Good house construction may reduce the risk of malaria by limiting the entry of mosquito vectors. The authors assessed how house design may affect mosquito house entry and malaria risk in Uganda. 100 households were enrolled in each of three sub-counties: Walukuba, Jinja district; Kihihi, Kanungu district; and Nagongera, Tororo district. CDC light trap collections of mosquitoes were done monthly in all homes. All children aged six months to ten years (n = 878) were followed prospectively for a total of 24 months to measure parasite prevalence every three months and malaria incidence. Homes were classified as modern (cement, wood or metal walls; and tiled or metal roof; and closed eaves) or traditional (all other homes). The human biting rate was lower in modern homes than in traditional homes. The odds of malaria infection were lower in modern homes across all the sub-counties, while malaria incidence was lower in modern homes in Kihihi but not in Walukuba or Nagongera. The authors concluded that house design is likely to explain some of the heterogeneity of malaria transmission in Uganda and represents a promising target for future interventions, even in highly endemic areas.
Poverty and health
Zimbabwe has had a notable record of innovation and use of appropriate technologies in primary health care (PHC), particularly in environmental health. These technologies are generally defined as small-scale, decentralized, people centred, labour-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled. This pilot assessment aimed to explore and map specific appropriate technology innovations being developed and used at community level for health in rural and urban districts of Zimbabwe. The assessment looked at the technologies, their materials, purpose and use and related issues around their development and use, with the evidence gathered by community based researchers within three main themes (i) food safety and nutrition, (ii) water, sanitation, waste management and housing and (iii) prevention and control of diseases. The results are presented in tables, with pictures of the technologies. While noting the limited size of the sample, the results suggest the wealth of innovations and appropriate technologies that exist, and the possibilities that may be found from a more systematic and wider assessment.
Millions of South Africans still lack access to basic sanitation, including at least 500 000 in Cape Town. The report found that 26 percent of the toilets in Khayelitsha’s informal settlements do not work, with 15 percent of them blocked, 12 percent without water, and 6 percent without a sewage pipe. The report’s key findings also showed a lack of proper worker safeguards: janitors do not have proper training, protective gear, or the required cleaning equipment, and only one in eight cleaners is inoculated against disease. By attempting to verify public service delivery and facilitating transparency and accountability, the community-led social audit approach has been successful in exposing—and, over time, reducing—corruption and enhancing basic services in India and Ghana, and elsewhere in the global South. In South Africa, the community used a social audit to investigate how ZAR 60 million (about US$5 million) of public resources was utilized. The audit included the residents of Khayelitsha and various partners in inspecting 528 toilets and interviewing 193 Khayelitsha residents and 31 janitors. The report calls for specific and workable government actions to rectify gaps in services that are provided by the private sector via the local municipality.
This paper analyses the prospects for social protection reform in Zambia under the ‘pro-poor’ government of the Patriotic Front (PF). The paper argues that the PF has been changing the development policy arena in ways that may modify domestic political structures providing more rights-based benefits especially for the extreme poor and vulnerable. It further argues that the persistence of the clientelistic dynamics of state-society relations and weak civil society organisations inhibit the expression of demands for formal social protection by poor people. It concludes that because the social protection reform is supply -, rather than demand-driven, its progress depends on the extent to which the government is motivated to sustain the provision of social protection in the long-run.
Much of the benchmarking that takes place in the water sector today focuses on financial and technical performance, making it difficult for water operators to pursue broader social, political and environmental objectives. As an alternative this paper introduces the concept of social efficiency; to widen the scope of performance evaluation by adding new indicators that emphasize equity and promote publicness, informed by extensive field research in Africa and Latin America. We argue that advancing social efficiency could be the most important contribution the Global Water Operators Partnerships Alliance (GWOPA) makes to knowledge transfer in the water sector, given the relatively small budgets it can leverage. WOPs may be the proverbial drop in the bucket when it comes to improving water and sanitation services around the world, but they could be a significant drop in that bucket.The paper examines two WOPs. The first is between Morocco Office National de Électricité et de l'Eau Potable (ONEE) and Burkina Faso Office National de Eau et de Assainissement (ONEA). The second is between Uruguay Obras Sanitarias del Estado (OSE) and Porto Alegre Departamento Municipal de Água e Esgotos (DMAE) in Brazil. The research shows that both of these partnerships reflect the general trend of prioritizing technical and financial efficiency. Despite having innovative social programs at home, neither WOP has formal pro-poor objectives or evaluation mechanisms to assess pro-poor outcomes, highlighting the untapped potential for knowledge sharing on this type of expertise. Platforms such as GWOPA could provide the necessary guidance and incentives to match water operators interested in pro-poor initiatives and prioritize social efficiency in partnership activities.
The author argues that the majority of humanity is on the rack of poverty; and a major obstacle to its eradication is the growing threat of extreme and irreversible climate change. The coexistence of a chronic crisis of serious under-consumption for most with an increasingly critical environmental crisis resulting from over-consumption in aggregate can only be explained by extreme inequality in the global distribution of income. Resolving both simultaneously, as envisaged in the Post-2015 Agenda, requires a fundamental reconsideration of the nature and objectives of economic policy, and of the global economic system. The lecture will discuss the extent and implications of global inequality, before building on a number of working hypotheses to outline an alternative model of economic development more conducive to the achievement of these two most fundamental global goals.
The paper seeks to assess the timeframe for eradication of poverty, defined by poverty lines of $1.25 and $5 per person per day at 2005 purchasing power parity, if pre-crisis (1993-2008) patterns of income growth were maintained indefinitely, taking account of the differential performance of China. On the basis of optimistic assumptions, and implicitly assuming an indefinite continuation of potentially important pro-poor shifts in development policies during the baseline period, it finds that eradication will take at least 100 years at $1.25-a-day, and 200 years at $5-a-day. While this could in principle be brought forward by accelerating global growth, global carbon constraints raise serious doubts about the viability of this course, particularly as global GDP would need to exceed $100,000 per capita at $1.25-a-day, and $1m per capita at $5-a-day. The clear implication is that poverty eradication, even at $1.25-a-day, and especially at a poverty line which better reflects the satisfaction of basic needs, can be reconciled with global carbon constraints only by a major increase in the share of the poorest in global economic growth, far beyond what can realistically be achieved by existing instruments of development policy – that is, by effective measures to reduce global inequality.
International development is dying; people just don't buy it anymore. The West has been engaged in the project for more than six decades now, but the number of poor people in the world is growing, not shrinking, and inequality between rich and poor continues to widen instead of narrow. People know this, and they are abandoning the official story of development in droves. They no longer believe that foreign aid is some kind of silver bullet, that donating to charities will solve anything, or that Bono and Bill Gates can save the world. This crisis of confidence has become so acute that the development community is scrambling to respond. The Gates Foundation recently spearheaded a process called the Narrative Project with some of the world's biggest NGOs - Oxfam, Save the Children, One, and others. They commissioned research to figure out what people thought about development, and their findings revealed a sea change in public attitudes. People are no longer moved by depictions of the poor as pitiable, voiceless "others" who need to be rescued by heroic white people. The author observes that this is a racist narrative that has lost all its former currency; rather, people have come to see poverty as a matter of injustice, that poverty is created by rules that rig the economy in the interests of the rich.
Public water and electricity are back in vogue! Yet many state-owned utilities are now undergoing “corporatization”: they have legal autonomy and manage their own finances. Is this a positive development in the struggle for equitable public services? Or a slippery slope toward privatisation? This video draws from in-depth research on corporatization cases from around the world.
Urban and regional planning is under the spotlight in Kenya. The 2009 National Housing and Population Census forecast that the percentage of Kenyans living in urban settlements will increase from 32 percent to 54 percent by 2030. Residents of Nairobi await the details of a new city master plan. The devolution of power and allocation of central resources to the 47 county governments created by the 2010 constitution is under way – a process that requires integrated development plans to be in place. In the post-independence era, urban planning was deployed as a tool for “modernisation” in Kenya. But in the 1980s and 1990s modernisation was supplanted by autocracy and straitened economic circumstances. In turn, planning became a means for securing control, exclusion and further enrichment of political and economic elites redolent of the colonial era. Legislation based on outdated and inappropriate models such as the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act was routinely used to carry out mass evictions and demolitions in informal settlements in Kenya. By the end of the 20th century, the planning profession had become irrelevant or discredited to all but its few beneficiaries. In this paper the author describes in detail how the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) at the University of Nairobi – and other institutions – have sought to revitalise and encourage the adoption of more progressive approaches among planning professionals. Curricula reform, research and innovation, close links with other planning schools in Africa, and working partnerships with civil society organisations in informal settlements are the bedrock of the effort to ensure that Kenya’s future urban planners are equipped to manage rapid urban transformation.