http://www.childrenswaterfund.org/
A Project of Children's Hunger Relief Fund
Got Water?
In much of the world, the answer is: NO!
Do you have a child who is precious to you? When she left for school today, she probably had a good night's sleep a healthy breakfast, and clean clothes on. Her mother may have reminded her to be sure and get her bottle of water out of her backpack and set it on her desk so she can sip water during the day.
Now, imagine it a little differently. Before dawn she had carried large containers four miles to a stagnant animal watering hole and home again to get water for her mother to make breakfast before school. But today, she was just too weak to go to school. Her mother has gone to the same spot to get water for cooking a meager dinner. In the murky water, you can see small organisms swimming around. Somehow you know they are the reason she's had to miss so much school lately.
Outside of our comfortable borders, thousands of grieving mothers and grandmothers face this terrible dilemma every single day.
In the barren, arid expanses of Africa, water is so scarce that it can only be found in a few stagnant, murky ponds or drying streambeds and ditches. Each day, sometimes two or three times a day, families trek up to five miles to fill containers with the toxic, disgusting water. At the same time, animals are drinking and urinating in it! Animal carcasses often lie rotting at the edge of the water. During the dry season, many of these water holes dry up, and people must walk even farther to find what infested water they can.
Water- borne diseases are the number one killers of children in Africa. It's hard to imagine anyone drinking this toxic, disgusting water. But for eight of ten rural families, it's the only water available. Driven by thirst, they must drink the only water they have, this revolting "cesspool soup". When these little ones drink this putrid water, the parasites from it thrive in their tiny, defenseless bodies, keeping them weak and sick until their bodies give out and die. Many others develop diarrhea and dysentery. Their bodies can no longer absorb the few nutrients from the meager food they have. They die of malnutrition.
Often, an outbreak of typhoid fever claims many children from a village all at once. Typhoid Fever! We don't even think of typhoid still claiming lives in our modern world. But three out of ten people subsisting on this polluted water suffer from typhoid. That is one third of the population--mostly children! Even when the children survive, constant water retrieval often means missed school days. It is not unusual for a child to go two weeks without bathing or having their clothes washed for lack of enough water' so they become lice-infested. These children live a life of malnutrition, illiteracy, and disease, far beneath any reasonable definition of human dignity.
The good news is, that with your help, CWF is transforming this landscape of despair to one of hope and opportunity. For every 25 donors sending $100 we can bring clean disease-free water to an entire village!
Did you know...
1. Every eight seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water.
2. In many African countries, toxic water is used by 80% of the rural population.
3. Nearly 1/4 of humanity still remains today without proper access to water and sanitation.
4. CWF has just implemented its 75th community water project!
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Six Steps to Healthy Children
1. Drill Water Wells to Access Safe Water
2. Provide Needed Equipment
3. Provide Water Storage Tanks
4. Provide Water Pipelines
5. Teach Villagers How to Maintain Their Own Wells
6. Teach Water Hygiene To Mothers and Children
True Stories From an Arid Jungle:
When you think of Africa, what comes to mind? Lush rain forests, magnificent water falls, the Nile River; in other words, abundant water? But most of Africa is not rain forest; it is a parched, arid land. Here are a few stories (gleaned from hundreds) from that arid land..."It's very painful to live a life using contaminated water."
The only river where people can draw water is about four miles away and it runs for only three months in a year. Dams and basins that collect water from rain run-off are at least 6 miles away, and their time span as storage facilities is short-lived as they quickly fill with silt. When these resources have dried up, children must walk over 11 miles in search of water. A lot of time is wasted in the daily search of water-it is at least a three-hour hike.
The quality of the rainwater, when it is available to our community is very poor. It is highly contaminated by animals. People drink from the same sources shared by farm animals as well as wild creatures.
Many health problems in this area are caused by the tainted water. Cases of typhoid and skin diseases are rampant! All of this could only be avoided if there was a source of clean water. Children fall victim to these water-borne diseases most of all.
~David Maina, Water Engineer
The atmosphere for learning is influenced by poverty, lack of clean water and poor sanitation. Early in the morning we sometimes miss morning classes to go about 2 miles away to fetch water for drinking in the classroom for Ndanugu River.
~Young Student
It is a two-mile walk from Jirani to the nearest river. You have to carry the water either on your back or on your head. If you have money, you can buy your water from people selling it from their donkey carts.
The only source of water is the Ndarungu River and a well at the local Catholic Church. The water from the river is polluted by sewage from Egerton College and Njoro Canning Factory. Other pollution sources are donkeys fetching the water straight from the river and cattle from the surrounding farms-which are taken to the river to drink water. Typhoid and diarrhea cases are very common in Njoro, especially in the dry season when water is very scarce and available only from the polluted river.
In the dry season we have three people out of ten suffering from typhoid fever.
-Kenyan Villager
My name is Elizabeth. I am in secondary 6 and I am 13 years old. I could be in secondary 7 today if I attend the school regularly. I have many absences and have performed poorly because I often can't attend the school. Instead, I must accompany my Mum in a water hunt. We walk many distances. My mother is always away from home on a water hunt and she comes home late to prepare my lunch. I often do without lunch. If water comes to our home or somewhere nearby, Mum will stop going far to get water and she will cook lunch for us.
~Eliza
Report from CWF Kenya Director regarding an elderly villager: She lives about two miles from the Ndaruga River, and is not able to carry the water this distance every day. In fact, there is a place where they all get water from: the place where women are washing clothes, cattle are drinking and all are contributing to the pollution of the river. I personally saw a donkey and a cow drinking there. The ground beside the river reminds me of a cow shed-it is covered with dung. And this is the place where approx. 3000 families (at lease 10,000 people) get their water.
One Child's Plight...
-- No Water at school
-- No Water to wash clothes
-- No Water to bathe
just sickness and death...
In a country where 80% of the rural population lacks access to clean water, a distressed eleven-year-old child recently wrote this letter to CWF with a simple request of a water well near his school:
Children's Water Fund is a project of Children's Hunger Relief Fund.
We offer a wide scope of relief aid in many areas around the world. For more information on our numerous projects, please visit our parent website at:
www.childhunger.org. or call us at: 888) 781-1585
How You Can Help
$25 can help provide water for one child
$125 can help provide water for a family of five
(On average, $125 provides water for an entire family of five)
Children's Water Fund
Project of Children's Hunger Relief Fund
182 Farmers Lane, Suite 200, Santa Rosa CA 95405, (888) 781-1585 Phone, (707) 525-1310 Fax
BBC NEWS, 29 August, 2002, 12:46 GMT 13:46 UK
Politics clouds clean water debate
Developed countries may take it for granted, but the BBC's Hugh Sykes in Johannesburg finds that providing clean water in poorer countries is no easy task.
Water for the bath, water for the shower. water for the toilet. Each leaf of the toilet paper in my hotel is over-printed with a message: "Stand up for better sanitation. More than 2.4 billion people have no toilet."
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" A lot of people will fight for water from the tap "
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Shamrock Miducka
Ten minutes down the road from the marble bathrooms of Johannesburg's big hotels is a squatter camp of thousands of rickety huts and shacks.
These makeshift houses have no taps or toilets. The taps are in muddy alleyways, shared by dozens of people.
Aida Matebone, whose home is 10 minutes walk from the nearest water supply told me: "It's difficult for me to come here to wash, and come here to pour water for drinking, because it's very far."
Demand high
Her friend Shamrock Miducka added that because demand for the water is high, a lot of people will fight for water from the tap.
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" We're talking about 20% of the world's population without access to fresh water "
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Andy Atkins, Tear Fund
"There's not enough water so that you can wash all your clothes.
"You have to give some other people the chance: this week, they have to wash, then you next week. Which means the cleanliness of the people is so difficult and health is at risk."
Along the edge of the camp are worn-out plastic external toilets with chemical tanks that often fill long before they are changed.
Water campaigner, Andy Atkins, of Tear Fund says that places like this should galvanise everybody to take action.
"It's very hard to know that is going on, and not see this conference take serious action," he says.
"We're talking about 20% of the world's population without access to fresh water, 40% of the world's population without sanitation.
"What that translates into is, for example, a child dying every 15 seconds because of easily-preventable diseases borne in water.
"It should not be controversial to bring fresh water and sanitation to nearly half the world's population. Sadly, it is proving controversial to some governments."
Privatisation debate
The dissenters are the United States and Australia, who do not want sanitation targets. Privatisation is another controversy in the water debate.
"We must always acknowledge that water and sanitation are essential services, Simpiwe Nogiaisa of the charity WaterAid explained.
"They must be kept in the hands of government to ensure that everybody, regardless of their income, has access to water and sanitation."
Mr Nogiaisa believes that privatisation will globalise poverty.
"Those services will only be a privilege of those that they can afford, of those that have more dollars, more pounds and so on. The majority of the people that are poor in a number of countries will have no access to essential services," he says.
Free-market supporters
However another lobbyist, Richard Tren of the Sustainable Development Network, says that properly-regulated privatisation is better than centralised government water distribution.
"If you look at the 'privatisation is evil' group, they're largely made up of the unions," he says.
"In developing countries unionised labour is far wealthier than the people who live in shacks, that have no jobs and no access to clean water.
"[Union members] are very much an upper class. When you've got between 40-50% of the population unemployed, they're very much the upper class," he says.
"On the other hand, privatisation needs to be done very carefully. One doesn't want to give too much monopoly power to private suppliers of water, so that they can then use that power to lobby government for special favours."
At the squatter camp, I met a man who carries 40 litres of water in two containers, one and a half kilometres to his home every day.
I wouldn't dare tell him about the fountain of abundant water - going nowhere - outside my Johannesburg hotel.
Green Nature, Aug 31, 2002 - 04:52 PM
African Ministers Declare Need for Safe and Clean Water
Ministers from 22 African countries are urging that action to reduce death rates resulting from poor hygiene and disease-contaminated water be given high priority at next year's World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa.
According to a December 6 press release, the recommendation -- which marks a new strategy in the field of water policy for Africa -- was part of a Ministerial Declaration at the close of the International Conference on Freshwater held in Bonn the week of December 3-7.
The declaration points out that 6,000 people a day are dying as a result of sub-standard sanitation, and that at least 17 countries on the African continent will be short of water within a decade. The African ministers express hope that the WSSD will deliver much needed solutions to the continent's water and sanitation crisis.
The declaration highlights:
almost half of the people of Africa suffer from water-related diseases; --habitats, ecosystems and aquatic species are at risk from the increasing demand for water;
the lack of agreements between countries on the equitable share of water resources such as underground aquifers, lakes and rivers.
The ministers say key actions that must be taken to deliver sufficient safe and clean water for people and wildlife include governance of the water sector, an intergovernmental policy dialogue on water security and financing for the development of the water sector.
The 17-point declaration was endorsed by the ministers of Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda. The ministers agreed to hold a meeting of the 53 African ministers in charge of water next March or April in Nigeria.
Source: United States Information Agency. December 14th, 2001.
© 2001-2002. Green Nature. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy
http://c3.org/news_center/press_releases/02pressreleases/west_africa.html
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 22 , 2002, Contact:Janet Flynn,(703) 741-5827
Chlorine Industry Helps Provide Clean Water to West Africa
Washington, D.C.-The World Chlorine Council®, joining with the U.S. Agency for International Development, World Vision, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, have announced a nearly $41 million public-private partnership to provide potable water and sanitation to rural villages in Ghana, Mali and Niger, West Africa.
The announcement of the West Africa Water Initiative comes on the eve of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which begins next week in Johannesburg, South Africa. Access to clean water is a major item on the summit agenda. The sponsors of the West Africa Water Initiative will hold a special briefing about the new partnership in Johannesburg on August 29.
By 2008, the partners expect to have provided Ghana, Mali and Niger with a minimum of 825 new water boreholes, 100 alternative water resources and 9,000 more latrines, reaching more than one-half million people. The World Chlorine Council, along with the Global Vinyl Council is making an initial in-kind contribution valued at $300,000, supplying PVC pipe for wells, chlorine for water disinfection and education materials on sanitation and hygiene.
Other partners in the seven-year initiative include UNICEF, WaterAid, the Lions Clubs International Foundation, the Desert Research Institute, Winrock International, and Cornell University's International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development.
According to C.T. "Kip" Howlett, WCC Secretariat and Executive Director of the U.S. Chlorine Chemistry CouncilÒ, "There is a critical relationship between water and health, and a real need for cost effective, reliable and easy-to-use water disinfectants, such as chlorine, to help ensure that people around the world have access to safe water."
According to United States Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, "This is an integral part of a larger water initiative that the United States will bring to Johannesburg. By working together, we hope to leverage the resources and expertise of all stakeholders and accomplish more than we might do separately."
President of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Steven Hilton, said: "Our board chose water and sanitation as a foundation priority many years ago, as we felt it was where we could have a maximum impact on the most lives for the monies invested. Where there is no clean water and sanitation, millions of children die each year, and millions of people become blind unnecessarily and suffer debilitating diseases."
Although clean water is available to almost everyone in the developed world simply by turning on the tap, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 20 percent of the world's population-more than one billion people-do not have access to safe drinking water. Worldwide, dirty water is estimated to affect the health of about 1.2 billion people and contribute to the death of 15 million children under five every year.
"Since it was first used on a large scale to disinfect water in the United States in 1908, chlorine has helped combat some of the deadliest diseases of the past 100 years, including cholera, typhoid fever and dysentery. The chlorination of water has virtually eliminated these threats and helped increase life expectancy in the United States by more than 50 percent. We are committed to helping making safe water available to people worldwide," Mr. Howlett said.
The World Chlorine Council® was formed in order to respond more effectively to global concerns and issues surrounding chlorine chemistry. The Council consists of national and regional chlor-alkali industry organizations, along with their member companies.
Developments is a free quarterly magazine produced by the Department for International Development to increase awareness of development issues. To order your copy of free copy of Developments click here.
http://www.developments.org.uk/templates/display/text.cfm
Sustainable development
As the World Summit on Sustainable Development approaches in August, Developments defines sustainable development - what does it mean in practice, and what difference can it make to people's lives?
Sustainable development in full...
Sustainable development explained
As Johannesburg prepares to host the World Summit for Sustainable Development, Nigel Cross explains why sustainable development is a goal worth working towards, and what it means in practice.
Over the last year or so, many hundreds of otherwise quite sane people have been spending much of their waking days thinking about what they need to discuss at Johannesburg in the late summer of 2002. World leaders have been commissioning background papers and ideas in a scramble to be informed and have something to say; diplomats have stayed up until dawn to tease out consensus on an agenda or tear out their hair; activists have lobbied for their single issues, or heaped scorn on what they decry as a failure in the making. There have been international preparatory meetings, hundreds of thousands of words and air miles and motions. And all this before the event – the World Summit for Sustainable Development. But with a name like that, you can see why. It is a global gathering, it is about the welfare of future generations, and it has a history. As the Brundtland Commission (1987) defined it, “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. A visionary task.
Thirty years ago, in Stockholm in 1972, the first of the international development and environment summits was held – the UN Conference on the Human Environment – bringing together different disciplines in a common cause. Twenty years later this was followed by the Rio Earth Summit, which led to conventions on biodiversity, climate change, desertification, and – the jewel in the crown – Agenda 21, a 40-chapter programme of action for sustainable development at local, national and global levels.
Each summit is a milestone, and also a hurdle. It is difficult to make sense of the everyday mass of opinion, opinion dressed as fact, and naked fact. Who has the answers – the economists who say the world is better place, and that growth works, or the campaigners who see a distressed planet and over-consumption? The occasional world summit offers a rare opportunity to catch up on controversy, debate and dialogue, which with luck and resolve might lead to a measure of international consensus on the state of the world and its imperatives.
Poverty and sustainable development
In the past governments and international agencies defined and measured poverty by income or consumption levels. But there are limitations to this approach:
• The lack of attention to the assets on which most poor people rely for their livelihoods, including access to resources (natural and financial), good health, and capacity to work.
• The extent to which income-based poverty indicators fail to capture many critical aspects of deprivation, including the health burden linked to very poor housing and lack of basic services, and powerlessness of poor communities (seen in the contravention of poorer groups’ civil, political, and resource-using rights).
• The lack of attention to the social relations that so often underpin poverty (or processes of impoverishment) – for instance, a lack of political influence, insecure or uncertain tenure of resources, and being the object of discrimination. These often underpin poverty because they limit both people’s access to income-earning opportunities, services and resources, and the fulfilment of their civil, political and resource-use rights.
This recognition has led to the concept of ‘sustainable livelihoods’ – entailing the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources), and labour required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the resource base. This highlights the extent to which poverty reduction must ensure that poor farmers, pastoralists, and those who depend on forests and fisheries have access to the natural resource base that permits sustainable livelihoods. This implies the need to address inequitable patterns of ownership or use rights.
MULTIPLE GOALS
Meeting the needs of the present…
Economics needs
Environmental needs
Social, cultural and health needs
Political needs
… without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
Minimising the use or waste of non-renewable resources Sustainable use of finite renewable resources Not overtaxing the capacity of ecosystems to absorb or break down wastes Protecting natural processes and climatic systems, including not overtaxing the capacity of global systems to absorb or dilute wastes without adverse effects Political and institutional structures within nations and internationally which support the achievement of the above
How is Johannesburg measuring up?
In the decade since the Rio Earth Summit, there has been progress on putting the principles of sustainable development into action, but many fundamental challenges remain. Globalisation was not an issue at Rio; it is now. In both rich and poor countries, much more effort is needed to place sustainable development as a central policy objective at every level, and to fully implement agreed plans and conventions. Poor countries require access to investment capital, technologies, and markets. Aid is needed to support poor country budgets and to build capacity. And then there is the issue of good governance. How do poor countries reach the (Northern) democratic ideal, underpinned by national prosperity and wealth? For their part, rich countries need to show real commitment to changing unsustainable patterns of consumption and an inequitable trading regime, and move towards far greater efficiency in resource use, not least around fossil fuels.
The Johannesburg Summit offers the first real opportunity for a decade to galvanise the international community – business, NGOs, governments and intergovernmental organisations – around the linkages between globalisation and local development, environment and poverty, trade and development, and local, national and international governance. Understanding such linkages are of paramount importance both for poverty reduction and sustainable development. The struggle has been how to turn that understanding into effective policymaking.
After two inconclusive meetings in New York, the whole Johannesburg agenda was supposed to come together in Bali this June. The Summit is intended to lead to intergovernmental agreements (‘type 1 agreements’ in the jargon) on, among other issues, freshwater, renewable energy, international governance, national sustainable development strategies and a raft of policies for Africa and the Small Island Developing States. And this is to be built on by implementation partnerships with civil society including NGOs and the private sector (known as ‘type 2 initiatives’).
The South African government had outlined a clear set of proposals for Bali and the Indonesian hosts had prepared a Chairman’s text – the ‘Bali Commitment’. In the event, little progress was made. The politicians and the political groupings were often at loggerheads: the United States introduced an extensive list of demands while opposing the previously agreed text on a number of issues, including reproductive rights; the EU and developing countries suffered from divisions on priorities and tactics. But there were flashes of leadership and calls for strong intergovernmental commitments from Brazil and South Africa. Pretty much a typical international negotiation process, in other words. It didn’t help that this sustainable development discussion came after the Doha meeting of the WTO and the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development. Issues of finance and trade have been struck from the agenda – they are dealt with already in other fora. But without their inclusion there is little from which to construct a viable ‘deal’ which addresses the primary concerns of developing countries.
So where does this leave Johannesburg? Running very late. A last ditch attempt to salvage some international honour has been made in Rio. But the prospects are not so good. It is in danger of becoming a non-summit, a political failure for intergovernmental commitment and action. Yes, it can still deliver an important message, it can be a fruitful international conference, it can raise awareness of important global challenges, it can give sustainable development a boost. But the world leaders who say they want to be there, expect the Programme of Action to be largely signed and sealed and allow for agreement of a high level Political Declaration; they also expect photo opportunities and a bit of bilateralism on the side, otherwise they may pull out. They are going to have to demonstrate the same resolve as they managed after 11 September, if we are to get anywhere close to equity for a small planet, on which all our security, peace and prosperity depends. Let’s hope they do.
Nigel Cross is Executive Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development.
http://www.iied.org
The World Summit for Sustainable Development takes place from 26 August – 4 September 2002
http://www.johannesburgsummit.org.
Plants or people?
Ten years ago, at the Rio Earth Summit, sustainable development was seen as an environmental issue. But greater understanding of the links between poverty and the environment has changed that. Mark Rowe looks at how the debate evolved.
In northern Namibia, between the more internationally renowned Skeleton Coast and Etosha National Game Park, lies the Torra conservancy, home to two semi-nomadic tribes, the Damara and the Herero. They share their land with wild elephants and black rhino. Poaching has been a perennial problem. While poachers were regularly caught, it was not usually until after the rhino had been killed. Poachers were jailed, but others simply took their place. So far, this is the familiar and depressing story that plagues conservation and development efforts across the world.
But what happened next didn’t follow the script. A radical approach was devised that typifies the shift in thinking that has taken place among the international community on the issues of the environment and poverty in the past ten years. When you scratch your head and wonder what is meant by that rather ponderous term “sustainable development”, think of the Torra conservancy. For their experience has everything to do with the World Summit on Sustainable Development taking place at the end of August in Johannesburg.
WWF-UK recognised that the traditional approach to poaching was not working. Poachers are not, by and large, “evil”. They shoot rhinos because poverty presents them with no alternative. One poacher questioned by WWF hunted rhino because he needed money to buy his son the shoes the child required to attend school. The father was jailed, the boy didn’t go to school and so the cycle of poverty and poaching continued.
Looking for a new way of tackling these problems, WWF arranged with its local partner organisation, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation, a Namibian NGO, for the conservancy to be granted rights over the land independently of the national government. As a result, they were given social responsibility and were able to arrange for access to the land by travel companies.
The success has been astonishing. The project has created a living for local people, preventing urban drift and reducing pressure on vital resources such as fresh-water. It promotes local culture and sensible and regulated tourism; it empowers women who are required to sit on the conservancy committees. Perhaps the greatest beneficiary is the wildlife: the conservancy has an incentive to protect it. Black rhino numbers have more than doubled to over 200 individuals, forming the largest free-roaming black rhino herd in Africa.
This is what sustainable development is about: a solution that tackles environmental, social and economic issues together. It represents a significant change in the international environmental agenda that was begun at the UN’s Rio conference in 1992. Put in the simplest terms, since Rio the consensus has switched from plants to people. For the main part, Rio laid down policies that targeted the environment. Legally binding conventions on combating desertification, climate change and biological diversity were signed.
Today, governments and non-governmental organisations prefer to see a bigger picture – where the environment, the damage we do to it and poverty are, like a cat’s cradle, inextricably interlinked. “The environment had to become mainstream,” said Peggy Allcott, WSSD manager for WWF-UK. “We can only make limited progress unless we tackle both human and environmental problems and balance them in a way that integrates economic, social and environmental issues.
“You really can’t look at the environment in isolation. Rio started to make those links but in Johannesburg we are trying to go one step further. We have a much greater chance of environmental concerns being taken on board if they are mainstream.”
But it would be misleading to suggest that sustainable development has only appeared on the radar in recent years. It was more the case that its significance was never really taken on board. It was in fact in 1972 that the first official mainstream recognition of a link between development and the environment took place, at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. The conference’s original remit was to look at large-scale industrial pollution but it ended up also addressing concerns about accelerated population growth and the depletion and destruction of the environment.
Following Rio, sustainable development was pushed onto the agenda at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The conference examined the inter-relation of high-density populations and poverty in the developing world and high consumption in developed countries. In particular, it adopted a 20-year programme to tackle poverty as part of efforts to reduce family size and improve access to health services, including family planning and sexual health.
The official endorsement of this new agenda came with the Millennium Development Goals, announced as part of a 2000 UN-sponsored Millennium declaration that expanded on the UN conferences of the 1990s. The goals embrace a view that development and poverty reduction should not only help raise incomes, but improve education, health and the environment.
There also came a recognition that if serious efforts were finally to be made to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, then this would have serious implications for the environment. The moral case that people in the developing world have the right to enjoy the same quality of life that we have is unanswerable. But there are only so many resources in the pot: if everyone on the planet consumed as much food and used as much energy in their daily lives as the average Briton does, we would need an extra two Earths right now to satisfy that demand. In any language, that is unsustainable.
“The question is whether we need a fundamental rethink in the way the world goes about its business,” said Peggy Allcott. “The current system tends to focus on short-term economic gain. Sustainable development is a commitment to the long term. It will be a brave politician that opts out of short-term gains for long-term benefits that voters possibly will not live to see.”
The journey of the environmental agenda to a position where it fully embraces the human dimension has not been easy. But the experience of some pioneering projects provides hope that the right solutions are out there. The experience of the Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest (PPG7) is typical. PPG7 was launched in 1990, a time when graphic images of the burning, logged Amazon were broadcast around the world. The aim was to establish a series of small initiatives on environmental and indigenous projects, working with local groups on themes such as forest management and sustainable use of resources. But it was faced with the problems that bedevil such environmental initiatives across the globe: grand designs and the insistence from governments that “something must be done”.
“The project wasn’t the immediate redemption of the Amazon that it was portrayed as being,” said Garo Batmanian, chief executive of WWF Brazil, “but each of the projects generated some kind of positive result.” Dr Batmanian believes the lessons of the first phase of PPG7 will prove invaluable when the second phase begins shortly. “I am optimistic about the second phase of PPG7,” he said. “It will look at some of the fundamental causes of deforestation.”
PPG7 has, at the bottom line, contributed to a modest but vital success. The rate of the Amazon’s destruction fell in the 1990s to around 4.5 million acres (1.8 million hectares) from more than 5 million acres (2 million hectares) in the 1980s. Would the Amazonian rainforest be in a worse state today if PPG7 had not happened? “Definitely,” said Dr Batmanian. “We would have had the equivalent of a man with a 40 degree temperature – that man would certainly die. What we have is a man with a 38 degree fever. He is still alive.”
Mark Rowe is a freelance journalist specialising in environmental and geopolitical issues. www.wwf-uk.org
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The party's over
Although developing countries in the South suffer the most severe consequences of environmental degradation, most of the damage is done in the Northern developed world. Things have got to change, says Sue Wheat.
A famous footballer and his celebrity wife throw a much-publicised extravagant party, complete with exotic food and 60,000 orchids flown from the Far East. Their love of all things expensive and luxurious supports businesses all over the world, which in turn employ people, who can then feed, clothe and educate their families. To add a virtuous twist to the fairytale event, the pair also raise thousands of pounds from their well-healed guests for deprived children. Everyone wins. Right?
It’s the basic justification for the globalised market economy as we know it. So why do so many of us feel uncomfortable reading about such decadence? Because no matter how much is raised for good causes, our gut feeling is that the level of energy and resources put in to it is excessive. We also know something’s wrong when celebrities can have sushi delivered from across the world but homeless people have to queue for a meal a day down the road. The average man or woman in the street may not explain it in such terms, but it’s the epitome of unsustainable living.
But this is not a personal attack on one particular couple, because they are no worse than anyone else. Multiply that party by millions – probably trillions – and you get an idea of the impact we, the ordinary, well-meaning inhabitants of Northern developed countries, have had over the last 50 years or so on the world’s environment. We don’t judge our lifestyles in the same way as we might judge those of the celebrities in our magazines and newspapers, but the reality in global terms is just the same. We are part of the 20% of the world’s population that consumes 80% of the world’s resources.
Friends of the Earth’s publication, Tomorrow’s World uses the concept of ‘environmental space’ per person and per country to show the extent of the North’s unsustainability. Environmental space is the sustainable rate at which we can use environmental resources without causing irreversible environmental damage, depriving future generations of the resources they will need. The calculations, based on a stable world population of 9.8 billion achieved by 2050, set targets for countries in order to determine appropriate action. The UK, for instance, with 1% of the world’s population, currently uses 5% of the planet’s capacity for carbon dioxide absorption, over 2% of its sustainable timber yield and almost 5% of its sustainable steel and aluminium production. The UK alone therefore needs to cut its use of resources by around 80%.
“If people living in the South used as much fossil fuel as people in the UK currently do, by 2050 we would need eight atmospheres to prevent global warming,” explains Ronnie Hall, policy and research officer with Friends of the Earth UK. “But of course, many of the poorer 80% need to increase the amounts of resources they consume just to meet basic needs such as housing and health, and to escape poverty. Clearly there have to be changes in global consumption – not just in overall levels but with redistribution as well.”
Information like this has been rolling out of environmental organisations’ press offices for a couple of decades now. The latest over-arching report Global Environment Outlook-3 (GEO-3) published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in May gives a sobering analysis of the state of the global environment – past, present and future. Assessing land, freshwater, forest and biodiversity, coastal and marine areas and atmosphere throughout the world, it reports on environmental changes since 1972. Behind nearly all the assessments and forecasts outlined in the report lies the spectre of global warming and its potential to wreak havoc on weather patterns and livelihoods over the coming decades.
Such a dangerous scenario is now forcing the biggest post-party clean-up in global history. Unfortunately, ‘sustainable development’ sounds nowhere near as fun as what came before. Many companies and governments are still being pulled kicking and screaming off the dance floor. But things are changing, the experts say. GEO-3 points out that by the end of 2000, about 2% of forests had been certified for sustainable forest management and that the total extent of protected areas has grown from
2.78 million square km in 1970 to 12.18 million hectares. Fertiliser use in Northern countries has also stabilised (although it’s increasing in the South) and ozone-depleting CFCs have been successfully phased out to very low levels. It is expected that the ozone layer will recover to pre-1980 levels by the middle of the 21st century.
In the cold light of day and with a clear head, corporations are starting to agree with environmentalists and putting their houses in order. The language of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ is now common parlance in all sections of big business. The mining industry has just set up an International Council on Mining and Metals, headed by leading environmentalists, to implement a sustainability strategy. European supermarkets are looking at using packing that is made from 100% renewable resources. All TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners and washing machines in Japan are now being recycled. Even the most vilified of the corporates – oil companies and manufacturers – are being hailed as environmental do-gooders by their long-time adversaries. Oil company BP was chosen by 110 NGO and media representatives as the company which is best managing its environmental resources, closely followed by Shell, Toyota and DuPont, according to the Global Survey of Business Excellence.
Unfortunately, the evidence that such changes could be little more than window dressing is also there. GEO-3 states that current levels of global change are not enough to stave off disaster: “Although improvements have been made in areas such as river and air quality in North America and Europe, there has generally been a steady decline in the environment, especially across large parts of the developing world.”
Naturally, Southern developing countries expect their Northern neighbours to take significant action before they commit themselves to pursuing economic growth without breaking environmental limits. As EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom said earlier this year: “We cannot keep coming back from world gatherings with impressive commitments and fine words that we then leave in the corner of our offices to gather dust. Our implementation deficit will quickly turn into a credibility gap.”
Sir Geoffrey Chandler, former senior executive of Royal Dutch Shell and founder-chair of Amnesty International’s UK Business Group insists that a “radical re-thinking” of corporate action is needed, putting ‘values’ instead of ‘business’ as the prime motivating force for change and a more open approach to the role of law. “The ‘business case’ is an impossible guide to the many decisions that a manager faces in real life,” he states. “I do not believe that the game of catch-up under pressure which has characterised the last century or more is any longer adequate.”
Fundamental to the question of sustainable development is the issue of international trade regulations. “Of course it’s important for the North to be more energy efficient, to reduce its consumption of resources, for individuals to make environmental changes in their lives, but in a way, all this is beside the point while trade is so inequitable,” says Tetteh Hormeku, a leading African trade campaigner with the Third World Network. “Trade rules drive everything – and they are set up in such a way that the ability to produce and consume in the South is undermined. Sustainable development will never be possible while multinationals are profiting so massively from the poor.”
“It is a big problem for us to face such biased trade rules,” agrees Manoa Malani from Fiji’s Ministry of Culture, Heritage and Civil Aviation. “The TRIPS agreement, for instance, which deals with intellectual property rights, is being pushed through without its effects being properly addressed. We believe this will allow our conservation areas and the indigenous people living in them to continue to be exploited by multinationals. They send scientists to talk to our indigenous people about the biodiversity of the land, take plant samples and then make millions from this biopiracy. Such inequality cannot be part of sustainable development.”
For those coming from low-lying islands the ‘debate’ about sustainable development is also rather academic – it is already too late. Sea levels are rising and various islands in the Pacific have been predicted to disappear within years. Guidebooks to vulnerable small islands like Tuvalu and Kiribati in the Pacific are taking a ‘go there before it’s too late’ approach. And locals are hanging on to reap the last few dollars from international tourism before taking up their emigration plans. For them, it’s the last chance to party on…
Sue Wheat is a freelance journalist specialising in development and environmental issues.
http://www.foe.org.uk, www.unep.org
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Can the tide turn for African fisheries?
For development to be truly sustainable, the livelihoods of poor people must be secure. But on the West African coast, traditional fishing communities are being threatened by foreign competition, as Alan Tollervey explains.
In the coastal states of West Africa, the livelihoods of millions of poor people depend on fishing. All along the coast, fishermen set off each day in small wooden boats to hunt for an elusive prey, braving the turbulent waters of the Gulf of Guinea. And many more people benefit indirectly, working in the service sectors, repairing engines and nets, smoking and drying fish, and marketing fish and fish products. Even more people – millions, in fact – rely on fish as a cheap and accessible source of protein and essential fatty acids, nutrients always scarce in the diets of the poor. In Ghana, for instance, about 1.5 million people depend on the sea to make a living, and fish accounts for 60% of the country’s intake of animal protein. In Senegal, the figure is even higher, with fish providing 75% of the animal protein in the diet of the population.
Governments also depend on these resources for income. Up to 50% of export earnings in Mauritania and Senegal come from fish products. Small, locally-owned boats catch most of the fish supplying these key industries. These stocks represent a vital and renewable resource: they are critical to the livelihoods of the population and to the economic and social development of the nations. In the case of Mauritania, one of the poorest and most debt-ridden countries in the world, fish represent their most valuable asset.
The Common Fisheries Policy
Fish stocks around the world are generally in poor shape. Many are over-exploited and most, if not all, are approaching the limit of exploitation. The failure of the Common Fisheries Policy to regulate fishing in European waters has led to a situation where funds are used by the European Commission to buy access to the rich waters of West Africa. Through a series of external agreements, the Commission has negotiated access rights for vessels from Europe. However, this is taking place in an environment where increasing local fishing effort is being deployed and where there is little effort made to build a realistic and cautious assessment of the state of the fishing stocks into the fishing agreements. Although these agreements are based on an explicit assumption of the existence of surplus stocks in the coastal waters of West Africa, there is very little effort made to link the development of external agreements with stock assessment data.
The foreign vessels target specific high value stocks; often those like octopus and squid that are extremely valuable and command a ready market in Europe. These fish are under increasing fishing pressure and there is evidence the stocks are close to their limit. Despite this, new agreements have been signed recently which substantially increase the quantity of these fish that foreign fleets are allowed to catch. Recent DFID research demonstrates that these agreements have had a significant impact on the availability of high-quality nutritious fish in local markets – traditionally the supplies that provide poor local consumers with critical elements of their diet. The Coalition for Fair Fisheries Agreements have reported that in both Senegal and Mauritania, the stocks which make up much of the catch from local fishing boats are declining under pressure from industrial fishing, leading to shortages for local people.
Policy Coherence
The Fisheries and Poverty Reduction paper produced for the EU Council of Development Ministers highlighted the role of fishing in supporting the livelihoods of the poor, and the need for agreements to be based on economic, social and environmental evaluations of impact. However, states are under pressure from the EU and from the international financial institutions to open their waters to foreign fleets. Government and international development policy very often fails to recognise the importance of coastal fisheries in supporting the livelihoods of large numbers of the poor, both directly and indirectly. While policies may support economic development and poverty eradication based around trade and investment, they may at the same time support the unsustainable exploitation of valuable fisheries resources to the detriment of local people.
These agreements represent a poor deal for the states entering into them and, in particular, for the local fishers who have to compete with foreign industrial fishing vessels; they also offer poor value for money for the European taxpayer. The beneficiaries are a small number of European states and fishing vessel owners and operators who have access to rich fishing grounds.
There is considerable evidence to support the argument that external agreements should be renegotiated on the basis of a better understanding of the implications of the Common Fisheries Policy for coastal states. Research into the impacts of foreign vessels fishing in West Africa has strengthened the hand of those concerned that the agreements should be based on a more equitable balance of power between the European Union and the African states, and much more firmly on an understanding of the full economic and social value of resources and the capacity of African states to monitor and regulate the actions of foreign vessels.
ILLEGAL FISHING
A recent aerial survey carried out in West Africa found:
1. 45% of foreign vessels actively fishing were inside the Inshore Exclusion Zone (IEZ) which protects small fishing boats
2. 50% of the vessels fishing in the IEZ bore no name, or their names were covered or illegible.
3. An additional 20% fishing outside the IEZ had no names
In total, 50% of vessels actively fishing were operating illegally and 10% of vessels were apparently fishing without a licence.
Source: Megapesca
FISHING IN SENEGAL
In 1999, it was estimated that 15% of Senegal’s economically active population derived their livelihood from fisheries. Of this total, some 50,000 were directly engaged in fishing, while the remaining 200,000 were engaged in fish processing, trading (mainly women) or providing support services to the sector.
Fish provides up to 75% of the protein intake of the Senegalese population. Locally owned small fishing vessels make a major contribution to national food security, with over 70% of the fish catch from small boats. Senegalese fishing is also of regional significance, with dried, smoked or salted fish being traded extensively throughout West Africa.
Local small-scale fishing operations are also closely integrated with industrial fish processing and the Senegalese export trade. As the industrial fishing sector has stagnated, fishing from small vessels has provided some 40% of the fish processing industries’ needs and has generated as much as 50% of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.
Source: The Coalition for Fair Fisheries Agreements
Alan Tollervey is a Rural Livelihoods Adviser with DFID.
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Sowing the seeds of hope
Providing relief in emergency situations is essential in the short term, but what happens to these communities in the longer term? Diana Shaw describes a project that has made the transition from emergency relief to sustainable development.
In the village of Ngiluni, in the drought-prone Makueni District off the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, lives a grandmother named Kooki and her three grandchildren. Recently Kooki lost her donkey and he-goat to leopards. Without a donkey to carry water, she must either fetch it herself daily, or have 20 litres delivered for ten shillings. Yet the cost of just a few weeks of water deliveries could pay for a new goat.
Kooki is, however, full of optimism. AMREF (the African Medical and Research Foundation) has loaned her an improved goat to breed with her she-goats. The resulting kids will produce up to four times more milk and earn more at market. She has also built a grain store and joined the local seed bank scheme so that she can save some seed to plant later or barter during hard times.
These initiatives are part of AMREF’s Makueni Applied Nutrition Project. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently selected the project as one of seven model community-based nutrition projects being highlighted at the World Food Summit. Of particular interest to the FAO was the linkage of short-term food relief with long-term sustainable development.
AMREF has worked in Makueni since the Kenyan government invited it to set up a primary health care centre and programme in 1979. During the drought and famine of 1984-1985 AMREF ran a supplementary feeding programme for 10,000 children under five. During this time the severity and impact of the area’s food insecurity became clear.
The Applied Nutrition Project grew out of the feeding programme and recognised that, while prolonged malnutrition has grave consequences for individuals, its root cause is a combination of individual, household, community, national and environmental factors.
Crop diversity for food security
Communication with local communities has always been at the project’s core. Women’s groups, community health workers and traditional birth attendants have been involved from the start, to address people’s existing knowledge of and beliefs about malnutrition. Helping people learn which foods to eat is always useful, but in Makueni appropriate foods were not always available. Beginning in 1986, the project helped families understand why this might be the case.
Once, the main crops in the district – which is regularly affected by drought – were cassava, millet, sorghum, cow peas and sweet potatoes. People gradually stopped growing them when maize was introduced and traditional foods came to be seen as poor man’s fare. Sweet and needing less labour, maize also requires lots of water over a long period.
In conversations, farmers often say they prefer the taste of maize and beans. But have they noticed that sorghum matures faster than maize, asks Susan Kilobia, the project manager. Have they seen that green grams need less water? The next step is to help farmers decide which crops to plant. With the local agricultural department, AMREF organises seed shows where farmers with the best seeds win hoes or ploughing harnesses. Their neighbours want to buy the winning seeds, and thus spread better seeds throughout the community.
The health and farming programmes worked together to improve weaning practices. Local mothers often give babies solid food too early, causing malnutrition, so research by AMREF and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) determined which crops are most nutritious for breastfeeding mothers and their babies.
To spread this knowledge, “barazas”, or field days, were organised, where women cook the food and grade it for ease of preparation, smell, looks and taste. Through these events, they learn that milk can be replaced with green gram paste when making porridge. Local millers have been trained to mill green grams and sorghum together. The result is a nutritious baby food and mothers already using it are now proud to show off their babies’ plump upper arms.
A study in 1994 revealed that most families in Makueni own fewer than five goats. Despite this, people often sell livestock to buy food during drought. The project thus extended its work to include small livestock such as goats and chickens to increase both household income and food supply.
Susan Kilobia helps keen farmers set up tests. Like Kooki, they might cross their goats with a larger breed, resulting in bigger kids that earn more at market. Milk production is higher so neighbours soon follow their lead.
AMREF then loans money to groups of farmers who buy a new male goat to mate with females. The he-goat serves many flocks before farmers exchange him for another goat to spread the genes. The same goes for chickens producing more eggs.
Around the same time, the project also began helping people build seed stores to save grain for future planting. AMREF recognised as well that water supply was still a big problem and women had to spend hours daily searching for water. Thus well building and rehabilitation were added to the project.
MAKUEINI
The Makueni project also includes:
- Trading recipes for drought resistant crops.
- Promoting sun drying of local vegetables to eat in the dry season.
- Promoting drip irrigation.
- Growing drought resistant mango tree seedlings in schools and community groups.
- Developing income generating activities to help buy food in hard times.
Source: The Coalition for Fair Fisheries Agreements
Building capacity deepens project impact
Within the project, and in AMREF as a whole, local and institutional capacity building has been increasingly important since 1995. To share research and experience, the project collaborates with approximately 20 government institutes and charities in Kenya. They range from ministries and the National Food & Nutrition Committee, to Nairobi University and other NGOs. Each year, the communities themselves contribute to an annual feedback meeting.
In January 2001, AMREF launched a lobby group to promote better practices in nutrition throughout Kenya. All 20 collaborators work with a number of international organisations with experience in their own countries.
The project’s next step is to integrate HIV/AIDS prevention and care into both local institutions and project activities. As it reduces agricultural production and worsens already high poverty levels, AIDS has a significant impact on family nutrition and welfare. For those already infected, healthy eating is obviously also very important.
Susan Kilobia stresses the community’s deep involvement in and control of the project. As Estifanos Tekle, an FAO consultant says, “Without community capacity development, food security and nutrition cannot be successful or sustainable... But when an organisation builds capacity, it leaves the knowledge and skills within the community, within the local structures, institutions and other community based organisations. As a catalyst, AMREF has assisted people to develop skills and knowledge.”
Diana Shaw is Head of Communications at AMREF.
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Tri-sector partnerships: how do they work?
Tri-sector partnering is a new approach that aims to demonstrate how the private sector, civil society and government can work together.
The world’s population is expected to rise from six to nine billion over the next 50 years, exacerbating the need to find ways of ensuring equitable, sustainable growth. Social, environmental and economic development is a priority for the international community, and foreign aid is no longer the only means of addressing these challenges.
Across the globe, in many developing countries, private sector investment is having a significant impact on the social and economic development of communities. Foreign direct investment flows to the developing world exceeded £240 billion in 2000, nearly five times as much as official development assistance from industrialised country governments. Partnerships with the private sector are therefore coming to be seen by many as an important strategy for poverty reduction. From this view has grown the concept of ‘tri-sector partnerships’ – the private sector, civil society and government working together to put communities at the centre of development, and deliver real and sustainable benefits for all.
Tri-sector partnerships
“No one government or organisation can afford to work in isolation. We need to recognise the different strengths and capabilities different organisations have and build partnerships and networks at the national and international level, which make the most of these different strengths,” International Development Secretary Clare Short said in a recent speech.
The key element in the partnership approach is that all partners act upon their different strengths – complementary resources, knowledge and skills – to jointly address the complexities surrounding social, environmental and economic development. For example, a private sector company could provide financing, project management and engineering skills, or local infrastructure such as roads and water supply. Local or central government could provide strategic co-ordination or source funding of public services. NGOs and community action groups could provide leadership to mobilise local community participation in the form of land and labour.
In Venezuela, the Canadian mining company Placer Dome decided on a partnership approach, after suspending plans to develop a mine in Bolivar State, following a fall in the price of gold. The partnership led to the construction of a major health facility serving not only future mine workers but the whole surrounding area.
The health facility in Venezuela was successful and cost effective because all sectors were responsible for a particular part of the development stage. The company organised the project management of construction, providing financing and building materials; the Ministry of Health sponsored training for local residents; a regional NGO supplied the medical equipment; and communities supplied voluntary labour and food. Even though Place Dome has withdrawn, it has left a legacy of improved health in the community and an energised local community looking to pursue more partnership projects in the future.
Business Partners for Development
One initiative aiming to put the principles of tri-sector partnership into practice is Business Partners for Development (BPD). A project-based initiative created by the World Bank in 1998 and funded in part by the Department for International Development (DFID), it aimed to study, support and promote strategic examples of tri-sector partnering.
Over the past three years, BPD has worked on 30 focus projects, involving more than 120 different organisations in 20 countries to share practical experience – good and bad – in building partnerships and learn how to achieve the greatest impact on businesses, governments and communities.
BPD activities were divided into four ‘clusters’:
• Natural Resources (focusing on the extractive industries: oil, gas and mining), to optimise long-term development benefits to communities while mitigating risks to investing companies
• Water and Sanitation, to test the partnership approach to the development of sustainable and affordable water services for the urban poor, and address the questions surrounding private sector participation in the provision of water and wastewater utilities.
• the Global Partnership for Youth Development, looking at the challenge – at local, national and international levels – of ensuring that young people in developing countries are provided with a secure environment in which to grow, with access to adequate eduction, healthcare and economic opportunities.
• the Global Road Safety Partnership, to address the issue of traffic casualties. Almost a million people are killed and up to 34 million injured in road accidents each year, with 86% of these deaths occurring in developing countries (although they account for only 40% of the world’s motor vehicles). The cost to the economy is US$100 billion – almost double the total spent on official development assistance.
BPD came to an end in December 2001, and recently launched its report – Putting Partnering to Work – on the lessons learned, as well as advice and tools on setting up successful partnerships in the future.
Key lessons and guidelines
The report provides a set of indicators to help each party undertake an internal assessment of the risk, costs and benefits of entering into a partnership. As a general rule, the closer the participants’ activities and benefits align with their key business strategy, the more likely the partnership’s overall chance of success.
Significant time needs to be allocated to building mutual respect and consensus, and to agree on specific commitments, roles and responsibilities. While formal governance structures should be developed, including partnership agreements, experience demonstrates that these must be sufficiently flexible to adapt to changes in context (such as change in government and economic cycles), learning processes, staffing and degree of success.
A partnership is a dynamic entity. BPD’s experience has shown that even over a short time frame, roles, responsibilities, and even partnering organisations can all change in a partnership. These changes may reflect those in the external environment, community, funding, performance levels and individual relationships. Structures and processes must be established to accommodate and respond to change.
Replication
The ultimate goal of tri-sector partnering is replication. If communities are actively engaged in the implementation stage, then they can pick up new project management skills that can be put to further use. In South Africa, for example, Vivendi Water spearheaded a tri-sector partnership to help in the management of water services in Durban and Pietermaritzburg. The Mvula Trust, a water and sanitation NGO, gained practical experience of working in urban environments. This strengthened its position in future activities with local governments in providing sustainable water and sanitation services to the poorer communities.
The focus projects have shown that tri-sector partnering can be a micro-level initiative, like the health clinic in Venezuela, that can be scaled-up, or a macro-level initiative, like the road safety cluster, that can be brought into action on a regional level.
THE DEVELOPMENT BENEFITS
Tangible development benefits have resulted from tri-sector partnering projects around the world, including increased access to resources – such as health, education, water and sanitation – poverty mitigation, and the empowerment of individuals and communites.
Access to Resources: In Dakar, Senegal, a partnership was set up to upgrade and expand the local water networks with the private sector, led by Senegalaise des Eaux (SdE). Safe, clean water is now provided to 200,000 people in poor communities through the installation of standpipes, with a drop in water-borne illness amongst children and the creation of several hundred jobs.
Poverty Mitigation: Using a tri-sector partnership approach can allow the resources and the skills of different actors to focus simultaneously on the core needs of the poor. In Konkola Copper Mines in Zambia, the purpose of tri-sector partnering has been to promote local business development and reduce dependence on mining through utilising the expertise of all parties involved, including Anglo American and the Zambian Agri-Business Technical Assistance Centre (ZABTAC).
Community and individual empowerment: The Partnership for Out of School Children and Youth Development in the Philippines provides competency-building opportunities to out-of-school children, and youth who have not finished high school. Those of sufficient age may undertake technical education courses that are tied to industries for curriculum development, apprenticeship and eventual employment. Together with skills training, they receive an alternative learning system in basic education to help them achieve high school equivalency and/or prepare them for higher levels of technical courses.
Not without risk
As the BPD partnership projects reflect, this tri-sector approach is not without risk. For example, companies that play a key role in establishing partnerships that eventually fail are at risk of being most strongly associated with this failure. NGOs risk loosing their independent credibility status, and governments face political risks from ceding partial control of social services in the short term, as well as the risk of receiving only limited credit for social improvements delivered through partnership.
Nonetheless, all parties share the potential benefits. By harnessing competencies from across the entire spectrum of society, tri-sector partnering can lead to more sustainable community development, increased transparency and accountability within the public sector, and benefits for companies in the form of reduced liabilities associated with social responsibilities, more efficient use of resources allocated to social programmes, reduced risks to investments and improved regional competitiveness and reputation.
Guaranteeing the continuity of the partnerships over time, finding incentives that encourage partners to share control, and knowing how to use the core competencies of companies more intelligently to reduce poverty are challenges that still need to be overcome. However, tri-sector partnerships demonstrate a re-think of the way that corporations discharge their new social responsibilities, and one that involves every sector of society, not just business.
http://www.bpdweb.org
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Find out more...
To find out more about organisations and work featured in this issue of Developments, you can contact them at the address below. Visit our links page for many more useful sites.
African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF)
(London)(http:// www.amref.org
Friends of the Earth
(London) http:// www.foe.org.uk
Human Rights Watch (UK)
(London) (http:// www.hrw.org
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)(London)(
http://www.iied.org
International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)
(London)
http://www.ippf.org
OneWorld International
(London)
http://www.oneworld.net
Sight Savers International,
(West Sussex)(
http://www.sightsavers.org
WaterAid (London)
http://www.wateraid.org.uk)
WWF (Surrey)(
http://www.wwf-uk.org
UN Chronicle, Volume XXXIX
Number 3 2002
Chronicle Essay
The Road from Stockholm to Johannesburg
By Lars-Göran Engfeldt
UN Photo
The pioneering 1972 Stockholm Conference - United Nations Conference on the Human Environment - and the rapidly approaching Johannesburg Summit - World Summit on Sustainable Development, in August/September 2002 - are closely linked both conceptually and substantively. Johannesburg, with its far broader scope, is also very different from its more modest, yet farsighted, predecessor. The focus in Stockholm was on international cooperation on environment, and twenty years later at the historic 1992 Rio Conference - United Nations Conference on Environment and Development - on the broader issue of the relationship between environment and development at the national and international levels. Now, there is consensus around the general concept of sustainable development and that its three pillars - economic, social and environmental - must be integrated in a balanced way. Another major change is the realization at the international policy-making level that in the era of globalization sustainable development can only be achieved through close partnership between Governments, the private business sector and civil society.
The implementation gap
There have been many achievements over the past thirty years. World trade has increased fifteenfold since 1960 and global per capita incomes have doubled. Life expectancy in developing countries is higher as a result of advances in the health area. However, key negative trends have proven difficult to reverse. They were summed up two years ago by 100 environment ministers in the Malmö Ministerial Declaration: " … the burden of poverty on a large proportion of the Earth's inhabitants counterposed against excessive and wasteful consumption and inefficient resource use that perpetuate the vicious circle of environmental degradation and increasing poverty".
The income gap between the richest and the poorest fifth of the world population increased from 30:1 in 1960 to 90:1 today. The richest fifth account for nearly 86 per cent of total private consumption. This has taken place in a world where half of the population lives on less than US$2 a day, where 1 billion persons are unemployed, underemployed or working poor, and where 250 million children are working. We have witnessed a doubling of fish catch in the last 25 years, with more than 60 per cent of marine fish on the verge of not reproducing stock, or beyond that threshold. Meanwhile, climate change is occurring at a rapid pace, with an increase in average global temperature by 0.4 degrees Celsius in the past forty years.
It is time to recognize that sustainable development has become a matter of survival, which must be given the same priority as traditional security policy. The landmark agreements from Rio show the way, but the key problem before Johannesburg is that implementation is seriously lagging. The scientific community tells us that we have perhaps 20 to 25 years to rectify the situation. The widespread insight that business as usual is not an option is inevitably tempered by our incapability to take long-term decisions in our own interest as human beings. Perhaps this is starting to change. Experiences from international negotiations over this thirty-year period give a perspective to the complex challenges of today, which could be useful to negotiators and decision makers. With this perspective in mind, below are some reflections.
From Stockholm to Rio to Johannesburg
Maurice Strong (left) with Conference President Ingemund Bengtsson at the closing of the Stockholm Conference on 16 June 1972. (Pressens Bild AB; European Pressphoto Agencies Union) In the 1960s, shortcomings were starting to appear in the United Nations system, a mirror of the sectorial administrative organization in nation States. The system was not designed to deal with rapidly emerging issues of a cross-sectorial and transnational nature that resulted from the unprecedented scientific and technological advances after the Second World War. One example was the environment, a victim of the negative side effects of these developments.
Through its Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Sverker Åström, Sweden placed this fundamental question on the agenda of the General Assembly in 1968. He proposed that a global action-oriented UN conference be convened in 1972 to increase awareness and to identify environmental problems which needed international cooperation. In a brilliant diplomatic operation, he overcame resistance from strong Western European opponents who argued that the environment was best handled in one of the sectorial agencies so that additional requests for development assistance could be more easily deflected. It was clear that a major structural reform of the UN system to address these problems in a comprehensive and holistic way was not within reach at that time. A similar institutional constraint still exists today, some 34 years later. The Conference model has been successful, but the increasingly integrated and complex global development agenda urgently requires new approaches. This issue is at the centre of the agenda for Johannesburg.
The Stockholm Conference
The Secretary-General of the Stockholm Conference, as well as of the Rio Conference, was Maurice F. Strong of Canada. His role was pivotal for both events. He brought to these processes a very special and constructive combination of vision and pragmatism, which yielded impressive results in spite of the institutional limitations.
Again, the importance of personal leadership - and there have been many more examples - was demonstrated. With the sound bottom-up approach of the Johannesburg process, the leadership factor has tended to become somewhat blurred, but remains key for success, and high-level political involvement in the Summit preparations in all countries is essential. The motto of the Stockholm Conference was "Only One Earth", a revolutionary concept for its time. After several decades of phenomenal advances in information technology, this vision is now easily understood and shared by almost all.
There were world leaders present, among them Indira Gandhi, who echoed strong sentiments among developing countries when she emphasized the close interrelation between mass poverty and the environment. Unwittingly, she set the stage for the next thirty years of international deliberations on these issues. This time was needed to make the conceptual breakthroughs, which can allow the international community at the beginning of the twenty-first century to start to embrace only one and not several agendas of development.
The Conference took place in the middle of the cold war with the Soviet Union and its allies absent; however, this did not seriously affect the results, as the Soviet Union participated actively in the unique preparatory process for the Stockholm Conference. It was also the first major international event in which the People's Republic of China participated as a new member of the United Nations. This led to a protracted and difficult renegotiation of the draft declaration, where China came close to formally opposing the text on the population issue. In the end, all decisions were taken by consensus-a tradition that continues until now.
As a result of Stockholm, environment ministries and agencies were established in more than 100 countries, a key requirement for carrying forth the results of the Conference. It also marked the beginning of the explosive increase in non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations dedicated to environmental preservation. In twenty years, an estimated 100,000 such organizations were formed.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in Nairobi to act as a catalytic instrument to promote the results of the Conference. The Declaration and the Action Plan, with recommendations for international action adopted at Stockholm, were particularly instrumental in the subsequent rapid development of international environmental law. Principle 21 of the Declaration has special significance; it contains the provision that States have the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment beyond their own borders. From a handful in the 1960s, more than 200 global conventions are in place today with their own Conferences of Parties and secretariats.
However, over the years this positive evolution became a victim of its own success through increasing fragmentation and lack of coherence in the overall system of international environmental governance. The Johannesburg Summit will consider steps to rectify this situation, including a desirable strengthening of UNEP as the centre of the system. UNEP has achieved many successes since the 1970s, notably in the area of international environmental law and assessment. But partly due to the relative weakness of the environment area of national administrations, the Programme has not been allowed to live up to its true potential as foreseen at the time of Stockholm.
As the globalization process accelerated in the last 25 years of the twentieth century, the Conference was used as a model for a series of similar United Nations events to try to come to grips with interlinked and related problems of a cross-sectorial nature, such as population, the food crisis, urbanization, human rights, social development and gender. They have all contributed to what is now a comprehensive global development agenda, including the Millennium Declaration Goals.
Debate on the relationship between environment and development
Various factors, among them the oil crises, contributed to a certain loss of momentum in the 1970s. At the tenth anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, the question was how lost ground could be regained. In reply, the UN General Assembly established a special independent Commission of eminent persons, under the chairmanship of then Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway. When the conclusions of the Brundtland Commission were published in 1987, the political climate was more receptive, as economic prospects in the industrialized world were more positive and serious threats to the global ecosystem were starting to emerge.
The Commission developed conceptually the relationship between environment and development, where divisions between North and South had not diminished since Stockholm. In fact, this issue had already been seriously debated before the Conference. Vocal arguments were raised, particularly by Brazil and Algeria, claiming that the Conference on the environment was a rich man's show to divert attention from the development needs in the underprivileged parts of the world. An influential seminar in Founex, Switzerland in the spring of 1971 concluded that there is no inherent contradiction between environment and development, and that these two concerns should be mutually supportive. This secured attendance from most developing countries, but the question could not be substantively settled at the Stockholm Conference.
An increasing consensus developed in the 1980s that environmental degradation undermines the basis of economic development unless radical steps are taken. At the same time, developing countries took the view that if poverty and underdevelopment were given priority, a sound and sustainable environment would follow.
The Commission emphasized the importance of economic growth and promoted the concept of "sustainable development", defined as a growth that satisfies today's needs without jeopardizing the needs of future generations. Protection of the environment should not be seen as a sectorial interest but as an integrated component in all economic and social development. The report recommended a sound management of natural resources, energy saving and a population size in harmony with the productive potential of the ecosystems. It also argued for a strong increase in capital flows and improvements in terms of trade for the developing countries, and other measures to reduce the gaps in living standards between rich and poor countries. The agenda was thus set for the Rio Conference, with major implications for the Johannesburg Summit fifteen years later.
It was not possible to use the new concept of sustainable development in the title of the Rio Conference. Influential developing countries, while recognizing the importance of limiting pressures on the ecosystems, feared reductions in their freedom of action. By keeping the term "environment and development", a certain ambiguity could be maintained. This made it easier to argue that the responsibility to take action against environmental destruction primarily rested with the industrialized countries which, in their view, had caused the problems in the first place.
At Johannesburg, promoting sustainable development is of course the recognized key objective. This does not prevent that underlying attitudes, as described above on the distribution of responsibilities for action, still are very much the same. However, in the years since Rio, there is a gradual and politically important shift in emphasis towards a realization of the key importance of national and local actions, including systems of good domestic governance.
The Rio Conference
Children from around the world presented their environmental concerns at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Mr. Nitin Desai (second from left) is Secretary-General of the Johannesburg Summit.
In 1989, the General Assembly decided to convene the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. The host country was Brazil, whose attitudes and policies had undergone major changes since Stockholm. The Rio Conference was a summit attracting some 120 heads of State or Government. The United States, which had played a leading role twenty years earlier, took a restrictive position. Nevertheless, the Conference took place in a spirit of high hopes after the end of the cold war and became a success. It adopted three documents: the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21 and the Statement of Forest Principles. Two global Conventions - on climate change and on biological diversity - were opened for signature and shortly followed by a desertification convention.
The Rio Declaration represents a delicate balance of principles, among them those of common and differentiated responsibility, polluter pays, precaution and liability. The Forest Principles reflected a hard-fought first global consensus on forests, which has since been further developed. Agenda 21 is a detailed blueprint for action into the twenty-first century, with a focus on integrating environment considerations in development, and also covering action at the national level, underlining national responsibility. This was a significant breakthrough. An attempt was made to cost the recommended measures, demonstrating the urgent need for additional financial resources to implement Agenda 21; the bulk would have to come from the domestic public and private sectors. At the same time, as part of the overall political agreement between industrialized and developing countries, the former reaffirmed their commitment to reach the accepted United Nations target of 0.7 per cent of gross national product for official development assistance (ODA). This did not include the United States, which had not made an original commitment in 1970.
A special financial mechanism - the Global Environment Facility (GEF) - was set up to deal with global environmental problems, where industrialized countries accepted a special responsibility. Through the GEF, some $11 billion have so far been disbursed. By comparison, an additional $50 billion a year will be needed to implement the Millennium Declaration goal of halving the number of persons living in absolute poverty by the year 2015. It is clear that such a magnitide of resources will have to come from a variety of sources, particularly domestic ones. External private financial flows have also become much more significant in volume than ODA during the 1990s. However, ODA remains a primary lifeline, particularly for the least developed countries. It is a case in point that the $50 billion roughly corresponds to the financial commitments made by the industralized countries in Rio, which as of yet have not been fulfilled.
The Rio Conventions reflect the broader concept of sustainable development. The Conventions on biological diversity and on desertification suffer from problems of implementation related to inadequate financial resources and lack of institutional capacity in developing countries. In a promising development, the Kyoto Protocol to the Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1997, containing in the first phase a series of binding, although modest, measures to respond to climate change that go straight into the heart of the industrial civilization. The Protocol will hopefully enter into force around the time of the Johannesburg Summit. Again, the United States has opted to step aside.
The Rio Conference resulted in the establishment of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), under the UN Economic and Social Council, to oversee the implementation of Agenda 21. The Commission has had some positive impact, including promoting dialogues between stakeholder groups and Governments. In spite of its broad sustainable development agenda, the CSD meetings had been attended largely by environment ministers.
At Rio, the non-governmental presence was very prominent. A significant informal involvement of private business leaders also took place, a first sign of an even more active involvement of these key actors, which has increased further as we approach the Johannesburg Summit. The five-year review in 1997 was a disappointment. Three years later, the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals at the Millennium Assembly in 2000 inspired new hope as the international community took a decisive step towards focusing its development efforts clearly on implementing agreed targets.
The road from Stockholm has gradually expanded in an ever more complex network of paths, which will come together at Johannesburg. From there, another journey will start.
The entire sustainable development agenda is now on the table. Again, the crucial importance of decisive leadership must be underlined. Ten years ago at Rio, world leaders demonstrated their personal commitment to the Conference and its results. Now, they are expected to take clear and tangible steps to reduce the discrepancy between commitments and action. With the new challenges of the accelerating globalization, and with September 11 just behind us, the case for a true global partnership cannot be made more convincing.
The clear recognition by most States that a sound and sustainable development is dependent on a balance of economic, social and environment considerations is perhaps the single most important achievement of the past thirty years. This new-found consensus that eluded us for so many years is rapidly changing mindsets and opens the way for integrated and more long-term policy decisions at all levels.
Solidarity between the rich and poor is squarely part of this equation. Therefore, issues such as improved terms of trade, market access, elimination of harmful subsidies, capacity-building, improved debt relief and increased ODA are intrinsic parts of the global sustainable development agenda. The Summit will need to demonstrate progress in these areas, building on other relevant processes, such as Doha and Monterrey.
Among the key substantive issues, the Johannesburg Summit will also consider measures to effectively address the poverty-related goals in Agenda 21 and the Millennium Declaration, eliminate unsustainable production and consumption patterns, protect the natural resource base and improve national coherence and governance structures at all levels. If Johannesburg can show a critical mass of concrete deliverables, it will reflect a new departure. Areas that are being discussed include access to energy and fresh water, health and special support to Africa. Partnerships with the private business and civil society will be essential components to reinforce the new government commitments.
The lessons on the road from Stockholm were hard earned and now deserve to bear fruit for all to see.
Links:
Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (
http://www.unep.org/Documents/Default.asp?DocumentID=97) (Stockholm 1972)
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (
http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html) (Rio 1992)
Agenda 21 (
http://www.unep.org/Documents/Default.asp?DocumentID=52)
Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (
http://www.unep.org/unep/rio.htm)
Statement of Forest Principles (
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-3annex3.htm)
Ambassador Lars-Göran Engfeldt has been Chief Negotiator for global environment and sustainable development issues at the Ministry of the Environment in Stockholm, Sweden since 1998 and is a member of the bureau of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. He was the Swedish liaison officer in the secretariat for the Stockholm Conference in the early 1970s, and in 1993 was appointed Ambassador in Nairobi and Permanent Representative to UNEP and Habitat.
UN Chronicle, Volume XXXIX
Number 2 2002
Partnerships: Where a Child Dies Each Minute
By Phyllis A. Cuttino, Vice President, United Nations Foundation
Every minute, a child dies of measles in Africa. Although the Western Hemisphere has essentially eliminated measles cases and deaths, with 450,000 children dying from the disease every year on the continent, measles causes more children’s deaths than HIV, tuberculosis or malaria.
And yet, every measles death can be prevented with a simple vaccination costing less than one dollar per child.
As part of the global effort to reduce child mortality, a new public-private partnership has been formed to prevent measles deaths in Africa - the Measles Initiative, a long-term campaign committed to vaccinating approximately 200 million children at risk throughout Africa. Through both supplemental and follow-up campaigns in over 30 sub-Saharan countries, an estimated 1.2 million deaths will be prevented, bringing measles deaths in the region to near zero by 2005.
The Initiative is a United States-based partnership, bringing together the technical expertise, experience and strength of the United Nations Foundation, the American Red Cross, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Through the Initiative, the UN Foundation provides funding and financial mechanisms to move needed funds to the African countries; UNICEF provides vaccines and supports social mobilization activities; and WHO helps design the policies and health guidelines tailored for each country to ensure that proper, safe steps are taken during immunization campaigns.
Before the measles vaccine became available in 1962, virtually all children contracted the disease, and an estimated 135 million cases and about 7 million to 8 million deaths occurred globally each year.
However, by 1998 approximately 82 per cent of the world’s children under the age of one were reported to have received the measles vaccine, preventing an estimated 2 million deaths. More recently, in Latin America, deaths caused by measles have been reduced to almost zero after a series of supplemental vaccination campaigns conducted during the 1990s.
Building on the success of previous measles elimination efforts in Latin America, supplemental campaigns were carried out in eight African countries last year, the first year of the Measles Initiative. As a result, more than 21 million children in the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Cameroon, Ghana, and Benin were vaccinated against the disease, preventing 47,000 needless deaths during a one-year period.
Because the Measles Initiative not only aims to vaccinate African children against measles but also to help build a sustainable health infrastructure to improve their overall health and well-being, in-country partners are critical to the success of the campaign. African partners include national Ministries of Health, national Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, country and regional WHO and UNICEF offices, with support from the International Federation of the Red Cross and other non-governmental organizations.
Every child deserves a healthy start in life. Every child has the right to be immunized and protected from measles. We have a real opportunity to use the upcoming United Nations Special Session on Children to protect and improve children’s health all over the world by making concrete commitments on their behalf. Working together - the United Nations, NGOs, Governments and the business community - we can make a real difference in the lives of children today, and for the future of the world.
Links
Measles.
http://www.measlesinitiative.org/index3.asp
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