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, says Seyler, highlights to the role of scientists in harvesting and synthesizing scientific knowledge on each of the SDGs and their interactions, a key role that require cross-disciplinary collaboration and a strong interest for working with policy-makers and stakeholders.
“The goals are the expression of a political agenda,” said Seyler, pointing out that it is one task of science organizations among others to make the goals realistic and feasible; in particular in deepening the investigations concerning the social and economic costs and benefits of their implementation and working on the indicators that are essentials to evaluate the progress made in their implementation.
The SDGs, cover a diverse range of issues including gender equity, sustainable cities, access to clean water, and good governance. The aim is for all countries to achieve the goals and their targets by 2030 and set the world on a path towards sustainable development
“This report demonstrates the unique role that science can and must play in the implementation of the SDGs,” ICSU Executive Director Heide Hackmann, said in a statement at the launch of the report in New York.
“We combined the rigor of scientific thinking with the in-depth expertise of scientists from diverse fields like agronomy, oceanography, and epidemiology. The result was an independent analysis that can help policymakers and others engage with the goals and define their own priorities.”
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 disciplines, cultures and ecological zones for the sustainability of the platform,” Kaya said.
He added that the complementarity of knowledge systems makes the platform a unique tool for climate change research, innovation, policy development and human capital development.
“The interactive multi-media database will have the capacity to synthesize modern climatic information systems informed by community-based knowledge systems that will be applicable across biomes and regions,” Matowanyika said.
He added, “The identified gaps and strengths of the two climate information systems will be accommodated by the complementarity of the knowledge systems to mitigate climate change and variability.”
The experts pointed out that the platform will help Africa better understand climate change and policy taking and making.
“This platform is in line with the broader objectives of the Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) Pan-Africa component which includes the strengthening of climate information governance and providing an enabling environment for climate information services uptake and use in Africa,” Kaya said.
Dr Mayashree Chinsamym a research manager at DST-NRF, CIKS noted the platform will provide an understanding of the importance of IKS in explaining the symbiotic relationship between ecosystems and human dynamics for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
“This includes the correlation between habitat, ecosystem services, culture including language, natural resources and their collective impact on community livelihood in terms of food security and nutrition and energy needs in the face of climate change and variability,” Chinsamym said.
Dr Yvette Smith and Dr David Smith of the DST-NRF, CIKS, noted the platform will facilitate research and documentation of African cultural and ecological histories, including indicators of natural early warning systems and innovative adaptation strategies to climate variability and change.
“It will also provide a clear and broad conceptualization of climate change and variability in the African context across time. This will provide foundation for devising policy strategies which are culturally and ecologically specific,” Yvette said.
She added that the platform will also identify IKS-based commonalities in ecologically and culturally comparable zones for climate change policy development and implementation.
David said the holistic and multidisciplinary nature of an IKS and climate change platform gives stakeholders from diverse backgrounds including disciplines, sectors and cultures across the continent, an opportunity to engage in innovative climate information service policy development.
Dr Richard Muita of the Institute for Meteorological Training and Research, Kenya pointed out that the involvement of local communities, as producers and end users of climate information is important.
“This should happen at all stages of developing the IKS climate change platform to create community ownership and sustainability of the process including policy development and implementation. This will mitigate the disjuncture between policy makers and communities,” Muita said.
The experts noted that IKS-CIS platform will allow collaboration between East Africa and Pan African Wiser components in knowledge management (KM) and offer guidelines for engagement with other initiatives such as BRACED, Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) among others.
It will also align itself with other KM strategies and processes in CIS, build on experiences of other KM initiatives in CIS (e.g. the Africa Adapt), and have mechanisms for reporting back on the performance of the IKS-Informed CIS platform and mechanisms for engaging with the wider CIS community through communications.
“This will be done through close coordination and collaboration with established initiatives and institutions at national and regional, continental and international levels and participation in the ongoing human capacity development initiatives such as curriculum development, short courses and training,” Matowanyika said.
Kaya said the platform’s broader achievements will be through formalised partnerships, networking and communication with ongoing initiatives for KM brokerage.
“We will be able to interface IKS-related climate information with conventional CIS to facilitate the transformation of existing CIS to become more accessible and relevant to local communities, achieved through co-production and co-design for strengthening and improving CIS with due consideration for international property rights (IPR),” Kaya said.
Faustine Ninga- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Tanzania said the platform will develop joint monitoring, evaluation and learning strategies that produce specific IKS-informed CIS with clear indicators, best practices and models.
“We will undertake a SWOT (Strength Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analysis of other KM initiatives in CIS Facilitating continuous participation of all stakeholders in co-production and co-design in the performance and relevance of the IKS-Informed CIS platform,” Ninga said.
Ninga also noted that there are mechanisms for reporting back on the performance of the IKS-Informed CIS platform.
“Regular monitoring and reporting of IKS-informed indicators and best practices, feedback from end-users through multi-media channels, annual, intermediate and end-term performance evaluation of the IKS-CIS and biannual internal meetings,” he said.
Protus Onyango of the Pan-African Media Alliance for Climate Change (PAMACC), Kenya said the IKS-CIS communication strategy will be representative and gender sensitive in its application.
“The communication strategy will be accessible and relevant IKS-informed communication multimedia system using integrated information and communication technologies and platforms that target diverse co-producers and end user groups and stakeholders that is culturally and linguistically acceptable in terms of norms and values,” Onyango said.
He added, “It will also address targeted diverse end user groups and stakeholders, be culturally and linguistically acceptable in terms of norms and values and engage strategically with journalists and the media in general.”
Pan-Africa IKS-CIS knowledge management and communication Strategy will encompass a synthesis of climate knowledge systems, which includes IKS, citizen science and conventional climate science.
The strategy will use local community radio stations, social media platforms like mobile phones, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and mainstream media.
The target audiences include farming and other community members, opinion leaders, urbanized and rural communities, women farmers, youth, traditional leaders, traditional health practitioners and schools.
Others are researchers, policy and decision-makers, government, specialist users of climate information, transport sectors, communication experts, and the media, funders and donors (resource mobilization), development agencies, traders, conservation NGOs, tourism and energy sectors among others.
The meeting is a follow up on an earlier workshop organized by the African Climate Policy Center (ACPC) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) on a knowledge management (KM) partnerships and communications in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May.
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 in rural Cameroon: lack of electricity.
SOLAR AND WIND STEP IN
According to the World Bank, nearly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa - most of them in rural areas where poverty is high - still lack access to energy, and electrification is barely keeping pace with population growth.
Limbe, a big coastal town in southwest Cameroon, runs on hydroelectricity provided by ENEO, the country’s lone energy provider. But even residents connected to the grid can’t rely on having electricity when they need it.
Prolonged droughts have caused a severe drop in the water levels of the Sanaga river, which feeds the area’s hydropower plant, resulting in crippling power outages.
“We suffer from persistent blackouts on a daily basis,” said Motanga Andrew, the government delegate to the Limbe city council.
In Idenau and Batoke, two fishing villages about 12 kilometres from Limbe city, there are pretty beaches and vast tracts of unspoiled mangrove forests that bring in the tourists.
But, until recently, the communities couldn’t access enough power to meet the most basic needs of running their businesses and health services.
Most of the hospitals even in the Limbe city could not function for 24hours because of persistent power failures, city council officials say.
“ Sometimes we go for over three days without electricity and this handicaps the work of the hospitals putting the lives of the population especially women and children at risk,” says Motanga.
The recent arrival of solar power, however, is already improving the lives, health experts say.
In 2015, a renewable-energy expert from Canada began using homemade wind turbines and solar panels to build a network of renewable energy electrical stations to supply power to homes and medical clinics in the area.
The networks are also used to charge motorcycle batteries, which residents take home to power their lights and charge their cell phones, which they can then use to conduct business and access health information.
Also last year, the African Resource Group Cameroon (ARG-CAM), in collaboration with the Limbe city council, built mini-electrical grids to provide light, cooking energy and phone-charging stations to the people of Limbe, Idenau, and Batoke.
According to the non-governmental group’s director general, Edmond Linonge Njoh, the initiative, funded by the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development, aims to power health institutions,reduce the fishing communities’ dependence on fuel wood and kerosene, both of which come with significant health risks.
“The coming of alternative and cheaper energy to our council area is a welcome relief,” said the government delegate to Limbe.
The local council official recalled with a sense of happiness the first day solar panels arrived in Limbe.
“It was like darkness has been crushed by light. I could not imagine the sun [would] be our saviour,” Motanga said.
“The coming of alternative and cheaper energy to our council area was born out of the need to improve the livelihoods of the people, alleviate poverty, save the lives of children and mothers and fight against climate change,” Monjimba said.
In Idenau, storekeeper Njombe Ikome said the provision of solar energy to the community has changed the lives of people there.
“Our wives can now power their phones to receive free health related information and children can do their homework at night and perform well in school,” he said.
According to Rose Agbor, assistant warden of the Idenau Health Centre, the facility used to help fewer than 15 pregnant women and nursing mothers each day.
Now, with solar energy providing a reliable electricity supply and the Gifted Mom platform raising awareness of the availability of prenatal care, the centre sees over 50 patients daily.
“What we gain from this life saving technologies is immeasurable,” she said.
According a 2016 UNICEF report the mortality rate of children below five years in Cameroon has reduced from over 150 per 1000 in 1999 to less than 88 in 2015, while maternal health care has gone above 60 %.
From 1990 to 2015, the global maternal mortality ratio declined by 44 per cent – from 385 deaths to 216 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to UN inter-agency estimates. This translates into an average annual rate of reduction of 2.3 per cent. While impressive, this is less than half the 5.5 per cent annual rate needed to achieve the three-quarters reduction in maternal mortality targeted for 2015 in Millennium Development Goal 5, the report said.
