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Is the U.S. a Development Commitment-Phobe?

by Global Washington Policy Coordinator Danielle Ellingston

The Center for Global Development released its 2009 Commitment to Development Index (CDI), and unsurprisingly, the United States ranked 17th out of 22, just below Portugal and above Greece.  The CDI rates rich countries on how much they help poor countries build prosperity, good government, and security. Each rich country gets scores in seven policy areas, which are averaged for an overall score.

The United States scored worst in the aid and environment policy areas, where it ranked 18th and 20th respectively.   In aid, the CGD found weaknesses in low aid volume, high tied aid, and poor targeting of aid to where it is needed most.  The environment policy weaknesses were high greenhouse gas emissions per capita, low gas tax, and not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.  The U.S. got some bonus points in aid for high private charitable giving- and we know that Washington State organizations had a lot to do with that.

The U.S. did well in the area of trade, where it ranked 3rd, behind Australia and New Zealand.  Our (relatively) low agricultural tariffs and subsidies were cited as our strength in trade policy.  Now if only we could get somewhere on providing duty-free and quota-free access to all poor countries, we’d be #1 in trade.

Who was #1 overall?  Sweden.  Read Sweden’s policy for global development and you’ll understand why – it reads like MFAN’s proposal for U.S. foreign aid.

There is hope for the United States in 2010- or maybe 2011, at the rate we’re going.  Obama announced a Presidential Study Directive () and a Quadrennial Review on Development and Diplomacy, and there is a lot of talk about reforming the Foreign Assistance Act, which isn’t so much a policy as a hodge-podge of initiatives and constraints that have been put together over the last 40 years.  It is hard to say where this will all lead, but it’s promising that there is finally a lot of energy and attention devoted to foreign aid reform in the United States, all the way up to the highest levels of government.

Many Washington State organizations are involved in this debate, including Global Washington member Initiative for Global Development, which has a lot of policy reform information on its website.

Global Social Event: North & West Africa

event re-cap by Global WA volunteer Saira Abbasey McDonald

El Centro de la Raza – Seattle, WA
October 21, 2009

Featured speakers:
·    Valerie Nkamgang Bemo, MD, MPH – Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
·    Carol Schillios – Founder and President of the Fabric of Life Foundation

Summary:
Originally from Cameroon, Dr. Valerie Nkamgang Bemo worked with several field-based health non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa before joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  She is now engaged in work related to emergency medical response related to natural disasters like cyclones and flooding, food crises, and diseases like meningitis.

Dr. Bemo detailed some of the critical issues that affect development progress in West African countries today, including:
·    Conflict.  Though there is officially peace in most of the region, pockets of armed conflict remain in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote D’Ivoire.
·    Population movement:  Conflict often gives rise to population movement.  Displaced people face a host of threats to their health and security, as well as issues of integration in their new environment.
·    Climate change:  Climate change has had great impact on the populations living near the Sahel, the arid band of land that stretches the continent.  Inconsistent rainfall has had significant economic impact on farmers and others who depend on the rains.
·    Health:  In the last ten years, West Africans have made significant progress in health.  Dr. Bemo noted several remaining issues, including:
o     Maternal and child health:  Many women are dying preventable deaths in childbirth, and child mortality rates remain very high.
o    Malaria claims many lives—especially those of children—due to the high cost of treatment
o    Meningitis outbreaks occur frequently due to the increasingly dry climate

Despite these troubles, Dr. Bemo noted that West Africa has great economic potential and an abundance of natural resources including diamonds, coffee, seaports, as well as the Niger River for irrigation.  The people of West Africa, she described as “warm and colorful.”

Q&A
It was noted by an audience member that there seems to be collaboration between the countries of West Africa.  Dr. Bemo was asked if West African collaboration with the countries of Central Africa will follow suit.  She explained that though trade occurs between the two regions, political leaders impede the flow of people and ideas.

Dr. Bemo was also asked to describe a typical day in the field.  Who does she meet?  What types of things does she monitor?  Dr. Bemo noted that she spends a lot of time on the road.  She and her colleagues spend time examining a project to see what the challenges are, and what they can do differently to improve it.  She gave drought as an example – how can one address future challenges associated with it?

Dr. Bemo was asked how she typically identifies organizations to fund.  She noted that most funding is given mainly to international organizations, as it needs to be fast and flexible money.  West Africa, she added, has a thriving civil society but is comprised mainly of community-based organizations that lack institutional capacity.

Carol  Schillios of the Fabric of Life Foundation, spoke of her experience working in microfinance for the past 25 years.  Working as a grassroots trainer, Ms. Schillios help to build institutional capacity of microfinance organizations.  She eventually started a school for poor girls in Bamako, Mali – a city where the begging population is growing at 5% per year.  Ms. Schillios’ school teaches the girls income generating skills to its members. Along with skill-building, the girls take classes in health and nutrition, family planning, AIDs prevention and literacy skills.  The girls’ products are available for sale at a boutique in Edmonds, Washington, which is run exclusively through volunteers.

For more information:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/global-health
http://fabricoflife.org/
http://www.upontheroofwithcarol.org/

Organizations represented by attendees at the event:

Kabissa, www.kabissa.org
Americans for UNFPA, www.americansforunfpa.org
Williamsworks, http://www.williamsworks.com/
Global Business Analysis, http://globalba.com/
American Red Cross, www.redcross.org
The Max Foundation, www.themaxfoundation.org
LINGOS, www.ngolearning.org
Grameen Foundation, www.grameenfoundation.org
Prosthetics Outreach Foundation, www.pofsea.org
Mo Tribe, Bamboi, Ghana
Real Life Church, www.reallifechurch.com
African Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific NW, http://www.africanchamberofcommercepnw.com

Featured Organization: Woodland Park Zoo

Featured Organization: Woodland Park Zoo

Is global development the first thing that pops into your mind when Woodland Park Zoo comes up?  No?  Well then, it may be time to take yourself down to the zoo again, with or without the accompaniment of children.  When you do, you’ll find that the exhibits not only display exotic animals and educate visitors about the environmental and man-made dangers to their natural habitats, but also engage those same visitors in actions they can take to help local people protect the animals and themselves.

Just take the African Savanna exhibit for example.  It showcases the huge varieties of animals, predators including lions and African wild dogs and large herbivores including giraffes, hippos, Grant’s gazelles, fringe-eared oryx, ostriches, zebras and patas monkeys, that inhabit the wild grasslands of East Africa.  But the exhibit also focuses on the reasons those habitats are endangered–excessive vegetation growth in the waterholes, human/wildlife conflict over shared wildlife corridors, long fences erected in wildlife corridors.  As part of its exhibit, the zoo supports and publicizes the work of the Waterhole Restoration Project in Kenya, which is restoring 18 natural waterholes for the benefit of wildlife in Merrueshi Group Ranch, a wildlife corridor between Chulu and Amboseli National Parks.  The founder of the Maasai Foundation, which administers the restoration work, is a cultural interpreter at the zoo during the summer.  He educates visitors about his culture, their links to savanna wildlife and how they can help preserve it.  Built on the edge of the Savanna exhibit, a reproduction of a modern rural village of East Africa shows visitors how people live who interact with the wildlife around them.  There young visitors get the opportunity to make an African beading project to help provide funding for the Waterhole Restoration Project.

Such projects help children become connected to the world.  Interest in wildlife or international development can begin from a spark at the zoo.  Once interested, visitors are directed by the zoo to organizations that are providing tangible outcomes.  This focus on local community involvement in solutions is critical to the zoo’s mission.  Dr. Deborah Jensen, the President and CEO of Woodland Park Zoo, says, “We face common problems whether in U.S or Africa.  Solutions require thoughtful local leadership.  When we decided, for example, we needed to clean up Puget Sound, we needed local people to lead the way, but we also learned that, as a community, we needed to change the way we operate, the fertilizers we used, the things we threw away.  The same is true abroad.  We tell our more than one million guests a year how they can help local groups abroad get involved.  It is a message of hope, that there are real solutions to difficult community and conservation problems.”

In some ways this is not really a new development.  The zoo’s very first veterinarian, Dr. Jim Foster, helped establish the first Mt. Gorilla Research Institute in central Africa and participated in the recruiting and hiring of its first scientist, Dian Fossey.  The zoo’s Partners for Wildlife focuses on ways to ameliorate the disappearing habitat of animals caused by human encroachment. These projects work on species preservation, habitat protection, local capacity building and community livelihood.   Years ago, Dr. Lisa Dabek, now director of field conservation at Woodland Park Zoo, set the example, founding the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program inPapua, New Guinea.  After her Ph.D. research on the tree kangaroo at the zoo, Lisa went to Papua New Guinea, and got to know the community there, building a long-term relationship with them.  Over the years she talked to people about the long term future of indigenous animals, which were decreasing in numbers.  One day she asked a hunter if he thought more tree kangaroos would survive if a part of the land were set aside for them where they could raise their babies and be protected.  He later said, “That message struck me like an arrow to my heart.”   That insight was the impetus to start the YUS community in a project of community mapping that resulted in their setting aside areas of the land for the tree kangaroos.   This year the government of Papua New Guinea turned those same areas into the nation’s first designated Conservation Area.  The zoo, in turn, is raising $1 million, to be matched by Conservation International to help create a stream of income for the YUS CO, a local non profit made up of representatives from the conservation area which manages it with TKCP.  Deborah Jensen calls this project, “The best example of how citizens around the world can act as a community to help save creatures as well as help the people who live there sustain themselves and the animals.”

The Botswana Wild Dog Research Project, initially supported by the zoo and later funded by Paul G. Allen Foundation, is currently doing research on the use of scent markers to maintain a natural separation–a kind of bio-fence– between the wild dogs and domestic livestock.  Another partner supported by the zoo is the Tarangire Elephant Project in Tanzania working to ensure the viability of the elephant’s ecosystem by initiating agreements with key villages to set aside easements over thousands of acres of land in the Simanjiro plains, the main calving ground for the large elephants.  A long research project on the impact of poaching the female leader of the elephant packs is underway as well.

The zoo contributes money and lends expertise to the Seattle-based Snow Leopard Trust for a long-term study in Mongolia; the trust was founded by a former staffer from the zoo.  As part of the trust’s education program local people are asked to pledge not to shoot the snow leopards and in return, the trust helps them make products to sell.  The trust conducts workshops with local women and artisans.  The zoo recently sent the director of its retail operations to Mongolia to provide advice about what kinds of products could be made that would sell here.  He has also helped place their products in other zoos.   Every year the zoo helps the trust put on a fundraising event held at the zoo.

The zoos and aquariums accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, collectively, devote over $70 million a year to international wildlife conservation.  Under President and CEO Jensen and the current board, the Woodland Park Zoo currently partners with 38 field projects in more than 50 countries locally and globally, receiving a third of its funding by private philanthropic donations, with conservation the fastest growing part of the zoo’s budget.  Because of the zoo’s emphasis on taking action, this summer alone over 28,000 people heeded the zoo’s call and took part in programs to help conserve the world’s habitats for both animals and humans.  The zoo’s message that the solutions are in our hands is taking hold and spreading, locally and globally.

Photo credits: Snow Leopard Cubs – Dennis Dow, Papua New Guinea Celebration (2 photos) – Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo

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