In Africa, more, not fewer people will work in agriculture

By Luc Christiaensen

co-authors: Karen Brooks

On Mon, 11/12/2018 

Is the neglect of agriculture in job creation strategies and public investments premature? Photo:  Peter Kapuscinski / World Bank

 


Many people in Sub-Saharan Africa still work in agriculture; on average, over half of the labor force, and even more in poorer countries and localities. Yet the share of the labor force in agriculture is declining (as is normal in development), leading African leaders and economists to focus on job creation outside agriculture.

Five ways Nigeria can realize mobile technology's potential for the unbanked

By Leora Klapper

co-authors: Andrej Popovic

Fri, 06/29/2018

Although it’s Africa's largest economy, Nigeria is missing out on the region’s most exciting financial innovation: mobile money.

Twenty-one percent of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa have a mobile money account, nearly double the share from 2014, according to the latest Global Findex report.

Breastfeeding: A Foundational Investment in Human Capital

By Annette Dixon

Wed, 08/01/2018

Photo: Dominic Chavez/Global Financing Facility

The best first food for a baby, providing essential nutrition in the critical early years of life. A child’s first immunization and her best opportunity for bonding, early stimulation and healthy brain development. Breastfeeding is all these things, but it also more than that -- it is a country’s first step towards building the human capital that will drive their economies in the future.

Community involvement can help end GBV in Kenya

By Janes Amondi Owuor

19/04/2018

Gender-based violence (GBV) has largely been understood as the act of violence against women. Hence society forgets that men also suffer the same way that women do, or even worse.

A water and sanitation success story in Uganda — but the question is how to sustain it

By Fadeke Ayoola

 Mon, 02/26/2018

The community fish pond in Kigungu, Entebbe, created to promote sustainable practices, self-sufficiency and to reduce over fishing in Lake Victoria.

Last year, I attended the African Great Lakes Conference in Entebbe, Uganda, joining over 300 specialists who presented on a wide range of water issues. The highlight of the conference, for me, was visiting the Integrated Community Environmental Conservation project in Arul village, Kigungu, in Entebbe.

The project aims to reduce bio-diversity loss, pollution of international waters of Lake Victoria, land degradation, and address some effects of climate change. The fact that the project was managed by a women’s empowerment network made the prospects of the visit more interesting. Mainstreaming gender in environmental and conservation work is an issue that needs to be addressed.

We arrived in Arul village, Kigungu, in the afternoon. The Kigungu area was a place where wetlands had been polluted, contaminated, and devastated by illegal sand mining, poor waste management, and climate change, among other issues. However, since 2006, the Integrated Community Environmental Conservation project has been addressing these issues.

A Sustainable Fish Pond
In the village, we visited a community pond filled with tropical fish. The pond was created to promote sustainable fishing practices and self-sufficiency in food production. For example, the tropical fish were used for local food production with the surplus fish stock sold in the local market as a small business venture which earned local women a small wage. The pond is also used to reduce over fishing in Lake Victoria.

Local fishermen enter the pond and demonstrate sustainable fishing practices

The fish pond is reaping benefits for the local community – a good practice that should be replicated in other local villages. However, as a trained environmental auditor, I had concerns over the quality of the water which appeared muddy and slightly dark in color. In my field of work, it is recommended that the pond water is green in color; deep dark colors should be avoided to gain good fish yield. The color of the pond water is usually a good indicator of the quality of the water. The deterioration of the water quality of the pond may be in its early stages. Without testing the water quality, it is difficult to assess; but the color indicates that the pond is in need of monitoring to evaluate whether the water quality may, if untreated, affect the fish stock. To ensure that the fish pond continues to produce local food for self-sufficiency in a sustainable manner, water quality monitoring and maintenance is essential to continue the success story.

Ecological Sanitation Toilets
The success story of conservation in this village continues, when we visited the ecological sanitation toilets. We learned that there was a water shortage in the village, which was multiplied by a high-water table which causes groundwater contamination. Due to these circumstances the women’s network decided to build ecological sanitation toilets, since these toilets can function within a closed system which does not require water.

After visiting an ecological sanitation toilet, I must say it is another good practice, a beacon of excellence in conservation that addresses the challenge and relationship between water shortage and sanitation. We discussed the principle of using this new technology, where the nutrients in the waste is recycled to create manure and fertilizer for agriculture, improving soil productivity for small-scale farmers. This vital technology was used to train three hundred local community members in the use and maintenance of the system. It was quite impressive.

But it also occurred to me that the nature of these new ecological sanitation toilets means they will require routine checks, monitoring, and regular training as well as sustainable policies and laws and regulations to enforce such actions.

According to the UN Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and drinking water, in Uganda, there are neither national standards for monitoring sanitation and drinking water, nor independent tests on water quality

A community ecological sanitation toilet - a model of good practice in conservation.

What is the future for these innovative conservation water and sanitation projects without adequate monitoring, measuring, analysis, and evaluation? How will these projects be measured for environmental performance? How will their success story be sustainable without monitoring and evaluation?

The upfront initial investment in water conservation projects is going well, and making a difference across Africa, but long-term monitoring and evaluation needs to be put in place as well. There is evidence that some projects started out as beacons of excellence in conservation tend to need extra investment in monitoring and evaluation to continue the success story.

Fadeke Ayoola is the CEO of NET Africa.

To Build a Brighter Future, Invest in Women and Girls

By Jim Yong Kim

Thu, 03/08/2018

As we mark International Women’s Day 2018, there has never been a more critical time to invest in people, especially in women and girls.

Skills, knowledge, and know-how – collectively called human capital – have become an enormous share of global wealth, bigger than produced capital such as factories or industry, or natural resources.

But human capital wealth is not evenly distributed around the world, and it’s a larger slice of wealth as countries develop. How, then, can developing countries build their human capital and prepare for a more technologically demanding future? The answer is they must invest much more in the building blocks of human capital – in nutrition, health, education, social protection, and jobs. And the biggest returns will come from educating and nurturing girls, empowering women, and ensuring that social safety nets increase their resilience.

According to UNESCO estimates, 130 million girls between the age of 6 and 17 are out of school, and 15 million girls of primary-school age – half of them in sub-Saharan Africa – will never enter a classroom. Women’s participation in the global labour market is nearly 27 percentage points lower than for men, and women’s labour force participation fell from 52 percent in 1990 to 49 percent in 2016.

What if we could fix this? Fostering women’s labor force participation, business ownership, and improvements in productivity could add billions to the global economy.

Educating a girl, educating a nation

There is no question the biggest bang for the buck in development is girls’ education. In the 1920s, the Ghanaian scholar James Emman Aggrey said, “If you educate a man you simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a whole nation."

A World Bank study found that every year of secondary school education is correlated with an 18 percent increase in a girl’s future earning power. And research shows that educating girls has a multiplier effect. Better-educated women tend to be healthier, participate more in the formal labor market, earn more, give birth to fewer children, marry at a later age, and provide better health care and education to their children.

In April 2016, I announced we would invest $2.5 billion over five years through education projects that directly benefit adolescent girls. I’m excited to report that demand for this financing has been so strong that we’ve surpassed this commitment by investing $3.2 billion over the past two years—three years ahead of schedule.

Leveraging Innovative financing for health

The World Bank Group and the Global Financing Facility (GFF) also are investing heavily in adolescent girls’ health. The GFF, a multi-stakeholder partnership hosted by the Bank, is helping countries tackle the worst health and nutrition issues affecting women, children and adolescents. Through the GFF’s innovative approach to financing, countries are increasing investment in the health of their people, which is saving and improving lives and increasing countries’ ability to thrive in the global economy.

For example, in Bangladesh, the GFF is working across sectors to stem early marriage and early pregnancies, reduce maternal and neonatal deaths, and improve adolescent health and well-being. The country is reducing dropouts among female and disadvantaged students, including sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender equity in curricula; and providing adolescent health services, including to girl students.

Together these interventions will help keep girls in school, delay the age of marriage, and postpone the timing of their first birth to increase the chances of survival for both mother and child.

Breaking down barriers by expanding access to finance

Only 30 percent of formal small and medium enterprises around the world are owned and run by women, and lack of access to finance is a major reason. We estimate there is a $1.48 trillion annual credit deficit for these women-owned businesses.

With more than $340 million in funding from 13 governments, the new Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative aims to mobilize more than $1 billion to help women start and grow their businesses, with increased access to finance, markets, and networks.  We-Fi will soon allocate its first round of financing.

Digital technology can also help women cut across other hurdles, such as cultural barriers, to open a bank account in their name and narrow the 7 percent gender gap in bank account ownership documented by the Global Findex database.

In China, our private sector-focused arm, IFC, partnered with Ant Financial, an affiliate of China’s Alibaba Group, to use Internet-based financing to expand lending to more Chinese micro and small enterprises and women-owned businesses.

Gathering evidence to inform policy

Data and evidence are crucial for decision-making.  One of our major flagships, Women, Business and the Law, identifies laws that hold women back. The most recent edition found that 100 of 173 countries limit the kind of work women can do. In 18 economies, women cannot get jobs without the consent of their husbands. There are also significant gaps in average wages of salaried women and men in both the formal and informal sectors.

A recent study found that close to 1.4 billion women lack legal protection against economic abuse such as intimidation and coercion. At the same time, more than one-in-three countries lack laws to protect against sexual violence at home at the hand of an intimate partner or family member.

The Tackling Childcare report draws on 10 case studies to find that offering childcare led to a substantial reduction in employee turnover; improved the quality of applicants and the speed at which vacancies can be filled; increased productivity through reduced absences, greater focus, and enhanced motivation and commitment; and improved gender diversity and the advancement of women into leadership positions.

We’re committed to helping countries close gender gaps as they look for new drivers of economic growth and build human capital. Aid alone will not be enough to effect real change. Change will come when government leaders and people around the world push for massive investments in people, and we will use our resources and expertise to make that demand a reality.

Corps Members as Change Agents: From National Service to Social Entrepreneurship.

Community Outreach by Youth Corps Medical Team
By Andrew Ogara

“It is expected that Corps members ….be agents of change, contributing towards the development of their host communities.”

“The Community Development Service (CDS) is aimed at harnessing the skills, creativity and innovativeness of corps members ….in identifying the needs of their host communities and mobilizing members of their host communities to embark on the project”

-NYSC on their Traditional Community Development Service and Integrated Rural Development.

Every corps member participating in the mandatory one-year Community Development Service (CDS) of the NYSC scheme should see his/her position and role as essentially that of a change agent for societal development. By seeing themselves from this perspective, corps members are able to have a clearly defined purpose for participating in the scheme. It equally makes it possible for corps members to be adequately orientated or trained, to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in the discharge of their duties.

I have mentioned elsewhere that the NYSC scheme is indeed an essential platform for youth participation in development since corps members are not only critical actors in Nigeria’s quest for development, they constitute a potential reservoir of power, knowledge and influence, that will in the near future participate in shaping and setting the nation’s human and sustainable social development agenda.

We live in a region and a nation affected by diverse national and global development challenges. These challenges and concerns range from widespread poverty, environmental concerns/ climate change, human right issues, social injustice/inequality, corruption, bad governance/misrule, to general ill – health among the citizens, homelessness, widespread unemployment, dearth of essential social services and infrastructure, famine and food insecurity, violent crimes including rape, rural – urban migration, trafficking in human persons, drug use and drug abuse, communal conflicts etc.

Although government is making effort to address these challenges, however, given the magnitude of the problems, government cannot do it alone. Government’s effort need to be supported by every Nigerian, especially the Nigerian youth, who represent a major stakeholder in the nation’s overall development effort. NYSC therefore presents an important platform for youth participation in development. Personally, I regard the NYSC scheme as a national development intervention programme, deliberately put in place by the nation’s visionary leaders to prepare a critical mass of socially and educationally empowered Nigerian youths for practical participation in the nation’s social and human development sector.

However, it is important to note that central to the overall success of the scheme is the Community Development Service (CDS) component which was conceived as a rural development strategy with the goal of promoting the active involvement of corps members who are potential leaders of the nation in tackling and addressing the nation’s rural and urban development challenges.

Consequently, many corps members have been motivated and many of them have gone beyond their normal duties and assignments to execute and implement various people – centred projects and programmes in their target communities across the nation. Executing such development projects by corps members has become the bench mark for measuring individual corps members’ performance. It has equally become one of the criteria or standards for giving awards and honour by the federal, state and local governments.

Transiting from National Service to Social Entrepreneurship

The activities of corps members as agents of change in their host communities during their one-year Community Development Service (CDS) include identifying societal or social challenges, problems and areas of need in their host communities and adopting innovative ways of addressing these concerns. Corps members have embarked on various people – oriented projects/programmes in areas such as health, education, water and sanitation, housing, environmental protection, economic empowerment, improving the plight of the urban poor, provision of rural infrastructure etc.

This is similar to the field of social entrepreneurship. They both seek to solve societal problems through innovative practices. While corps members’ participation in the compulsory one year CDS basically helps to expose them to the concept of public good, public interest or social mission only, social entrepreneurship incorporates both financial and social mission. As a social entrepreneur, one has the opportunity to start, develop, lead or manage your own innovative company or organization.

Whether your discipline or passion is in the field of education, health, politics, ICT, youth development, engineering, women empowerment, law/human rights, reproductive health, agriculture, transportation, environmental/ climate change, urban or rural development, social entrepreneurship, provides one with the opportunity to turn one’s passion in addressing these national and global issues into a prestigious endeavour and a financially rewarding career.

In the next blog, we will be sharing on the vast and limitless career/job opportunities available in the social sector and how development finance and philanthropic resources are currently directed to social entrepreneurship organizations to support young men and women with ideas and insights on how to address these societal problems.

Empowering Women to Lead The Way On Climate Change

By Connie Britton

UNDP Goodwill Ambassador

November 16, 2017

Women are poised to be grass-roots leaders for climate action, since implementation at the local level will largely fall on their shoulders. Photo: Giacomo Pirozzi/UNDP Benin

As world leaders meet for climate talks this week in Bonn, at the UN Climate Change Conference, they should embrace the tenacity, spirit and energy of women to promote more effective climate actions across the globe.

Community Reporting

By Dan Agbese

 Nov 26 2017

 

PHOTO: AFP / STRINGER

Borno State : Houses Ravaged by the Boko Haram Attacks.

There is a silent majority in our rural communities throughout the country. How much reporting are our news media doing on these communities? How much of their economic and social problems do we know? Indeed, do we know them?

 None of us would be proud of the answers to these questions. Community reporting is not attractive to reporters. It lacks glamour. The path to journalistic success and fortune does not cut through the isolated rural communities. Still, I suggest we bestir ourselves and take up the challenges of community reporting so we can bring our rural communities in from the cold. It would be good for the health of national development. 

The focus of community reporting is to give our rural communities human faces and human voices. The first rule in community reporting is for the reporter to know the community he wishes to report on. We have two broadly distinct communities - urban and rural. As the name implies, the urban communities live in our towns and cities and the rural communities live in the rural areas.

To Transform Agricultural Extension, Give Youth a Voice.

 By Hope Mpata

Tue, 01/02/2018

© Neil Palmer/CIAT

At the recent Africa Agriculture Extension week in Durban, there was a common refrain: "Demand for food in Africa is growing and expected to double by 2050." This is why we see continued growth and employment opportunities in the agricultural value chain and why agriculture extension—or training-- is more important than ever.

Climate-Smart Agriculture: Lessons from Africa, for the World

By Ademola Braimoh
Wed, 01/17/2018

The world’s climate is changing, and is projected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  The impact of climate change will be particularly felt in agriculture, as rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and increased pests and diseases pose new and bigger risks to the global food system. Simply put, climate change will make food security and poverty reduction even more challenging in the future.