Dr David Nabarro is Special Envoy to the World Health Organisation on COVID-19 and Strategic Director of 4SD. He sets out his challenge to leaders to use COVID-19 as an opportunity for radical change that responds to the needs and the interests of all of humanity.

• Countries must work together
• Focus on equity
• Effective local action

David Nabarro

And not just because of COVID, but because of all the challenges that our world faces. We have to keep this work up, we have to keep connecting with each other, and finding the inner resources that are necessary for living systems leaders.

This is not an idle remark. I’m saying it as a heartfelt, genuine personal feeling. I think I’m reflecting the feeling of hundreds of millions of people all over the world who are looking for a different kind of leadership to help them find their pathways forward and to see COVID as a real opportunity to do that.

It means that we have to keep a narrative, the language that we use, the stories that we tell, patterns that we weave. Language has to be kept as simple as we can make it. It also has to be coherent and consistent. And that’s where I, and I think many others, so easily get tripped up. We must continue to develop the language and the metaphors that will help others as they try to establish and implement the new patterns of leadership. If we slip into the adversarial language of modern politics and present every issue as an “either, or” choice, we get stuck.

Finding these ways, finding the language, finding the idioms is my big challenge of now. At my own organisation, 4SD, we have produced a number of narratives that talk about local level solidarity with rigorous action to find the people with the disease and interrupt transmission.

Networks that brought together a non-hierarchical approach with a clear strategic direction, and with the capacity for adaptation to local realities; consistent and clear communication and continuous accountability. Without that, people can’t shift. We need to be able to trust our leaders, and we’ll only trust leaders through accountability.

What we’ve learned is that where action has been integrated and local, built around the basics of public health – interrupt transmission and suppress disease outbreaks – it has been an extraordinary success.

I want to share with you three major conclusions.

Countries must work together

The outbreak is advancing so fast, all over the world. The impact on people – their lives, economies and systems that are so important like food, like employment and systems for law and order – is just growing. There is nothing to suggest this is going to slow down in the coming weeks and months.
We need every national leader working together on it and treating it with the attention it deserves.

Get it done quickly. It’s no good waking up at the end of this year and realising that the world really has broken badly and international relations have fractured. We need to deal with it now.

Focus on equity

Thousands of people employed in really awful conditions is just one extraordinarily bad situation revealed by this virus. How many such situations of indignity and inequity are there? Where people are working under unacceptable conditions to enable people to have kind of food we want, the kind of products we want, the kind of opportunities we want?

This revealed inequity is right at the heart of my own thinking on whether I personally do not want to go on tolerating a situation where people’s lives are massively endangered. They are unable by economic and other reasons to reduce that danger, simply to enable me to have more luxuries and pleasures in my life. I am part of the system that encourages and then tolerates inequity. And I have to look at myself.

Effective local action

There’s no magic in this. People’s lives reflect the interconnections of systems in their own experiences in their own locations. We must focus what we do on local realities, respond to people’s perceptions in their local setting and encourage coordinated action.

The power of dialogue and engagement at local level flies in the face of the tendencies that some want to centralise and control in government. We’ve seen this in so many issues over the last few years, particular on this COVID. Well-organised, data driven, integrated, local level action is immensely powerful.

We can’t deal with climate change without global action and it’s really urgent.

At the same time, humans are not going to be able to find pathways through the current challenges by relying just on global factors. Let’s get better at encouraging local solidarity with coordinated, networked action.

We must do it through constant connections, without worrying about who’s in charge. Get more and more people appreciating the value system that has to underlie this way of working, and not worrying about where it’s going to lead to. Not worrying about who’s going to be in charge. Not worrying too much about whether a political leader here or there is going to be able to deliver. Just let the feeling grow that we need to be able to have these kinds of connections, working to navigate the challenges now and those still to come.

Dr David Nabarro is Special Envoy of the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID-19. He is also Co-Director of the Imperial College Institute of Global Health Innovation and Strategic Director of 4SD, a social-enterprise focused on developing Skills, Systems and Synergies for Sustainable Development. This article is extracted with permission from David Nabarro’s Online Briefing on 9 July 2020.

This story was originally published by Thinking the Unthikable

Children in northern Pakistan line up for food rations. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Dr Lawrence Haddad and Dr David Nabarro
DES MOINES, IOWA, Oct 11 2018 (IPS)

From cold chains and blockchains – major technological revolutions are on the brink of transforming food systems.

While cold chain technology can prevent losses as food travels from farm to market, blockchain technology can help digitally and accurately relay vast amounts of data between networks of farmers, traders and vendors.

All this can help reduce transaction costs, reduce financial barriers to accessing markets and build trust in the provenance of food, from farm, forest and ocean to fork.

Today more than one person in 10 struggles to get needed nourishment from food systems. It is tempting to turn to technology to solve such issues, This, however, will not be enough.

Instead, we need to shift our thinking from seeking singular solutions, and start to look at building better food systems as a means to deliver on the entire Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda.

By investing in nutrition and more reliable food systems, you can reap rewards across all the goals. Yet according to the Global Nutrition Report of 2017 funding for nutrition by global development donors only constitute 5 per cent of all total global aid. Governments, on average, allocate a similar share of their budget to nutrition.

This needs to change, not only to improve nutrition for nutrition’s sake, but to achieve all of the Global Goals.

Better Health

The biggest driver of mortality and poor health today is poor diets. Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension are on the rise in both the developed and developing world, putting a major strain on healthcare systems worldwide.

Many policymakers right now are very concerned about how to make universal healthcare financially feasible. One of the ways to reduce the financial burden of universal healthcare is to invest in sustainable diets and better nutrition now, before these diseases become a critical issue.

Hence the need to make sure that all food systems yield the kind of food that is needed for good nutrition and for good health. We can do this by enabling everyone to widen their diets to include more diverse and nutritious crops.

A Resilient Planet

The people who work in food systems across the world tend to be some of the poorest and most vulnerable people. They are particularly vulnerable to adverse weather patterns, so we need to help them to be both prosperous with decent livelihoods and resilient in the face of stress.

Farming systems that deliver nutritious diets, can also improve the resilience of farmers, and the resilience of our planet. Crop diversification for example can replenish nutrients to degraded soils, while offering a more diverse and nutritious diet to farmers. It also reduces risk for farmers who will no longer suffer a devastating loss if one crop is destroyed by bad weather or pests.

What we grow and what we eat also have a fundamental impact on greenhouse gas emissions. It is not enough for farming and food production to adapt to changing climates – it must also help to extract carbon from the environment.

Food systems that yield nutritious foods are perfectly capable of doing this – so the health of our planet and the health of our population can progress hand in hand.

Decent Work

Good nutrition improves wellbeing, and therefore productivity of a workforce. If Africa is to harness a dividend from its booming youth population, investments to ensure young people have adequate nutrition to support cognitive and physical development must be made now.

Nutrition-sensitive interventions can easily be integrated into the workplace. For example, can we enable women to have affordable nutritious snacks when they’re hard at work making garments that we will eventually buy in our supermarkets? Can tea plantations offering a facility for women who are lactating to be able to breast feed onsite?

The biggest innovation we need to achieve sustainable development is a different way of thinking about nutrition. This will involve getting people together within and across countries to begin talking about what the problems are and the solutions we can produce in collaboration.

Too often the conversations have been fractured between those who care about physical systems and those who care about human systems; between those who care about humanitarian issues versus those who care about development, or between those who care about the environment versus those who care about human health.

By integrating good nutrition into wider development interventions, we can tackle all these interconnected issues. We can work together towards zero malnutrition, a more resilient planet and prosperous societies.

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