddy leveling.

No matter what one’s views of climate change are, it is a very real problem for the poor with real effects on the people struggling to survive in the delta and forest regions of Vietnam. USAID has proved an essential resource in the developing world. With the programs offered by the agency and its partners, poverty could soon be a thing of the past.

– Jason Zimmerman

Sources: USAID 1, USAID 2, Winrock, MARD

Photo: OceanBitesE

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The Consequences of Cutting Aid to Palestine

Palestine
When it comes to the polarizing issue of the $400 million of foreign aid the United States is giving to Palestine, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says, “There’s a new game in town.”

On January 7, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a new bill in the wake of Palestine’s application and recent acceptance to the International Criminal Court. Rand, Graham and their proponents argue that this action is in direct conflict with the one of United States’ three stipulations regarding aid to the West Bank, which is that the Palestinians will never seek to persecute Israel at the Hague.

Graham believes this bill presents a change in the dynamic between USAID, Palestine and Israel. Formerly, Israel fought against cutting assistance to Palestine and viewed international aid as an investment in national security and a movement toward the elusive “two state solution.” Rand and Graham now believe that it is time for the tide to turn in favor of a more aggressive statement.

“I cannot tell you the number of times the Israelis have engaged me to try to stop an emotional reaction by the Congress to terminate aid,” Graham said to Foreign Policy. “[But now] I’m going to lead the charge to make sure the Palestinians feel this.”

This aggressive approach is lauded as a defense of Israel, one of the United States’ closest allies. Yet research has shown that making the people of Palestine “feel” the loss of roughly $400 million could have the opposite effect, putting the civilians of the West Bank at a greater risk than ever before.

Primary defenders of the “cut aid” camp argue that aid to Palestine is akin to bankrolling the terrorist group Hamas. When they look at that $400 million, they see missiles pointed directly at Israel’s iron dome. What they do not see is the 515,000 Palestinian civilians who have been raised from poverty by the affordable water programs, infrastructural efforts and humanitarianism that flow from this aid.

According to an investigation done by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), USAID to Palestine has been carefully vetted and primarily channeled through in-kind efforts to change lives on the ground. In 2011, they found that the majority of aid was focused on the building of five hospitals, six clinics, the upgrade of 23 schools and the revamping of over 20 small- and medium-sized water systems. It was used to computerize hospitals in the main city of Mendabollah and provide 127,000 people with access to potable water.

“These aids are very helpful for us,” said Dr. Niha Sawaheh, head of the ER at the Palestinian Medical Center (a USAID project hospital) in Ramallah. “When they stop, they will affect us.”

What happens when the aid stops is not a theoretical question to Sawaheh. It is a recent memory. When the United States froze half of their allocated funds to Palestine in 2011, the hospital saw sharp declines in efficiency and diagnostic potential. After those cutbacks, the new, computerized CT system sat unused in Ramallah’s largest hospital, yet there was no discernible decline in Hamas-initiated bombings of Jerusalem.

Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestinian government, commented that “by such a decision, [Congress is] punishing the Palestinian public in education, and in health, in a way that is very, very difficult to understand.”

Research has shown that declines in public education, health and accessibility to necessities such as clean water have little effect on ethnically charged violence like that between the Israelis and Palestinians.

In their famous 2010 paper, Professors Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel of the University of California Berkeley argue that “greed” or the desire to improve one’s living conditions by targeting another regime is a much more powerful incentive to violence than is “grievance” or deep-rooted primordialism. “At present,” they write, “the economic motivators for conflict are better theorized than psychological or sociological factors.”

Removing the programs that allow Palestinian civilians to live above the margin — where they do not have to live on Hamas’ assurance that the downfall of Israel will put water in their wells and computers in their hospitals — will not, as some argue, quench Hamas’ thirst for terror. Rather, it would push those who in better times would not raise arms to Israel to resort to those same desperate measures. From this perspective, it is likely that Israel (America’s ally) would be the one to feel the effects of the $400 million cuts, not the terrorist groups hell-bent on Israeli destruction.

As this bill and others like it move through Congress, there is no doubt heated debate over “our duty to Israel” and the “message we send to Hamas” will circulate. Yet from a national security standpoint, the answer is simple: $400 million can buy lasting infrastructural development, something that in 30 years will drive off more missiles than even the iron dome.

– Emma Betuel

Sources: Berkley, NPR, Foreign Policy, Huffigton Post, Al-Monitor, GAO, FAS, Reuters
Photo: Caritas

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Can Aid Abroad Aid Detroit?

Detroit
In 2013, Detroit filed for bankruptcy. The city is full of empty factories and dirty streets. Two years ago, when crossing the border from Canada back into Detroit, my family and I commented on the dramatic change in scenery that occurs when crossing this small border. On one side of the border, the streets are immaculate and bright with blues and greens, there are ongoing construction projects, and polite signs telling drivers to, “pull over and take a nap.” On the other side in Detroit, it seemed to me that almost everything was grey and brown. Many of the people crossing the street appeared to be living in poverty.

An article by economyincrisis.org comments that the city looks, “war-torn,” partially thanks to the fact that, “American automakers shipped their jobs to Canada and Mexico.” While Detroit could use economic assistance in its transportation, educational and architectural sectors, what the city really needs is jobs. Perhaps one place that these jobs could come from could be foreign aid.

USAID has lost funding since 2009. While a loss in funding is always an issue, USAID was already understaffed in 2009.

Foreign aid is shown to boost the United States’ economy and create jobs, so why is the countries aid organization losing funding?

USAID is one source of potential in the U.S. job market. If USAID were better funded, it would have the ability to create more jobs and expand in order to have locations to manage and contain those jobs. One city that could perhaps become a place of USAID expansion could be Detroit. In addition, USAID works with many partner organizations in order to help people abroad. If USAID had the economic ability to utilize these partners more often, then the partner organizations would expand as well. This leaves yet another avenue open for expansion into Detroit, or at the very least providing some of the unemployed people there with jobs.

Detroit had an unemployment rate of 24.8 percent in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While USAID expansion could in itself be at least a partial solution to the Detroit job crisis, sending more aid abroad will also be a great solution. AIPAC.org says that “by law, nearly all of U.S. assistance must be spent on American-produced items.” If the U.S. sends more aid, then it will have to open up factories in order to create projects to keep up with the increase in aid. As the aid brings greater numbers of people out of poverty, these aid products will become purchased products.

If more people abroad can afford these products from the United States, then more people will buy them. While these factories may begin as “aid” factories, they will in the end boost the American economy. The United States was once an industrial giant and Detroit was in some ways at the center of the industry.

Perhaps the solution is to return Detroit back to its roots and get the empty “war-torn” factories running again.

– Clare Holtzman

Sources: AIPA, Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Detroit News 1, The Detroit News 2, Economy In Crisis, Foreign Policy, Jalopnik
Photo: Urban Ghosts

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Online Meal Planner Reduces Malnutrition in Ghana

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Ghana is one of the most successful countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa region in combating hunger and malnourishment. The proportion of undernourished people went from 23.5% in 1996 to 2.9% in 2013, allowing them to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1) target for halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger.

In northern Ghana, 63% of the population lives in extreme poverty, and most rely on crop production. Most of the service and industrial industries are in the south, where poverty is less prevalent.

School feeding helps keep malnutrition low: every day, 368 million children around the world eat a meal at school. The World Food Programme (WFP) provides monthly rations to families who send their daughters to school, and they provide scholarships for secondary school to those who complete the program with an 85% attendance rate.

Over 1.7 million children every day are fed through the Ghana School Feeding Program. The Partnership for Child Development (PCD) is collaborating with the government to link nutrition with school meals and community training. One way the PCD is developing nutritious school meals is through the use of an online meal planner.

The web-based planner allows the user to create and add the costs from local ingredients. It links prices from local markets and displays the total cost of each meal. Only 12.3% of the population has access to the Internet, so for those who do not have access, the PCD developed an offline meal planner.

“By coupling high-tech digital resources such as the meals planner with low-tech engagement, integrated school feeding and health programs are vital if governments are to tackle the malnutrition crisis facing the next generation,” said Dr. Lesley Drake, executive director of PCD.

PCD is also combating malnutrition in Ghana through community meetings and 400 community-based champions of health and nutrition in order to convey the importance of proper nutrition and hygiene.

Feed the Future is fighting for food security in Ghana by focusing on rice, corn and soybean production to help farmers where poverty is most prevalent. The agricultural industry needs more support in order to do more research for crop-yielding and improve irrigation infrastructure.

USAID is committed to sustaining agricultural productivity by managing natural resources. Feed the Future and USAID activities support Ghana’s goals of reducing poverty and increasing food security.

Malnutrition in Ghana is declining due to programs like the online meal planner and the work of organizations like Feed the Future and USAID. Undernourishment and hunger continue to decline, but since 2007, the prevalence of underweight children under the age of five in Ghana has only dropped 0.5% after declining 11.8% between 1997 to 2007. Today, 13.9% of children under five in Ghana are underweight.

– Donald Gering

Sources: HGSF, Impatient Optimist, Knoema, Social Progress Imperative, UNDP, USAID WFP 1, WFP 2
Photo: Modern Ghana

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Young Social Innovation Around the World

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Countries are growing younger than ever. One quarter of the world’s population is made up of adolescents, and more than half of the world is under the age of 30.

Paired with technology and a global trend for social responsibility, the young majority is making headway in addressing youth crises and global issues.

While this demographic change poses potentially destabilizing risks, USAID is working to enable the youth bulge to make positive change in their communities through social innovation.

In Honduras, young people are mapping crime violence along its urban public bus systems. According to USAID, the United Nations and the Honduras National Police tracked 86 homicides per 100,000 people in 2011, the highest in the world. Due to gang violence and armed robbery, busses are ripe for extortion and murder. In June 2012, young Hondurans traveled through Tegucigalpa’s dangerous buses with a global positioning system (GPS) in order to develop blueprints for a public bus map for citizens to follow so they could avoid problematic hotspots. The GPS data was then entered into Google Earth.

This was a part of a USAID-led volunteer program. Members of the national anti-violence youth movement, Movimiento Jovenes contra la Violencia, took part in mapping fifteen of the busiest and most risky bus routes in their area, according to USAID.

The Kyrgyz Republic found USAID support when they experienced significant political and social conflict in 2010. Protests and violence, subsequently, gave way to a cynical youth population.

USAID partnered with Youth of Osh, a nongovernmental, secular organization from Osh, Kyrgyzstan. Youth of Osh leads community development projects in the city. In the October 2011 presidential election, USAID and Youth of Osh applied SMS technology to monitor the elections in more than 70 voting stations. They located approximately 1,300 violations via text. This was a groundbreaking accomplishment in political transparency in the Kyrgyz Republic’s election processes.

USAID continued to support the youth bulge in Haiti. Similarly to Honduras, USAID helped construct a mapping device for the urban St. Marc region. The maps pinpointed post-earthquake refugee spots. Thirty local Haitian youth roamed their streets to draw the blueprints.

USAID’s Frontlines also followed Sri Lanka’s diverse social communities. USAID funded a project that taught Sri Lankan youth how to create and broadcast documentaries about Sri Lanka’s people. Eighteen young reporters practiced in journalism, camera and audio equipment, and production and editing, according to USAID’s Frontlines: Youth & Mobile Technology–September/October 2012 issue. The team developed 45 stories that they called “Development Diaries.” USAID continued to support a second season covering minority voices and post-war issues.

Liberian students enrolled at the Kwame Nkruman University of Science and Technology in Ghana pursued master’s degrees thanks to a USAID program. The program follows a development plan sponsored by the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation Threshold Program, and looks to establish better management of land rights and access.

USAID’s LAUNCH energy forum on November 10-13, 2011, starred Gram Power, an energy tech company based in the United States but servicing India’s poor electricity market. The self-described “micro solution to India’s major energy woes” was co-founded by Yashraj Khaitan and Jacob Dickinson. The men both graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011 with Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The highly selective LAUNCH event led to Gram Power building its first micro-grid installation and electrification in the Khareda Lakshmipura village. They soon brought electricity to 200,000 homes in five years. Gram Power hopes to bring power to 1.4 million people by the end of 2016.

USAID also works in the Philippines, teaching young people at the University of Cebu the prospect of “technopreneurship.” USAID’s Innovative Development through Entrepreneurship Acceleration (IDEA) works with higher education engineering and science programs to engage students on the possibility of bringing their ideas to life.

IDEA offers the Global Entrepreneurship Symposium and Workshop, which teaches young students how to create products, research, understand the global market and work with venture capital, according to Frontlines.

By 2016, IDEA will have garnered more than $2 million, which more than matches the U.S. Government’s $1.5 million investment.

In addition to IDEA, USAID invested $34 million to help higher education in the Philippines. The programs offer study abroad opportunities in the United States and funds for many students to obtain master’s degrees in science and technology.

– Lin Sabones

Sources: USAID 1, USAID 2, USAID 3, USAID 4, USAID 5, United Nations Population Fund
Photo: Creative

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Improving Governments Decreases Poverty

Improving Governments Decreases Poverty - Borgen Project
A country is as strong as their government, and as the world comes closer to ending global poverty, policies in developing nations are beginning to improve. Poor countries are adopting new ways to help the public and, as a result, find a decline in poverty. When people have access to resources like food, sanitation and education, they have a greater opportunity to improve their lives. Although resources are vital to improving governance, it is just as important to establish equal political participation.

The World Bank understands the importance of proper governance and collects data of the progress in developing countries. The data collected includes “Gender Statistics, African Development Indicators, and Education Statistics,” says The World Bank. Keeping track of governments that are improving policies will determine the rate of poverty. Measuring statistics gives a better look at what is working to help improve the lives of those in need.

USAID has taken measures to better the lives of those living in Afghanistan. They have brought safety to the population and voter inclusion for women. “Since 2012, USAID has supported over 1,200 community improvement activities, such as construction of potable water pumps and maintenance for local schools and clinics,” according to USAID’s website. Elections in Afghanistan have greatly improved; representation of women has brought a greater turnout of voters.

Latin America has also experienced economic growth thanks to the efforts of USAID. “Political advances have been notable as well: free elections, vibrant civil society, and responsive governments are mostly the norm,” says USAID. They continue to focus on drug trade, civil rights and natural disasters. However, USAID has improved family planning, revitalization in Haiti and the decline of violence in El Salvador.

The government of a country represents the health and safety that the people are receiving. If development continues to progress, poverty will continue to decline. It is vital that the World Bank continues to track progress and organizations like USAID help those in poor countries.

– Kimberly Quitzon

Sources: World Bank, USAID, USAID 2,
Photo: UN

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Global Development Lab Brings Silicon Valley to Washington

Global Development Lab Brings Silicon Valley to Washington-TBP

USAID’s mission to fight global poverty has just received significant support with the recent addition of the Global Development Lab. USAID has long been the leading government agency seeking to alleviate poverty, yet their mission has primarily been that of implementation. The agency is now not only committed to the physical deployment of aid, but also the development of future relief systems.

Founded in April of 2014, the new subdivision seeks to change the ways in which aid is delivered and developed. According to the official website, “The U.S. Global Development Lab is a new entity within USAID that brings together a diverse set of partners to discover, test, and scale breakthrough solutions to achieve what human progress has only now made possible—the end of extreme poverty by 2030.”

The Global Development Lab is bringing the fight against extreme poverty into the 21st century information age. Its aim is to use strategies that top technology companies have used, such as crowd sourcing, big data collection, and constant research and development to find the best solutions in terms of ending extreme poverty.

USAID has appointed Ann Mei Chang as Executive Director for the Global Development Lab. Chang worked for twenty years in Silicon Valley, spending eight of them working for Google as lead engineer of its mobile division. With both experience in the technology and nonprofit sectors, Chang brings a fresh outlook on new ways to implement global development.

The lab is revolutionary in its mission to use resources and partners from both the public and private sectors. The Global Development Lab is partnered with technology companies that are synonymous with innovation. Microsoft, Intel and Nike are listed as cornerstone sponsors. Many of the nation’s top universities, including the University of California, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have also partnered with the lab. USAID hopes that these partnerships will “leverage the combined skills, assets, technologies, and resources of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to deliver sustainable development impact.”

USAID and its new Global Development Lab are not only attempting to alleviate extreme poverty through donations and other tried methods, but the agency is now attempting to end the suffering of millions around the globe by seeking cutting edge solutions through science, innovation, and collaboration.

– Joe Kitaj

Sources: USAID, The White House
Photo: USAID Blog

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How USAID Is Falling Apart

USAID-Falling-Apart

The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is the United States’ lead agency for international development and poverty reduction. The organization is credited with a multitude of successes, but in recent years it has faced organizational problems that have for the most part gone unnoticed by governmental higher-ups.

These organizational pitfalls threaten the agency’s ability to combat poverty and promote development worldwide. Recently, USAID has come under attack in the news for providing the wrong geographical coordinates for health centers that the agency funded in Afghanistan. A further look into the organization to find what internal problems are facilitating such mistakes revealed administrative and staffing discrepancies.

The USAID staff has become a major debilitating problem for the agency. There seems to be a rift between new and established staff members when there needs to be collaboration and unity among them. The veterans of the agency should be advising and teaching the newer members so that when they move on or retire, the staff remains steady and prepared. According to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, two-thirds of USAID’s professional staff has left. Over 50% of professionals still with the organization are over retirement age. As these older employees are gearing up to leave, the agency is left with a young, new workforce. Over 70% of USAID’s younger employees have less than five years of work experience.

Another problem USAID is facing is the lack of support from Obama’s administration. The slip up in Afghanistan was acknowledged but underscored by USAID, who defended the error with the fact that knowing the geographical coordinates for the center is not the first priority. However, the mistake undermines international credibility and domestic trust in the agency. USAID officials are also claiming that as the United States continues to prepare to fully leave Afghanistan, their own on-the-ground operations are threatened by a lack of firsthand protection. However, the avoidance and negation of blame that such statements allude to may come from a larger internal frustration with a lack of attention from the government and a lack of experienced staff.

Continued increases in spending on military and defense, despite widespread support of development as a better investment for long-term national security measures, undermines the work that USAID can do. Military-led humanitarian efforts rarely focus on the real core issues contributing to the problems and instead expend energy on the symptoms, which makes it unsustainable and often ineffective in the long-term.

The development sector of the government receives only a fraction of what the military receives. Development needs to be made a priority in order for it to receive the recognition and funding that it deserves so it can not only improve countries around the world, but our own country as well.

– Emma Dowd

Sources: Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, U.S. Global Leadership Coalition
Photo: Washington Post

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The Importance of Data Collection in Global Health

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Data collection is essential to address public health concerns in the developing world. If a nonprofit or government institution cannot identify risk factors, outbreaks, health trends and vulnerable populations, aid cannot be targeted effectively at the people who need it the most. As Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization puts it, “without these data, countries and their development partners are working in the dark – throwing money into a black hole.”

That is why the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced the Roadmap for Health Measurement and Accountability and a Five-Point Call to Action. These initiatives are meant to encourage the governments of developing countries to strengthen their public health registration systems, with the goal of making health aid more effective while avoiding some of the data-collection pitfalls of the past.

While previous data-collection initiatives, many motivated by the Millennium Development Goals, led to dramatic improvements in public health knowledge gaps, they also had some negative consequences. These were mainly a result of the programs’ tendencies to fragment as well as detract from country-led approaches to data collection.

Jimmy Kolker, assistant secretary for global health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, points out that data collection should not be an “end in itself.” To be effective, governments need to have the political capacity to support, and act on, the data that they collect. In contrast to previous initiatives, the Roadmap and Call to Action are intended to empower countries to develop their own integrated health systems, which should be more sustainable and robust in the long-term.

The Five-Point Call to Action includes some very specific public health monitoring goals. For example, the third point emphasizes a need for adequate civil registration systems, with the goal of registering all births by 2030, as well as registering 80% of deaths and their causes. The reasoning behind being so specific in establishing broad standards is that in the past, data collection efforts were hampered by a lack of coordination; a poor focus on specific health issues also failed to reveal broad trends and strengthen public health systems. Thus, these initiatives emphasize establishing accurate measurements of a few basic indicators, such as births and deaths, as well as having basic reporting and public access mechanisms in place.

The Call to Action calls for adequate data collection and interpretation through modern technology, not just traditional registration systems. Point four emphasizes that by 2020 all countries should have “real-time disease surveillance systems in place, including the capacity to analyze and link data using interoperable, interconnected electronic reporting systems within the country.”

As technology has developed, aid agencies and governments have an ever-growing list of resources that can help them monitor, collect, and interpret health-related data. Up to two-thirds of the world’s population in 100 countries is absent from public registration systems, a gap that must be filled by modern data-gathering and reporting solutions. Mobile technology is an enormous boon to governments trying to build data collection and dissemination systems.

For example, since 2008 Bangladesh, with relatively little funding and prior to the aforementioned initiatives, has managed to strengthen programs for establishing electronic medical records, centralized databases, accessible online resources for data-entry and reporting, and citizen feedback mechanisms. Bangladesh is a great example of how a low-income country can rapidly modernize its public health data resources cheaply and efficiently, a model from which other developing countries might learn, spurred on by the recent initiatives by USAID, the WHO, and the World Bank. Perhaps, with some financial and technical support from these institutions, developing nations can create their own path toward improved public health.

– Derek Marion

Sources: MA4Health, World Bank, Devex
Photo: Leaning Forward

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Flood Warning System Saves Lives in the Philippines

Flood_Warning_System

The Philippines is the most exposed large country in the world to tropical cyclones. The storms have shaped settlement patterns in the northern islands for centuries and have killed thousands of people, wreaking havoc on rural communities already mired in poverty. A simple yet effective new flood warning system is already saving lives.

In November 2012, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in partnership with the Philippine Partnership for Development of Human Resources in Rural Areas, launched the Agusan Marsh Climate Change Adaptation Project to help 61 villages, including La Flora, increase their resiliency to climate change.

The Agusan Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary is a protected area in the Philippines, roughly the size of metro Manila and home to approximately 120,000 people, 80 percent of which belong to the indigenous Manobo tribe. The tribe is dependent on the regions numerous large lakes, forests and rice paddies, which are all essential to the tribe’s way of life. The region’s features are necessary for fishing, farming and wood gathering, however, they also make the land extremely susceptible to flooding. Although its inhabitants are fully aware of the dangers, the rains have increased over the years and the storms that bring them have become more frequent.

Villagers settled along the marshes in stilted homes and floating communities are acutely aware of the flooding that occurs. However, as climate change is fiercely debated but not felt in the largest carbon producers of the world, the problem hits very close to home in the Philippines, with storms intensifying and recurrent flooding destroying lives.

According to USAID, the Agusan Marsh Climate Change Adaptation Project, in addition to educating villagers about adapting farming techniques to environmental changes, has also developed hazard maps using geographic information systems and flood early warning systems. Outreach campaigns taught families how to prepare for and respond to natural disasters.

In La Flora, USAID introduced a simple flood warning system consisting of color codes painted on houses designed to be easily understood by the whole population, spreading the message about flood severity and evacuation.

The system works using colors. The colors act as watermarks: yellow suggests monitoring weather, orange indicates pre-evacuation measures and red represents full evacuation.

In 2014, the warning system proved valuable when a tropical depression storm swept through the area devastating half a million people. In La Flora, residents adhered to the warning system and although water reached 24 feet almost submerging even the tallest buildings, the entire village of 1,120 survived.

As climate change intensifies and the flood waters rise, with the help of USAID and its partners, those affected most—the indigenous cultures of the low lying islands and marshes—will be more prepared and adaptive to the disasters that will inevitably come.

– Jason Zimmerman

Sources: USAID, United Nations Development Programme,
Photo: Telegraph