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:
- Sustainable access to modern energy service for all by 2030
- Systems which provide food security and livelihoods for people in rural areas
- Improved access to drinking water, sanitation and waste services for people living in towns and cities
- 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.
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The 3 securities we need to worry about.
I am writing this blog from a conference hosted by the German Government in the old parliament building in Bonn.
Influencing the Rio +20 summit
The Bonn conference is being attended by over 500 people, including ministers, senior government officials, representatives from the UN agencies and development banks, researchers and civil society groups. It is the German Government’s attempt to put an issue on the agenda for the next ‘earth summit’ – Rio + 20 summit next year, and it is confirming for me the relevance of our work to the subjects which will be increasingly central to future international development policies.
The Germans held a similar conference, which I also attended, just ahead of the last ‘Earth Summit’ in 2002. That conference focused on freshwater, with a big emphasis on water and sanitation. It gained momentum for the move to get a sanitation target into the MDGs and ensured the topic got a good airing at the Johannesburg summit. So this conference has a bit of a track record of getting issues onto the ‘Earth Summit’ agendas.
The subject of the conference this time is the critical importance to both poverty reduction and a sustainable future for all of us of three inter-related ‘securities’ – food security, energy security and water security – and it this that the German Government would like to see centre stage of the discussions for Rio +20. Interestingly, the EC has just announced its new ‘agenda for change’ which outlines a new and tighter focus to its development assistance, with a big emphasis on two of these three securities – food and energy.
There are some fascinating figures being quoted in the various sessions here. Did you know, for example, that globally 70% of freshwater extraction and nearly half of energy production is consumed by the agriculture sector? Or that the amount of cultivated land per capita is expected to be just 1.61 ha per person by 2050, compared to 7.91 ha per person in 1900?
No Comments » | Add your commentThat ‘eureka’ moment
On a recent holiday in Sicily I visited the tomb of Archimedes, engineer and inventor of the 3rd century BC – famous for his ‘eureka’ moment. Born in the rich and powerful city of Syracuse, he benefited from the financial support of its ruler Hiero II.
He was considered the greatest mathematician of the ancient world and was responsible for many important discoveries. The Archimedes screw is still extensively used throughout the world as a method of raising water.
His home city of Syracuse was at war with Rome and under siege for two years with the result that Archimedes was obliged to devote a great deal of his time to the design of the machinery of war. He proved remarkably good at this. But imagine what he might have achieved if his work had been devoted to inventions for human good rather than human destruction.
In our sophisticated modern world we still devote a disproportionate amount of our budgets and great scientific minds to the pursuit of war. The technologies in which we invest most in the developed world are designed either to provide us with an even greater level of comfort and ease than we already enjoy or to destroy our enemies. And we expend vast sums in the destruction of our beautiful planet. Only a small proportion of our enormous wealth is devoted to finding solutions to the basic needs of more than a billion people in the world who live in poverty.
This is a great injustice and one which Practical Action is determined to address. Providing clean, sustainable energy systems, more easily accessible water supplies and better sanitation give poor men and women the opportunity to live healthier and more rewarding lives. Surely that’s worth fighting for?
3 Comments » | Add your commentLeasing land for food
2011 Blog Action Day on 16 October – World Food Day – is, naturally, themed around food
The hill and mountain districts of far and mid-western Nepal have been hit by persistent food insecurity. The agricultural produce is not sufficient for household consumption in many areas of the country due to high dependency on subsistence agriculture, very small land holdings, inequality in land holdings, low productivity, limited agricultural infrastructure, use of traditional tools and lack of appropriate technologies.
In my recent visit to one of the Practical Action’s project sites in mid-west Nepal I saw a ray of hope where people were continuing the land leasing approach for food production introduced by Practical Action.
A women land leasing group (Jhumka Land Leasing Group) sharing their experiences in mid-west Nepal
Practical Action, with support of the European Union, implemented a food security project in this area, focusing on a land leasing approach targeting smallholder farmers who owns less than 0.05 hectare of land or are landless.
The project has supported the group of small land-holding or landless farmers in accessing the land through a land leasing approach. The project has also people in accessing various appropriate agricultural technologies, extension services, agri-infrastructures and linking with markets.
A survey indicated that the proportion of project households having food sufficiency for less than three months has been decreased to 6.7% from 58.3%. The study also revealed that the food sufficiency for three to six months, six to nine months and more than nine months have been increased to 41, 33.8 and 18.5% from 28, 10.7 and 2.9 per cent respectively.
The smallholding farmers, who I met recently, were very happy and were continuously practicing the plastic house technology and micro irrigation technology in their leased land. They were receiving support from the local agro-vets and local resource people developed by the project. It is encouraging that from the selling of the vegetables and other agricultural produces, they were able to buy some pieces of land on their own where they can grow more produce to fulfill their food need.
With this evidence, I think the land leasing approach can be a sustainable approach that can be replicated elsewhere while working with the smallholders or landless farmers to secure or improve their food security conditions.
5 Comments » | Add your commentSince when did the suffering of 12 million people stop being headline news?
This morning before work I spent my usual few moments educating myself about today’s news on the BBC website.
I was especially interested in reading the latest about the Horn of Africa drought and famine because in five days I will be travelling to Kenya myself to visit a range of Practical Action’s projects. My trip will include four days in Mandera, an area in the very north of the country, and one which is severely affected by the worst drought in 60 years.
However, it took me much longer than I expected to read news about the drought. In fact, it took me four mouse clicks to reach any sort of update about the current crisis. The drought does not even headline the Africa section of the BBC news page.
This horrifies me perhaps even more than I can express. Since when did the suffering of 12 million people stop being headline news?
When reading the comments section underneath virtually every article on Africa and development and poverty on any mainstream news website, there is a worryingly high number of opinions along the lines of “Africa brings its poverty on itself”, “it’s not the West’s problem anymore, we’ve done enough”, “charity begins at home”, “just give them condoms” and a whole host of other ill-thought out, lazy and ignorant attitudes.
Of course development has its problems. But when the lives of 12 million people – and most of these children – are at risk these do not matter.
You have two choices. Bury your head in the sand and ignore the suffering of so many because it has nothing to do with you - which is a very easy choice, as demonstrated by the absence of the crisis from mainstream news.
Or support relief efforts of other NGOs, and the long-term development work of Practical Action.
You can give, and try to help.
Or you can choose not to. And more many innocent girls and boys from Africa will die.
I will be reporting from Kenya throughout my time there. Stay tuned.
No Comments » | Add your commentImagine you are a 14 year old boy or girl…..
…..and think about how closely you agree with the statement ‘I should only eat food grown in my country ’ was something the President of the West African Farmers Federation ( ROPPA) was asked to do at the kick off meeting for a new EC project on African Agriculture called EuropeAfrica2.
Along with about 20 other attendees he took part in an activity called a belief circle. Designed by Practical Action Education it will be one of a number of educational activities to raise awareness of how food choices we make in Europe affect farmers in Africa. It’s a three year project and Practical Action will be working with partners from Belgium (VECO) and Italy (Terra Nova) to produce material for schools which can be adapted to fit the needs of a number of European countries.
A belief circle can be used to stimulate discussion on a number of issues related to international development including sustainability in engineering. Looking at the enthusiastic response of the president of ROPPA it certainly stimulates engagement!
No Comments » | Add your commentA hand-up, not a hand-out
I was in good company (approx. 12 million people in fact!) by spending my Friday night curled up at home watching BBC’s bi-annual charity telethon Comic Relief. For the most part, I was entertained by the host of comics and celebrities, moved by the footage of vulnerable families in the UK and Africa, and inspired by the efforts of Comic Relief-funded projects to transform lives for good.
However, I found one video extremely unsettling. This short film showed comedian Jack Dee handing out nutritional bars named “Plumpy’Nut” to malnourished children in Kenya. Now I realise that the children receiving this high-protein peanut paste bar were gravely underweight, and in need of urgent help ultimately to save their lives. And I do believe that R.U.T.F. (or ‘ready to use therapeutic foods’) have their place – in times of famine or disaster, for example. But as an example of how Comic Relief strives to “create a just world free from poverty”, I think it was flawed.
After a bit of research today I discovered that a French company named Nutriset manufactures “Plumpy’Nut” bars and protects its intellectual property fiercely. Apparently the inventor of the product envisaged people making it for themselves wherever they were in the world (developing nations grow the majority of the world’s peanuts) but Nutriset’s patent means that this is illegal – although obviously this doesn’t always stop local producers from making their own versions of “Plumpy’Nut”. Regardless of this, it seems that business is profiting from poverty. Maybe it’s naïve, but to me this seems profoundly unjust.
And furthermore, the eradication of malnutrition and weeding out its roots – poverty – is not as simple as distributing a one stop solution to hunger. The answer is far less flash and glamorous. We need to work together with poor people to ensure that they are not condemned to a life of reliance upon Western interventions. And we do that by empowering poor people around the world to challenge their own poverty. At Practical Action we believe that simple, practical solutions can help poor people escape their poverty forever, and we provide the tools and opportunity they need to drive their own development. Read about our work here.
This is the point that our recent spoof video ‘Fat of the Land’ was trying to make. In my opinion handing out “Plumpy’Nut” is no better than donating fat at the Klaxon Institute. Watch it here if you haven’t seen it yet and tell me, what do you think? I’d be interested to hear other thoughts on this. Because the only one echoing around my head is that to achieve fair, long-term and lasting development we should be giving people a hand-up, not a hand-out.
No Comments » | Add your commentBlind faith – Biotech scientists’ report skews off target
The UK’s Foresight report, Global Food and Farming Futures, delivered by the UK’s Chief Scientist John Beddington on 24 January 2011, provides few surprises and offers no new proposals.
It could have been different and saved the taxpayer a lot of money had government and the scientific establishment not been so ‘willfully deaf’ about recognising and taking forward the findings of the World Bank and UN sponsored global scientific assessment of the future of agriculture – the IAASTD reports (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development) – approved by the UK government and 57 others in 2008.
IAASTD confirmed the proposals of the small-scale farmers’ movement La Via Campesina for securing future food and realising food sovereignty. It found that small-scale, more agroecological and organic production methods, based on local knowledge and especially women’s skills and protected from damaging globalised markets, were the way forward to avert hunger, improve equity and restore the environment now and in the next 40 years.
What the Foresight report does do, though, is make the almost desperate plea that for UK science to be involved in what it claims is globally relevant research for food and agriculture the UK must embrace GM foods – a somewhat odd conclusion given that most people in the world eat GM-free food produced locally by small-scale food providers – farmers, livestock keepers, artisanal fishers. Perhaps that is the motivation for investing so much time and money in the Foresight process – to force acceptance of GM foods in the UK? Once accepted, and it does not matter if the GMOs proposed by Beddington et al are ecologically attuned or patented or not, it will open the floodgates for the Monsantos and Syngentas to swamp British and European agriculture and our food system with their single gene and rather ineffective seeds and the GM food products that result. Watch the documentary “Food Inc” and its portrayal of the dysfunctional GM dominated US food system that forces farmers to brink of existence, if you want to know what could lie in store
The way forward, as we are informed by the small-scale food providers themselves, is to secure future food through biodiverse, climate-resilient, ecological practices of the majority of local food providers, protected within the framework of food sovereignty. These are the most productive methods using land and water efficiently, increasing agricultural biodiversity and maximising ecosystem functions in every locality. If UK science could get off its biotech pedestal and find ways of supporting social movements, that are working to strengthen their members’ local, diverse small-scale food systems, then it might become relevant.
Practical Action has first-hand experience over more than 40 years of working with small-scale food providers of their ability of to grow enough food for themselves, their communities and provide excess for the market. What they say is their priority is to have protection of their rights: to have access to, and to be able to grow, food, using their GM-free seeds and livestock breeds; to access and use their land and the water they need for their crops, livestock and fish ponds; to have exclusive access to their coastal fishing grounds, which should be protected from industrial fishing boats; and to have their markets protected from speculators and underpriced imports. They want these rights guaranteed in the framework of food sovereignty, and research to support their ecological food provision, so that they can continue to feed the world. Now, there’s a challenge for UK science and for the UK government in its advocacy in international negotiations.
Patrick Mulvany, Senior Policy Adviser, Practical Action
Brussels, 24 Jan 2011
Communicating with the outside world
Farming is a really important for families trying to earn a living in the remote forests near Moyabamba. So is radio contact with the outside the world. Find out why …
Sara-Jane Brown from our communications team is travelling across Peru and Bolivia to see examples of how Practical Action’s work is making a difference to poor communities. Follow my trip live on Twitter: #sarainperu
No Comments » | Add your commentTrekking up moutains
Imagine climbing two hours up a steep mountainside with heavy bags and then walking hours to the nearest town. Find out how Sara-Jane got on living a day in the life of the Chamaoa villagers …
Sara-Jane Brown from our communications team is travelling across Peru and Bolivia to see examples of how Practical Action’s work is making a difference to poor communities. Follow my trip live on Twitter: #sarainperu
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