The Palestinian village Zaatara at the foot of Herodion. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

If Herod the Great was a controversial figure of his time, 2,000 years on the controversy isn’t about his legacy; it’s about who holds the rights to excavate and preserve his artefacts.

A new exhibition at the Israel Museum which, for the first time, displays the king’s relics, might serve as a great tribute to him, but is also a powerful reminder of how the history of the Holy Land and today’s conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have become intertwined.

On top of a hill “raised to a greater height by the hand of man; rounded off in the shape of a breast,” as Flavius Josephus, Jewish historian of Rome described it, the old monarch had a fortress-palace erected as memorial for himself; and named it after himself – Herodion for Herod.

Herodion, from where the bulk of the exhibition originates, is visible from Jerusalem and dominates the Judaean desert, since 1967 part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank which the Palestinians seek as part of their future state.

Herodion is in Area C, namely 62 percent of the West Bank maintained under full Israeli control since the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords. An Israeli military base protects the site.

The Holy Land changed hands time and again since Herod’s time, but at 758 metres high, the lay of the land looks unchanged – at first glance.

Dotting the surroundings, Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages vie for rights to the land.

Appointed by the Romans, Herod ruled the vassal kingdom of Judaea, part of the Palaestina province of the Roman Empire, for 33 years between 37 and 4 BCE.

“He was a cultural bridge, working on both sides, caught between the exigencies of the Roman Empire and that of Judaism,” says David Mevorah, the exhibition’s curator. “By his people he was regarded as a convert Jew; by Rome as a client king. But Judaea prospered in his time.”

Exquisite tableware from glass and fine and glossy red roman pottery; a statue of Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt; a decorated basin, a gift from his patron Emperor Augustus, whose bust is on display; his royal highness’s bath – all were found in situ.

Adorned with stucco and rare frescoes of sacred landscapes and navy battles painted with pigments on plaster, also imported from Herodion is the royal chamber.

The jewel of Herod’s crown, so to speak, is the reconstruction of his mausoleum which sheltered what archaeologists believe is the sarcophagus in which his body was placed. The man surely possessed a taste for the arts – even on his deathbed.  “He was very aware of historic memory,” comments the curator.

Here nowadays, historic memory refers mostly to competitive national quests.

Excavations at Herodion began in 1972 under Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer. “No one asked us or consulted us, then or now,” protests Jamal Amro, a Palestinian scholar from Bir Zeit University familiar with the site.

“The Israelis plundered Herodion,” he adds. “Israel uses archaeology to shape history and validate the country’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

After prolonged exploration, Netzer uncovered Herod’s tomb in 2007. Two years later, he died in tragic circumstances at the site.

It took three more years to move some 30 tonnes of carved masonry from Herodion to the museum. “We actually moved thousands of fragments to our laboratories, working intensively from here on restoration and reconstruction,” says Mevorah.

“We’ve performed quite an important role for world cultural heritage,” says Israel Museum director James Snyder. But the self-complimentary effusion has been short-lived.

Palestinians complain that Israeli archaeological activities in Palestinian territories are illegal. “According to international law, this is a crime,” declares Amro. “Israel must recognise the rights of the Palestinian nation to their historical sites.”

The Israeli government lists Herodion as a national heritage site. Granted full membership of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Palestinian Authority now wants to nominate Herodion for recognition as a world heritage site.

“The Oslo Accord makes Israel responsible for custodianship over archaeology in the West Bank until a final settlement is reached,” retorts Snyder.

A ruthless ruler who had the last lineage of the Hasmonean dynasty that ruled before him executed, including high priests, opponents, his beloved second wife and three of his children, Herod was feared by his subjects. In Christianity, he’s ‘Horrid Herod’, thought of as a serial baby killer.

At the museum, he is mostly remembered as a master builder for his colossal projects, including expansion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem revered in Judaism. Centuries later, the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary would be edified on its ruins.

For Amro, “Herod and Herodion are important not only to Jews but to Christians and Muslims. We should be in charge.”

“We borrowed the artefacts as authorised loans; we’ll retrocede them once the exhibition wraps by year’s end,” assures Snyder.

The question is where the relics will be returned to, and to whom. “To the authority in charge of archaeology in the West Bank,” clarifies Mevorah. That is, to the ‘Civil Administration’, a well-known euphemism for Israeli military authorities in the West Bank.

“They’ll never give back the artefacts to us, forget it,” protests Amro, not sure himself whether “it” refers to the site and its treasures or to the West Bank.

“When Israel signed the Camp David peace accord with Egypt in 1979 and withdrew from Sinai,” recalls Snyder, “there was a very intelligent division of material: what related to Egyptian heritage was returned to Egypt; what related to Jewish heritage stayed with Israel.”

Would such a model be applicable to Israel and Palestine were peace to be signed between them? “I’m just a museum director, but it was well done,” says Snyder.

From Zimbabwe to El Salvador, women in poor countries suffer the brunt of climate change, but also learn to recover from disasters, to adapt and even to find opportunities in the new weather conditions.

Turkana women in Kenya. Turkana district was one of the hardest-hit areas in the Horn of Africa in the 2011 drought that affected the entire region. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

The skyscraper Qatari capital city of Doha is a far cry from Cecilia Kibe’s home in Turkana district, a remote area in Kenya inhabited by mostly nomadic communities and pastoralists hit hard by the effects of climate change.

But the agriculturalist-cum-sociologist has come here to the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), thanks to funding from the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice (MRFCJ), to sit and listen as scientists, researchers, top government officials and activists argue their case.

Kibe is on a mission – to gather as much knowledge as possible to share with the women in her community. Turkana district was one of the hardest-hit areas in the Horn of Africa in the 2011 drought that affected the entire region.

According to Oxfam International, Turkana district has gone without good rain for about five years. And this has affected the community severely. In 2011 the United Nations news agency IRIN reported “Turkana has experienced malnutrition rates of up to 37.4 percent; the highest recorded in 20 years and more than double the U.N. World Health Organization emergency threshold of 15 percent.”

Back in Turkana district, Kibe runs an information-sharing network that she started because she refused to allow herself and the other women in her village to continue suffering from hunger as they repeatedly lost their crops in the prolonged drought.

“Most women in African rural communities still attribute the impact of climate change to different myths, including that God is upset with people,” Kibe told IPS.

“I work with 4,000 champions (women) who educate their fellow community members and help them come up with adaptation strategies,” she said. She named her organisation Kenya Climate Justice Women Champions, and has now expanded her network to benefit over 3,000 households.

“In turn the women identify their areas of need and, based on the information I get from international conferences such as this one, we start projects that address those challenges,” said Kibe. The projects are funded by MRFCJ.

She said that often the information from conferences such as COP 18 does not filter down to the people most affected by climate change.

“We need to get the information from this conference to help them understand what exactly is happening,” said Kibe.

Top of Kibe’s priority list of things to tackle is food insecurity. And the cultivation of cassava, a drought-tolerant crop, has been identified as part of the strategy to combat this. Previously people in Kibe’s area grew maize, which often failed because of the lack of rain.

Another priority is addressing water insecurity, Kibe said. Back home, women and children have to travel long distances to fetch water, which in many cases is contaminated.

“We have introduced solar water cleaning, which is a technology that uses a device that easily purifies water when placed in the sun,” explained Kibe. “It’s just a press of a button.”

Women are also encouraged to plant five trees each to combat carbon emissions.

What Kibe is doing is important. According to Trish Glazebrook, a researcher from the University of Texas:  “Knowledge transfer is very important because we know that in as much as women need to adapt, they also have to mitigate through climate smart technologies for their farming and sources of domestic energy.”

She told IPS that women in sub-Saharan Africa are not only victims of climate change, but are also contributing to pollution because they lack the technology to improve their farming methods and remain heavily dependent on agriculture, a sector that contributes to global emissions.

But Robinson, who was the first female president of Ireland, said Kibe’s story was a compelling case of why women should be adequately represented at the COP 18.

“A lot of rural women like Cecilia are doing a lot of work on the ground to adapt, but they are hardly recognised and they work with limited resources,” Robinson said.

Speaking at the first ever Gender Day at COP 18 on Nov. 27, Robinson called for more active participation of women in the conference. For more than 10 years gender organisations have advocated aggressively for this day to be recognised in the climate negotiation process.

“We need gender balance in all the UNFCCC bodies, including the attendance,” she said.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, concurred.

“It’s very dumb not to maximise the participation of a group that is over 50 percent of the world population,” she said.

She said she was proud that the gender text was included in the UNFCCC process, although the words needed to be transformed into action.

Mozambican Minister of Environment Acinda Abreu said that society as a whole needed a mind shift to allow women to make meaningful contributions at all levels of the climate change process.

“Adaptation strategies should prioritise the farmers, particularly women who are mainly into subsistence agriculture, and the communities they live in,” she said.

The special advisor at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Francois Rogers, told IPS that women from all walks of life have to be adequately trained to give them the capacity to participate in policy-formulation processes at the local, regional and international levels.

“It should not be just about meeting quotas, but we should ensure that they have confidence in understanding the issues so that they can fully participate in the decision making,” he said.

Forty-nine percent of all disaster survivors are women. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

In the aftermath of a natural disaster, women are often the most vulnerable. Particularly in rural areas, women suffer disproportionately from inadequate shelter and poor sanitation facilities and are often tasked with rebuilding shattered homes.

The theme for this year’s international day of disaster reduction, led by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), is more relevant than ever: ‘Women and Girls: The [in]Visible Force for Resilience’.

Across India, droughts and floods – which Rajan Joshua of the Society for Education and Development (SEDS) described as “two sides of the same coin” – have put scores of women at risk, but also highlighted their ability to endure and adapt to even the most harsh conditions.

Vikrant Mahajan, chief operating officer of Sphere India, a New Delhi-based non-governmental organisation working on disaster relief operations in the subcontinent, told IPS, “Forty-nine percent of all disaster survivors are women”, many of whom face extreme challenges in the post-disaster period.

While conducting field research for her PhD, Parimita Routray, a student of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Bhubaneswar, encountered shocking tales from rural women across the eastern state of Orissa, which is prone to floods, sea surge, storms, cyclones and seawater incursions.

“I have seen fisher folk using the beach for defecating and using sea water for cleansing,” Routray told IPS. “During my field visits, I have not come across a single water or sanitation programme for fisher folk.”

The lack of facilities itself is a “disaster in the making”, especially in a state that is susceptible to a host of natural catastrophes, she added.

“Women from the Kusupur village in the Puri district of Orissa, told me they find it extremely difficult to manage in flood or cyclone shelters, especially during their (menstrual cycle),” Routray added.

“All kinds of people (live) in those shelters and there is no privacy. A woman by the name of Pramila Pradhan in Puri district told me that women often avoid eating during the day to ensure that they can use the cover of darkness to answer nature’s call.”

At nightfall women must bear the additional risk of encountering floating animal carcasses or live snakes struggling to survive in receding waters. Without proper toilets they are also more likely to contract waterborne diseases, and must guard against epidemics like cholera, malaria, dengue and diarrhoea.

Crime rates, too, rise inevitably along with floodwaters, often hitting women hardest.

Mamata Nayak, the village council chief in Chahabatia village in Puri, told Routray that when outdoor areas used as toilets are submerged by floods, whole families are forced to defecate on dried cow dung cakes inside their homes, and then dispose of the waste in the water outside.

The Kosi River flood, which impacted over 3.3 million people in India’s western Bihar state in 2008, highlighted another aspect of women’s vulnerability to natural crises.

For miles around, agricultural fields were submerged in silt, leaving millions homeless and preventing farmers from cultivating their fields. The desilting process has not been completed to this day, forcing men to migrate in search of employment.

The women left behind were tasked with repairing homes that had been destroyed in the floods, as well as running households on next to nothing.

Even today, “Women (lament) that government officials who interview them for compensation demand that they produce property papers (land deeds) in order to legally claim compensatory housing,” Jaya Jha, coordinator of collaborative advocacy with Sphere India told IPS.

“These women are now desperately in need of shelters, water and sanitation. Inadequate power supplies and a dearth of health care services are worsening the situation,” she added.

Because they bear the brunt of disasters, women are determined to find ways to mitigate the effects of natural calamities.

Mamtha Kulkarni, a Bangalore-based advocate hailing from the Gadag district in northern Karnataka, a highly drought-prone and arid region, told IPS, “Water supply is reliable only twice a month and rainfall is so scanty that growing water-hungry crops like rice and green vegetables is impossible.”

“So instead, women in the villages cultivate gherkins, onions, garlic, tomatoes and aubergines. The only fruit we can grow is bananas. All our food recipes utilise these commodities to balance our nutrition needs – our staple diet includes maize flour-based steamed cakes and lentil salads,” she said.

Annie George of Building and Enabling Disaster Resilience of Coastal Communities (BEDROC), an NGO involved in tsunami relief in the town of Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, believes women-led efforts are the best solution.

“Recovering and strengthening traditional skills is far more sustainable than developing alternate skills and livelihoods. Protection, promotion and expansion of livelihoods should be the approach (…).”

Strong policies, legislation and other supportive structures and networks are “essential and the governments should take this aspect very seriously”, she added.

In the Anantapur district of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh – a region afflicted by drought in six out of every 10 years – droughts and floods are becoming more frequent due to climate change.

“For SEDS (located in Anantapur) it was clear that the women and the community as a whole need to be able to produce, reproduce and invent ways to mitigate disturbance of their livelihoods as a result of climate variations,” SEDS CEO Manil Jayasena Joshua told IPS.

“We support community organisations, (traditional) agricultural practices, natural resource management and health services,” Joshua stressed.

“All our projects, programmes and trainings are aimed at promoting self-reliance for rural women in the disaster-prone Anantapur district. An integrated approach is essential for long term disaster risk reduction,” he added.

(END)

From left to right, Haydee Rodríguez, Violet Shivutse and Josephine Castillo. Credit: Julia Kallas/IPS

Women and girls can be powerful agents of change, but they are disproportionately affected by disasters because of social roles, discrimination and poverty.

The International Day for Disaster Reduction on Saturday this year celebrates the theme of ‘’Women and Girls – the [in]Visible Force of Resilience’’.

IPS correspondent Julia Kallas sat down with three women – Josephine Castillo, grassroots community leader and organiser with DAMPA in Manila, Philippines; Haydee Rodríguez, president of the Union of Women’s Cooperatives, Las Brumas, in Jinotega, Nicaragua; and Violet Shivutse, leader and founder of Shibuye Community Health Workers in Kenya – to talk about the importance of girls and women as actors and leaders for resilience.

Q: You all come from very different backgrounds and contexts. Can you briefly talk about the main challenges you face in regard to building resilience in the community you live in?

JOSEPHINE CASTILLO: I am one of the board directors of my community’s association. It is a homeowner’s association, we have 421 community members and everybody owns their land since 1995. This is due to a successful programme that our association made with the national government, which provided women with mortgages to buy their houses.

We have programmes that bring our community together in case a disaster hits us. We train quick response teams with the collaboration of our local government and our resilience programmes have also a partnership with the Huairou Commission and GROOTS International.

In August, people affected by the floods in Manila were bought to our resettlement sites, which rescue families affected by flooding and earthquake. Natural disasters are happening more often because of climate change so we need to have climate adaptation, disaster mitigation and resilience programmes.

HAYDEE RODRIGUEZ: I am the president of the Union of Women’s Cooperatives, “Las Brumas” in Jinotega, Nicaragua, and we have created 20 grassroots women’s cooperatives with a total of 1,200 associated women and other 960 that are indirectly associated.

In our community we are facing a lot of difficulties with climate change and land ownership allocation. So through our resilience work we created a programme to cultivate food and medicine plants in the houses of our community as well as a programme to help build a better dialogue between community and government.

We have also succeeded in inserting grassroots women to participate in governmental parties. The next elections, which will take place on the 4th of November, have the involvement of 14 grassroots women inside of the parties.

VIOLET SHIVUTSE: When I used to work in an office that registered farmers, I came across lots of working pregnant women who were having problems giving birth. Most of them died during delivery, others had complicated births when the child died or the women had been sick for a long time after.

The main problem was to help and ensure that these women reached the local hospital, because the distance and the high cost of the services did not encourage them. Then I started thinking how we could help these women who are very important for the community. So that is how I started getting involved with community work and women’s health issues.

HIV/AIDS funds, food security, periods of drought and flooding are the biggest problems in my community. Water, sanitation and hygiene are also big problems for children in schools. When I realised these problems were rising, I brought grassroots women together to work on the development of our community. We started a community-based organisation called the Shibuye Community Health Workers, which today brings together 2,036 grassroots women in Kenya who work on these issues.

Q: Why is it important to focus on women and girls in the context of disaster reduction?

JC: Because women and girls are the most affected when it comes to disaster. They need to be prepared and trained. We don’t like to say that we are vulnerable, but we are. When we talk about resilience work we are not only talking about natural disaster. Lack of education also means disaster. Woman and girls cannot get jobs if they are not educated. That is also why women need to be involved in international conferences, to show our needs and fight for our rights.

HR: Women resilience work is important because we need to work for our lives and the lives of our community. Women need to work in resilience because if we do not take care of water, for example, there will be no cultivation and if there is no production, there is hunger.

VS: We believe that resilience starts with women. They are the ones taking care of the rural communities because men migrate to the urban areas to find jobs. So the impact of disaster for women and girls is very high. We encourage women to work in groups so they can understand how to build resilience. Resilience means having food in their houses, resilience means establishing food storages, resilience means identifying natural resources and protecting them. We also believe that it is important to teach our girls the importance of resilience work so when they become adults and mothers they can help their communities.

Q: What is the road to building efficient women-led resilience projects?

JC: It is important to have collaboration and partnerships with local government, institutions and organisations around the world. Also, local to local dialogue is very important. Organisations have to focus on more than one issue, because focusing in only one issue can burn them out, and if that issue is solved you have nothing else to work on. Our programmes came from our people, not from our funders.

HR: I believe we need to work on encouraging women to able to participate of decision making and leadership positions. Organisations should support and encourage women innovations by providing them with resources .Also, grassroots women should share their work and projects with other communities in order to help others developing resilient work too.

VS: First, we need to educate women and girls… because if they are not educated they cannot get involved in community work. Second point is to make women stronger politically and economically. Give them more value and equality within the work environment.

The January floods resulted in the contamination of water sources in Nsjane, including boreholes and dug-out wells, thereby escalating the cholera incidents. Credit: Claire Ngozo/IPS

For many women in Malawi’s disaster-prone southern district of Nsanje, resilience is essential to survive the cyclical flooding.

Twenty-four-year-old Chrissie Davie, a mother of four, saved two of her three children from drowning when water filled her house as she slept early this year.

About 6,157 families lost their property, over a thousand hectares of crop fields were ruined and 343 houses were destroyed in a matter of minutes when tropical cyclone Funso from the Mozambican channel landed on southern Malawi in January. The region is hit annually by high rainfall around this time of year.

“Water came so quickly that by the time I woke up, it was too late for Chimwemwe, my youngest son,” she told IPS.

Chimwemwe was already dead when she reached to pull him out of the floodwaters.

He was only 18 months old.

Davie used an empty drum to float her two remaining children, four-year-old Saulos and two-year-old Moses, to safety.

Chrissie Davie now lives in a makeshift shelter with her children after floods destroyed her house in January. Courtesy: Mabvuto Banda

She reached Chikoje, one of the schools in Traditional Authority Mbenje, southern Malawi.

But within hours, she, together with the others who sought safety there, abandoned the school when the floodwaters rose. They walked for hours to reach a Malawi Defence Forces emergency camp called Nyatwa.

Sandram Chale recalls how in 2003 his wife saved him when flash floods hit their village in Nsanje.

“My wife firmly gripped my right hand and dragged me out of the water that had filled our house as we slept…I was too drunk, too weak to swim,” Chale said. He was talking about the flooding caused by two weeks of torrential rains that destroyed thousands of homes in eight districts, leaving 300,000 people destitute, eight people dead and several missing.

Dorothy Chale did not only save her husband. She also saved her four children from drowning when raging waters crashed into their home after the banks of the Ruo and Shire rivers burst.

These are some of the untold stories of extraordinary bravery by women in this part of the country. But they are not the only ones coping in times of disaster here.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), this landlocked, resource-poor southern African nation is vulnerable to a wide range of shocks and disasters, including yearly flooding and drought once every three to five years.

“Although the likely impact of climate change cannot yet be specified for Malawi with a high level of confidence, forecasts for southern Africa indicate that it is likely to face some of the most extreme climate changes,” the UNDP says.

Because 65 percent of the country’s population live below the poverty line, with an overwhelming large percentage of Malawi’s 16 million people located in rural areas and dependent on maize for their livelihoods, there is a need to “elaborate a national disaster risk reduction strategy and integrate it in government policies and programmes,” according to the UNDP.

Malawi began prioritising risk reduction in 2009, and the country’s Department of Disaster Management Affairs was allocated about 99,000 dollars to raise awareness for disaster risk management in the 2011/2012 budget.

About 3.2 million dollars is set aside for responding to disasters, according to a joint report by the Malawi Economic Justice Network, Christian Aid and the Centre for Environmental Policy and Advocacy. However, this is retained by the Treasury and not the disaster management department.

“The Department of Disaster Management Affairs needs to have its own vote with adequate resources for their activities other than waiting for the same from the Treasury. This would enhance their programming as some of the disasters have actually become very predictable of late,” stated the report titled “2011/2012 Draft National Budget Analysis with Focus on Climate Change”.

Agnes Chembe, 25, has learned through bitter experience the devastating consequences of these “predictable” disasters.

“My house used to be close to the river, but it was swept away during the last floods. It was destroyed,” she told IPS.

She is now living in a grass house about a kilometre from the Shire River.

It is the third time she has been forced to move because of flooding. Like most of the villagers in Nsanje, she now uses local knowledge to prepare for the next floods.

“I know for instance that the coming rainy season will not bring devastating floods like last year’s,” she said.

“But I am already preparing to move upland before disaster strikes,” said the mother of three who lives alone with her children. Her husband, she said, works in Blantyre, the country’s commercial capital, and only returns home once every six months.

District Commissioner for Nsanje Rodney Simwaka described the women in this region as invisible heroines.

“We always look at them as the victims and ignore their resilience in surviving these disasters because most of these women are home alone, their husbands are in town working when floods hit,” he told IPS.

“In most instances it is a woman who makes plans to move some property to another house on the high land, it’s a woman who uses local knowledge on how to survive and save her children first,” said Simwaka.

James Chiusiwa, of the Department of Poverty Management and Disaster Preparedness, agreed.

“What these women do is extraordinary, especially when you look at the fact that they are the most vulnerable in such situations. They survive the floods, continue to feed the family, and sustain the household all the time,” he told IPS.

On Oct. 13 the International Day for Disaster Reduction focused on highlight the need for women and girls to be at the forefront of reducing risk and managing the world’s response to natural hazards. Cyclical natural disasters are not a new phenomenon and it is not uncommon for rivers in this part of Malawi to burst their banks.

However, a recent increase in the frequency and intensity of floods has made the area both dangerous and difficult to farm, according to group village headman Osiyina

“We used to have floods every five years, but now they come almost every year,” he told IPS. “They are also a lot more violent and bigger than before and are now a serious threat to the livelihood of our villages, especially the women and children.”

Davie knows that her village is in a disaster-prone area and she always prepares for the worst. But she breaks down when she remembers how her child died, because she blames herself for being unable to save him.

“This is what I fear most all the time. I cannot afford to lose another child to floods and that in a way is my motivation to stay strong and to be always ready to survive against all odds when disaster strikes,” she said.

It’s been two years since the 2010 freeze left her and dozens of families without corn, potatoes or beans to cover their needs, and without pasture to graze their animals in the rural town of Chare, more than 3,500 metres above sea level in the Andean department of Cuzco.

“There was no food, so the women went with the leaders of the community to the civil defence institute and the agriculture ministry. We got new seeds that are still producing our food today, and we continue to burn manure to produce smoke to protect the crops from freezing,” she told IPS.

Quispe is the president of the Qamayoc Association that provides technical assistance in animal health, the use of medicinal plants, and decent housing for women in local highlands communities, where “life is very sad” because of the poverty, and where even water is scarce, she said.

Indigenous women in rural Peru have to walk longer and longer distances to find firewood. Credit: Elena Villanueva/IPS

“We don’t want handouts from the government – that breeds idleness. We want gender equity, training for women, education and healthcare; we don’t want our children to die because they can’t get medical attention, since it takes a day to walk down from the mountains to reach a health clinic,” she said.

Although Peru has managed to reduce under-five child mortality by 76 percent, severe inequality and high levels of rural poverty pose serious risks to children in areas vulnerable to climate swings and weather disasters.

According to the United Nations children’s fund, UNICEF, children represent 65 percent of those affected by climate disasters, which in the last 10 years have affected 64 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The largely indigenous population of Peru’s southern Andean region is in danger. The region of Puno, over 4,000 metres above sea level, is experiencing freezes that have ruined crops and killed babies. In March, health authorities reported 31 deaths of children from pneumonia.

Ricardina Bedoya, a 64-year-old peasant farmer who lives in the Puno community of Arboleda, is among those who have been facing difficulties.

She lost her crops in the 2011-2012 harvest season when lake Umayo overflowed its banks due to intense rainfall. The grass that her livestock grazed rotted at the roots, and her potato, quinoa, barley and oca – a tuber grown like potatoes – crops were destroyed.

Her land was under water, she had no crops to take to the market, and she was forced to sell off her animals at a low price.

“We had nothing to cook, the kids got sick with whooping cough and bronchopneumonia, and many died before making it to the health post,” she told IPS. “It’s really hard, but we want our daughters to learn to cope with the problems nature throws at us, and to continue on with their lives, their growing of food, their education.”

Although her community had taken prevention measures, these fell short given the magnitude of the flooding. Now they are preparing to apply for government support, to build sheds for the animals and plant crops in new areas.

The efforts of Felícitas Quispe in Cuzco and Ricardina Bedoya in Puno are an illustration of the initiatives led by women who are taking an active role in the face of complex situations that experts attribute to climate change.

Although women are hit hardest by the effects of floods, freezes or drought, they are the ones who assume the responsibilities of feeding and taking care of their families and communities, said Castorina Villegas López, coordinator in Peru for Groots International (Grassroots Organisations Operating Together in Sisterhood), a U.S.-based grassroots women’s leadership development and networking project.

Saturday Oct. 13, International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction, is dedicated by the United Nations to “Women and Girls – the [in]Visible Force of Resilience”, to highlight the role that women and girls play in risk reduction.

Women and girls “organise themselves on the basis of their capacities and skills, and respond, for example, by contributing to food security. And they do this despite the gender inequality that is ignored by society, by the government and by men,” Villegas López told IPS.

In observance of the International Day of Rural Women, Monday Oct. 15, organised groups of Peruvian peasant women will present an agenda of proposals on five climate change-related areas.

IPS had access to the document, signed by women farmers from southern departments (Arequipa, Apurímac, Cuzco and Puno) and northern departments (Cajamarca, La Libertad, Lambayeque and Piura), which calls on local, regional and national authorities to take into account the gender differentiated impacts of global warming, and to apply public policies to put an end to the neglect that rural women suffer.

The five areas covered by the proposals are food security, natural resources, agricultural production and trade, women’s work in the field and the home, and living conditions.

The rural women are asking for a strengthening of irrigation infrastructure, the construction of family and community water storage reservoirs, reforestation with native species, upgrading of housing, access to agro-ecological techniques and inputs, and participation in decision-making spaces, among other things.

Rural girls and women have the highest illiteracy rate in the country: 14.4 percent, compared to 7 percent for the overall population, according to the National Households Survey of 2010. And 75 percent of illiterate people in Peru are women, according to the Defensoría del Pueblo (ombudsman’s office).

Meanwhile, only 63.7 percent of births in rural areas are attended by skilled health personnel, and 19 percent of adolescent girls have been pregnant, according to the ministry of women and vulnerable populations.

“Women have aptitudes that must be strengthened,” and they have “concrete proposals that are contained in their agenda, which the authorities must take into consideration,” said Blanca Fernández of the Centro Flora Tristán women’s centre.

Among the eight objectives of the National Plan on Equality and Gender 2012-2017, approved by the government in July, is recognition of the contribution of rural women to the sustainable management of natural resources.

To that end, the plan proposes that the proportion of women who receive training and technology transfer be increased by 30 percent over the next five years, and that a disaster response and risk prevention plan with a gender focus be designed.

Fernández believes these targets are important, but says that meeting them depends on political will. “Budget funds are needed to make rural women a priority,” she said. “Otherwise, we will not be able to make progress towards the diverse, intercultural Peru that we want.”

Newly-appointed Special Representative for Sustainable Energy for All, Kandeh Yumkella (right), addresses assembled dignitaries at the United Nations. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (centre) and World bank President Jim Yong Kim will provide additional leadership to the energy initiative. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

Under the moniker Sustainable Energy for All, the new initiative aims to establish universal access to modern energy, double the share of renewable energy worldwide and double the rate of improving energy efficiency over the next two decades.

“Our goals are ambitious,” Ban told country leaders during a high-level discussion on the initiative taking place on the sidelines of the 67th General Assembly in New York on Monday.

In all, the effort will target the approximately 1.3 billion people currently living without access to electricity, 95 percent of whom reside in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia.

“We have come a long way, but we have a long road ahead,” the U.N. chief said, referring to gains made since the launch of the initiative last year, which have surpassed expectations for 2012, according to Ban.

So far, over 60 developing countries have signed on to the initiative and upward of 50 billion dollars have been committed by businesses and investors for the global effort that aims to entice the private sector to invest heavily in energy solutions by partnering with public and philanthropic institutions to mitigate investment risks.

In order to provide universal energy access by 2030, investment of 48 billion dollars per year will be needed, according to a vision statement by the secretary-general released at the launch of the initiative.

While that number sounds large – it is five times the investment brought together for expanding energy access in 2009 – it’s only three percent of total global energy investment, according to the statement.

New leadership

To give permanent leadership to the initiative, Ban on Monday appointed Kandeh Yumkella, current director-general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), as new special representative and CEO of the effort.

In addition, the Secretary-General himself and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim will co-chair a new board to provide strategic guidance, Ban told assembled dignitaries.

Kim called access to energy crucial for economic growth and poverty eradication, referring to both as “the problems of our time”.

Yumkella’s first goal as full-time captain of the initiative is to utilise its 30-member board to grow the existing coalition of partners, including governments, private sector and civil society, the special representative told IPS.

The initiative will have a “solid private sector approach … with clear milestones and meetings every six months,” according to Yumkella, who says the board is particularly zeroing in on current barriers to private investment.

At the same time, he aims to build “a network of networks” for sustainable energy finance that builds on proven strategies.

Need for funding

Developing countries came out in strong support of the initiative on Monday, but also reminded assembled leaders of the unequal burden falling on them to deal with the effects of climate change.

“We are the countries who contribute least to greenhouse emission and are yet hit by it hardest,” the permanent representative of Swaziland said on Monday. “We therefor appeal to our developed partners for support.”

Affected by the global economic crisis, Swaziland is struggling to meet food needs while also trying to grow a green economy.

While the initiative will provide both financial and technical support to countries developing their energy sector, Yumkulla underlined that “this is not an aid model” but one in which donors commit their money to leverage private capital for energy projects.

Commitments

As partner institution, the World Bank, in June, committed to doubling its energy investment to 18 billion a year, with an emphasis on low-carbon energy.

The African Development Bank aims to invest 20 billion in energy by 2020, which it thinks will leverage 80 billion dollars in partnerships.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, meanwhile, is throwing eight billion dollars at the issue over the next three years.

On the private side, Bank of America has will invest approximately 35 billion dollars into renewable energy, efficiency and access over the next 10 years.

Chairman of Bank of America Corp. Charles Holliday – who saw the initiative through its first year – will continue as chairman of its new executive committee.

Women to benefit most

As women make up two-thirds of the world’s poor, lack of energy access causes an unequal drain on women’s time and opportunities, according to Sheila Oparaocha, coordinator of Energia International, a network on gender and sustainable energy that’s a partner to the initiative.

Yet, “across the board, we find that existing energy policies don’t address women and the poor,” Oparaocha told IPS.

Energy solutions ought to target cooking needs and small-scale businesses, she said, adding that real participation of women in energy decision-making is crucial for better governance of the energy sector as a whole.

Rio+ 20

Hopes for increased government investments in a comprehensive sustainable development agenda were shattered in June when Northern governments – mired in a global financial crisis – barely agreed to reaffirm their commitments made 20 years ago.

The secretary-general’s sustainable energy initiative is now focusing on what many post-Rio perceive as the only viable alternative to bridging the finance gap for sustainable development initiatives: leveraging private investment for social good.

About 100 companies and institutions have so far signed onto the initiative – one of the initiative’s biggest achievements to date, Yumkella says.

The other is Monday’s high-level discussions itself – “getting diplomats and world leaders together in New York, and there is no talk about oil and gas but energy for development.”

As a cross-cutting issue, energy solutions influence all of the Millennium Development Goals world leaders are struggling to accomplish by 2015.

Beatrice Mueni Mutisya inspects her maize crops grown in semi-arid Eastern Kenya. Studies have shown that men and women farming together can lift millions of people out of hunger. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

Three years ago, the residents of the semi-arid Yatta district in Kenya’s Eastern Province lived on food aid due to dwindling crops of maize that could not thrive because of the decreased rainfall in the area.

That was until a local bishop, trying to find ways to prevent mothers from forcing their teenage daughters into prostitution, changed everything.

Now, on a Saturday evening in the district’s village of Makutano, Stephen Mwangangi, his wife, Margaret, and their two children pick bullet chilli peppers meant for export to Europe.

The family is one of about 2,000 households that are part of a project called Operation Mwolio Out – Mwolio means food aid in the local Kamba language.

The project began after Bishop Titus Masika from the local Christian Mission Impact ministries saw a story on local television that showed women from the area forcing their teenage daughters to peddle sex for food or money.

“I was disturbed by the story. It prompted me to convene a meeting of all the agricultural and marketing experts born in Yatta who I could reach – most of them were working elsewhere in the country. We sat with the residents of Yatta to identify the main cause of the problem, and find the solution,” Masika told IPS.

What the residents needed was sustainable employment that would lift them out of poverty.

“By implementing advice from the experts and using the traditional knowledge from the residents, we have now successfully eradicated Mwolio. But this was not going to be possible without the involvement of all family members at all stages,” Masika said.

Local farmers were introduced to different farming techniques, which include the use of zai pits (pits of manure on top of which plants are grown), irrigation using rainwater stored in water pans (small earth dams), and the planting of drought-tolerant crops.

Through seminars, training workshops and field days spent at local villages, Masika and other agricultural experts from Yatta managed to convince men to join the project. The men provided the hard labour to help dig the water pans, but they also helped women access farm equipment generally owned by men.

Now farmers in Yatta grow their high-value crops, including the bullet chilli peppers, and jointly package and export them to Europe. Farmers are paid depending on the amount of produce they contribute.

Masika said that the success of the project was thanks to the involvement of entire households and not just women seeking ways to support their families. “When we started this project three years ago, we only had 60 women participants,” Masika said.

Now, if people want to join the project, they can only do so if all their family members join as well.

“Working together as groups of families, when men became involved, has worked miracles over the past two years. As families, we usually reason together, identify prevailing challenges, and strategise how to tackle them as a team,” said Masika.

And scientists from the Swedish International Agricultural Network Initiative say that in Sub-Saharan Africa, men and women working together for a common goal increases productivity.

A book soon to be published by the initiative, titled “Transforming gender relations in agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa: Promising approaches”, highlights innovative methodologies in small-scale farming that have improved gender relations. The book states that cooperation between the genders contributes to increased food production, food security and nutrition, stronger value chains, and better use of natural resources.

“This means that we have to improve women’s positions in communities so they have equal access to land, to tools and supplies (like fertiliser), to learning opportunities, and to markets,” one of the authors of the book, Marion S. Davis of the Stockholm Environment Institute, told IPS.

One of the case studies in the book is of coffee farming in Uganda, where men and women directly competed with each other, but in the process ended up producing lower-quality coffee.

“But after a gender-focused project came in and encouraged men and women to collaborate, they were able to work together to produce higher-quality, higher-value coffee that they sold together, benefiting the whole family,” said Davis.

Transformation involves more than just focusing on women’s needs and empowerment, according to the findings of the book.

“It also depends a great deal on men and women working together at all levels. This is true particularly in the case of adapting technologies and integrating into market value chains,” Dr. Cathy Farnworth, an international expert on gender issues and one of the authors, told IPS.

She said the findings showed that promoting methodologies that encouraged cooperation between women and men farmers resulted in increased productivity dividends when they shared resources and maximised the efficiency of their decision-making.

“Right now women do not have access to the tools and supplies they need. So if you even the playing field and give women the same access to supplies and tools as men, they’re going to be able to produce a lot more,” Farnworth said.

Her co-author, a senior researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Melinda Fones Sundell, told IPS that while women have a key role in agricultural production, in many cases they do not have correlated roles in making production and marketing decisions.

“They are efficient producers with what they have, but usually produce less than male farmers because of their limited access to land, credit and other production inputs,” said Sundell.

Janice Wanyama, a housewife from Bungoma County in Western Kenya, is a case in point.

“I have just a small plot within our compound where I grow vegetables that feed the entire family throughout the year. But the commercial part of the land, the tractor used for preparing the land and other major farm equipments are controlled by my husband. But still, I have to find time to labour on the commercial land as well,” she told IPS.

This is despite the fact that women in Sub-Saharan Africa have the highest average agricultural labour force participation in the world.

“In Ghana, for example, women produce 70 percent of the food crops, provide 52 percent of the agricultural labour force, and contribute 90 percent of the labour for post-harvest activities. In East Africa as a whole, women make up about 51 percent of the agricultural labour force,” said Sundell.

She said that where women lacked the right to own land, children also suffered.

“A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development indicates that countries in which women lack any rights to own land have on average 60 percent more malnourished children,” said Sundell.

But a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations titled “Closing the Gender Gap in Agriculture” shows that closing the gap between the genders in agricultural inputs alone can lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger.

And the community in Yatta district is proof of this. “On average, my family earns 250 dollars, the equivalent to 20,000 shillings every two weeks. This is far better than many employed people in Nairobi,” Mwangangi told IPS.

Smallholder farmers around the Yaounde city centre are increasingly farming on urban wastewater sites. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

Cameroonian urban famer Juliana Numfor has six plots of land where she grows maize, cassava, sweet potatoes and leafy vegetables, including cabbages, wild okra and greens.

The soil in which her crops grow is moist and visibly marshy, and a stream of water runs near it. But if you take a closer look you will notice that the water is dark and smells unpleasant.

In fact it is wastewater, which comes from a student residential quarter in Yaoundé, popularly called “Cradat”, that is less than 400 metres away from her plots of land.

But it is precisely thanks to the wastewater that Numfor is farming on this public land.

She told IPS that she prefers planting her crops on urban wastewater sites because she can easily irrigate them by using the readily available wastewater. She said that this was because rainfall had become increasingly irregular – coming and going when she least expected.

“The kind of crops on this piece of land can grow on any fertile land if it is well watered. But during this period in August, which is supposed to be a very wet time of the year in Yaoundé, very little rainfall has fallen. It makes it impossible for vegetable crops to grow without proper irrigation,” Numfor said.

And Numfor is not the only farmer doing this. Smallholder farmers around the Yaoundé city centre are increasingly farming on urban wastewater sites.

While there are no official figures of how many people are farming in these areas, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MINADER) admitted that the practice was overwhelming.

Smallholder farmers in and around Yaoundé can be seen planting their crops on public land, along railways, in conservation areas, and even near roads.

“This is a long-time practice that has only intensified due to a lot of causes, climate change being one. Many farmers have resorted to urban farming with wastewater,” Collette Ekobo, an agricultural inspector at MINADER, told IPS.

One 45-year-old woman told IPS that she knew 11 other women who cultivated crops on land near wastewater.

“All I know is that the ground is very fertile. I think when people empty their sewers and other household waste into this water, it makes the land very fertile for farming. And there is water all season round,” she said.

Rural-urban migration, aggravated by the adverse effects of climate change on rural farming, is thought to be one of the main reasons behind the growing number of urban farmers in the city.

In 2011, MINADER began warning farmers about the climate variability affecting agriculture across the country. Yaoundé, which is located in Cameroon’s Centre Region, experienced reduced rainfall.

“Over the years in Yaoundé, the rainfall pattern has been so variable and not easy to understand. Rainfall has become very irregular, unpredictable and reduced … this leads to prolonged dryness and the drying up of streams, accompanied by exceedingly hot climatic conditions – all of which provoke poor agricultural performance and low output,” the ministry said.

Ekobo said that because of the changing climate, many farmers found it difficult to predict when to start planting.

“The month of March traditionally marks the start of the planting season in the Centre Region of Cameroon, following the start of the rains. But due to changing rainfall patterns, farmers have now readjusted their planting periods, a phenomenon which is rather difficult to grasp a perfect mastery of. It has caused a lot of confusion with the farmers,” she said.

She added that urban farming was integrated into the urban economic and ecological system of Cameroon.

“The land is rich with urban resources like organic waste, which is used as compost, and urban wastewater, which is used for irrigation. There are also direct links to urban consumers,” Eboko said.

But farming on urban wastewater sites is not a safe practice, according to Foongang Mathias, an agriculture expert at the Ministry of Environment, Nature Protection and Sustainable Development.

“Wastewater irrigation provides the necessary plant nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorous that are required by crops for ample growth. But farming in wastewater poses both health and environmental threats, not only to the urban agriculturalists, but also to the consumers of the crops grown on that field,” he said.

He told IPS that toxic waste from homes, hospitals and industries was probably deposited or carried into the wastewater.

“This water contains pathogenic organisms and disease vectors similar to those in human excreta. Pathogens that are brought in with the wastewater can survive in the soil or on the crop and are responsible for human diseases,” he said.

In addition, according to the World Health Organization: “Available evidence indicates that almost all excreted pathogens can survive in soil for a sufficient length of time to pose potential risks to farm workers.”

Despite the risks to her and her customers’ health, Numfor told IPS that the economic gains from farming in urban wastewater areas far outweighed the dangers.

She will continue to sell her produce to customers, who include restaurant owners and retailers. Numfor said that she earned an average of eight dollars a day, but sometimes made more when she sold her crop to women who export Cameroonian vegetables to the United States and Europe.

At a local market in Obili, a neigbourhood in Yaoundé, stallholders displayed large piles of vegetables that range in price from 200 CFA Francs (50 cents) to 300 CFA Francs (75 cents) per bunch. And consumers here did not care where the produce was grown.

“I totally ignore the fact that they are grown in wastewater because even if they contain germs, the organism cannot survive in the pot with very high temperature,” one woman, who bought three bundles of bitter leaf or Vernonia amygdalina, told IPS.

Another said she felt the vegetables were safe if cooked in hygienic conditions and besides, “no one has ever complained after consuming these vegetables.”

Meanwhile, Eboko said that the government did not plan to regulate farming near wastewater areas.

“Urban wastewater farming is not a regulated activity in Cameroon, although it is an important part of the urban food system. It is not yet considered as a potential problem, but is considered as a subsistence way of life for women.”