YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon (PAMACC News) - Lives of over 5.6 million children are increasingly threatened by extreme weather in countries around Lake Chad including, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, UNICEF has warned. Heavy rains leading to floods in most of these regions is not only slowing down development assistance to a region already crippled economically by high insecurity but has left the poverty-mired population especially women and children even more vulnerable to water borne diseases, a UNICEF report has noted. Cameroon government officials say the rains are already severe in the Northern region of the country, and it is now a problem for the local population, and a concern to development partners and the government.“Floods have been a major challenge in the Northern region of Cameroon stoking climate worries. The government is on the alert,” says Cameroon’s minister of environment, nature protection and sustainable development Hele Pierre.According to health and environment experts, epidemics have continued to worsen in the past years as a result of heavy rains, which sweep impurities into open drinking water wells, thus, exposing mostly children and women to multiple health risk.According to the June 26, 2917 UNICEF report, more than 5.6 million children are at increased risk of contracting waterborne diseases, such as cholera and diarrheal infections, as the rainy season takes its toll in the countries around Lake Chad already devastated economically by conflicts and insecurity by Boko Haram terrorists.The report says “the threat of disease outbreaks in Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria coincides with growing regional insecurity and increased population movements particularly in Nigeria's northeast.”"The rains will further complicate what is already a dire humanitarian situation, as millions of children made vulnerable by conflict are now facing the potential spread of diseases," said Marie Pierre Poirier, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa. "Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene conditions leads to cholera outbreaks and to Hepatitis E, a deadly disease for pregnant women and their babies, while standing water pools can attract malaria-carrying mosquitos the UNICEF report says.The heavy rains which triggers flooding and muddy roads constitutes a major impediment to development assistance, severely limiting humanitarian access to remote areas and villages amidst rising needs of millions of children and families left homeless and hungry in refugee camps in Northern Cameroon and Nigeria.Across the Lake Chad region, UNICEF and other development partners are working in communities at higher risk of cholera outbreaks to teach families about the effects of the disease and practical steps to help avoid infection. In Niger, Cameroon and Chad, essential drugs and bars of soap have been prepositioned in warehouses close to IDP camps to curb cholera outbreak.According to UNICEF Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, response in the Lake Chad Basin has received less than 20 percent of the US$80 million required to meet urgent needs in 2017.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (PAMACC News) – Getting political and policy buy-in on the Sustainable Development Goals is not an exception but critical in achieving the ambitious agenda to end global poverty in 15 years, a leading science think tank says.SDGs, adopted by global governments in 2015 and considered the best chance at delivering development, can be successfully implemented if they are integrated says the International Council for Science (ICSU), a non-governmental organisation representing 122 national scientific bodies across 142 countries. The ICSU in May 2017 launched a blue print report titled ‘A Guide to SDG interactions: from Science to Implementation,’ to help countries implement and achieve the 17 goals and supportive 169 targets. The report, a collaboration of 22 scientists - examines the interactions between the SDGs and applies a quantitative scale to determine the extent to which they reinforce or conflict with each other.“It is a big, unwieldy, ambitious agenda that – if it is successfully implemented – could set the world on a course toward inclusive, sustainable development,” Anne-Sophie Stevance, report Lead Coordinator and Science Officer at the International Council for Science, said in an online interview. Stevance says in the SDGs are all the pieces needed to address sustainability challenges in a single bag but assembling them into a coherent picture key to desired development outcomes for people and the planet, requires understanding on how the individual pieces fit together.“Connecting the dots will require science and information gathering, political leadership, cross-sectoral coordination and multi-stakeholder dialogues, realigning funding and ways of working to match the ambition of the agenda and realise its transformative potential,” said Stevance.The ICS developed the guide to facilitate the integration of the SDGs which Stevance said are a comprehensive set of aspirational goals for people and the planet as they integrate the three dimensions of sustainable development in the 17 goals and 169 targets that were agreed. While the goals fundamentally reframed development by recognizing the interdependency between economic prosperity, fair and equitable development for all, environmental protection and stewardship, the number of goals and targets bore and the risks of countries and stakeholders cherry picking among the goals.The UN has called for the SDGs to be considered as integrated and indivisible agenda but no one fully understands what this entails, Stevance noted.“The scientific community has argued throughout the SDG process for the definition of the goals to take a systems-approach that takes fully into account the growing body of scientific evidence on how fundamentally connected natural and social systems are at multiple scales, said Stevance, adding that a systematic and science-based mapping of interactions goal by goal that applied a common language and approach to characterizing the nature and strength of the interactions was missing.Frédérique Seyler, Deputy Director of the department on Internal Dynamics and Continent surface at the Institute of Research for Development in France, says science has played a major role in the lead up to the definition of the SDGs, and now it can influence their implementation and monitoring. The report,…

DURBAN, South Africa (PAMACC News) - African experts in indigenous knowledge have begun steps that will culminate in the establishment of a Pan-African Indigenous Knowledge Systems-Informed Climate Information Service (IKS-CIS) platform.The experts have also developed Natural Resource Management and Sustainable Livelihood and Communications strategies that will work hand in hand with the IKS-CIS platform.The experts have also resolved to develop an IKS-CIS curriculum and spearhead teaching of IKS-CIS in African universities and other institutions to promote indigenous knowledge in promoting climate information.The experts developed the above after a two-day workshop in Durban, South Africa last week.Prof Hassan Kaya, Director of the Department of Science and Technology-National Research Foundation (DST-NRF) Centre in Indigenous Knowledge Systems (CIKS), University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa emphasized the importance of African IKS-CIS.“Conventional weather services need to be more relevant and accessible to African local communities. We need to harness indigenous knowledge weather forecasting practices that are inbuilt in African indigenous cultures, established after long years of observation of their respective natural environments,” Kaya, who is also the chair and convener of the Durban workshop, said.He noted it is mostly the only knowledge accessible, affordable and actionable source of weather and climate information for sustainable community livelihood. “Most African local communities tend to perceive conventional weather information as unreliable and untimely. African local communities in their diverse ecosystems and cultures make use of biotic indicators to predict future weather conditions. However, research also reveals increasing pessimism about the viability of indigenous weather forecasting mechanisms,” Kaya said.Prof Joseph Matowanyika, of the Zimbabwe-based Chinhoyi University of Technology, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Environment and Lifelong Learning Department, attributed the above scenarios to a number of factors.“This is due to the extinction of some biotic species that were used for weather forecasting and expansion of modern education and monotheistic religions which undermines the claimed rationality of indigenous knowledge,” Matowanyika said.He added, “It is also due to the precarious survival of indigenous weather forecasting skills is further undermined by poverty and lack of clear knowledge transfer mechanisms and poor documentation of indigenous knowledge-related climate information.Kaya observed that the limitations of both (indigenous and conventional) weather information service systems require research on the status of indigenous weather forecasting practices among different African ecosystems and cultures and ecosystems.“This should be done before they vanish beyond recovery; and integrating the experience of modern science and indigenous knowledge for more rigorous weather forecasting. It is this consideration which led to the initiative of developing a Pan-Africa IKS-CIS platform,” Kaya said.The platform will serve as a coordinating tool for interfacing conventional/existing weather information services and indigenous knowledge systems-based climate change information services. This will make conventional weather information services more culturally and ecologically relevant and accessible.“The platform will assist in building an interactive multi-media database informed by the nature and processes of production, sharing, storage and application of IKS-informed climate information which are culturally and linguistically specific,” Matowanyika said.“The holistic and multidisciplinary nature of IKS provides the platform with the opportunity to engage diverse stakeholders from across…

IDENAU, Cameroon (PAMACC News) - Julianna Senze, 40, had been in heavy labour for eight hours when she arrived at the Idenau Health Centre in Limbe, on the southwest coast of Cameroon. Like many women in the country, she had had no prenatal care, so what should have been a routine delivery was now a high-risk medical procedure. The nurses, looking worn and tired, rushed her to the delivery room. “We had to get her here quickly from Batoke village, some eight kilometres away, after receiving an SMS message from the doctor on duty,” said Michael Senze, her husband, his voice strained with worry. Less than an hour later, Senze safely delivered a healthy baby boy. Only a few years ago, Senze’s story could have had a more tragic ending.Michael recollects how his family had to bear lots of pain and a hazardous emotional downtime after the death of their first son at the age of 3 some 17 years ago from malaria. “I was afraid of losing yet another baby or even my wife,” Michael said. Cameroon has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. More than 7,000 women die due to pregnancy-related causes and 58,000 children under the age of 5 lose their lives every year in Cameroon, according to the United Nations Population Fund, UNPF in Cameroon. Most of them live in rural parts of the country with abject poverty and where health services are weakest.According to UNPF, access to clean drinking water, proper sanitation or medicine leading to deadly diseases, some preventable, has become part of their daily lives. But a combination of solar energy and a new mobile phone platform, which gives women access to important health information, is changing that. New renewable energy projects are giving more people the electricity they need to access health information, and giving hospitals power to deliver essential care, experts say. The message that may have saved Senze’s life was sent using Gifted Mom, a mobile platform founded by Cameroon engineer Alain Nteff in 2012. The text-messaging service and app gives women in out-of-the-way rural communities free health advice, sending reminders about prenatal check-ups and children’s vaccinations. It tells users when and where to get the treatment they need, and gives them access to doctors who can answer health-related questions.According to Nteff, Gifted Mom is now used in all 10 regions of the country and has since helped thousands of women, especially pregnant mothers access useful health information to make more informed decision on themselves and their children. “The project has significantly helped mothers and their children and will continue to help reduce the number of Cameroonian women who die during childbirth and the number of babies who die at birth or below the age of five by at least 70 percent by 2020,” said Nteff, talking to the press in Yaounde. But Gifted Mom’s success would be impossible if it weren’t for the other projects tackling another issue that blights the lives of those living…