In June 2010, 16 individuals who are leading the way in Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) programs in East Africa gathered in Nairobi to participate in one of PRB’s highly acclaimed policy communications workshops. Through this training, participants learned how to better communicate information about effective PHE interventions and advocate for policy change that promotes PHE linkages and integrated approaches to policymakers in their home countries.
Since 2005, PRB has partnered with the National Coordinating Agency for Population (NCAPD) based in Nairobi, to facilitate these workshops. While the workshop provided participants with a number of take-home messages, three of the main principles of the workshop were: know your audience, use empirical evidence to support your message, and provide specific recommendations that encourage policymakers to act. Workshop activities showed participants how to implement these principles in written formats, when communicating in person, and when providing formal presentations. It was an intensive week-long experience; participants attended panel sessions and group meetings during the day and worked on individual exercises at night.
This year’s workshop, not unlike workshops in years past, brought together a remarkable group of professionals. The participants were from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda and they worked on a diverse range of PHE issues, including public health and endangered wildlife, HIV/AIDS and environmental linkages, and reproductive health advocacy as a conservation strategy. Given the incredible resumes and experience of our participants, I was curious to see how they would respond to the workshop activities. Would the experience meet participants’ diverse needs? Would it be challenging to even the most seasoned professionals? And lastly, would it leave participants more confident in their abilities and energized to reach out to decisionmakers?
The answer to all of these questions was yes. Despite the numerous qualifications and years of experience that participants possessed, the workshop still provided a unique opportunity to spend a concentrated period of time thinking about and practicing communication techniques with constant feedback from policy communication experts and their peers in the field. They learned new skills, built new connections, and reinvigorated their enthusiasm to share evidence and findings with decisionmakers.
On the last day of the workshop, each participant gave a formal presentation to the group. Despite the level of comfort that comes from spending a week together, for some participants, the presentation was still nerve-wracking. The presentations were filmed so that participants could see their own strengths and weaknesses as communicators, and the feedback from the group was honest. Still, every participant rose well beyond the challenge, proving that policy communications is a critical skill that can be cultivated, and that good mentoring, peer support, and hard work pay off. The participants also demonstrated that the process of growing as a communicator is never done. We all can continue to challenge ourselves to be strong policy communicators, and learn new techniques to improve the success of our messages, regardless of where we are in our careers.
Two participants share their thoughts on the workshop:
by Karin Ringheim, senior advisor, International Programs
I first met Henry the Hand at the 2003 Global Health Conference in Washington, DC. Dressed as a giant plush yellow hand with a permanently happy face, Henry, alias Will Saywer MD, attended the annual conference to promote his handwashing message among global health professionals. Will was an amiable presence, but as he attempted to cordially insert himself into conversations, some no doubt found his persistence about handwashing annoying. Weren’t there bigger fish to fry? AIDS, TB, malaria, reproductive health? Henry appeared to be better suited to a children’s fair.
Later that year, as director of research for the Global Health Council, I came across a Council publication summarizing a systematic review on the benefits of handwashing as a deterrent to illness and deaths from diarrhea.I found other research substantiating that handwashing significantly reduced the incidence of pneumonia and other infectious respiratory diseases. If diarrhea and pneumonia, responsible for more than a third of the 9 million deaths to children under five could be so effectively curtailed by handwashing, Henry the Hand was definitely on to something. At the 2004 Global Health Conference, Dr. Will gave me some teaching materials on handwashing for my son, a family practice doctor in Minnesota with three young children. And I more conscientiously began to wash my hands at the end of each metro ride.
Used under Creative Commons license from ESP Indonesia.
In the years since, enough scientific literature has been published about the benefits of handwashing to convince most skeptics that handwashing is a vastly underutilized and potent public health strategy. The importance of handwashing to prevent hospital-acquired infections has been increasingly stressed, as through the installation of hand sanitizers at the entry to hospital rooms. We see the signs in restrooms requiring restaurant workers to wash their hands before returning to work. The threat of the H1-N1 virus made us all more conscious of the need to wash our hands at every opportunity (and for the duration of the Happy Birthday song). Far less attention has been given to the practice of handwashing in the home, the transmission site for much infectious disease. As documented in an extensive 2009 review prepared by the International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene (IFH), promoting home hygiene – including hand-washing, safe handling of food and disposal of waste – may be the single most cost-effective among all preventive public health measures available to developing countries today.
The Millennium Development Goal target to increase access to improved water and sanitation by 2015 has spurred the construction of water and sanitation treatment facilities, wells, and toilets throughout low-income countries. As worthy and necessary as these measures are, the process is expensive and will require decades. Furthermore, the benefits of improved water and sanitation will not be fully realized unless concurrent effort is put into health education for mothers, children, families, and communities to make handwashing and home hygiene a new norm. As written in The Global Burden of Hygiene-Related Diseases in Relation to the Home and Community: An International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene Expert Review, not only can “hygiene improvements … prevent the death of a child at only a fraction of the cost of community water supply and sanitation in the developing regions of the world,”but, most fortunately, these benefits are not limited to households with sanitation facilitates. Even in households lacking safe sanitation and where the mother is illiterate, (describing at least 30 million households with children under the age of 5 years), educating mothers about home hygiene and handwashing would prevent an estimated 600,000 to one million deaths per year. On a global scale, the simple strategy of handwashing with soap can prevent millions of deaths due to infectious intestinal and respiratory diseases, especially among children under age five. Every parent deserves to share in this knowledge.
It must have been a thrill for Dr. Will to witness the launch in 2008 of the first Global Hand Washing Day. The potential of this effort to succeed should not be undermined by the cost of a bar of soap. In a squatter settlement in Pakistan, the introduction of handwashing with soap cut pneumonia and diarrheal diseases in half, but half of the residents lived on less than 50 cents per day and were too poor to buy soap.The Disease Control Priority Project highlights handwashing with soap as a particularly cost-effective and affordable global health strategy: for only US $1 per capita, excellent results can be achieved. Let’s ensure that the most inexpensive means to help keep children alive and well, handwashing with soap, is universally known and freely available to the poor.
And Henry, for being persistent and ahead of your time, here is a well-deserved pat on that giant plush hand.
As the tragedy of the Haitian earthquake unfolded, I coincidentally was in Ethiopia attending two meetings on disaster risk science: an African regional workshop on building educator-practitioner networks in Africa focused on Disaster Risk Science Scholarship and Sustainable Development, and a national conference on Enhancing Disaster Risk Management for Reducing the Impact of Climate Change in Ethiopia. My challenge was to find appropriate entry points for incorporating population dimensions into disaster risk science using reliable data. As a professor of Population and Development in Ethiopia who had been seconded to government’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission’s (DPPC) Research Division for four years, this struggle was not unfamiliar to me.
The key framework in disaster risk science has been well documented in the UN’s Hyogo Framework for Action on Disaster Reduction. The assembled African experts in Bahr Dar last month identified capacity building as one of the most crucial needs for research, training, and public outreach, and for strengthening educator-practitioner networks in Disaster Risk Science/Management in Africa. The subsequent national conference aimed at strengthening community resilience and local adaptive capacity to climate change in Ethiopia – well-timed, in light of the government’s new and comprehensive Disaster Risk Management Policy.
Population pressure on a mountain in the densely populated and disaster-prone Southern Region of Ethiopia. Photo: Charles Teller.
So, where were the demographic dimensions in the trend analysis of increased risk and vulnerability to drought and climate change? After I presented a holistic model of the interactions of demographic, socioeconomic, environmental, technological, and policy/governance variables with hazards, responses, and adaptation, I was asked: Why has the number of disaster-risk prone Ethiopians actually increased since the terrible famines of the mid 1980s? Is the increase in the number of highly vulnerable Ethiopians (13-15 million chronic and acute food insecure in 2009) due mainly to high fertility, rapid population growth and resulting population pressure on the land?
I felt that was too simplistic and passive an assessment. While population growth has occurred, changes in coping, resilience, adaptation, and productive capabilities have also been happening. Moreover, even in the face of annual population growth rates of nearly 3 percent, infant and child mortality rates have plummeted since 1990, and education and health coverage has greatly increased and are on track for meeting many of the MDG targets. However, the lack of sufficient progress in urban development, land reform, agricultural intensification, economic diversification, and technology has induced an increasing movement of temporary off-farm laborers and permanent migrants to search for greener pastures (if any pasture at all). The pressure of continuing to maintain the overwhelming majority (84 percent) of the population on the land is tremendous, depresses the younger generations’ aspirations, and should be alleviated through off-farm employment, planned small market towns, and urban development
As a result of rural population pressure, a system of demographic change and response to natural and human hazards and climate variability appears to be functioning, and researchers have tried to monitor these through demographic and health surveillance, famine early warning, livelihood information, and vulnerability profiling. We know from years of research at DPPC and Addis Ababa University on drought risk, hazards and vulnerability that certain demographic characteristics are associated with high vulnerability: female or elderly-headed households; larger number of young dependents; and land scarcity (less than half-hectare of arable land per household). The most adaptive rural households are those with available adult labor for off-farm and diversified employment, or marketable urban skills
However, these risk and vulnerability factors vary widely across this very diverse country, from the cold, eroded highlands to the hot and dry lowlands. There really are two Ethiopian worlds: traditional rural Ethiopia and cosmopolitan Addis Ababa. The major research problem we face is the lack of reliable, seasonal, local area data and information systems for monitoring and evaluating these trends, demographic responses, and human development capabilities. Even when the data are available, constraints to access, analyze, and communicate these to policymakers who make decisions about disaster risk mitigation are formidable.
In the context of social change and sustainable development, demographics matter. The new field of Disaster Risk Science needs to include in its modeling the measurement of risk of mortality, the vulnerability of population pressure and household characteristics, and the adaptive capacities embedded in multiple migratory processes. To do so, we need to update our micro-level models, insert the missing demographic dimensions, and ensure that reliable data especially on both temporary and permanent migration, are generated and analyzed.
by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment
My mind is often flooded with indicators: population size, percent of the population living on less than a dollar per day, landholdings per household, average family size, and unmet need for family planning are a few that often float around in my head. Statistical research, however, never replaces the wealth of insight that can be gained through visiting communities, talking to people, and connecting faces and stories with indicators, results, and statistical associations.
During this field visit I came to the realization that a field visit is probably as intimate a communications opportunity as a project can have. People aren’t reading a one-pager or watching your perfectly crafted video. They’re actually there, talking with project staff, listening to beneficiaries, and seeing your efforts with their own eyes. Will you ever have a more captive audience? Probably not. Thus, while visiting the projects and talking with community members, I was constantly reflecting on the process itself, and this set of visits presented a whole spectrum of different experiences to reflect upon. So here are a few of my initial quick thoughts on field trip best practices.
by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment
I was recently asked whether I thought Optimum Population Trust’s Carbon Offsets Program was akin to “population control” by rich countries on poor countries. I felt the question mischaracterized the program and population and climate change relationships in general, and this was my response:
Optimum Population Trust’s (OPT) carbon offsets program as well as a recent study they commissioned from the London School of Economics on population and climate change advocate for increased financial support for family planning programs that meet the needs of women regardless of their location in the context of climate change. Some have argued that this amounts to “population control” of developing countries.
The idea of “Population control” referred to ideas and programs that were being implemented from the 1960’s to the early 1990’s that largely argued that national governments should address high fertility for various developmental, economic, and environmental reasons. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), however, led to a transformative change in the views, goals, and approaches to family planning, and all efforts since then have been focused on the individual needs of women, their reproductive desires and rights, and voluntary access to family planning for those who wish to space births or limit their number of children. Currently, there are approximately 200 million women worldwide who want to space their births or not have more children but are not using a modern method of contraception. Research indicates that this large “unmet need for family planning” is primarily due to inadequately financed voluntary family planning and girls education.
The most recent research available from OPT and others indicates that adequately financing voluntary family planning programs and therefore meeting the existing need of 200 million women would benefit individual women and reduce future carbon emissions – a potential win-win. Unintended pregnancies occur throughout the world in both developing and developed countries and thus efforts should be focused where there is a recognized need by individual women (the U.S. for example has a very high rate of unintended pregnancies).
Efforts to reduce emissions must start with developed or rich nations changing their energy and consumption patterns. The amount of emissions reductions that are needed to avert the worst climate change scenarios, however, is daunting and will require efforts beyond anything we’ve yet seen. Adequately financing voluntary family planning programs is not a panacea but rather is a contribution to these efforts.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate change models depend on population size in their emissions scenarios. The research that I have read, including some very well done and sophisticated research that should come out sometime later this year, indicates that reducing unintended pregnancies through voluntary programs would result in reductions of at least 1 billion tons of carbon annually by 2050. For those of you familiar with the idea of carbon stabilization wedges, you’ll note that 1 billion tons annually is significant.
I’d like end by pointing out the just-released UNFPA State of World Population 2009 report that deals with family planning and climate change from the perspective of women’s rights: Facing a changing world: Women, Population, and Climate.
by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment
This week is World Water Week, and an international conference in Stockholm, Sweden is focusing on the converging challenges that characterize the world’s growing water crisis. Unfortunately I’m not participating in the meeting this week, though the humidity here in Washington DC certainly makes it feel like water week.
Looking at the program for World Water Week, what I find most interesting, and what I see as one of the great challenges of the coming decade is meeting the water and sanitation needs of people living in small cities and towns of developing countries. Safe drinking water and improved sanitation are among the Millennium Development Goal targets and are the two most important means of reducing infant mortality from diarrheal disease, one the leading causes of death of infants worldwide.
Global demographic trends illustrate the challenge effectively. The image below links to a graph showing the urbanization and income trends for every country in the world from 1960 to 2006 using Gapminder.org’s innovative Trendalyzer web application. On the vertical axis is the percentage of a country’s population that lives in an urban area. On the horizontal axis is income per capita. Press the play button after linking through to the graph and watch how countries of the world gradually become more urban as per capita income increases.
Notice, however, that many of the dark blue countries of the world, which represent sub-Saharan Africa have become more urban over time with little corresponding increase in income. I’ve highlighted Nigeria, the country with the largest population in Africa, as an example of this trend.
Click on the image to view trends in urbanization and income from 1960 to 2006.
Nigeria defines urban areas as, “towns with at least 20,000 inhabitants, engaged mostly in non-agricultural work,” and the United Nations Population Division now estimates that approximately 50 percent of Nigeria’s population of around 150 million lives in urban areas. Urban areas constitute both an opportunity and a challenge for meeting water and sanitation needs. Services per capita are cheaper to provide and serve a far larger population. At the same time, the failure to provide services for concentrated populations can lead to massive exposures to pollutants and diarrheal disease.
While urban populations tend to have better access to safe water and sanitation, the provision of these basic services in the growing number of small towns and cities of developing countries is a great challenge in the context of little growth in per capita income, limited infrastructure investment, and centralized government services. In Nigeria, for example, access to improved water services has shown no improvement over the last two decades, and remains just under 50 percent of the total population or more than 75 million people living without safe drinking water.
Click on the image to view trends in access to improved water services in Nigeria.
Some discussions at World Water Week are focused specifically on water and sanitation service delivery in small towns and more broadly on sanitation in urban areas of developing countries, and I look forward to reading more about the case studies and innovative approaches that are discussed. If you know about innovative projects focused on delivering water and sanitation services to urban areas of developing countries I would love to learn about them, or if you think I’m wrong to focus on the challenge of urban areas given poorer access to water and sanitation in rural areas, let me hear your thoughts.
by Jason Bremner, program director, Population, Health, and Environment
Andy Revkin’s post this week on The New York Times’ DotEarth blog highlights a recent paper published in Nature that indicates that countries with the highest Human Development Index are seeing rises in fertility. Revkin asks if this is a boon or trouble, and refers specifically to what impact rising fertility among the richest countries might have on climate change.
At first glance, the article suggests a fundamental change in our understanding of the relationship between fertility and development. However, the United Nations Population Division’s (UNPD) medium projections for world population already account for an increase in fertility among developed countries. The medium variant projection, which would put world population at about 9 billion by 2050 assumes that fertility in more developed countries will increase from a low level of 1.56 in the 1990’s to 1.8 by 2050. The world population projections are an aggregation of individual country level projections based on the most recent census and the best available data on fertility, mortality, and migration trends. Even for countries that have continued to experience fertility declines, such as Japan and Canada, the UNPD medium variant projection assumes an eventual reversal of the trend and an increase in fertility. More information about these assumptions can be found on UNPD’s website.
As for the second part of the question (how will this increase impact the environment and specifically climate change), there is already quite a bit of research on the link between population and climate change, and population projections are already one of the backbones of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) carbon emissions scenarios. The IPCC actually uses the UNPD’s medium variant population projections in their emissions scenarios, which suggests that the observed fertility increase among the most developed countries of the world is already accounted for in current scenarios.
A more important question, however, is whether the consideration of population growth alone is adequate in current IPCC scenarios. Research summarized by Population Action International suggests that age composition, the urban and rural distribution of a population, and the number of households as well as the number of people living in each household all have an impact on emissions. For example, estimates of carbon emissions in China are 45 percent greater if aging and urbanization trends are considered in scenarios in combination with population size, while in the United States, aging results in reduced emissions scenarios.
Instead of asking whether rises in fertility in the most developed countries is a boon or trouble, perhaps we should examine what other types of demographic shifts are occurring and how these affect the environment. Are aging, urbanization, and household size affecting climate change more than fertility rates? If so, what should be done?
I admit that the relationships between HIV/AIDS and the environment are not as intuitive as other population, health, and environment links, however a growing number of research studies and health and conservation programs have explored these relationships. The simplest explanation is that HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality may affect people’s natural resource use or may affect institutions that govern resources, thus impacting natural ecosystems. On the flip side, environmental change may have special impacts on people living with HIV/AIDS or may increase susceptibility to HIV infection among certain groups.
At the meeting in Kenya, we went into far greater detail on the nature of the linkages with the goal being the development of an HIV/AIDS-environment framework to assist organizations in determining priority actions for reducing the impacts on households, their resources, and the natural environment. A few of the linkages discussed included:
AIDS, Food Security, and Exploitation of Natural Resources
Evidence shows that AIDS exacerbates vulnerability to food security because AIDS disproportionately affects young adults thus decreasing available labor for small-scale agriculture. A survey in South Africa found that households affected by AIDS are significantly more concerned about food security. The study also found that households that had experienced AIDS mortality were more likely to use natural resources as cost-saving substitutes (in particular turning to fuelwood from forests) perhaps due to their perceived need to save money for food.
Impacts on the Conservation Workforce and Loss of Human Capacity
Conservation work tends to take adult males to remote areas and separate them from their families for long periods of time. Unprotected sex and extramarital sex during these absences puts these workers and their partners at risk of contracting HIV. For those conservation workers who are already living with HIV, long absences for work can complicate the care and support they need. In sub-Saharan Africa, the conservation workforce has been heavily affected by AIDS morbidity and mortality resulting in a substantial loss of human capacity among conservation institutions. One conservation organization has reported losing 14 percent of its workforce to AIDS since 1994, and national agencies such Kenya Wildlife Service now have specific HIV/AIDS workplace policies and programs to increase awareness among staff.
Limited Access to Land Ownership and Resources for Widowed Women and orphans
Women whose husbands have died from AIDS face challenges in maintaining livelihoods and food security in contexts where female ownership of land is prohibited. In such contexts, widows may lose their household’s land and lose access to agricultural lands and a source of wealth. Orphans whose parents have died from AIDS are also especially vulnerable to having their parent’s land and wealth taken from them.
Natural Resources, Migration, and HIV
Households dependent on natural resource-based livelihoods that require temporary migration to access resources, such as seasonal fisherman, are at greater risk of contracting HIV due to periodic absences from home, influxes of cash, and extramarital sex. The increasing prominence of wage employment to supplement agricultural livelihoods may also take individuals away from the household to work in natural resource based industries such as mining, timber, and oil and gas production, and thus place people at greater risk of contracting HIV.
Complex Emergencies, Resource Scarcity, and HIV
Natural disasters and armed conflict can make gathering food, fuelwood, and water risky endevours. Traveling farther for food and resources during complex emergencies puts women at greater risk of sexual violence. In addition, women may be more likely to be coerced into transactional sex to attain resources when a household’s survival depends on a woman bringing home food and resources. Sexual violence and transactional sex both put women at risk of contracting HIV.
These were just a few of the relationships discussed, and a great deal of work on HIV and environment has been done by the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group among others. Despite this work many participants at the seminar were new to the idea of HIV and environment relationships. The IPPF and IUCN collaboration is promising, but much remains to be done to popularize these relationships.
It would be great to hear your thoughts. Have you thought about HIV and environment relationships before? Do the linkages mentioned above make sense to you? Are you already doing work to reduce the impacts of HIV on households, their resources, and the natural environment, or to reduce the impacts of a changing environment on people living with HIV?
Teaching an entire semester’s graduate course in three weeks at the end of the academic year seemed a dubious task under normal conditions. But teaching it at the end of Ethiopia’s long dry season with shortages of electricity and water, not to mention scarcity of recent publications and slow internet speed in the mountainous capital city of Addis Ababa, made it even more challenging.
I had taught at the Flagship University of Addis Ababa’s Institute of Population Studies for four years in the mid-to-late 1990s, and served as external thesis examiner off and on since then, but now the government really needed more Ph.D demographers as it greatly increased its student intake in higher education, even pushing to start a Ph.D program on top of an already overstretched masters degree program.
In one of the poorest countries in the world, with 13 million food insecure, the second largest population in Africa (nearly 80 million), and an annual population growth rate around 2.6 percent, we discussed theories of population and development and debated models of the demographic transition. In a secret ballot early on in the course, I was not surprised to find out most of the 22 mature graduate students were Malthusian pessimists or even alarmists.
The job of a good professor is to challenge his students into reconsidering their cynicism and, in this constrained setting, provide rays of hope that things might get better. In the past few years, my Ethiopian colleagues and I had published evidence that the country was unexpectedly progressing better along the demographic transition than most of its neighbors, and that it was surprisingly on track to meet many of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially in education and health.
In just a few weeks, in spite of the lack of computers, electricity, and inability to download publications from the internet, the students were able to work in teams of two to three to read recent literature and access demographic and development data through sharing CDs, photocopies, and handouts. They closely assessed the quality of differing estimates of progress since 1990 on the MDGs: the 1993 National Population Policy and its ICPD+15 (2008) goals, and the 2005-08 Poverty Reduction Strategy.
Ethiopian population graduate students prepare outside on campus at dark when electricity went out. (Photo by Charlie Teller)
In their final exam, I asked if any had changed their minds away from pessimism, and why. To my pleasant surprise, some had after seeing progress on the some of the MDGs and social change in their own younger generation, calling themselves revisionists, neutralists,or cautious optimists. They became convinced of the importance of using rigorous research methods and reliable indicators to closely monitor and evaluate the pace of the demographic transition and socioeconomic and gender inequities, as well as capacity building in research and training.
If these keen students in such a resource-constrained environment can learn so quickly, can’t a country under population pressure use its resilient and adaptive skills to begin to believe in their capacity to accelerate the demographic transition? ?
“Wall-to-wall houses along the dirt road, clinging to the steep mountainsides,” is what I, a demography professor at Addis Ababa University, heard from fellow participants in the bus on a long weekend study tour of two areas with very high population densities in the Southern Region of Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian Consortium for Integration of Population, Health and Environment (CIPHE), coordinated the field trip with the Sustainable Land Use Forum, LEW Ethiopia, and other local NGOs with participation from the Wendo Genet College of Forestry and Natural Resources and film crews from Ethiopian national TV and radio. The objective was to create understanding between development actors and donors to facilitate the Gedeo indigenous afro-forestry system, a UNESCO-designated cultural heritage site, and enhance the integration of population, health, and environmental issues in highly densely populated areas of Southern Ethiopia.
As a social demographer/geographer, I thought it natural to come on this trip armed with up-to-date local area population data and agro-ecological maps: the recently released 2007 National Census results by district; the new 2008 Statistical Abstract; recent maps on rural demographic characteristics at the district level; the latest Health Information System Annual Report health indicators; food/nutrition security data on vulnerable household surveillance websites; survey data on fertility and mortality trends from the DHS and other surveys; and additional migration data from the University of Addis Ababa’s Institute for Population Studies. In fact, my bag was completely stuffed with data and maps.
A study tour of the three-tier indigenous agro-forest system in Wenago District, Gedeo Zone, Southern Ethiopia, March 28, 2009. (Photo by Negash Teklu)
The data indicated that two of these districts had the highest district crude densities (overall population size per area, one with over 1,000 per square km) in Ethiopia, with high fertility and declining mortality rates, and an almost 3 percent /year population growth rate, while the dryland had reached its carry capacity. But the data don’t tell the whole story. We got a more mixed picture of relationships between people and their environment in casual conversations with locals about their livelihoods. There were interesting histories on the resilience of indigenous agro-forestry systems on the one hand, but clear indications of very high fragmentation of land holdings, invasive eucalyptus tree farming, and forest clearing for highly profitable khat cultivation on the other. Also observed was the drying up of a vast wetland near the booming Southern Regional capita city of Awassa.
Most interesting, perhaps, were my conversations with youth in the areas of indigenous agro-forestry systems. These conversations suggested a future of changing attitudes and more interest in education, smaller families, and nonfarm employment then in the traditional agro-forestry practices of their forefathers.
While my observations (and “spontaneous focus groups”) were selective, they seem to suggest a future of:
Much greater reliance on new cash crops (khat, eucalyptus, and commercial flowers), in addition to the traditional small coffee holdings (the famous Yerge-cheffa sweet Arabaica)
Rapid expansion of schooling and youth interest in nonfarm employment, along with increased migration to urban areas, rising age of marriage, and greater use of contraception
Mushrooming of small market towns (although these are still coded among the 84 percent “rural” of the 80 million Ethiopians)
Taller and healthier children (where 50 percent of rural kids are still stunted) related to expansion of basic health services to the rural population, including maternal/reproductive health, water/sanitation, and nutrition.
Another reflection I had was that the projects and we the visitors didn’t have enough reliable population data on local trends and spatial distribution to truly understand how population issues were interacting with health and the environment. No one else on the study tour came with existing data either, nor did the local forestry college have them.
When addressing these complex dynamics, local universities/colleges, NGOs and planning departments of the local government need to take more holistic approaches to inter-related population, health, and environment issues. It seems that social and demographic change is occurring faster than poverty and food insecurity reduction, and that the youth are going to confront rising population pressure and cultural change by “voting with their feet”. Strengthening access to and use of macro and micro demographic data, as well as developing project M&E systems and media exposure, will help shed light on these rural-urban linkages that are seemingly necessary for effective policy and programs.
