This post originally appeared on the website of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Science & Technology Policy Research in June 2016. See the original post here.

From June 30th to July 1st, 2016, I had the honor of participating in a two-day meeting hosted by the Zambia Relief and Development Foundation to share the findings from a study to assess the feasibility establishing a non-state actor’s humanitarian platform in Zambia. Such a network would allow for the activities of humanitarian actors to be more strategically coordinated while also providing a space for exchanging best practices. In addition to consultants from the University of Zambia responsible for conducting the study, representatives from more than a dozen organizations and local institutions working in the humanitarian sector across Zambia were invited to play a key role in defining the next steps forward in establishing a platform for coordinating relief activities and leveraging the organizations’ collective expertise to influence policy. The goal by the end of the two-day meeting was to collectively develop a vision, mission, objectives, governance structure and work plan for formally establishing the Zambia Humanitarian Actors Platform (ZHAP). The shared learning generated through this meeting was hoped to serve as a model to facilitate similar processes in the creation of national platforms for humanitarian actors in other parts of Africa.

The formal establishment of the ZHAP was inspired by remarks made by non-state humanitarian organizations interviewed during the initial feasibility study. Many institutions with rich histories of working in communities on the ground across Zambia lamented how most organizations within the humanitarian sector tend to work “as islands,” with individual voices too weak to be recognized by national policy makers. Instead, humanitarian organizations usually find themselves called upon by the government only in the wake of a disaster, but in a way that is explicitly prescriptive. In other words, many humanitarian actors seem to feel that while asked to assist in cleaning up after natural and human disasters, they have little support in preventative projects or ongoing work to build resilience in communities. Frustrated with feeling as if their recommendations are disregarded and not taken seriously during recovery, many organizations interviewed in the scoping study by faculty at the University of Zambia suggested that a common space was needed for non-governmental and humanitarian organizations to convene and share their collective expertise with one another as well as to strategically lobby for more proactive and socially just policies around disaster prevention, relief, and recovery.

Another recurring comment made by participating institutions during the meeting was concern that the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU), with a mandate under the 2010 Disaster Management Act to coordinate all relief activities in Zambia, does not currently place enough emphasis on disaster risk reduction, community preparedness, and resilience in its long-term recovery activities. We need to act before the disaster!” one workshop participant asserted. “We cannot afford to sit around waiting for the event to occur.

This conviction, which seemed to resonate among all of the representatives at the planning meeting, became central in ZHAP’s vision statement, which was later articulated in the work groups: to proactively promote a culture of disaster mitigation, management and sustainable recovery across all scales in Zambia. This led to a preliminary discussion about how early action could be encouraged through mechanisms like contingency funds linked to forecasts, disaster finance and other insurance schemes.

The organizers of ZHAP were explicit that the goal of establishing this platform for non-state actors is not to duplicate the function of DMMU or take over its mandate, but rather to create a space for important humanitarian actors currently marginalized in the broader national conversation around disaster response and recovery to be more engaged in generating creative and just interventions. “Experiences abound,” Simon Mwamba, the ZHAP Coordinator exclaimed. The need now is to create a space to bring these diverse areas of grounded expertise together, to coordinate activities, and to develop a sense of collective legitimacy in order to influence national policy. “We need to understand this as the beginning.”

Initially, I had reservations when I was asked by the Zambia Red Cross Society (ZRCS) to represent them at this meeting. With the focus of the event on group work and debating how to best set up a governance structure appropriate to the desires and needs of the participating institutions, I felt that I would have little to offer. I felt even more humble when I arrived at the hotel where the event was being hosted and found that I was the only non-Zambian in attendance. However, rather than dissolving into the background as a note taker for the ZRCS as I had originally planned, I was intentionally drawn into the conversation due to the nature of my graduate studies by the other participants who made me the secretary and spokesperson for one of the work groups. As my group members representing institutions as diverse as the Green Living Movement, Caritas Zambia, and World Vision Zambia, debated the legal formality necessary for the ZHAP, what its mandate should be, and how to structure membership, I found myself having more and more to contribute.

Although most of my experience with disaster relief and recovery is in South Asia, distant from the specific challenges of organizations and communities working in sub-Saharan Africa, I found that the references that I made to similar governance structures I had encountered in India and Nepal were profoundly useful for guiding the brainstorming process around me. Rather than having situated expertise here in Zambia, my role became sharing strategies and best practices that I had witnessed at India’s National Institute for Disaster Management (NIDM), such as building partnerships with research faculty at local institutions of higher education. Asked by my group to read aloud NIDM’s mission statement and strategic objectives, my group found inspiration in articulating a vision for ZHAP.

Participating in the development of a governance structure for a formal Humanitarian Actors Platform in Zambia was certainly an inspiring experience. Despite my initial reservations about being the only ‘outsider,’ what I realized is that even though I cannot speak for or represent the decades of work of the ZRCS on the ground in Zambia, I can humbly contribute to such a process in other ways by offering what I have seen and studied in other places. This is, after all, why I wanted to spend time in Africa in the first place: to gain a broader comparative perspective on how disasters exacerbated by climate change are coped with in similar and diverging ways and what lessons in terms of effective climate adaptation are capable of being shared between distinct regions.

It would appear such an exchange can begin with the articulation of a vision. For me, it was an honor to have the opportunity to be part of such a profound process: to meet so many dedicated people representing diverse organizations who had come together in the spirit of greater cooperation.

Rather than laboring in isolation to end suffering in the wake of disasters, this meeting was the first step in joining hands and moving forward together toward a common vision. With increasingly tight budgets, competition for funding, and limited staff to address the demands of institutional mandates that require a response to challenges as immense as natural disasters, refugee crises, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, such collaborative projects are few and far between. And yet, they are not only practical from a cost-benefit analysis perspective, but also in the sense of building greater and stronger networks that can collectively engender more change than each group individually. This meeting was the first step in joining hands and moving forward together toward a common vision–building greater and stronger networks–can collectively engender more change than each group individually.

See photo gallery of Sierra’s Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship in Zambia.

This post originally appeared on the website of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Science & Technology Policy Research in July 2016. See the original post here.

As we dodge potholes on the highway from Kazungula to Sesheke, the bush smolders on the shoulders of the road. Men pause in the heat of the day from clearing brush, squatting in small patches of shade on the side of the road. When I ask the Zambia Red Cross Society (ZRCS)’s Disaster Management Officer, Samuel Mutambo, seated beside me about the fires, his brow furrows. We are in the midst of a week monitoring activities associated with the Building Resilient African Communities (BRACES) program supported by the American Red Cross and are on our way to check on communities and deliver materials for the implementation of local action plans in Kazungula and Mwandi districts. Samuel, still troubled by the sight outside our window, launches into a thoughtful explanation. The forest burning is common here I come to learn, along with many other areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. According to Zambia’s Energy Regulation Board, approximately 75% of Zambians live off the grid without electricity (a rate that rises to 95% in rural areas), where firewood serves as one of their only forms of fuel, heat, and light. While rural Zambians often shoulder the blame for statistics on the growing rate of deforestation (according to the Times of Zambia, now approaching 300,000 hectares per year), the reality is not so simple.

Even in Lusaka, Zambia’s rapidly developing capital, people who live with modern conveniences and access to more sustainable fuel alternatives often choose charcoal for cooking traditional dishes over their outdoor charcoal stoves. This urban consumption of forest resources has been exacerbated by the growing frequency of power cuts and load-shedding in urban areas which leaves vast swathes of Lusaka without power on a daily basis. Getting a meal on the table often means lighting up a bag of charcoal. Rural communities, like those along the road between Sesheke and Kazungula, serve as suppliers in a market currently estimated to be worth more than US $100 million (Ngosa, 2014).

The Zambia Red Cross Society (ZRCS)’s BRACES project seeks to combat such ‘destruction of the environment’ by empowering communities to manage local forest and land resources in ways that build rather than erode their resilience. While this aim is noble, its implementation is not always so straightforward on the ground, particularly when the approach depends on residents identifying their own needs through community action plans. This becomes evident during our first stop in a cluster of huts in the community of Sikaunzwe. We are delivering axes to the local head of the Satellite Disaster Management Committee (SDMC), so that remote communities gardening in the bush could clear a track to the main road to get their goods to market. Not having known exactly what we were delivering, I have to laugh at the profound irony as we, as part of a climate resilience intervention, stack hatchets in the shade of a hut that also has dozens of bags of charcoal waiting to be carried to the highway. I ask Samuel, trying to suppress the doubt in my voice, how we know that the axes will be used to clear the road and not in the production of local charcoal (certainly more profitable than selling tomatoes and okra!).

Samuel laughs. He knows where I am going. He assures me that the axes will be used for widening the road so that buyers may better access the vegetables grown through the BRACES program. Here, SDMCs carefully manage the tools they are provided and they cannot just be used for anything. Still, even Samuel admits that the possibility of the axes being used for other means remains. This, however, is the compromise he and others must be willing to make if they take seriously the self-proclaimed needs of communities. They have to learn to trust in order to build a reciprocal exchange with communities. The longer I have time to reflect on my own internal conflict over distributing axes, which could very well be used to exacerbate the forest’s felling, however, the less crazy it feels. Anything less than this commitment to local self-determination, I came to realize, would be paternal and colonial, another unidirectional intervention rooted in ‘education’ and coercion that so often occurs in the development industry and that the ZRCS works hard not to reproduce. When they give a community tools, they never have full control over how the community uses them. In the end, the lesson becomes about having a relationship that does not breed doubt but trust.

Having studied the limits of local participation in resilience interventions in distant river basins in Nepal and India, I find the ZRCS’s commitment to local visions in rural Zambian communities inspiring. Community needs are being identified by the people who know their own vulnerability best, and the ZRCS functions primarily as a facilitator, doing its best to provide materials for activities that communities propose while encouraging independent replication and the innovation of local solutions that do not require outside assistance.

During the course of our week in the field, in addition to handing out axes, we also deliver timber and tin to construct toilets for the elderly, renovate an abandoned bore well to provide water access at a local school, and distribute bags of sawdust to be used in the construction of fuel-efficient stoves. Here, I learn, in the loamy soils of the Zambezi River’s floodplains, drinking water is often brackish and toilets collapse constantly in the easily erodible sand. The large tubular baskets we carry lashed to the back of the pick-up truck will be lined with plastic and used by the community to construct stable outhouses that are less likely to pollute the water table.

As I stand in the sun, watching the school children of Situlu, half of whom are barefoot, assemble in a knot watching for over an hour until their broken pump once again draws water, I am struck by the simplicity of the actions we call “building resilience.” Fixing a water pump, building a toilet, providing chickens that can sustainably reproduce a local source of protein. I say this not to belittle the important work that the ZRCS and its donors are doing in these communities, rather to highlight the fact that building resilience must not be romanticized. In most parts of the world resilience is not grand, a single transformative act, nor a project that swoops in and leaves people supposedly ‘secure.’ Rather, building resilience from the ground in places like Zambia and across the developing world is more often a modest endeavor: a long process of taking steps toward bringing people the things that so many of us in the world have already come to take for granted.

It is humility I now feel when we drive past bags of charcoal for sale by men and women squatting on the side of the road. While the current rates of deforestation sweeping rural Zambia are certainly of concern and warrant intervention, how exactly this is carried out is important. We, as both academics studying these interventions and development/humanitarian workers contributing directly to them, should be careful about the way in which we position blame and the assumptions we make about people’s economic alternatives. When it comes down to it, people use charcoal and depend on selling it to a growing urban population to feed their families. Any intervention must be grounded in this reality.

Certainly if we expect people in the bush to change their livelihoods, to find other sources of income than supplying charcoal to urban markets, then it seems to me that all of us—particularly wealthy Lusakans and Americans supporting such interventions—should also consider the ways in which resilience, even in the thickets of rural Zambia, requires all of us to change. This includes how much we consume, what we eat, and when faced with climate change, the moral stories we tell of who needs to transform their way of living. Responsibility for both climate change and its solutions falls much further than upon the shoulders of a man with an axe.

References
Ngosa, S. (2014, November 20). Exploring New Forms of Cooking Energy. Times of Zambia.

See photo gallery of Sierra’s Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship in Zambia.

 

This post originally appeared on the website of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Science & Technology Policy Research in June 2016. See the original post here.

The truck fishtailed in deep sand as we rumbled out an unmarked track into the bush toward Sikaunzwe, a community situated along the Zambezi River on Zambia’s southern border. As an intern in Zambia for two and a half months through the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, I was traveling with the Zambia Red Cross Society (ZRCS)’s Disaster Management Officer, Samuel Mutambo, and District Project Officer, Emmanuel Mudenda. We had left the ZRCS field office in Kazungula, six hours from the capital of Lusaka in Zambia’s southern province, almost an hour ago to monitor community interventions as part of the Building Resilient African Communities (BRACES) program supported by the American Red Cross. The objective of this program is to increase the security and resilience of rural communities in the three southern districts of Kazungula, Mwandi and Sesheke, which are particularly vulnerable to droughts and flooding within the Zambezi River Basin.

Key to BRACES’ goal of achieving local resilience is the diversification of livelihood strategies to sustain households economically through times of climactic variability and deep uncertainty. While this region of Zambia has benefited from investment by the Red Cross in early warning systems for floods due to its proximity to the Zambezi River, the communities here are currently struggling through an extended period of drought (see: New York Times article, Climate Change Hits Hard in Zambia, an African Success Story). Since one of the interventions under BRACES is to support the development of small-scale sustainable agriculture, my colleagues were particular keen on learning how beneficiaries were coping with the lack of water. Climbing out of the truck in Sikaunzwe, we bushwhacked through neck-high grasses to several plots carved out of the bush above a sandy wash. Dry except for a few stagnant pools, this water source continues to sustain more than a dozen gardens strung along its banks. Scrambling down into the channel, we found two women crouching near a pit that they have dug into the sand. Using a bowl, they dished water into a bucket. When it is full, they carried it up the bank to irrigate their crops.

Following the women into their gardens, we found the plots dominated by tomato plants, heavy with green fruits and lashed to stakes for support. Once ripe, these will be carried to the road to sell to buyers. I am reminded of my eight-hour bus ride from the capital of Lusaka; every time we pulled off the road women would emerge from patches of shade, raising plates of stacked red tomatoes to the bus window. This is one way small pockets of cash come to circulate in the region’s villages. BRACES, in an effort to support the expansion of income at the household level, supports farmers by supplying them with a variety of seeds and irrigation equipment. As a result, even those farmers who had been gardening for decades were able to expand their diversity of vegetables under production. Some had even begun to find a pathway out of poverty. One farmer, we spoke with outside the village of Kawewa, had entered the BRACES program with only a few plants. However, the following year with access to a pump and irrigation tubing provided by the program, he was able to exponentially expand his land under cultivation. Following him through freshly tilled fields, we listened to him describe the crops he planned to plant this season and the calculations of his anticipated profits.

While this farmer’s tale deeply resonates with resilience, not all gardens offer such financial advancement. Many barriers impede the translation of seeds into crops, and ultimately into cash. It is not a simple story of merely having the motivation.

Not all households, for example, have a reliable water source to draw from. Some have to dig their water from the sand. Others are limited by their capacity to access seeds. While the Red Cross BRACES program provides seeds to its beneficiaries, the ultimate goal is for farmers to be financially secure enough to purchase their own stocks. For some women we talked to, however, being forced to travel several hours by bus to Livingstone to purchase seeds, which are not sold locally, makes sustainability a challenge. While one woman explained that she can save seeds from some crops like okra, the varieties of cabbage, rabe, and tomatoes that most customers prefer are hybrid and must be purchased each season. Even corn, a Zambian staple, is increasingly planted as a hybrid, its sterile kernels provide no prospect for rejuvenation.

Thus, reliance on annual seed subsidies has become a reality of what it means to be a farmer. Even as the Red Cross works to get people to a place where they can afford to buy their own seeds, their dependency risks getting displaced to corporations that control the circulation of genetically modified seeds. While resilience, here at least as BRACES defines it, means creeping out of poverty with each kilo of tomatoes sold, it seems worth considering what crops are indigenous with seeds capable of being harvested and banked. Perhaps resilience can become more than capturing cash by serving the desires of markets, but by shaping what we choose to eat (e.g. local, heirloom vegetables over foreign hybrids) to begin with.

In the meantime, even in the midst of growing modern hybrids, villagers continue to lean on indigenous knowledge and traditional strategies for securing good yields. As we walked among the rows of heavy-headed tomatoes, I noticed long furrows of smoldering cow manure along the edges of the garden. These fires, I was told, had been lit overnight to ward off the cold and protect the vulnerable fruits of the tomato from freezing. Although none of the ZRCS staff whom I was with had seen this adaptive technology before, we were assured this was a quite common practice in the community. The work of resilience, I am learning, is not only about teaching innovative ways to change, but also about learning old ways of survival.

See photo gallery of Sierra’s Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship in Zambia.

This post originally appeared on the University of Colorado Boulder’s Tibet Himalaya Initiative’s website on September 7, 2015. View the original post here.

Photo Essay by Sierra Gladfelter

Climate change is expected to express itself in South Asia in numerous ways, including through an increasingly unpredictable and more intense monsoon. Already, floods triggered by relentless rainfall, associated landslides, and the failure of man-made dams, account for a greater proportion of deaths and damages than any other natural disaster in the Himalaya.

Rajapur, an island that sits between two flood-prone arms of western Nepal’s Karnali River just a few miles above the Indian border, is no exception to this trend. In August of 2014, an unprecedented flood struck Nepal’s Bardiya and Darchula districts, claiming 100 lives, destroying over 14,500 homes, and displacing nearly 80,000 people. While many individuals have still not directly received assistance in recovery, the Nepali government has responded by initiating a multi-year river training project to embank over 40 kilometers of the Karnali’s bed. Non-governmental organizations have also funded interventions in the region, including an early warning system that relays river level and rainfall data from an upstream gauging station to vulnerable communities downstream via mobile phone. This network, which serves 52,000 people in Nepal’s lower Karnali basin alone, is also being extended across the border into India to support rural communities living on the margins of Uttar Pradesh.

These photos, taken during fieldwork for my Master’s thesis in July 2015, document the impacts of inundation in the Kanali River Basin and the creative ways people have adapted to live with floods. While both embankments and early warning systems each have a role to play in mitigating the impacts of flooding, they certainly do not solve everything. My goal then—in both this essay and my broader project—is to identify the places where people remain very much on their own in adapting to floods, while also seeking to understand the complicated ways in which the impacts of climate change and development become entangled in a specific place.