Women laborers engage in a development project in Bangladesh. Credit: LGED

By Shahiduzzaman
DHAKA, Aug 13 2017 (IPS)

Breaking all the social barriers and taboos, poor women in Bangladesh are now engaged in rural development works across the country as labourers.

The Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) of Bangladesh initiated the move in the early 1980s, a time when a section of the so-called local elite and influential people stood in their way to move forward.

The engineers of LGED walked a long way to make this happen. They brought the working women under a platform named ‘Labour Contracting Society’ or ‘LCS’. Most of the LCS members are poor women from local communities. The LGED in cooperation with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have been successful in formally shaping the LCS concept.

IFAD as an important development partner of Bangladesh, working with the government for the last four decades and supporting the country in alleviating poverty and strengthening the rural economy.

The participation of women in the LCS for rural development is on the rise and they are replacing formal business contractors who have no accountability once the work is done.

The LGED has laid out eligibility criteria for the LCS members, particularly for the women living within a 2-km radius of the work station to include those who are unemployed, divorced or separated from their husbands, widows, destitute, with physically challenged person/s in their families, those who do not have more than 0.5 acres of land, including the homestead, and who are adults and physically fit to take on construction work. There are also men in LCS but their numbers are insignificant.

These poor women have proven that they can build rural roads and markets, and maintain them in the long run better than the private contractors. They also own their own work as their community asset, which can never be expected from the business contractors.

IFAD is promoting the active participation of LCS members in most of their projects in the country, the Coastal Climate Resilient Infrastructure Project (CCRIP) being one of them. LGED considers CCRIP as a ‘Silver Bullet’ for eradicating rural poverty and unemployment.

CCRIP Project Director AKM Lutfur Rahman said apart from engineering aspects of infrastructure development, they consider its social aspects, too. “So, we call it ‘Social Engineering’, in a broader sense ‘engineering for poverty alleviation, education, irrigation, agriculture, women empowerment and tree plantation and so on’.”

LGED and IFAD are planning to further strengthen the LCS and diversify their effective involvement in the projects. As part of this, both the organisations recently supported a study conducted by Professor Sharmind Neelormi of the Economics Department of Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, on the LCS.

The study found that the concept of a ‘Labour Contracting Society’ is a proven successful formula for reaching out to the target groups and implementation of their work. Higher quality of work coupled with an increase in daily labour income and skill development form a strong base for further strengthening and expansion of this model.

Earlier this month, Professor Neelormi presented the key findings of the study at an LGED seminar in Dhaka. She put forward a set of recommendations to further improve the LCS. The key recommendations include ensuring gender-friendly working environment in project areas; revising the wage structure in the schedule considering seasonality, location-specific requirements and inflation adjustment; exercising the practice of ‘Force Majeure’ as contractual agreement; ensuring life and injury insurance during road maintenance and market construction works; and ensuring the use of retro-reflective vests.

LGED’s engineers and IFAD staff from its project areas, experts and representatives from other partners such as the World Food Programme (WFP), German KFW, Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), and the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (BMP)actively participated in the seminar.

Almost all the participants agreed with the study findings and the recommendations. Professor Sharmind drew attention of the project planners to the review some issues of LCS such as revising the wage structure to consider seasonality, location-specific requirements and inflation adjustment; and harmonisation of the daily wage rate and policy for profit-sharing across projects.

She said, “living in uncertain realities, no overnight change can be expected. Issues need to be challenged from the institution itself. It might not be possible for a local project implementing agency to ensure the safeguard.”

Jona Goswami of BMP said it is encouraging for rural women that job opportunities are created for them. She emphasised safety and security of female LCS members, saying they often become victims of violence, harassment and abuse either in their own houses or in workplaces. “So, the project authorities must ensure a gender-friendly working environment and they should be flexible about their personal issues,” Goswami said.

In an interview, Professor Md Shamsul Hoque of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) commended the initiative, saying, “It has proved through all projects that the LCS approach of constructing minor infrastructure has not only increased the income of the poor women and men but also enhanced their technical and management skills. The concept of LCS can now easily be embraced in the country’s other development programmes as well as other developing nations.”

Akond Md. Rafiqul Islam, General Manager of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation, commenting on the income sustainability of LCS members, said LGED can include more partner organisations (POs) of PKSF in the projects.

The POs are helping select the LCS members and provide financial services to them, which is an important tool for the members’ income sustainability, he said. “After receiving training, many LCS members have now turned into micro entrepreneurs and they are doing well.”

PKSF is an apex development organisation for sustainable poverty reduction through employment generation.
Rafiqul Islam suggested building up an effective linkage between LCS and POs for supporting the LCS members’ income-generating activities and building them as sustainable micro-entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, Professor Hoque said different ministries and non-governmental organisations are now engaging LCS in different titles in their development activities. Some of them are the Bangladesh Water Development Board, Department of Forest, Department of Disaster Management, Department of Agricultural Extension, Cash for Work Program, World Food Program (WFP), CARE Bangladesh, BRAC and Oxfam International.

Given Mbwira (left) and Obed Nkhoma on the internet, some of the people who will benefit from cheaper, affordable and faster Internet due to the WhiteSpaces Project. Photo taken at the offices of The Nation in Blantyre. Credit: Bobby Kabango/IPS

By Charity Chimungu Phiri
BLANTYRE, Nov 1 2016 (IPS)

This month, many Malawians, especially those in rural areas, will be able to start accessing the internet as easily as opening a tap to get water.

At least that’s the dream of C3, a communication services provider and the first commercial entity to deploy countrywide TV White Spaces-TVWS for a trial period of nine months.

Most Malawians live in rural areas. The majority of them are poor and only 6.5 percent are connected to the internet. To reach this population, C3 is building a new network that relies on unused frequencies in the television spectrum, called “TV white spaces”, with plans to extend it throughout the country.

The connectivity is then distributed to the user communities with a new, efficient and affordable last mile technology using TVWS and Dynamic Spectrum. Users then access the network via Wi-Fi.

“It’s a cheap and effective way of having internet,” said 17-year-old Elizabeth Kananji, a second year student at the Malawi Polytechnic.

“Not all people are able to access the net as they have to pay the service providers, which is a challenge with the high prices, but with TVWS you don’t have to pay as long as you have your gadgets. You’re good to go, which is amazing,” she told IPS.

Malawi has just concluded the TVWS technical trial project, a collaborative effort of the Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA), the Chancellor College physics department and Marconi Wireless Lab T/ ICT4D of Italy.

The project is aimed at promoting research and development in the field of ICT, according to MACRA’s Deputy Director of Spectrum Management, Jonathan Pinifolo.

The TVWS was piloted in Zomba in 2013 at St Mary’s Secondary School, the Malawi Defense Force’s Air wing, Pirimiti Rural Hospital and the Geological Survey Department.

Other countries that carried out similar pilot projects include U.S., United Kingdom, South Africa and Kenya. But Malawi will be the first country in the world to deploy TVWS nationwide.

The project has received praise worldwide, with the United Nations and the International Telecommunications Union saying it is a viable and cost-effective way to reach rural areas with internet services.

Globally, TVWS has provided an alternative means of providing internet to remote and underserved areas without using traditional internet spectrum (radio spectrum), which experts say is becoming congested.

In Malawi, C3 is the only company that has shown interest in running the project, according to MACRA.

“We are anticipating initial launch of some parts of the infrastructure in November, however, since we are not only looking at TVWS we are building towers, installing Wi-Fi hotspots, backhaul links, some of these will be ready before end November. We can then announce the official launch date,” C3’s Richard Chisala told IPS.

“We did research where we assessed all the internet service providers in Malawi and found out that internet is more expensive in Malawi than in Kenya, for example. This has resulted in only 10 percent of the population accessing the internet. This is mainly due to greed and inefficiency,” added C3’s CEO Chris Shaeke.

“So we want to change this…even our license from MACRA states that we have to focus on the rural areas.”

Shaeke says their service will be reliable and affordable: “Because there’s intermittent power supply in Malawi, we are running all our equipment on solar. In addition, we have set up our infrastructure where rural people can easily access the internet right where they are.”

Shaeke told IPS that they have partnered with the Malawi Posts Corporation (MPC) to allow people in rural areas access to the internet through their mailboxes. He says a person will just plug in their device and connect to the net as like people do when they want to get electricity or water, for example.

Currently, C3 is acquiring their infrastructure with funding from Microsoft, which also funded a similar project in Kenya.

“We’re getting financial and technical support from Microsoft…we’re a grant recipient of the Microsoft Affordable Access Initiative which aims to empower the billions of people worldwide who do not have affordable access to the internet,” said Chisala.

“We have a data centre in Lilongwe and a disaster recovery centre in Blantyre…these two will be the first data centres in Africa to provide what we call cloud services…we are an open access network.”

Cloud computing and storage solutions provide users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process data in third party data centers that may be located far from users.

Among the agencies expected to utilise the C3 network are non-governmental organisations, ministries and department agencies, micro- and small or medium enterprises as wells as resellers.

One of the companies showing interest is Health Point Media. HPM plans to provide audio and visual messages to district hospitals and health centers. They will be installing displays (TV monitors) in all health centers in Malawi, according to the company’s head, Tapiwa Bandawe.

“We are targeting our messages to the 1.9 million people who visit these health facilities every month. Because the patient to health worker ratio is so high in Malawi (one to 10,000), it is difficult for the health personnel to spend time teaching people how they can prevent diseases, for example. So through our messages, people are able to learn while waiting to get help at the hospitals,” Bandawe told IPS.

Elizabeth Kananji, the student at Malawi Polytechnic, says she was inspired by the TVWS project to study Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering.

“I got acquainted with the project in 2013 when they came to my former school (St. Mary’s Secondary) to install antennas during the pilot phase. At first I wasn’t sure what to major in college but TVWS showed me how telecommunications can change the world,” she told IPS.

Women are the backbone of the farming sector and have a crucial role to play in improving nutrition through food preparation and the education of children. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Gloria Schiavi
ROME, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

It does not make the headlines, but 2014 is the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF) and family farming will be centre-stage at this year’s World Food Day on Oct. 16 at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

“If we are serious about fighting hunger we need to promote family farming as a way of production and also […] as a way of life. It is much more than a way of agricultural production”, says Marcela Villarreal, Director of FAO’s Office for Partnerships, Advocacy and Capacity Development.

According to FAO, family farming – which is the largest employer in the world – can help combat hunger and poverty and contribute to healthy food systems. It can also play a role in protecting the environment and managing natural resources in a sustainable way.Family farming is estimated to provide 70 percent of the food produced in the world, sustain 40 percent of households worldwide and is twice more effective in reducing poverty than any other productive sector.

There is no official definition for family farming, which sometimes replaces the term ‘smallholders’, but its key features are family ownership and the use of mainly non-wage labour provided by family members.

Family farming is estimated to provide 70 percent of the food produced in the world, sustain 40 percent of households worldwide and is twice more effective in reducing poverty than any other productive sector.

A FAO working paper, which used figures from the World Census of Agriculture, calculates that “there are more than 570 million farms in the world and more than 500 million of these are owned by families.”

The paper also notes that 84 percent of the world’s farms are smaller than two hectares and operate on about 12 percent of the world’s farmland. The remaining 16 percent of farms are larger than two hectares and represent 88 percent of farmland.

East and South Asia along with the Pacific account for 74 percent of the 570 million farms, with China and India accounting for 35 and 24 percent respectively. Only three percent of farms are located in the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean represent four percent each.

Farmers’ organisations from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania met in Abu Dhabi in January at the start of IYFF and issued a set of five demands to make family farming the “cornerstone of solid sustainable rural development, conceived of as an integral part of the global and harmonised development of each nation and each people while preserving the environment and natural resources.”

Among others, they called for strategies to attract young people and prevent migration, creating the conditions for them to take over their parents’ farms or set up new farms.

With regards to gender equality, they criticised discrimination over inheritance rules and wages as unacceptable, saying that women are the backbone of the farming sector and have a crucial role to play in improving nutrition through food preparation and the education of children.

The farmers’ organisations also called on governments to finance the creation of cooperatives, and guarantee access to markets and loans for smallholders.

According to José Antonio Osaba, Coordinator of the IYFF-2014 Civil Society Programme of the World Rural Forum, all nations, and especially developing nations, “have the right to protect their agriculture so as to be able to feed themselves and trade under equitable conditions … the reverse is now the case: a small handful of major exporting nations with high productivity levels and considerable subsidies dominate the world food market.”

Ranja Sengupta, senior researcher at the Third World Network in India, shares Osaba’s position. On the side-lines of the Asia-Europe Peoples’ Forum held in Milan, Italy, on Oct. 10-12, she told IPS that free trade agreements pose a serious problem for the capability of developing countries to sustain their people.

“I think in countries like India, large countries with a large, hungry population, there is no alternative to strengthening small family-based farms”, she said.

“We cannot depend on imported food. So for us, if we have to provide food to our people, we have to take it from our producers and we have to ensure that they are able to produce; that’s why we do need to give essential subsidies – at least for now”, she added.

“It is something which should be non-negotiable for any developing country government and no global agreement should be able to actually say ‘no’ to that”, Sengupta concluded.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

To meet the challenge of feeding the world’s 805 million hungry people, this year’s State of Food Insecurity report calls for the creation of an ‘enabling environment’. Credit: FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Phil Harris
ROME, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

The number of hungry people in the world has declined by over 100 million in the last decade and over 200 million since 1990-92, but 805 million people around the world still go hungry every day, according to the latest UN estimates.

Presenting their annual joint report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), international Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and World Food Programme (WFP) said that while the latest hunger figures indicate that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of undernourished people by 2015 is within reach, this will only be possible “if appropriate and immediate efforts are stepped up.”

These efforts include the necessary “political commitment … well informed by sound understanding of national challenges, relevant policy options, broad participation and lessons from other experiences.”"We cannot celebrate yet because we must still reach 805 million people without enough food for a healthy and productive life" – WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin

Introducing this year’s report, FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said that the figures indicate that a “world without hunger is possible in our lifetime.”

The three Rome-based UN agencies noted that while there has been significant progress overall, some regions are still lagging behind: sub-Saharan Africa, where more than one in four people remain chronically undernourished, and Asia, where the majority of the world’s hungry – 520 million people – live.

In Oceania there has been a modest improvement in percentage terms (down 1.7 percent from 14 percent two years ago) but an increase in the number of hungry people. Latin America and the Caribbean have made most progress in increasing food security.

However, WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin warned that “we cannot celebrate yet because we must still reach 805 million people without enough food for a healthy and productive life.”

Calling for what they called an ‘enabling environment’, the agencies stressed that “food insecurity and malnutrition are complex problems that cannot be solved by one sector or stakeholder alone, but need to be tackled in a coordinated way.” In this regard, they called on governments to work closely with the private sector and civil society.

According to the report, the ‘enabling environment’ should be based on an integrated approach that includes public and private investments to increase agricultural productivity; access to land, services, technologies and markets; and measures to promote rural development and social protection for the most vulnerable, including strengthening their resilience to conflicts and natural disasters.

Speaking at the presentation of the report, the WFP Executive Director referred in particular to the current outbreak of Ebola in the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea which, she said, “is an unprecedented health emergency which is rapidly becoming a major food crisis.”

“You cannot isolate people without addressing the food and nutrition challenges of those who need assistance,” she added, noting that the populations in these countries are not harvesting or planting according to their regular seasonal requirements while the crisis rages.

“This is rapidly becoming a food crisis that is potentially affecting 1.3 million people today, with an unknown number of how many will be affected in the future.”

“We cannot let the unprecedented level of humanitarian crisis undermine our efforts to progress even further, to reach our planet’s most vulnerable people and to end hunger in our lifetimes.”

The State of Food Insecurity report will be part of discussions at the Second International Conference on Nutrition to be held in Rome from 19-21 November, jointly organised by FAO and the World Health Organization (WHO).

This high-level intergovernmental meeting will seek a renewed political commitment at global level to combat malnutrition with the overall goal of improving diets and raising nutrition levels.

Hortensia Martínez, who along with her husband Guillermo García decided to dedicate herself to farming on the La China farm on the outskirts of Havana, after a long career as a mechanical engineer. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Aug 7 2014 (IPS)

Scattered houses amidst small fields of vegetables and other crops line the road to the La China farm on the outskirts of the Cuban capital. This is where Hortensia Martínez works – a mechanical engineer who has been called crazy by many for deciding to become a small farmer.

“Our story isn’t common,” Martínez, 48, told Tierramérica at the entrance to the six-hectare farm that was granted “in usufruct” to her husband Guillermo García in May 2009 in Punta Brava, in the municipality of La Lisa, a semi-urban suburb west of Havana.

Since Cuba adopted economic reforms in 2008, land has begun to be granted to people “in usufruct”, to stimulate agriculture.

From one edge of La China, scrubland can be seen stretching all the way to the horizon. In 2013, according to official figures, 1,046,100 of the 6,342,400 arable hectares in this Caribbean island nation were idle.

A scarcity of people not only interested in farming but who also have the skills and resources to produce more food is one of the hurdles to making headway towards the goal set as part of the broader economic reforms that put a priority on the agricultural sector in a country in dire need of boosting production and reducing food prices.

Among the factors standing in the way of improvements in agriculture are realities that are rarely talked about, such as the rural exodus decades ago, which left the Cuban countryside much emptier.

Of the country’s 11.2 million inhabitants, just 2.5 million now live in rural areas, according to 2013 data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).

Although half of the rural population is female, women do not generally work the land themselves directly, due to a culture of sexism and machismo. To begin to change that, the authorities have stepped up strategies aimed at drawing more women into the rural workforce, although it is widely recognized that progress in that direction has been slow.

In April there were a total of 65,993 women in the country’s farming cooperatives – not a major increase from 64,063 in February 2011.“My experience, from driving around the countryside for many years, has shown me that there is little social activity, and that life is full of limitations and unmet needs. With what they earn, farmers cannot cover their basic needs.” -- Agroecologist Fernando Funes-Monzote

The Cuban population is irreversibly ageing, and is doing so fast. It is estimated that by 2025, people over 60 will make up 30 percent of the population.

“The farm was a way to return to our roots,” said Martínez who, like his wife, comes from a farming family in Granma, 730 km east of Havana.

For decades, farmers proudly hung on their walls the university degrees earned by their children, who gained broad access to tuition-free education after the 1959 revolution.

But the newly educated generations migrated to the cities to work in their new professions.

And in the 1980s the idea was that it was cheaper to import food than to develop the agricultural sector, thanks to the subsidised trade with the now defunct Soviet Union. The collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989 tipped the Cuban economy over the edge, into a crisis that has dragged on to this day.

One of the results of the crisis was that professionals began to earn less than those who produced goods with their work.

“We joined the agricultural workforce to support our family,” Martínez said, explaining that both his and his wife’s nephews and nieces work on the farm with them.

“Now we eat healthier food and we are earning more money,” he said. The family raises rabbits, lambs, pigs and 18 species of birds. They also grow fruit and vegetables.

In La China, there is a large shed for rabbits, several corrals, and even a ‘ranchón’, the name given in Cuba to a traditional open-side palm-thatched wooden structure that serves as a social space, decorated with hanging flower pots.

But “we still don’t have a house here yet. I wish they would approve that,” lamented Martínez, who every day makes the five-km trek back and forth to the farm, where she leaves a guard on duty at night.

Decree-law 259, passed in 2008, stipulated that people could apply for idle land to farm in usufruct for an extendable period of 10 years. But it was not until 2012 that decree-law 300 was approved, allowing people to also build homes on the land.

“The red tape surrounding that is really bad,” Martínez complained.

Bureaucracy is a chronic problem in Cuba’s agricultural sector, which is tightly controlled by the state, even the portion that is in private hands.

During a Jul. 5 parliamentary session it was reported that the Agriculture Ministry staff and its provincial and municipal delegations were being cut 41 percent, as part of economic adjustments and an attempt to reduce bureaucracy.

Of the land farmed in Cuba today, 26.6 percent is in private hands, 21.7 percent has been granted in usufruct, and the rest is state-owned or belongs to cooperatives.

“It’s really hard to return to the countryside if you don’t have the know-how, skills and economic resources,” said 44-year-old Mireya Ramírez (no relation), who left her job in computers to take charge of the family farm when her father-in-law injured his hand.

Until five years ago, she told Tierramérica, she knew nothing about farming, even though she lived ever since she got married on the Los Solos farm in Campo Florida, another area on the outskirts of Havana.

“If the land is far away, you need transportation to get there,” she said. “Producing at some scale requires a significant investment of capital. For me it was hard to juggle the capital to diversify production, even though I received a farm that was already up and running.”

But “I finally have a level of liquidity that I never had before,” she said with a smile on her face.

The authorities also opened up lines of microcredit for farmers, and stores selling some farming tools and seeds, while increasing the prices paid by the government for agricultural products (farmers must sell a majority of their production to the state). In addition, tourist establishments are now allowed to directly purchase from farmers.

But farmers and experts told Tierramérica that the measures have fallen short.

“Policies must be broader and more generous, ranging from more credit for buying seeds and baby animals to facilities to rent or buy vehicles and buy houses, sheds, corrals and access roads to fields,” journalist Roberto Molina said in an interactive online conversation organised by Tierramérica in Cuba.

The faces of Cuba’s farmers vary depending on how far from the cities they are and the level of economic development of each province.

On the outskirts of the capital and in the western provinces like Mayabeque, Artemisa and Matanzas, there are prosperous farming families with cars and comfortable homes.

But in the mountains and other remote parts of the country many people live in bohíos – dirt-floored wooden shacks typical of poorer parts of the Cuban countryside – with pit latrines and no electricity or running water.

“My experience, from driving around the countryside for many years, has shown me that there is little social activity, and that life is full of limitations and unmet needs. With what they earn, farmers cannot cover their basic needs,” agroecologist Fernando Funes-Monzote told Tierrámerica.

The 43-year-old professional has also started running a farm with his family: the Finca Marta in Artemisa, the province adjacent to Havana.
This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, interviewed by IPS at the end of his Aug. 2-8, 2013 visit to Peru and Colombia. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 12 2013 (IPS)

“There is no development without peace. It should be understood that, for there to be development in a country, there must be an internal peace process,” says Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

With respect to Colombia, the Nigerian expert in agricultural development said: “We have to create a platform of trust” in abandoned rural communities.

IFAD is the only United Nations agency created to provide financial support to peasants and smallholder farmers. It works with governments, but in bottom-to-top projects. Organised groups of people propose their own initiatives which compete for funding, through the Agriculture Ministry in the case of Colombia.

The funds are managed by the communities themselves. More than 1,700 projects presented by Colombian rural groups obtained support that way through the IFAD-Rural Opportunities project that began in 2007 and is now coming to an end.

IFAD is now launching a new programme in Colombia through the Agriculture Ministry, which will act in war zones, termed “territorial consolidation areas” by the government – a controversial concept involving both questions of security and development.“IFAD is not a top-down institution, it is bottom-up. You walk with the communities. They have to be part of the project. They have to own it.” -- Kanayo Nwanze

“Small and medium enterprises in rural areas are a source of generating social stability in countries,” Nwanze says in this interview with IPS in Bogotá at the end of his Aug. 2-8 visit to Peru and Colombia.

Nwanze met with the presidents of both countries – Ollanta Humala of Peru and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia – and visited rural communities.

Q: IFAD has wide experience working in conflict zones to bring development and to help to build peace. How can this experience be applied in Colombia?

A: We have found in many parts of Africa and Asia – India is a very good example – where, if there is ability to organise rural populations, women and men and children, and give them opportunities to have gainful employment…youth in particular are less likely to be attracted by rhetoric and extremism.

Just a few days ago we launched a new programme called TOP (Trust & Opportunities Project), which takes the first project into a different dimension, a much higher dimension.

Trust & Opportunities, we believe, will contribute significantly to bringing hope, economic development, and social inclusiveness to rural areas of Colombia. And we hope that this process will contribute to peace and development in Colombia.

Q: Most of the places where the new project will be deployed in Colombia are still war zones. What kind of concrete difficulties could that pose?

A: I can talk from our experiences elsewhere. A good example is…projects involving community development and natural resource management in communities of the northeastern states of India.

The primary impact of that project was not only community development and management of natural resources, but [the fact that] it generated such economic benefits that young people who formally were engaged in extremism now had jobs, and it reduced the rate of insurgency.

You see, IFAD is a unique institution. Apart from being a specialised U.N. agency, which gives us…global legitimacy and trust by populations and governments, [we have] the ability to organise rural populations, so that they have…their own structural governance platform to operate.

You need a mechanism where you can build trust, between the populations in the war zone and the governments. And this is what IFAD is fantastic at doing. We trust and we are trusted by the communities; they see us as their friends. The governments we work with – in Colombia [for instance] – see us as very apolitical [and that] our interests are basically for the populations and for the national policy dialogue.

The difficulties that people often face in these communities is the way…an idea or a concept [is presented to them] – you have to avoid just parachuting in and telling them ‘this is what you have to do’.

IFAD is not a top-down institution, it is bottom-up. You walk with the communities. They have to be part of the project. They have to own it. And that way they are committed to it; when they own it they want it to succeed; if it is parachuted from the top, they reject it.

And there is no other institution that I know of within the U.N. system or within the international financial institutions that goes to the remotest and most difficult areas in the countries. IFAD does.

Q: Is the new TOP in line with Colombia´s policies?

A: First of all, I think it is important to understand that IFAD only works with governments. IFAD does not define for governments what governments should do. IFAD works with governments, partners and rural populations, to define the programme that they want.

Now, President Santos’ major priority today is peace and inclusive development. So what do we do? We say OK.

We have allocated 25 million dollars. That is nothing for Colombia. But what we bring is knowledge and experience on how we work with rural populations. So, we are a facilitator…[and] our programmes are defined by the strategy and the priority of the governments for its people.

Our programmes are not political. But the outputs, the results can have political impact, because they bring about political stability and trust in the community, which is the foundation for peace.

In Latin America – in Brazil, Peru or Guatemala – or in different countries in Africa or Asia, when you go to the community, you see the commitment and the excitement they have, for the simple fact that they are now doing dignified activities that are generating money.

Do you think that they want to take up arms against the government? No. That is so fundamental.

Q: What general impression did you get from your trip to Peru and Colombia?

A: In both countries I was impressed. In Peru, because of the president’s commitment to agriculture and rural development. I’m also impressed with the emphasis that is given to creating peace through investment in development, in both countries.

Unless we have stable and vibrant rural communities, we cannot achieve sustainable development in any country, because you always have this gap between those who have and those who have not. And when the gap gets to [a certain] point, it’s like a string that snaps. And when it snaps, you have political crisis.

Excerpt:

Women farmers are taking the lead in managing leasehold forestry programmes in rural Nepal. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
JHIRUBAS, Nepal, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Nearly 300 km from Nepal’s teeming capital, Kathmandu, in a small village dug into the steep slopes of the mountainous Palpa district, 35-year-old Dhanmaya Pata goes about her daily chores in much the same way that her ancestors did centuries ago.

Pata and the roughly 200 other residents in the scenic yet sparse Dharkesingh village, part of the Jhirubas village development committee (VDC), live off the surrounding forests, in bright red, thatched-roof mud huts.

Jhirubas is the most remote of the 3,913 VDCs scattered across 75 districts in Nepal, but it shares with its counterparts a high level of underdevelopment, food insecurity and poverty.

The road infrastructure is very weak and often gets washed away in the monsoon rains, making transportation of food very difficult – in fact, over half the population suffers from inadequate food consumption. The nearest water source is a three-hour walk away.

These villagers have no illusions of living in grand circumstances; their humble dreams consist only of ensuring a decent future for their children. And with the help of a massive leasehold forestry programme, they are doing just that.

Great swathes of the forests that cover 40 percent of Nepal’s territory have been degraded, prompting the government to embark on a project in collaboration with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to convert wasted land into economic opportunities, officials at the Department of Forests (DoF) told IPS in the capital.

In 2005, a 12.7-million-dollar Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme (LFLP) took flight in 22 mid-hill districts, stretching from the country’s easternmost extremity to its western border, covering 28,000 hectares of forest land managed by nearly 6,000 forestry leasehold groups involving 58,000 households.

Four years later the government began pilot projects – led by the DoF, with technical inputs from the FAO and financial assistance from IFAD – in five districts including Jhirubas, where locals have converted degraded forest areas into the country’s largest broom grass plantations.

Locally known as ‘amresu’, the grass now covers 246 hectares of the 350-hectare region. The grass requires little water and thrives on steep slopes, preventing landslides and helping to remediate the soil.

By turning the flowers of the plant into traditional brooms, which are then sold to a local retailer, villagers earn the money required to stock up on food for the monsoon months when the roads in their landslide-prone village become impassable.

“In the last 12 months we earned about 3.5 million rupees (roughly 37,000 dollars) and the income is growing every year,” Navindra Thapa Magar, a local farmer and secretary of a leasehold forestry cooperative in the Kauledanda village of the Jhirubas VDC told IPS.

Each of the 246 households in the village earned about 150 dollars in 2012, income that has proved to be indispensable in supplementing villagers’ diets during the nine months out of the year when production of maize, wheat, potatoes, millet and green vegetables comes to a standstill.

Amresu leaves also provide fodder for livestock, and the stems provide fuel.

Women run the show

Households surviving on less than 80 dollars per year quickly stood out as the target population for the project, which promised each family a 40-year free lease of one hectare of land.

DoF and FAO officials provided support by training farmers and initiating a shift away from slash-and-burn practices, known locally as ‘khoriya farming’, towards more sustainable agro-forestry techniques, in which crops are interspersed with trees and other plants, ensuring a longer and healthier life for the entire ecosystem.

What officials had not anticipated, however, was the level of women’s participation in the project.

A wave of male migration out of Jhirubas over the last few decades had pushed women into the dual role of labourer-housekeeper.

Daman Singh Thapa, chairman of the Kaule leasehold forestry cooperative, told IPS that when the scheme spread to their remote village, women quickly took up the challenge of planting and harvesting the grass, working long hours on the steep slopes.

DoF Official Govinda Prasad Kafley added that every participating household now involves equal numbers of trained men and women, who share decision-making power.

While FAO experts say income generation has led to developments like the installation of water pipes, which relieve women of having to walk several kilometres each day in search of water, others worry that the burden of farming and business operations heaped on top of household chores and care of livestock might end up hurting rather than helping the community.

Forty-year-old Bom Bahadur Thapa told IPS that the work, which includes hand-clearing shrubs in order to plant the grass, and then hand-picking the flowers for the brooms, is backbreaking.

“Let’s hope that men become more involved, instead of leaving to look for work elsewhere,” she said.

Indeed, news of the project’s success has already gone viral, prompting migrant workers to return to their village after pictures of thriving broom grass plantations and the smiling faces of their families replaced images of hardship.

Leasehold Forestry Brings a New Lease on Life from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

To reduce the drudgery of harvesting and carrying brooms on their backs to the local collection centre, several farmers in the community recently pooled their resources to purchase a tractor, becoming the first leasehold forestry group in the country to do so.

With the grass providing plenty of fodder, livestock herds have increased four-fold from roughly two to three goats to an average of 12 goats per family, said Hasti Maya Bayambu, chairperson of a leasehold forestry group in Dharkesingh. The community is even considering selling the excess fodder to markets outside their village.

Following the success of broom grass plantations, impoverished families from the traditionally marginalised janjatis (indigenous) and dalit (low caste) groups have also embarked on commercial ventures, producing cardamom and ginger using agro-forestry techniques, according to Palpa District Forest Officer Suresh Singh.

But even while celebrating the project’s success, government officials are gearing up for the next big challenge: what to do when aid from the FAO and IFAD expires at the end of 2013, leaving farmers without technical inputs like free seeds, savings schemes and marketing trainings that are integral to the proper functioning of the micro-economy that has developed around the programme.

Narayan Bhattarai, the hub officer and key field officer of the pilot districts, told IPS that farmers rely greatly on the presence of fulltime field officers, who, in addition to arranging trips for officials and donor representatives, boost locals’ confidence in the project.

By the farmers’ own admission, it will take at least five years to attain full self-sufficiency. Unless donor agencies step up their efforts, the future of one of Nepal’s most successful rural development programmes hangs in the balance.

Left to right: Juan Camilo Restrepo, Josefina Stubbs and Alex Segovia Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Apr 25 2013 (IPS)

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) initiatives working to overcome poverty and improve food security in the Colombian countryside can make a positive contribution to government efforts to tackle some of the most neglected problems facing this South American country.

“Rural development was forgotten in Colombia for a long time,” Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Juan Camilo Restrepo said at a seminar on Monday Apr. 22, organised by IFAD and his ministry to share experiences linking the situation in rural areas with peace efforts in this country that has seen nearly 50 years of armed conflict.

“That’s why we’re now making great efforts to give rural development pride of place. But there is a long way to go,” Restrepo admitted at the opening of the seminar on “Desarrollo rural y construcción de territorios dinámicos y pacíficos” (Rural development and construction of dynamic and peaceful territories).

Recent indicators show progress has been made against poverty, but it is still concentrated in the rural areas where one-third of Colombia’s 47 million people live.

According to figures released Apr. 18 by the National Administrative Department of Statistics, while the overall poverty rate declined from 40.3 percent in 2009 to 32.7 percent in 2012, the urban rate last year was 28.4 percent compared to 46.8 percent in rural areas.

“The country needs to work extremely hard to give rural areas the importance they deserve, with or without a peace accord,” said the minister, referring to the talks taking place in Havana between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, in which land reform is a key issue.

“The support we receive from IFAD, and events like this, contribute to increasing our resolve,” Restrepo said.

Josefina Stubbs, Latin America and Caribbean director of IFAD, said “Colombia today is at a crucial moment, redefining its frameworks, policies and laws for rural development.” That is why “this event is very important, as much for IFAD as for other development sectors here present,” she told IPS.

The Victims’ Law, in force since January 2012, provides for the restitution of lands taken by armed groups from campesinos or peasants and other people displaced by the conflict.

The government says it has already distributed over one million hectares and is waiting to recover another one million hectares of idle land to form a land bank. The authorities estimate that some 200,000 campesino families lack land to farm.

Another bill, the Law on Land and Rural Development, which Restrepo is promoting, is under consultation with indigenous and campesino communities before it is presented to Congress.

In this context, “strengthening dialogue with the Colombian government at this point is extremely important, because this country is trying to close the gaps of inequity and the large differences between urban and rural sectors, and very seriously re-thinking the processes of rural development in a way that would contribute effectively to poverty reduction,” said Stubbs.

IFAD’s experience in this field is vast. Through its Rural Opportunities Programme, shared with the government, “it has generated support covering 20,000 families and 400 businesses,” Roberto Haudry, IFAD country programme manager for Colombia and Peru, told IPS.

The Rural Opportunities Programme “is an off-shoot of another programme with which IFAD has contributed to public policies in Colombia through the strengthening of over 1,000 campesino enterprises involving some 120,000 families,” he added.

“The country is changing. It’s time to talk less theory and to put people to work with other people, with the state as a partner. We can have absolute confidence if small entrepreneurs are empowered to make changes in this country. Campesinos, young people and vulnerable sectors with a productive attitude will emerge from poverty under their own steam, with their own motivation and abilities, without intermediaries of any kind,” Haudry said.

This is what Teófila Betancourt has done. She is an Afro-descendant from Guapi, a small town on the Pacific ocean in the southwestern department of Cauca.

“We have worked for many years to improve people’s welfare, based on the recovery of traditional practices, food security, territorial solidarity and human rights, and we have made considerable progress,” she said.

There are 25 cooperatives in Guapi, with an average of 15 women each. They plant food crops for their own consumption, as well as aromatic and medicinal species, and they make jams, crafts and traditional musical instruments. They sell their produce in local markets and have gradually taken up the public space that had been occupied by vendors from other regions.

These producers have also opened a restaurant that promotes typical foods of the coastal region, and they offer accommodation to visitors.

Along the Pacific coast, there are 84 groups doing similar work. “We have been doing this for 22 years” and recently, “we have received support from IFAD through Fundación Acua (an Afro-descendants’ cultural organisation),” Betancourt said.

“They support us because they know what we contribute to the rural area of Guapi. And that’s why I’ve come here (to the seminar) today. Although I feel a bit like a fish out of water, I have learned that this is where we can find out exactly what the government is thinking and what it is doing,” she said.

Alex Segovia, technical secretary in the office of the president of El Salvador, described the experience of his country, where a 12-year civil war came to an end in 1992, and which is governed today by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the former guerrilla group that laid down its arms and took the path of electoral democracy.

“This debate is very important because rural development is combined with the urgent need for peace,” Miguel Fajardo, the head of the Centro de Estudios en Economía Solidaria (CEES – Centre for the Study of the Solidarity Economy), told IPS. He described the achievements of cooperativism in three provinces in the department of Santander, in the northeast of Colombia.

“There are signs of change linked to justice and land restitution in rural areas, and without a doubt minister Restrepo is presenting carefully thought-out reflections on issues that had practically vanished from the agenda over the past 20 years or more,” said Fajardo, a sociologist.

However, he expressed “uncertainty” about the advance of the mining industry in locations like Páramo de Santurbán, an area of rich biodiversity with a wealth of water resources, and in the region of Vélez, “which have been granted in concession to multinational corporations, with the result that the regions have become impoverished.”

Restrepo told IPS that “Colombia began a peace process in spite of ongoing armed conflict, which is not usual, but even within the conflict one must begin to think about what the post-conflict reality is going to be in every sense, and particularly in terms of rural development.

“Let us remember that real peace comes after an accord has been signed, when a country’s institutions achieve the administration of that peace and its adaptation to the times,” he said.

Villagers in Zimbabwe’s Mwenezi district have not had access to running water for more than a decade after more than half of the boreholes in the broke down. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE , Apr 25 2013 (IPS)

For the last 13 years, Trynos Mbweku, the headman of Mwenezi district in southeastern Zimbabwe, has had to use a cart to fetch water from the only remaining borehole in his area, which lies some 10 kilometres from his home.

For villagers in this district, which is about 160 km southwest of Masvingo, the capital of Masvingo Province, the water crisis seems to have no end in sight.

“We have been reduced to becoming water scavengers owing to several dysfunctional boreholes that broke down over 10 years ago,” Mbweku told IPS.

Officials from the Mwenezi Rural District Council, who requested anonymity, told IPS that out of a total of 46 boreholes in the district, 26 had broken down and had not been repaired for the last 13 years.

Locals blame the District Development Fund (DDF) and the Mwenezi Rural District Council, which are responsible for repairing and maintaining the boreholes.

But officials from the Mwenezi Rural District Council said that over 120,000 dollars was required for repairs, and that the DDF was underfunded and could not afford it.

Zimbabwe is still recovering from an economic crisis. Between 2003 and 2009, the country had one of the worst rates of hyperinflation in the world – year on year inflation was reported as 231 percent.

However, economists in this Southern African nation attribute the deepening water woes here to the forced departure of agricultural investors at the height of the country’s controversial and often violent land reform programme, which began in 2000. The programme was a government initiative that attempted to reclaim land from almost 4,500 white commercial farmers, and was carried out by disgruntled war veterans.

“The water crisis is Zimbabwe’s national problem. It worsened after the 2000 chaotic land reform programme, which saw a downturn in the country’s economy. It resulted in the country losing revenue to maintain community boreholes when productive commercial farmers were evicted from their farms,” economist Kingston Nyakurukwa told IPS.

With around 70 percent of Zimbabwe’s population living in rural areas, improving access to water, sanitation and hygiene is critical. Although the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development funded a 50-million-dollar rural water and sanitation hygiene programme in 2012, which aimed to benefit drought-prone areas, most of rural Zimbabwe has difficulty accessing safe drinking water.

“We are grappling with water shortages here because several community boreholes broke down and have been out of use for years now, owing to the country’s poor economy,” Dereck Siyaya, an agricultural officer based in Guruve, a rural district in Mashonaland Central Province, told IPS.

According to figures from a 2010 United Nations Children’s Fund report titled “Child-Sensitive Social Protection in Zimbabwe”, almost half the population lives below the poverty line of 1.25 dollars a day.

A top official from the Ministry of Water Resources Development and Management told IPS that about 60 percent of rural water pumps, out of a total of about 2,714, were broken.

An estimated 2.5 million of the country’s 12.5 million people do not have access to improved water sources. And officials from Zimbabwe’s National Statistical office told IPS that 56 percent of people did not have access to improved sanitation facilities.

“Failure to act on the water crisis in the country will see Zimbabwe fighting over the precious liquid … we must commit to a sustainable water sector,” Minister of Water Resources Development and Management Samuel Sipepa Nkomo said at a water summit on Mar. 20 in Bulawayo.

A senior government official from the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture told IPS that rural school children were also affected as they invested considerable time in fetching water instead of attending classes.

“The water crisis in rural areas has resulted in school pupils spending much of their time fetching water for their teachers alongside ordinary villagers also hunting for the precious liquid,” the official said.

In 2009, Zimbabwe signed an agreement with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Institute of Water and Sanitation Development, Zimbabwe, to raise funds to supply clean water to the local population. But four years later, the agreement is yet to be implemented.

In order for Zimbabwe to reach the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to increase improved access to water sources, the country needs an investment of 400 million dollars per year, according to a 2010 U.N. Children’s Fund report. There are eight MDGs that were adopted by all U.N. member states in 2000 in order to curb poverty, disease and gender inequality.

But independent economist Hillary Jamela told IPS: “Constructing more dams for rural communities here would only help to further enfeeble the country’s already suffocating economy.”

By Raúl Pierri
PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay , Nov 1 2012 (IPS)

The countries of the developing South should remove the barriers still faced by small-scale farmers, because smallholders play a key role in economic growth, says Carlos Seré, the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s (IFAD) chief development strategist.

“National and regional policies need to eliminate cross-border delays and regulatory stonewalls faced by small farmers,” said the Uruguayan expert, who stressed that “Investment in smallholder agriculture and rural development is the foundation for economic growth.”

In this interview with IPS on the occasion of the Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD2), Seré also discussed the importance of helping women gain access to land and of taking into account the environmental challenges faced by smallholders, in support programmes.

Carlos Seré: “Investment along the entire value chain is key.” Credit: Courtesy of IFAD.

The Oct. 29-Nov. 1 conference held in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este was organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research, in collaboration with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) consortium.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: The GCARD2 Road Map emphasises agricultural research and innovation for development. Is input from the ancestral knowledge of local communities – which has proved effective, for example, in the search for localised adaptations to climate change – being sidelined?

A: GCARD2 is a multi-stakeholder platform which is promoting partnerships in research for development. These are meant to forge alliances between advanced research institutions in the developed world, international agricultural research centres such as those of the CGIAR, and national agricultural research systems in the developing world.

The latter include national and local entities such as agricultural universities, civil society organisations, NGOs and farmer organisations, including indigenous peoples’ organisations, as full partners in the research process.

GCARD2 places an emphasis on the role of participatory technology development which builds on local knowledge and involves better understanding of people, their beliefs, their culture and other local socio-economic variables together with the bio-physical conditions.

Q: How can poor farmers adapt to new technologies and what criteria should guide investment in the sector?

A: For research to move from the lab to the field, it needs to be supported by a strong extension system and enabling policies that link research to products and markets so that the applications benefit both the public and private sectors.

The decision or choice to adopt new technologies is often quite complex for farmers, especially because they engage in agriculture for a variety of reasons such as generating income, providing for their own food consumption, buffering the impact of possible insecurity or shocks affecting other sources of income (for instance informal employment), and so forth.

Investment in the development of new technologies for adoption by small farmers should be guided by an understanding of the incentives and risks confronted by different types of farmer groups.

Therefore the need to focus more on research and innovation efforts to developing technologies that help farmers increase their productivity in ways that enable them to adapt better to harsher environments, water scarcity, and climate change.

Q: There are projects like the “Millennium Villages” which support small farmers in an interdisciplinary manner and have managed to increase yields. However, they still face logistical difficulties in accessing markets and ensuring that this increase will translate into higher revenues. How can this be fixed?

A: When small farmers in developing countries increase productivity, for a start, it can make a significant contribution to local and national food security and economic development – if they can, then, ensure that surplus food gets efficiently, safely from the farmer’s field to the market.

With extra money in the farmers’ pockets, we can then start to see true transformation for the developing world. Investment in smallholder agriculture and rural development is the foundation for economic growth.

If we want to make regional markets work, if we want to ensure developing countries’ food and economic security, then we must transform our infrastructure and the way we do business.

Roads, access to stable electricity, energy and running water, and good governance are also key to making the business environment attractive in developing countries Smallholder agriculture needs to be seen as a business.

National and regional policies need to eliminate cross-border delays and regulatory stonewalls faced by small farmers, to make it easy for them to get their produce from one country to the next.

Q: How successful can initiatives to provide inputs and training to small farmers in the South be, while subsidies in the North and barriers in international trade remain in place?

A: Proposals or schemes to provide inputs and training to farmers must be part of a broader package of initiatives to support agriculture-led development in developing countries – with maximising opportunities for access to markets.

However, while we recognise market distortions do exist and there are barriers to free trade, the low world food prices of the past that adversely affected agricultural incentives and performance have now changed dramatically.

Higher prices must come with opportunities for a supply response. We need comprehensive approaches to stimulating growth in the agriculture sector and in other rural sectors that can offer new entrepreneurial and employment opportunities.

Q: Women are the foundation of family farming in the developing world, but often the laws and customs of the countries limit their access to land. What is being done in this regard?

A: Gender equality is both a matter of fundamental human values and rights, but is now increasingly also clearly becoming more understood as a driver of economic efficiency in agriculture.

Women have major roles in all aspects of agricultural and food systems across the developing world.

Women are often the farmers of the developing world. Simply giving women the same access as men to agricultural resources and inputs could increase production on their farms by as much as 30 per cent and could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 100 to 150 million people.

We know, from a number of studies, that when women earn money, they are more likely than men to spend it on food for the family.

When rural women are economically and socially empowered, they become a potent force for change. When it comes to access and control over land, in particular, this may translate into gender sensitive approaches in community-level institutions.

Thus, activities that have an impact on land access, building women’s capacity to be aware of their rights and able to claim them, supporting rural women to have access to identity cards so they can claim their entitlements over land are important enabling institutional responses, while technology systems must be responsive to time and labour saving for women.

Excerpt:

Three Crowns Rural School in South Africa is a leader in recycling, turning various waste into gas and fertiliser, and recycling its water. Above, the bio-digester. Credit: David Oldfield/IPS

By Thalif Deen
STOCKHOLM, Aug 29 2012 (IPS)

When the international community was struggling to ward off a potential decline in development aid in early 2000, it came up with a novel idea: a proposal for “new and innovative sources of financing”, including a tax on airline tickets and a levy on foreign exchange transactions.

The funding, mostly from the tax alone, first proposed at the 2002 U.N. conference on Financing for Development, has already generated over 11.7 billion dollars, according to the World Bank.

And now, the Swedish government has come up with a variation of that proposal: a new finance instrument called Water Innovation Challenge Fund (WICF) whose primary objective is to capture, promote and implement “innovative ideas and new technologies”  in water resource efficiency.

The proposal, announced at the international water conference in Stockholm this week, comes at a time when the United Nations has repeatedly warned of an impending water crisis in the next two or three decades.

Or as Alain Vidal, director of the Challenge Programme for Water and Food (CPWF), describes as “a perfect storm”  – food shortages, water scarcities and insufficient energy resources – collectively destined to hit the world by 2030.

Addressing delegates here, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation Gunilla Carlsson said the new fund is also about finding new ways to sustainably intensify the use of water, land and energy in production to achieve equitable social, economic and environmentally sound development.

“Simply put, we need to create more with less. This to me is innovation at its best,” she said, pointing out that in a finite biosphere, achieving such a combination will require new thinking.

Asked for his expert advice, Dr. Colin Chartres, the director-general of the Colombo-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI), told IPS: “I am highly supportive of the Swedish minister’s proposal.”

“The more we can do to foster and encourage innovation in the water sector, the better,” said Dr. Chartres, the 2012 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.

He added, “We can’t have water without using energy, and we can’t have energy without using water, and that an increased understanding of the water energy nexus, coupled with efficiency innovation in both sectors, is vital.”

Elaborating on her proposal, Carlsson said innovations have historically changed the lives of millions of people for the better. “Just think of vaccines, improved grain varieties and, more recently, the impact of mobile phones,” she pointed out.

The less well-known innovations are often found in the poorer countries, among large numbers of people surviving on very low incomes but who are very resilient and often creative entrepreneurs, she added.

“These innovations are often about crafting business solutions that are relevant to poor people and about making them available to the many. Low-cost mobile financial services and insurances are among the more recent ideas”.

Carlsson also said innovations have provided many new employment opportunities across Africa. Small affordable packages of improved seeds or fertilisers have reduced the barriers of upfront costs for poor farmers.

Some of the most important growth markets today are African and Asian. Increasingly, business is looking for innovative models building on local ideas and demand, rather than adapting products and distribution processes that were conceived for U.S. or European markets, she noted.

“If we can find similar innovations and scale up in a sustainable manner, the lives of millions of people, if not hundreds of millions, could improve,” Carlsson added.

The Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has been a leading proponent of innovative ideas relating to smallholder agriculture and rural development.

In a statement released here, IFAD says it supports practices that help poor farmers in developing countries to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their water use.

In Brazil, grey water filtration recycles washing water for agriculture, and integrated rice and fish production in South East Asia allows farmers to optimise water productivity.

In Madagascar, old flip-flop sandals were collected by otherwise unemployed people and used to make parts for micro-irrigation equipment.

Besides aiding irrigation, says IFAD, this activity promoted recycling and created jobs for street workers who collect old sandals and for the small businesses that produce the irrigation parts.

Carlsson said that “now more than ever, we need to encourage new thinking in our development assistance” and “reflect on lessons learned and find out whether and what we can do better”.

And one of the most important lessons has to do with partnerships. “It is clear to us that no one single actor can solve development challenges,” she added.

Perhaps two of the time-honoured technologies are wastewater treatment and desalination of sea water.

Asked about its potential, Dr Chartres told IPS:  “Given the cost of desalination and the large requirements for water and agriculture, I don’t see it as a current option, except in a few small niche environments.” But recycling, he said, was a different matter.

“Recycled water can be treated for purpose and it is an excellent way of using urban waste and nutrients,” he said.

And IWMI, which he heads, is currently working on the development business models to encourage more use of recycled waste water.

Meanwhile, Sweden prides itself as a country which inaugurated its first water treatment plant about 150 years ago. Gosta Lindh, managing director of Stockholm Vatten, says his company stands on the foundation that were laid more than a century and half ago.

In Stockholm, food waste and fat are basic raw materials for producing biogas. And inner city buses, garbage trucks and nearly 10,000 passenger cars and taxis are run on biogas.

“We are proud to be able to supply clean and fresh water to an ever-expanding Stockholm. We also take care of waste water and residual products in the most efficient way and reintroduce them to the cycle,” says Vatten.

And in Stockholm, he boasted, “we are proud to say we have world-class water.”

The Association for Integrated Rural Development is one of a number of rural organisations on the periphery of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are strengthening the city’s food security while demonstrating how to maximise sustainable use of agricultural land.

Joseph Ngandungala, an agricultural engineer and one of the association’s twenty-odd members, guided IPS through a tour of ADRIM’s 25 hectare plot in Mbenkana, a settlement just west of Kinshasa.

The site was purchased from the local chief for 300 dollars in 2005. Ngandungala explained that the project encompasses livestock and aquaculture as well as agriculture. Eight hectares are given over to cassava, dwarf palms, pineapples and bananas. The grunting of pigs can be heard from another section and seven fish ponds are partly concealed by the healthy plantains growing up around them.

“Our objective is to contribute significantly to the food security of our people and to improve the living conditions of smallholder farmers in this area,” ADRIM president Justin Katumbue told IPS.

Since ADRIM began its project here on the outskirts of Kinshasa, the crop varieties planted have been carefully chosen to achieve these ends. Five hundred pineapple stems were brought from Kisangani, in northeastern DRC, back in 2008, Katumbue said. They have done well, and he expects the association will harvest around four tonnes of pineapple in November from the two hectares planted with this year’s crop.

The Kinshasa office of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has offered practical support, providing agricultural equipment and cuttings of a disease-resistant, high-yield variety of cassava known as Matuzolele.

“Since switching to this variety of cassava in 2008, we’ve harvested 10 to 15 tonnes per hectare,” said Elisabeth Mafuantala.

She told IPS that before the introduction of Matuzolele, the yields from another variety called Diaki ranged between four and seven tonnes per hectare. In 2011, the ADRIM project produced nearly 27 tonnes of cassava from a little over 2.5 hectares – worth about 1,200 dollars.

“Our harvest is made into fufu or shikwang (popular cassava dishes) or cassava chips sold in the city’s markets,” said Mafuantala.

Gerry Mantoto Manitu, director general of another local NGO, Agriculture Association for Development, believes that ADRIM has succeeded in putting in place a participatory approach to using these rural areas with the involvement of local farmers.

Josephy Muamba, a veterinarian specialising in small livestock, told IPS, “We launched our piggery with seven pigs in 2008, with two male and five female pigs again provided by FAO. Now we have 26 pigs, as the demand for their meat has increased… a kilo of pork sells for 10,200 FC (11 dollars).”

The aquaculture operation has also been growing steadily, expanding from an initial seven ponds dug in 2009 to 15 ponds today, covering an area of four hectares. Earlier in the year, 70 kilos of mature tilapia fish were harvested and sold for around 2.5 dollars per kilo in the local market.

Beyond these productive activities, ADRIM is popularising the planting of acacia trees. Katumbue explained: “Mbenkana is presently a degraded site due to the deforestation of hillsides where there was once untouched forest.”

“By growing acacias, we want to reconstitute this forest to allow residents to fertilise the soil with the trees’ leaves, as well as produce charcoal and honey,” he told IPS. 

Gilbert Mayimona, one of the Mbenkana farmers, welcomes ADRIM’s initiatives. He said that five hundred dollars of income from the project which has been allocated to the village committee has allowed members of the committee to organise themselves to sustain their development projects.

“We are aware of our responsibilities and by involving ourselves in the development programme of our country thanks to this project, our way of life is really improving,” he told IPS.

Beyond these productive activities, ADRIM is popularising certain methods of planting acacias, because according to Katumbue, “Mbenkana is at the moment a degraded site because of the deforestation that its hillsides have suffered, where once there was primary forest.

“With the cultivation of acacias, we want to restore this forest, to allow residents to fertilise the soil with its leaves, to produce charcoal and also honey,” he told IPS.

Amanda Menjívar is moved by the sight of the 16 sewing machines donated to help a group of local women set up a sewing centre to get over the devastating effects of the disaster caused by Hurricane Ida in the Salvadoran town of Verapaz.

“We want to earn an income to help us get over the losses we suffered from those rains,” Menjívar, 26, told IPS. She is leading the project, which is just getting off the ground.

When Ida smashed through Central America in November 2009, it hit El Salvador particularly hard, leaving a death toll of 200 and causing 239 million dollars in material losses, equivalent to 1.1 percent of GDP, according to official estimates.

Verapaz, a town of 7,000 in the central department (province) of San Vicente, 56 km east of San Salvador, is a symbol of the tragedy caused by the hurricane in this impoverished country of 6.1 million people, the smallest in Central America.

The intense rainfall caused a mudslide from the slopes of the Chichontepec volcano, which buried much of the town.

A total of 355 mm of rain fell in just four hours – five times the average for the entire month of November. Local and international experts agreed at the time that the unusually heavy rainfall was an effect of climate change.

Three years later, the local population is still working to get over the impact of the catastrophe, which claimed 13 lives in Verapaz and destroyed much of the town’s infrastructure.

Three members of the Verapaz egg farm cooperative and one proud daughter show IPS their hens. Credit:Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“We want to get contracts from the government to make school uniforms, but we are not going to limit ourselves to that,” said Menjívar, excited as she talked about the workshop, which she hopes will grow quickly once it begins to operate.

The sewing machines were donated by Angels in Flight, a group of flight attendants working for JetBlue, a low-cost U.S. airline.

But Menjívar also had complaints: “It’s a pity that our efforts are not really recognised, because of the persistent idea that women are incapable of pulling ahead, when we actually carry much of the burden of dealing with all of these climate changes.”

The work carried out by local women’s associations and collectives to adapt to the challenges posed by climate change is not always acknowledged by the government or by society at large.

“Women’s contribution to the struggle to adapt to climate change and achieve climate justice is largely invisibilised,” César Artiga, the president of the Asociación Nueva Vida, a local organisation that is part of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), told IPS.

He said Salvadoran society, and especially key actors like the government and media, were not aware of the repercussions of climate change on people’s day-to-day lives.

Artiga also argued that the media are partly responsible for the invisibility of women’s work, because they still do not include issues like women, climate change and climate justice in their coverage.

To illustrate, he cited a public hearing held in December 2011, where rural women talked about the problems they faced as a result of global warming, and the efforts they were making to adapt to and mitigate the phenomenon.

Not only were government institutions absent from the hearing, but it received little media coverage, “despite the fact that El Salvador is at high risk from climate change,” Artiga said.

In fact, a 2010 report by the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) ranked El Salvador as the most vulnerable country in the world, with 95 percent of the population at risk of natural disasters.

“Let’s be realistic – it’s very difficult for reporters to put these (new) issues (gender and climate change) high up on the news agenda,” Nery Mabel Reyes, the president of El Salvador’s association of journalists, told IPS.

Discrimination towards women and their struggle to adapt to environmental risks represents “a lack of climate justice,” Artiga said.

He explained that this concept not only referred to the fact that different regions and population groups were affected in different ways and to varying degrees by global warming, but also extended to the recognition of adaptation efforts – in this case the ones made by women.

One of the few such projects that have been picked up by the media is a successful poultry farm run by a group of women in Verapaz seeking to pick up the pieces of their lives after the disaster caused by Hurricane Ida.

Salvadorans living in the U.S. city of Los Angeles, California donated funds to buy 500 chickens to start the egg farm in August 2011. It currently supports 15 families.

The Ministry of Foreign Relations acted as liaison between the donors and the women in Verapaz, and the National Centre of Agricultural and Forestry Technology (CENTA) provided technical support and training.

The farm sells 400 eggs a day on average. The profits cover the women’s earnings of 42 dollars a month, and the rest is reinvested in things like feed and medicine for the laying hens. The women also take home eggs for their families.

“We are very motivated; we have put everything into this, looking towards the future, for the good of our families,” 44-year-old Ana Cecilia Ramírez, who is raising four children on her own, told IPS. She heads the Los Ángeles Cooperative, which runs the egg farm.

“These 42 dollars a month are really helpful. I used to do ironing and cleaning, but I was only paid five dollars. I feel motivated to keep this project going,” she said.

Rosa Lidia Ávalos, a 43-year-old mother of four, is also happy about the farm, not only because of the material benefits it offers, but because her relationship with her husband has been strengthened since he totally supports her work outside the home.

“You’ll see how my husband brings my lunch at noon,” Ávalos told IPS during the day spent with the women at the poultry farm. And at 12:00 sharp, her husband José Raúl Romero showed up with her meal.

“I completely support her, because she is full of enthusiasm, and of hope now that they were promised that the farm would be expanded, and I think the income will increase a little, and I like to see her like this,” Romero said.

Miriam Acevedo, a 37-year-old mother of three, said it was her husband who signed her up for the project.

“We feel like we have really done something,” she said. “Our biggest dream is to have two or three sheds, to have more hens and earn more money. We have to take advantage of the high demand.”