The heads of state from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) met in August for a two-day annual BRICS summit, with one of the issues that of energy related investments and their impact. The author notes that China and India are investing billions of dollars in coal-fired thermal-power generation in Africa while winning global applause for increasing their solar and wind power at home and suggests that this points to a contradiction and policy inconsistency. China is funding coal projects in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, yet is a global powerhouse in renewable energy. He suggests that Chinese state energy companies losing business due to government slowing of carbon emissions in China are turning to Africa, even while they have first-hand knowledge on the effects of coal on the environment and human health. The Indian Government is also being praised globally for taking steps to halt carbon emissions, but it too has made investments in Africa in coal-based energy. He describes protest against harmful approaches with pickets by activists raising issues and demands to address exploitation, climate change, pollution and the looting of Africa resources with inequality and social harm.
Poverty and health
With increasing urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa and poor economic performance, the growth of slums is unavoidable. About 71% of urban residents in Kenya live in slums. Slums are characteristically unplanned, underserved by social services, and their residents are largely underemployed and poor. Recent research shows that the urban poor fare worse than their rural counterparts on most health indicators, yet much about the health of the urban poor remains unknown. This study aims to quantify the burden of mortality of the residents in two Nairobi slums, using a Burden of Disease approach and data generated from a Demographic Surveillance System. Data from the Nairobi Urban Health and Demographic Surveillance System (NUHDSS) collected between January 2003 and December 2005 were analysed. Core demographic events in the NUHDSS including deaths are updated three times a year; cause of death is ascertained by verbal autopsy and cause of death is assigned according to the ICD 10 classification. Years of Life Lost due to premature mortality (YLL) were calculated by multiplying deaths in each subcategory of sex, age group and cause of death, by the Global Burden of Disease standard life expectancy at that age. The overall mortality burden per capita was 205 YLL/1,000 person years. Children under the age of five years had more than four times the mortality burden of the rest of the population, mostly due to pneumonia and diarrhoeal diseases. Among the population aged five years and above, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis accounted for about 50% of the mortality burden. Slum residents in Nairobi have a high mortality burden from preventable and treatable conditions. It is necessary to focus on these vulnerable populations since their health outcomes are comparable to or even worse than the health outcomes of rural dwellers who are often the focus of most interventions.
With increasing urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa and poor economic performance, the growth of slums is unavoidable. About 71% of urban residents in Kenya live in slums. Recent research shows that the urban poor fare worse than their rural counterparts on most health indicators, yet much about the health of the urban poor remains unknown. This study aims to quantify the burden of mortality of the residents in two Nairobi slums, using a Burden of Disease approach and data generated from a Demographic Surveillance System. Slum residents in Nairobi have a high mortality burden from preventable and treatable conditions. It is necessary to focus on these vulnerable populations since their health outcomes are comparable to or even worse than the health outcomes of rural dwellers who are often the focus of most interventions.
What do newer emerging external funders do in the field of agricultural cooperation in Africa? And how does this relate to the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP)? This paper from ECDPM looks at Brazilian agricultural cooperation in Ghana side by side with the CAADP process in the country. It finds that while Brazil largely supports the country’s CAADP investment plan, it does not engage with the process around it. This is not necessarily the result of a conscious policy choice or bad will, but due to the fact that CAADP might not be very attractive for newer external funders as currently designed, the author argues. Yet, there are clear trends towards cooperation and joint learning between Brazil and Western external funders, which might provide some space for CAADP to play a role in facilitating these exchanges.
This report from UNFPA focuses on world population, reproductive health and poverty ten years after the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action was agreed in Cairo. The report finds that many developing countries have made substantial progress in implementing the ICPD's recommendations. However, resources remain inadequate and the needs of the poorest populations are still not being met. Key challenges include the continued spread of HIV/AIDS, especially among the young, unmet need for family planning, and high rates of maternal mortality in the least-developed countries.
Between 300 and 420 million people are trapped in chronic poverty. They experience deprivation over many years, often over their entire lives, and commonly pass poverty on to their children. Many chronically poor people die prematurely from health problems that are easily preventable. For them poverty is not simply about having a low income: it is about multidimensional deprivation – hunger, undernutrition, dirty drinking water, illiteracy, having no access to health services, social isolation and exploitation. Such deprivation and suffering exists in a world that has the knowledge and resources to eradicate it.
Widespread chronic poverty occurs in a world that has the knowledge and resources to eradicate it. This report argues that tackling chronic poverty is the global priority for our generation. There are robust ethical grounds for arguing that chronically poor people merit the greatest international, national and personal attention and effort. Tackling chronic poverty is vital if our world is to achieve an acceptable level of justice and fairness. Currently, development research is mainly assessed in terms of its contribution to meeting the Millennium Development Goals, in particular MDG1: to halve absolute poverty by 2015. However, achieving the first MDG would still leave some 800 million people living in absolute poverty and deprivation – many of whom will be chronically poor. Their lives are extremely difficult and, being marginalised, their story is rarely told. This report tries to tell parts of their story. It does so through the lives of seven chronically poor people:Maymana, Mofizul, Bakyt, Vuyiswa, Txab, Moses and Angel. Chronic poverty is a varied and complex phenomenon, but at its root is powerlessness. Poor people expend enormous energy in trying to do better for themselves and for their children. But with few assets, little education, and chronic ill health, their struggle is often futile.
The Cost of Hunger in Africa (COHA) study links the role of child nutrition and human development to Ethiopia’s Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP). This plan, that projects a sustained GDP growth of 11% to 15% from 2010 to 2015, represents the national strategy of Ethiopia towards poverty eradication. The results of the study strongly suggest that in order for the country to achieve sustainable human and economic growth, special attention must be given to the early stages of life as the foundation of human capital. The results of the study are supported by a strong evidenced base, and a model of analysis specially adapted for Africa, which demonstrates the depth of the consequences of child undernutrition in health education and labour productivity. This paper further quantifies the potential gains of addressing child undernutrition as a priority. Now, stakeholders have not only the ethical imperative to address child nutrition as a main concern, but a strong economic rationale to position stunting in the centre of the development agenda, the paper concludes.
International development is dying; people just don't buy it anymore. The West has been engaged in the project for more than six decades now, but the number of poor people in the world is growing, not shrinking, and inequality between rich and poor continues to widen instead of narrow. People know this, and they are abandoning the official story of development in droves. They no longer believe that foreign aid is some kind of silver bullet, that donating to charities will solve anything, or that Bono and Bill Gates can save the world. This crisis of confidence has become so acute that the development community is scrambling to respond. The Gates Foundation recently spearheaded a process called the Narrative Project with some of the world's biggest NGOs - Oxfam, Save the Children, One, and others. They commissioned research to figure out what people thought about development, and their findings revealed a sea change in public attitudes. People are no longer moved by depictions of the poor as pitiable, voiceless "others" who need to be rescued by heroic white people. The author observes that this is a racist narrative that has lost all its former currency; rather, people have come to see poverty as a matter of injustice, that poverty is created by rules that rig the economy in the interests of the rich.
"Ill-health and the household costs of illness can undermine livelihoods and contribute to impoverishment, processes that have been brought into sharper focus by the social and economic impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Concerns about the links between ill-health and impoverishment have placed health at the centre of development agencies' poverty reduction targets and strategies and increased the weight of arguments for substantial health sector investments to improve access for the world's poorest people (WHO 2001)." The aim of this paper from the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia in the UK is to review and summarise studies that have measured the economic costs and consequences of illness for patients and their families, focusing on malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.