Using panel data from Mozambique collected in 2007 and 2008, the authors explore the impact of the food crisis on welfare of households with people living with HIV and AIDS. The analysis finds that there has been a real deterioration of welfare in terms of income, food consumption, and nutritional status in Mozambique between 2007 and 2008, among both sets of households. Households with people living with HIV have not suffered more from the crisis than others. Results on the evolution of labour-force participation suggests that initiation of treatment and better services in health facilities have counterbalanced the effect of the crisis by improving the health of patients and their labour-force participation. The authors look at the effect of the change in welfare on the frequency of visits to health facilities and on treatment outcomes. Both variables can proxy for adherence to treatment. This is a particularly crucial issue as it affects both the health of the patient and public health because sub-optimal adherence leads to the development of resistant forms of the virus. The authors find no effect of the change in welfare on the frequency of visits, but they do find that people who experienced a negative income shock also experienced a reduction or a slower progress in treatment outcomes.
Poverty and health
The authors have two main policy messages from this study for food security and trade for low and middle income countries. First, as evidence shows that poverty and hunger materialise at household and individual levels, the special and differential treatment for developing countries in trade negotiations at the national and/or crop levels may not be sufficient to reach the households and individuals at risk. Secondly, they argue for a balance between protections that help small producers with protections for poor consumers. They propose increased investments in physical capital and human development, land tenure, water access, technology, infrastructure and general services (such as health and education), especially focusing on poor and female headed households. They call for state support to non-agricultural rural enterprises and also well-designed safety nets, including conditional cash transfers (CCT), school lunches, women and infant nutrition and food-for-work. They propose strengthening of organisations of small farmers and women and supporting their participation in policy and political processes. This is argued to demand financial, human and institutional capacity support.
This study uses updated global poverty estimates to infer that nearly half a billion people escaped extreme poverty in the five years from 2005 to 2010. However the gains have not been equally distributed, globally. Between 2005 and 2015, Asia’s share of global poverty is expected to fall from two-thirds to one-third, while Africa’s share will more than double from 28% to 60%. Although sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate had by 2010 fallen to below 50% for the first time and is projected to fall below 40% by 2015, at global level the authors argue that the share of the world’s poor people living in fragile states is rising sharply and will exceed 50% by 2014.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have signed an agreement to work together to reduce child stunting in Eastern and Southern Africa in an effort to reach the UN Millennium Development Goals by 2015. UNICEF and WFP acknowledged the progress that had been made to address the nutritional factors hampering children’s health. UNICEF said that the prevalence of stunting in the developing world declined from 40% to 29% between 1990 and 2008. Stunting in Africa only fell from 38% to 34% in the same period. Of the 24 countries that make up 80% of the world’s stunting burden, at least seven are in Eastern and Southern Africa. UNICEF argues that investing in child nutrition pays high dividends for a country’s social and national development. National nutrition strategies need to tackle not only the root causes of stunting, but also to target the most vulnerable children and their families, including those in remote areas, or from the poorest and most marginalised communities. Only 11 African countries are on track to reaching the Millennium Development Goals to halve hunger by 2015, four of which are from the eastern and southern African (ESA) region: Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland and Angola.
The 2010 edition of the European Report on Development (ERD) deals with the issues of poverty, inequality and social protection, notably in sub-Saharan Africa. It examines the external shocks that African countries experiencing chronic poverty are undergoing, such as climate change, food and fuel price volatility, or the recent financial crisis. These shocks are undermining progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, and the report highlights increasing demand for new and more substantive social protection programmes in many African countries. It focuses on the role of formal and informal mechanisms of social protection as a means to enhance the resilience of sub-Saharan countries when faced with shocks (short-term) and structural vulnerabilities such as poverty traps (long-term). Specific interventions targeting the most vulnerable sectors of the population should go hand in hand with more traditional pro-growth policies, the report argues, especially when dealing with emerging unstable global socio-economic scenarios.
In this article, International Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) offers five strategies to reduce the psychological trauma experienced by African AIDS orphans. In Africa, most orphans remain with their extended families, being cared for by either the remaining parent, or by grandparents or other relatives, and this approach has been shown to minimise trauma for the children. Institutional care should only be a temporary solution or last resort, the article argues. Also, keeping brothers and sisters together also enhances their emotional wellbeing. Other strategies include meeting the basic needs of orphans, for example by instituting school feeding schemes and providing social grants, as well as providing psycho-social care in the form of grief counseling and peer support groups. Governments should also ensure that orphans remain at school. So far, free primary education has gone some way to improving overall school attendance, but other factors, such as living with a non-relative, appear to continue to hamper orphans' education. Finally, the article agues for more support for the carers of orphans, especially custodial grandparents. It recommends that health workers and home-based caregivers be trained to support orphans' caregivers.
If wheat and maize production do not rise substantially in 2011, global food security could be uncertain for the next two years, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned in its latest Food Outlook report. Wheat and maize prices have passed their 2009 highs, with FAO adding that international food import bills could surpass one trillion US dollars in 2010. Food imports last topped the trillion dollar mark during the 2007/2008 food price crisis. The FAO anticipates that world cereals stocks will shrink by 7%, with barley declining by 35%, maize by 12% and wheat by 10%. Six percent more maize will have to be produced in 2011 than in 2010, while wheat stocks need to rise by more 3.5% to ensure the world has enough reserves to tide it over 2011. The FAO has cautioned that its calculations have not taken into account the possibility of unfavourable weather conditions in 2011.
This brief notes some developments in the provision of water to poor Kenyans since the enactment of the 2002 Water Act. These include increased government spending for further water provision and policy reforms that separated asset ownership from service provision, regulation and policy formulation. Yet it found that at least 16 million Kenyans do not receive clean, piped water and remain at risk for water-borne diseases. It also noted that urban water kiosks provide an inadequate service, with many users forced to use minimal quantities of water as distance, waiting times and cost make water inaccessible. Poor people in urban areas appear to pay much more for water than those with piped water, while urban coverage of the piped system is declining. Large inequities exist in access to water as the struggle for water by the excluded sections of Kenya’s population contrasts sharply with the privileged, who benefit from water delivered to their homes, often at very low prices. At the current pace of expansion, the author argues that it will take unacceptably long to cover populations that urgently need water. It estimates that it will take at least 30 years for rural areas to have acceptable water supplies. The government’s budgets allocated to water provision, the author argues, do not reflect need. To address existing inequalities, the government should urgently develop and implement a needs-based budget allocation formula.
This report was launched during the Third African Water Week in Addis Ababa on 23 November 2010. About 350 million Africans still do not have access to water, according to the report. The author investigates whether poor governance has been a major contributory factor in the lack of sustainability in the African water sector. The report identifies numerous but common governance risks, and shows that these are easily identifiable and preventable. The main challenges and issues in the water sector are identified as sustainability, capacity and finance. The report also finds that substantial gains would be made if government assessments became standard procedure and if governance criteria were introduced in donor project approval procedures. While local and national institutions have the most visible role to play in governing the water sector, the report notes that it is the sector’s underlying policies, legislation and regulations that provide the foundation for overall governance. To meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, an enormous annual investment is required, probably more than four to five times current investment rate in the water sector.
This report seeks to explain why people are poor and why inequalities exist, as well as what can be done to rectify these injustices. It explores the causes, dynamics and persistence of poverty; examines what works and what has gone wrong in international policy thinking and practice; and lays out a range of policies and institutional measures that countries can adopt to alleviate poverty. It notes that current approaches to reducing poverty and inequality fail to consider key institutional, policy and political dimensions that may be both causes of poverty and inequality, and obstacles to their reduction. Moreover, when a substantial proportion of a country’s population is poor, it makes little sense to detach poverty from the dynamics of development. For countries that have been successful in increasing the well-being of most of their populations over relatively short periods of time, the report shows, progress has occurred principally through State-directed strategies that combine economic development objectives with active social policies and forms of politics that elevate the interests of the poor in public policy. The report is structured around three main issues, which, it argues, are the critical elements of a sustainable and inclusive development strategy: patterns of growth and structural change (whether in the agricultural, industrial or service sectors) that generate and sustain adequately paid jobs; comprehensive social policies that are grounded in universal rights and that support structural change, social cohesion and democratic politics; and protection of civic rights, activism and political arrangements that ensure that States are responsive to the needs of citizens and that the poor have some influence in how policies are made.