Friday Podcasts From ECSP and MHI

Resilience means different things to different people. For many in the international development and humanitarian communities, building resilience means responding to growing climate risks through disaster mitigation and planning. But for people like Birhani Fakadi, a 39-year old mother of 11 in rural Ethiopia, it also means access to reproductive health and family planning services, says Roger-Mark De Souza in this week’s podcast. Birhani is a “model farmer” who teaches others in her community to adopt sustainable agricultural practices in the face of environmental change. But she was only empowered to do so after taking control of her reproductive health through a development program that combined health and conservation interventions, De Souza says. This raises important questions for resilience programming. “If we want to talk about resiliency we need to be thinking about population dynamics.” A reality check is needed, he says. This year the global population is expected to grow by 82 million people, and the fastest growing areas are often the most vulnerable to climate impacts. “These shocks will be quick hits, so we need to think about how we respond quickly. But how do we set the base for longer-term mechanisms to deal with these shocks and stressors over a period of time?” Population dynamics, climate change, and the connections between food, water, and energy are all part of the equation. We can build resilience by linking social trends with technological innovations, as well as by fostering greater integration and flexibility across development and humanitarian efforts, De Souza says. “A lot of the international programming continues to be in stovepipes. Many think about responding just initially without setting the basis for longer-term strategies…The funding mechanisms that are in place are very much stovepiped also.” One of the most important factors in building resilience is health. “Health is everything. A resilient community is a healthy one. And if you’re unable to address the key health dimensions around communities and think about how you scale that up, resiliency programming will face many more challenges.” Roger-Mark De Souza spoke at the Wilson Center on April 23. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Reducing gender-based violence requires turning our attention to what we normally do not see, says Alfred Omenya of Eco-Build Africa. In this week’s podcast, Omenya, who collaborated on a four-year study investigating all types of violence in four cities around the world, explains how certain forms of gender-based violence are “invisible” in conventional research and policy. Gender-based violence hides in a number of places; culture is one, he says. “We found out that there’s quite a lot of structural violence condoned by society, sometimes not even identified as such, embedded in culture.” Structural gender-based violence is “largely ignored by most researchers and policymakers because it’s assumed that that’s just the way the society is… It’s only when you look at the figures that you are shocked that there has been so much culturally sanctioned rape, for example.” Though gender-based violence occurs in the public domain as well as the private, violence in the home is often overlooked, he says. There are a number of responses available to help curb public violence, including improved policing, hotspot mapping, and mobile and internet technology, but relatively few policy interventions can penetrate the bedroom door. This makes it far more difficult to measure and address. Conventional wisdom also maintains that “the poorer you are the more likely you are to perpetrate gender-based violence,” he says, but Omenya’s research found this may not always be the case. In Santiago, Chile, high rates of gender-based violence were found across all economic classes – the only distinction was that wealthier households hid it better, motivated in part by their perception of gender-based violence as a lower-class phenomenon. The drivers of gender-based violence defy simplistic explanations. What is clear, says Omenya, is “male-female violence is way more complex than patriarchy.” Economic factors, such as the aspirations of the middle class, can transcend patriarchy and create stresses that “translate into direct violence within the family.” Strategies to reduce gender-based violence tend to look at it in isolation. But new research suggests it may be linked to other forms of violence, like political conflict, and should be viewed in a broader societal context. Policy responses should seek to illuminate and address the full range of gender-based violence – including structural, private, and higher-income – rather than focus only on its most visible manifestations, he says. Alfred Omenya spoke at the Wilson Center on February 18. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

India has the second largest – soon to be largest – population of any nation on the planet and boasts a rapidly developing economy, yet it consumes only a fraction of the energy of China or the United States. Much like China before it, the Indian government has proposed an ambitious system of hydroelectric projects in an attempt to catch up. But, says Keith Schneider of Circle of Blue in this week’s podcast, “the Himalayas are pushing back – the landscape is being soiled at an unbelievable rate, the water is already getting to a point of being untenable…it’s not possible, is my conclusion of this current project, that India can get there.” Schneider recently traveled to India as part of “Choke Point: India,” a joint reporting and research project examining the intersection between water and energy in the sub-continent by the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum and Asia Programalongside Circle of Blue, a water journalism organization. “The Himalayas,” Schneider says, are, “if not the most dangerous place, the most treacherous place, the most difficult place to engineer, design, operate, and manage big dams, it’s at the top of the list.” While India has planned new dams at an impressive rate and has an estimated 150,000 megawatts of hydropower potential, it has failed to bring new projects online as quickly, only adding about 1,000 megawatts of hydropower annually. At that rate, “it’s going to take India over a century to reach that 150,000 megawatt potential,” he says. A “Wild West” for Coal Mining As a result, “India’s GDP growth has been slowing over time, particularly in the last two or three years,” and the government has leaned more on coal power, “which also uses an enormous amount of water.” The coal industry is notoriously unregulated and home to some of the most dangerous working conditions in the world, says Schneider. Box mines are no more than square pits, dug by hand in some cases, supported by multi-story ladders constructed from tree branches. The mining industry in Meghalaya State may be “the closest approximation of the Wild West in the United States in 1880 that may exist on the planet…an unregulated, market based, heavily polluted free-for-all.” India’s imperative for energy isn’t set to slow down anytime soon, as it represents a major portion of the world’s population growth every year and extreme poverty persists. Though “growth in total energy consumption and production in India is rising very slowly,” the government wants to speed the process up, committing to generate a staggering 90,000 megawatts of power annually within the next five years, he says. Schneider views this goal as admirable but unrealistic, especially given the natural constraints being encountered in the Himalayas. “For India to succeed, in my view and in view of the project we just completed, India has to develop a new sense of what is the good life, which is deep in the culture of India,” he says. “Building dams in the Himalayas and operating them unsafely? Mining coal in 200-foot deep, incredibly dangerous box mines? And polluting the air the way it’s being polluted? And exposing so many of their people to rising seas? It’s not, in the end, a definition of the good life, and that’s what we found in ‘Choke Point: India.’” Keith Schneider spoke at the Wilson Center on April 2. Download his slides to follow along. Read more stories from “Choke Point: India” on CircleofBlue.org. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.  

A new model of integrated development, combining population, health and environment (PHE) interventions, is efficient, effective, and relatively inexpensive. But more rigorous program evaluations are necessary to prove its value, argues John Pielemeier in this week’s podcast. Pielemeier, who spent a career evaluating programs at USAID, first evaluated the PHE approach for the Packard Foundation in 2005, and found “early PHE programs – mostly in the Philippines, Madagascar, Guatemala, some in Mexico – they met their objectives, they were inexpensive, many community-mobilization techniques would work, and you could get results in a couple of years.” PHE programs combine both reproductive health and conservation interventions in areas with rapid population growth and low access to health services, bringing together two sectors that don’t always interact. “These are things that the health people don’t necessarily want to hear, the environment people don’t necessarily want to hear, but people in the field do, the practitioners: It’s cost-effective to have an integrated program,” he says. “You have one boat going out to an island rather than two in a week." But because it’s a relatively new approach and more complex than single-sector efforts, program evaluations are especially necessary, Pielemeier says. “Many other [development] programs that are evaluated don’t have that need,” he says, because it’s already been decided they’re effective and useful for various reasons. For example, “when Rajiv Shah goes on the Hill and talks about AID’s Feed the Future program, he doesn’t really have to talk a lot about the nuts and bolts of whether agriculture development can work and whether it can have an impact on farmers in certain parts of the world.” Pielemeier cites Lynne Gaffikin, a former PHE fellow and USAID technical adviser, saying PHE programs ought to find ways to account for the “interactivity” that makes them special – “evaluate the invisible changes.” To do this, evaluation must be incorporated into programming from the start. “When you design the program you have to have in mind the impact evaluation later on, 5 years or 10 years down the line. You can’t start the process after the program has been running.” John Pielemeier spoke at the Wilson Center on March 21. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Climate change vulnerability is closely tied to population dynamics, says Kathleen Mogelgaard in this week’s podcast. “We know that population size, composition and spatial distribution around the world is constantly changing, and that these changes do have implications for climate change exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity – the three elements of vulnerability.”  And yet, despite this knowledge, alternative population scenarios are rarely considered in climate assessments. “We do know that things like fertility and population growth can be responsive to policy and programmatic interventions,” she says, and more than 233 million women worldwide currently lack access to family planning but want to delay or prevent pregnancy. Addressing that unmet need could make a major difference in the growth rates of many regions of the world, reducing climate vulnerability along the way. Mogelgaard outlines four ways the links between climate change adaptation and reproductive health strategies need to be strengthened: in adaptation planning frameworks, tools and training, program design, and the evidence base of these connections. The creation of National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) was a major initiative by UN Framework on Convention on Climate Change to create climate adaptation plans for the most vulnerable countries. Most of the plans, in fact, identified rapid population growth as something that exacerbates vulnerability. But when it came to the implementation phase, only a “handful of the NAPAs recognized that family planning and reproductive health services could be part of an adaptation strategy,” Mogelgaard says; fewer still made them a priority, and none were funded. This was a missed opportunity, she says, but there is hope that the NAPA successors – the National Adaptation Plans – may be able to better incorporate reproductive health needs. In the second area for strengthening, tools and training, Mogelgaard says it’s “part of a classical problem that we have, of people being in different sectors and not being able to talk across sectors.” She suggested there is a “deep need” for tools that can “help folks who are scientists, who are dealing with the physical aspects of climate change, understand some of the social dimensions related to population dynamics and reproductive health.” In terms of program design, she says one promising approach is the population, health, and environment (PHE) model of development, which integrates community-based approaches to challenges related to population dynamics, access to health services, and environmental degradation. PHE has an “explicit focus to address family planning among women in these communities,” she says, and is making progress in places like the Philippines, East Africa, and Malawi. She points out the Lake Chilwa Basin Climate Change Adaptation Program in particular, which incorporated family planning into their conservation project after discovering local women were struggling to participate due to lack of access to reproductive health services. “I would love to see more examples like that,” she says, “but to my knowledge I have not heard of other…explicit climate change adaptation programs that are incorporating lessons from PHE.” For the last key area of integration, building the evidence base, Mogelgaard emphasizes the importance of publishing literature on these linkages in peer-reviewed journals. More exposure (and scrutiny) could “boost legitimacy, and better mainstream these ideas within the scientific community focused on climate change.” “We don’t have a lot of evidence about how meeting family planning needs contributes directly to adaptive capacity. We can connect the dots… and yet the direct connection has not been very robustly documented yet in the (continued)

At last month’s launch of the USAID Water and Conflict Toolkit at the Wilson Center, Gidon Bromberg explained that the toolkit is about much more than just conflict. “It’s put very much in forefront the possibilities of peacebuilding,” he says in this week’s podcast. “Water is an opportunity in areas where there aren’t many opportunities.” Bromberg, the Israeli director of EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East, argues that a shared dependence on clean water can bring communities together, even in the most divided places. If you design a program that speaks to both self-interest and mutual gain, which water provides for, “you’re really changing mindsets on the ground,” he says. “Whatever you do of course impacts your community, but whatever your neighbor does also impacts you, and vice versa.” He uses the Jordan River, which has headwaters in Syria and forms the border between Israel/the West Bank and Jordan, as an example. Over the last 50 years, 96 percent of its freshwater has been diverted for domestic and agricultural use, and annual flow dropped from 1.3 billion cubic meters to less than 30 million cubic meters. Despite a treaty signed by Jordan and Israel 20 years ago, there was “no political will” to implement the water rehabilitation aspect of it. In 2013, however, after years of working through a cross-national committee on rehabilitation which included many local leaders, the Israel Water Authority announced their decision to pump water regularly from Lake Kinneret into the lower Jordan River to restore its suffering ecosystem: "I had a water minister from both sides come and say, ‘You guys, you environmentalists, you’re dreamers, you’re tree-huggers! Water is too scarce! We’re not going to waste water to allow it to flow down the River Jordan. We’re not going to allow water to go beyond our borders and empower the other side, the enemy.’ Well, that was said to us a decade ago. Today, that same leadership is carrying the flag of rehabilitating the Jordan River. This is their project, this is their political leadership, this is their success." Such a successful initiative “didn’t happen by accident,” Bromberg says. It took creating political will, “and the people who created that political will were the kids in the schools because they were first, and the leaders followed them, not vice versa.” Bromberg believes that will for change starts from the bottom-up, through public awareness and practical educational initiatives on where water comes from, and then “doing the same thing next door, with the community on the other side.” Gidon Bromberg spoke at the Wilson Center on February 24.

Effective development interventions often require thinking outside the box. In southern Malawi’s Lake Chilwa basin, where environmental degradation, public health, and population dynamics intersect in unpredictable ways, people like Deepa Pullanikkatil of Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) are challenging conventional thinking with promising results. Decreasing water and land availability are growing problems around Lake Chilwa, says Pullanikkatil in this week’s podcast. Population growth is rapid, driven in part by a ban on contraception that inflated fertility rates from 1964 to 1994. By 2032, water availability is expected to reach about 300 cubic meters per person per year, or 12 percent of current U.S. availability, according to Pullanikkatil. “We have right now about 0.2 hectares of land per person, which is about half the size of a football field…You can imagine if there are 9 people or 10 people in a household – how will they survive on half of a football field to produce their food?” Climate change adds another layer of complexity. Temperatures have risen by 0.9 degrees over the past 40 years, Pullanikkatil says, and changing rainfall patterns and extreme weather events increasingly threaten agricultural livelihoods. In 2012, as much as 70 percent of the lake dried up, devastating local communities and prompting an outbreak of cholera. “It was quite a shock for us,” she says. The outbreak was traced to feces contamination from zimbowelas, or floating huts, which enable migrant fishermen to live on the lake for months at a time, but lack proper sanitation. Pullanikkatil’s work on the Lake Chilwa Basin Climate Change and Adaptation Program revealed more links between health and the environment. She and her team were concerned about the lack of female participation in the program and, upon further investigation, discovered two key issues. First, women reported they were simply too busy raising families to take part in climate adaptation efforts – and not entirely by their own volition. Pullanikkatil reported a high unmet need for family planning, which her team addressed through advocacy and education. They also lobbied to include population issues in Malawi’s National Climate Change Policy. “People were asking, ‘why do you want to include population in climate change policy?’ But we were able to bring out the linkages and convince them,” she says. Second, women were often sick. The program discovered a debilitating parasite called bilharzia was spreading through irrigation systems that had been originally installed to help farmers adapt to climate change. After convincing local authorities of the scale of the problem – disease prevalence rates were as high as 49 percent rates in some areas – medication was distributed more widely. “We’re not health experts; LEAD is an environmental organization,” says Pullanikkatil. But by identifying cross-sectoral links and partnering with others, she and her colleagues have been able to address some of the basin’s most difficult health and environmental concerns. “We are now talking of systems thinking,” she says. A holistic, cross-sectoral approach is needed, or, as expressed in a Malawian proverb, “It takes many hands to fix the roof.” Deepa Pullanikkatil spoke at the Wilson Center on February 10. Download her slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

What’s the best way for America’s chief development agency to help other countries reach prosperity and democracy? Increasingly, it’s creating partnerships not just with other governments, but with the private sector too, says USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah in this week’s podcast. “When we think about the future of engaging the world through developmental activity, we’re not thinking anymore about just paying for infrastructure and services, as important as those activities are,” says Shah, who spoke at the Wilson Center on February 14. “Instead, we’re now thinking about how do we build the kinds of partnerships that really, in a results-oriented way, can reshape the vulnerability in the world in which we live.” USAID is working with a host of companies: Google, which does everything from “mapping Lahore communities to find and vaccinate young kids” to “helping to invest in entrepreneurs creating new businesses to tackle extreme poverty and make a living for themselves by using private means;” Cargill, which was able to “redirect a $7 million shipment of rice and put it quickly into the Somalian economy” to reach famine-affected areas; Wal-Mart, which is reaching “hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers” with technical assistance and connecting them to a market that “is going to be there in the long haul and sustain their gains;” and GE, which is helping to bring power to hundreds of health clinics in East Africa. This “new model of development,” as Shah puts it, now composes 40 percent of USAID’s programming, and he said the hope is to increase that over time. “What that effectively means is that when there are disasters, instead of simply providing aid assistance, we’re also laying the groundwork for recovery and rehabilitation.” What Does America Stand For? The U.S. response to Typhoon Haiyan is an example of the power of these partnerships, Shah says – and the two most important things about the response were “far from the cameras.” The first happened before the storm hit on November 8: the U.S. shared predictive and climate data that allowed the Philippine government to evacuate 700,000 people. “We all saw those early estimates of death toll being far higher than what people ultimately found was the consequence, and it’s in large part because in partnership we were able to get that done,” Shah says. The second was getting energy and food systems and health clinics back in operation, which was in part due to “military and developmental humanitarian partners doing great work,” but also “pulling together a consortium of companies – mostly local – that got those systems back up in running and did so quickly.”  “This discussion should really be about what America stands for in the world and how we stand for it,” says Shah: And the answer to that question cannot only and just always be what our military is doing. It’s got to be more comprehensive in a manner that captures certainly our diplomatic and development efforts in government, but also captures the full range of American institutional partnerships around the world in business, science, innovation, and technology. Rajiv Shah spoke at the Wilson Center on February 14 as part of the “National Conversation” series, co-sponsored by NPR. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Gender-based violence in developing countries is more than just a product of culture, war, extreme poverty, or historical patriarchy; it’s also a result of rapid economic change and urbanization, according to Alison Brysk, a fellow at the Wilson Center and the Mellichamp professor of global governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I think culture plays an important role, but I think there are some broadly-based features of patriarchy that change and morph over time,” Brysk says in this week’s podcast. “If we compare, for example, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, these are countries that have very different cultural roots, and they’re all democracies…where the governance is troubled, but they’re not war zones and they’re not the poorest or most patriarchal.” So why do they have some of the highest rates of gender-based violence? Brysk hazards a theory based on her recent studies: They’re all rapidly developing and urbanizing. “There’s a dynamic process here,” she says. “It’s not just the static features, it’s not just, for example, poverty; it’s economic change, it’s inequality.” Brysk argues that crowding, resource competition, and breakdowns in urban governance fuel violence against women, as well as high levels of inequality and rapidly shifting gender roles. “It’s not just how urban a country is, it’s whether there’s a process of urbanization. Social change tends to be a driver and a tipping point for conflict and violence of all kinds.”  Understanding the drivers of gender-based violence is only becoming more important as rates and intensity appear to be rising in some parts of the world. Mexico, for example, has witnessed an “increasing use of weapons in sexual assault,” and in Africa and India, there are more reports of gang rape and assaults on children, she said. Likewise, reported cases of sexual violence have increased 150 percent over the past five years in Brazil, and 14.8 percent of women report they’ve been sexually abused in their homes in India, which she points out is 60 million women minimum. How to reverse this disturbing trend is far from clear. “What we need is to assess what we’re finding out about drivers, and where the interventions are, and really do a better job about which interventions are going to get at which of these factors,” Brysk says. Alison Brysk spoke at the Wilson Center on February 18. Download her slides to follow along.

How clean can coal be? What is the future of food security in water-deprived regions, and how will that affect national security? Dennis Dimick, National Geographic Magazine’s executive editor for the environment, discusses some of the most pressing global environmental problems in this week’s podcast. “If you look back to Tunisia, the catalyst for disruption was the price of food,” says Dimick. “In 2008 in Mexico, the riots were over the price of corn. That’s all a direct downstream result of: Was there rain? Could the crops be harvested? Was the harvest that came off the land available and an affordable price?” The interaction between agriculture and water is a global phenomenon. Maps from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GRACE satellite, show “shocking” soil moisture deficits, he says: As there’s rising pressure on water supplies, you have competing demands. There’s this energy-food-water nexus that occurs... In Texas, [for example], there’s very little surface water, so you’re mining fossil water that will run out eventually…to get cheap energy. That may help you in the near-term, but you’re setting up the program for essentially desertification and abandonment in future decades. This food-water-energy nexus is an issue that “needs to be addressed and is not necessarily being included in the narrative right now,” according to Dimick. Perhaps the biggest issues incarnation of this nexus is the concept of “clean coal.” “It is technologically feasible,” he says of carbon capture but the question is, “is it economically sustainable?” Since the turn of the century, coal has grown faster as a primary energy source for the global economy “than virtually all other energy resources combined.” But coal-burning power plants remain one of the leading contributors of greenhouse gas emissions and are extremely water intensive. Further, “when you build pipelines, when you build coal plants, you’ve made huge capital investments for decades,” Dimick says. “And that sets an energy path for you…[tying] yourself more to oil or other carbon sources…foreclosing or precluding choices that you might have made otherwise in investing in non-carbon emission energy.” Dennis Dimick spoke at the Wilson Center on January 24 about the biggest environmental headlines in the year ahead at an event co-sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists.  Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Sexual assault remains distressingly common throughout the world and too often it’s the victim who gets the blame, says Nancy Schwartzman, filmmaker and executive director of Tech 4 Good, in this week’s podcast. “A lot of services for young women tell them how to dress and to watch their drink,” she says. Schwartzman and Tech 4 Good are trying to change that through their Android and iOS app, Circle of 6, which Schwartzman believes cultivates a narrative of empowerment. “Our goal is to meet people where they are, which might be at a party with a lot of alcohol.”  Sexual assault and gender-based violence is a global phenomenon encountered by many international development programs. At least one in three teens in the United States report experiencing abuse in their relationship, 67 percent of Mexican women report experiencing sexual or inter-personal violence, and nearly half of all women in Kenya experience rape in their lifetime, Schwartzman said. Circle of 6 was created in response to a 2011 challenge from the White House to create a technological tool that addresses gender-based violence for college-age women. The app allows users to quickly and discreetly contact up to six friends using a pre-written message if they find themselves in an uncomfortable or dangerous situation. Users can send GPS information on their location, request a ride, or prompt a friend to call them in order to have an excuse to leave a conversation. Circle of 6 also contains regionally tailored information on emergency hotlines and information on healthy relationships and sexual assault. “Circle of 6 is really the intersection of stories, privacy, and interactivity,” Schwartzman says. “A lot of apps will give you information [but] young people – myself included – that’s not how I like to use an app. I want my app to be interactive, I want my app to connect to people and really, truly in that way be social.” Schwartzman believes developing a strong network of peers is critical to empowering young women, especially when local authorities often prove to be slow or non-responsive when it comes to sexual assault. Circle of 6 is “trying to not link our users to the police, because the police are not always safe spaces for victims,” she says: We wanted to make something that was simple, that emphasized relationship and community building…We wanted to make this look like a game…so if someone is in an abusive relationship, and a boyfriend or partner is looking over their shoulder, it doesn’t look like a police/danger thing. Mobile phones are now nearly ubiquitous, and in parts of the world, they’re helping to connect and empower previously marginalized women. Nine out of ten women report they feel safer because of their phones, 87 percent of citizens in Africa own mobile phones, and 90 percent of college students say texting is an important part of building friendships, Schwartzman says. Circle of 6 has gained a significant amount of traction, particularly on U.S. college campuses and in urban areas. Schwartzman says they have recently stepped up efforts in India too. The high-profile gang-rape and murder of a girl in New Delhi in 2012 was a major catalyst. “We had 400 users…and it spiked up to 3,000 in a month,” she says. Overall, the app now has more than 100,000 users in 32 different countries. While Schwartzman still sees some challenges in making the app effective everywhere – Circle of Six’s efforts are now focused on making resources available for non-smartphone users and tailoring the app to be more useful for women living in rural areas – she believes it can make a positive impact. The key, she says, is giving young women the information they need to defend their personal rights. “Young people go to each other in a peer to peer model…and that ca(continued)

HIV-positive persons in all segments of society face intense marginalization, but the effect is immensely compounded for women and expecting mothers. In Central America, where at least 57,000 women are living with HIV, the stigmatization is so great that many are denied basic reproductive rights, says Harvard University’s Tamil Kendall in this week’s podcast, from the Maternal Health Initiative. Following a community-based survey on reproductive rights violations in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, Kendall noticed a clear trend of withheld care and abuse at the hands of health care workers for HIV-positive women, with some survey participants recounting harrowing ordeals. “There’s fear about the reactions women get [from health care providers],” Kendall said, and the stories of those surveyed show that it is, “a reasonable fear.” Despite medicine and techniques that can make mother-to-child transmission extremely unlikely, HIV-positive women were denied access to contraceptives and told they should not become pregnant. Some were even operated on unwittingly. “Some women don’t even know they’ve been sterilized until they try to get pregnant and then someone looks in their medical records,” Kendall said. She recounted one case of a woman being made to make her mark on a consent form while still recovering from anesthesia after a caesarian section. Misinformation on the part of health care providers is part of the problem. “Many times, providers are operating under false assumptions about the risk of transmission, which is added to already existing discrimination and stigma and produces these kinds of problems,” Kendall said. “Only 45 percent [of women surveyed] had received information on how to reduce the risk of transferring HIV to their partner.” The result is a wholly inadequate health care experience: “Under half of the women [surveyed] considered that they had received comprehensive reproductive health services, and in fact 41 percent said that they have been discriminated against by health care workers specifically when seeking reproductive services.” With such a high level of stigmatization and discrimination, change may be a slow process, but governments need to take the first step, she said. “In order to protect reproductive rights as human rights…[states] need to implement rights-based training for HIV providers around reproductive health, and to disseminate cutting-edge knowledge about treatment as prevention and about the low vertical rates of HIV transmission and sexual transmission.“ Tamil Kendall spoke at the Wilson Center on January 13. Download her slides to follow along. Note: Some statistics have been updated since the initial presentation. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Trade is “the lifeblood of Darfur’s economy,” says Margie Buchanan-Smith in this week’s podcast. Buchanan-Smith, a visiting fellow at Tuft University’s Feinstein International Center and the lead author of a recent study on livestock trade in Sudan, presented at the Wilson Center in November on the Feinstein Center’s collaboration with the UN Environment Program studying pastoralism in Sudan during the last decade of conflict. “The reason we think this work is so important is that actually you can understand a lot about the conflict dynamics by understanding trade dynamics – whose trading with who, where is it safe to trade, [and] which trading routes the trade is using,” she says. Trade is a “key point of connection between different livelihood groups and different ethnic groups, and it has, for decades and centuries, been a very important factor in building those social ties.” Buchanan-Smith says she and her team saw “constantly shifting trading activity according to the conflict dynamics” during their three-year study. “As we know, traders are extremely flexible and adaptive, and Darfur’s traders I think have a reputation for their entrepreneurialism.” Based on rough estimates, Darfur’s livestock trade may have contracted by as much as 50 percent in the early years of the conflict – longer routes, armed guards, and informal taxes at security checkpoints increased costs by as much as 900 percent, she says. But still, trade continued. Pastoralists and traders developed longer trade routes to avoid the worst areas, reduced herd sizes to lessen risk, and shifted trade hubs to more secure towns. The cash-crop market also contracted significantly during the violence and has only recently recovered, albeit marginally, says Buchanan-Smith. She explains that the conflict affected some crops more than others. For example, sesame has a very narrow harvest window of just one week; if the farmer losses access to the field during that week, then the harvest is lost. “Yet there are some economic opportunities associated with Darfur’s shifting settlement pattern,” she says. Urbanization has created a burgeoning dairy industry, rising demand for meat, and a growing trade in hides and skin going to West Africa. “In both the livestock trade study and the cash crop study, we found examples of trade agreements being made between groups that were otherwise hostile to each other in the current conflict,” she says. “When you have a conflict that’s going on for a decade and more, it’s incredibly important to understand that bigger picture, and to understand what’s happening in terms of the wider economy, particularly to inform any interventions to support livelihoods and to find ways of actually supporting the economy in the longer term.” Buchanan-Smith spoke at the Wilson Center on November 13. Download her slides to follow along.  Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

“If girls and young women are often thought of as the forgotten drivers of development, their sexual and reproductive health is almost entirely absent,” says the Guttmacher Institute’s Heather Boonstra in this week’s podcast. Speaking at the launch of the latest State of the World Population report, which focuses on improving health care for adolescent girls, Boonstra highlights three actionable recommendations from the report: promoting the right to age-appropriate, comprehensive sexuality education; reaching girls 10 to 14 years old; and investing in appropriate services for young people. The UNFPA report is welcome, Boonstra says. The Guttmacher Institute found in a recent door-to-door survey in sub-Saharan Africa that myths about sex, such as “you can’t get pregnant the first time,” were very prevalent. “A lot of adolescents wanted more information, but they really wanted [it] from trusted sources…from teachers and from health care providers,” she says. “They were less interested in getting information from their family or friends.” Boonstra recommends that policymakers address common barriers to youth-friendly health services, such as distance from clinics, fear of stigma, and the perception that services are expensive, and focus on what is important to adolescents, like privacy, confidentiality, education, and relationships. “To be most effective, we really need to reach young people before they begin having sex,” she says, which means getting age-appropriate, mandatory sexual education in the primary school programming. “In many parts of the world adolescents and particularly young women never make it past the primary school years.” “We know that there’s a really direct line between sexual and reproductive health, and being able to be empowered there, and a young woman’s ability to lead a productive life,” Boonstra says. “Therefore investing in this area…is really essential to prosperity and opportunity, whether you’re talking about the young woman, or you’re talking about families and communities, or the national government.”  Boonstra spoke at the Wilson Center on October 30 for the launch of UNFPA’s State of the World Population 2013. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

What does Himalayan ice melt have to do with food security in Cambodia? A lot, when they both significantly affect the flow of the Mekong River. But when it comes to long-term planning across topical and regional lines, development agencies aren’t always as collaborative as they could be – both externally and internally. Recalling a multi-day USAID workshop on the future of development at the Wilson Center, Ohio University’s Geoff Dabelko said there are four major barriers to this kind of connected thinking: “The tyranny of the inbox, the tyranny of immediate results, the tyranny of the single sector, and the tyranny of the uni-dimensional measurement of success.” These barriers, a consequence of bureaucracy and accelerating demands on development practitioners, create incentives to work in topical and regional “silos” and produce results as soon as possible. They also result in poor communication between groups that could otherwise be collaborating, Dabelko says in this week’s podcast. Speaking at the Atlantic Council for the launch of The Future Can’t Wait, which examines societal and technologic trends that might influence development over the next few decades, Dabelko said his chapter in the book began with a focus on the environment but ended up commenting more broadly. “If we do the long-term trends analysis…then how do you put [what we’ve learned] into play? And how well or how poorly are our institutions for doing development set-up to take account of those trends?” he asked. The answer is, not very well, at the moment. A lot of organizations are constrained by funding that’s earmarked for single sectors, like biodiversity or climate change. But in an increasingly connected world, “the periphery” of these sectors – for example how they might overlap with global health or security concerns in another country – is critical, he said. “The challenge becomes, how do we systematically understand those connections?” Dabelko spoke at the Atlantic Council on December 17 for the launch of The Future Can’t Wait.