Simple solutions to complex problems

Conflicts between moving populations with livestock and settled farmers groups are common in many parts of the world.

Practical Action Sudan has developed and tested an approach to mark the pastoralist routes more clearly and have negotiated this with the farmers around the routes.

This involved complex negotiations but led to something simple, which works. The routes are marked with colored poles and provides a visible mark for all the parties involved. This approach has great potential to reduce conflicts.

Prayers for rain

I crave sunshine. I think it comes from being born just after Midsummer. I feel at my happiest when sitting in dappled sunlight, underneath the promise of a cloudless blue sky.

So the last three weeks of constant rain, and the forecast of the wettest and coldest May for many years, fill me with melancholy.

Yet in spite of the current weather, we are in a time of drought, and counties up and down the UK face hosepipe bans until the end of this year at least.

It’s strange to be in drought during a time of so much rain. I was in Kenya during the drought in the Horn of Africa last summer. It was the worst that the region had witnessed for 60 years. The red flesh of the earth was barren, the empty river beds like bloodless veins. Cattle carcasses littered the horizon, and the wind carried the pungent smell of death.

One woman I met told me that she prayed for rain every single day, a prayer for rain to comfort the earth, to bring food and hope and life.

So today – even though the rain makes me crave tea and hobnobs and an old film and bed – I am remembering that woman, and her prayers for rain. I am reminding myself to be grateful for it.

There’s another drought this year in the African Sahel, which comprises Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and northern Senegal. A toxic combination of low rainfall, high food prices, entrenched poverty and regional conflict means that 13 million people are at risk of malnutrition and starvation.

Those 13 million mums, dads, children and grandparents are probably praying for rain too.

We are so lucky we don’t have to.

Unlike some larger NGOS, Practical Action is not an aid agency, and we do not deliver emergency relief. Instead, we believe passionately that it is only through long-term development work using appropriate technology that poor and vulnerable communities can become more resilient, and the desperate tragedy of drought and famine can be avoided. You can support our work here.

Once upon a time…

….there was a little girl who loved stories. As a little slip of a thing, she used to stand and swing on the garden gate, waving to passers-by in the hope that she could chat to them and ask them questions to find out their stories (she was a very curious little girl). A few years later, her very patient, very wonderful mother would read her favourite Maurice Sendak stories Outside Over There and Where The Wild Things Are to her every night. When she was at school, she’d set her alarm super early so she could wake up and read Enid Blyton books before going to lessons. English was always her favourite subject, and characters such as Elizabeth Bennett, Scout Finch, Jo March and Scarlett O’Hara were as familiar to her as her oldest friends. And then she studied the art of telling a story – for it is an art – during an English Literature degree at university.

Now that little girl (who’s not so little anymore) works for Practical Action.

I am that girl. And I work at Practical Action because I want to change the world. But my passion is storytelling: both discovering a good story, and then telling it in the best possible way. But how do you change the world with a story?

Well, this week, we at Practical Action launched our next five year strategy. It is bold and ambitious and exciting – but challenging too. The targets, both in terms of fundraising and impact at scale, are high.

But that’s because there are huge problems to solve. Right now 1.3 billion people across the world don’t have clean, safe water. 1 billion people don’t have enough food to eat. 2.6 billion people don’t have adequate sanitation. And 1.6 billion people don’t have access to modern energy. Too many people live in abject poverty. It is a world of great technology injustice.

There is no question that this needs to change. So over the next five years we will work towards four universal goals:

1. Sustainable access to modern energy service for all by 2030
2. Systems which provide food security and livelihoods for people in rural areas
3. Improved access to drinking water, sanitation and waste services for people living in towns and cities
4. Reduced risk of disasters for marginalised communities

And by the end of this next strategy period, in 2017, we will have transformed the lives of 6 million people.

That is an exhilarating prospect for me.

Because 6 million people = 6 million stories to find and tell.

Each of those 6 million is not just a ‘project beneficiary’ but a living, feeling, thinking human being with their own unique life story. And those 6 million life stories are 6 million more reasons to support Practical Action, today and for the future.

I can’t wait to get started.

How Practical Action is building resilience

Susan Upton
March 8th, 2012

Resilience is a hot topic in the development sector. Practical Action sees resilience as the ability of a system, community or society to resist, absorb, cope with and recover from shocks and stresses. A resilient community is one in which people can manage risk and recover from shocks such as floods, droughts and conflict. It also means people have the ability to adapt to long term trends such as climate change in a timely manner without undermining their wellbeing.

A key element of resilience thinking is the way it integrates multiple risks, shocks and uncertainties and their impacts on vulnerable people as well as ecosystems. Therefore resilience emphasises system, community or individual capacities to learn, adapt and innovate to cope with and recover from disruptive changes. However, learning, adapting and experimenting are not always a priority for development programmers. They are also hard to measure and quantify.

How to turn resilience into practical actions is therefore a challenge for many organisations.

So how is Practical Action building resilience into its programmes?

Practical Action has produced a briefing paper called ‘Resilience in Practice’, which explains just how resilience is being built into projects. The paper is made up of six case studies of projects in Peru, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sudan and Kenya that illustrate Practical Action’s work in building resilience into its programmes. They provide an evidence base for how Practical Action is turning resilience into practice and for including processes and resources that are essential for supporting learning, adaptation and experimentation.

The case studies reinforce the need for organisations to be proactive in reaching out to build partnerships and alliances with people and organisations operating outside of their specialist intervention areas.  This means they also require an investment and challenge our traditional way of working.

These projects have already seen increases in people’s livelihood security through the strengthening of food security, more diversified livelihood options and disaster management plans at the district level reflecting local level risks.

So what’s next?

The briefing paper highlights that there are still a range of challenges that need to be overcome and that there are areas that need further research. The challenges include a lack of relevant climate data, appropriate tools and incentives in organisations to support integration of sectors, a lack of scenario planning methods and clear indicators of resilience on which to base planning, monitoring and evaluations. For the full briefing paper please see ‘Resilience in Practice’.

A very happy International Women’s Day!

Margaret Gardner
March 8th, 2012

I asked my colleague Grace Mukasa in Kenya what she would celebrate today, she said

‘In East Africa I would celebrate the work of younger women, those still of reproductive age, who are often too overloaded with pregnancy, childcare and family welfare to have even a little time to rest or look after themselves. The younger women who lose out on so much opportunity because they are so busy looking after others. The period in life where husbands and relatives combine to control your mobility because of fear of adultery. The young women who have no older daughters or daughters-in-law to delegate to! It’s a day to celebrate their resilience. It’s an opportunity to look forward to the day they will know they have the abilities; the family, community and government support; and the means to use opportunities to improve their wellbeing.’

 
I’m with Grace – let’s celebrate resilience and the day when young women in East Africa can take opportunity.

A handbook for building resilience

Susan Upton
February 9th, 2012

Promoting resilience is a growing area of interest in development. The UK Government’s Humanitarian Policy ‘Saving Lives, Preventing Suffering and Building Resilience’, puts resilience at the heart of their approach. Building on this, DFID have committed to embedding resilience building in all of its country programmes by 2015 and integrating resilience into all of their work on climate change and conflict prevention.  

So what is resilience?

Practical Action sees resilience as the ability of a system, community or society to resist, absorb, cope with and recover from shocks and stresses. A resilient community is one in which people can manage risk and recover from shocks such as floods, droughts and violent conflict. It also means people have the ability to adapt to long term trends such as climate change in a timely and efficient manner without undermining their wellbeing.

So how do we achieve resilience?

How to operationalise concepts of resilience is a challenge for many organisations. Practical Action has developed an approach called From Vulnerability to Resilience (V2R). This is a framework that analyses the causes of vulnerability and how disaster risk reduction, climate change impacts, governance and livelihoods interact and affect resilient outcomes.

The handbook

This new handbook is aimed at practitioners who seek examples of how the V2R framework can be used in practice, based on examples from Nepal. It offers a step process, workbooks and tools.  It includes guidance on how to include long-term trends in programming with a focus on climate change.  

It is essential that organisations working on poverty reduction take into account the impact of climate change on the communities and sectors where they are working. In so doing, they will be better able to support community members and government officials to adapt to the adverse effects and take advantage of any opportunities presented. This requires a detailed analysis of the impacts of climate change at the local level in order to build adaptive capacity to withstand both sudden shocks and incremental changes in the climate. Participatory tools have been updated for use of uncovering community perceptions of changes, alongside identifying historical climate data.

Download it here.

Climate Change and Disasters – What we can do

Maggie Ibrahim
Bourton on Dunsmore, Warwickshire CV23 9, UK, Bourton on Dunsmore
November 14th, 2011

The Special Report on Managing the Risk from Extreme Events and Disasters for Advancing Adaptation to Climate Change (PDF)  is a welcome resource  for Practical Action as it helps to confirm the direction we need to take for our 5 year strategic plan on disaster risk reduction.

 The challenge for our disaster risk reduction (DRR) programme is to systematically include the latest climate change information into programme design, project planning and monitoring and evaluation. Despite the latest Special Report providing assessments at the global, regional and sub-regional level, there are real challenges of including climate information for community based DRR planning. Data is often missing at the local level.

 To overcome this gap, Practical Action has developed a  handbook with a six stage process to bring climate data into our programme planning. We start with triangulating climate data, and climate change proxies of plants and animals with weather trends and communities perceptions.

We then use this information to understand the different scenarios communities may expect.  This provides us a way with working with uncertainty by understanding how climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency hazards and in turn the impact of these hazards on livelihoods.

From here, we turn to our Participatory Action Plan Development approach to build consensus on an action plan among a range of stakeholders. For us, this means working with local communities and national, meso and  local level authorities , as well as scientists, academics and the private companies to integrate climate information into DRR planning and participatory technology development.

The handbook for a holistic vulnerability and capacity assessment  includes the latest observed and projected changes in climate related hazards and non-climate related hazards, livelihoods and governance. This is to be used at the local level and fed into meso and national level DRR processes to build resilience of communities facing changing risks.

Stay tuned for our forthcoming release of our:

From Vulnerability to Resilience Handbook: Steps for Holistic Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment for Programme Design in a Changing Climate

Angelina Jolie eclipses full-time humanitarians

I just read this in Guardian’s G2 magazine about Angelina Jolie winning another humanitarian award for her philanthropy. I enjoyed it, thought others would to. While Practical Action is not a humanitarian agency (though we do plenty of work to influence humanitarian agencies to improve their practices, see our Recovery and Reconstruction work) I feel this article is also a tribute to the unsung, hard-working, tired heroes  I have a privilege to work with around the world.

International Day for Disaster Reduction – it’s all about children

Julie Brown
Bourton on Dunsmore, Warwickshire CV23 9, UK, Bourton on Dunsmore
October 7th, 2011

October 13^th is International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction and this year the focus in on children and young people.

Last year I visited Nepal where I met an amazing young student who was on the committee for disaster management in her village.  She told me that learning what do if a flood occurred made her less afraid.  What really impressed me was that students were considered an important part of the committee and that their contribution was valued.  They helped educate other students in school as well as spreading the messages in their community.  Children power at its best!  It made me think that we could really learn something from that here in the UK.  As far as I am aware the committees that run Neighbourhood watch schemes do not inactively encourage participation from young people, perhaps they would be more effective if they did.

To find out moreabout the day and how you can get involved go to the United Nations website.

Disasters, climate change and development: what do we need to do differently?

Jonathan Ensor
September 30th, 2011

What is the missing link in disasters? According to Terry Cannon, in a session I attended today it is the attention to social and cultural issues that mediate preparedness and perceptions of risk. Terry highlighted the need to think more broadly about the challenges of addressing disaster risk, discussing the need to bridge institutional and local knowledge systems, and bring in knowledge from other disciplines – a theme taken up by his co-presenter, Katie Harris.