Sustainability from the Ground Up - Working on Reproductive Health and the Environment in Communities

March 1, 2007

Robert Engelman

Like many other countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Kenya suffers from growing scarcities of productive land and waters for subsistence farming and fishing. Once-rich cropland is deteriorating through overuse, irregular rainfall and the loss of nearby wild vegetation. The ratio of productive land per person is dwindling as Kenya’s population continues its rapid growth. In recent years some of the country’s pastoral peoples have clashed with agriculturalists over increasingly scarce land, and the government is scrambling — so far with little success — to find solutions.

Yet tucked up against Kenya’s easternmost corner, where the country meets the southern edge of Somalia and the Indian Ocean, there are signs of hope for the sustainability of livelihoods. There, in communities within and around the Kiunga Marine National Reserve, the international environmental organization WWF is experimenting with one of the more innovative experiments in the struggle to find ways simultaneously to improve community livelihoods and to enhance environmental stability in developing countries.

Collaborating with the Kenya Wildlife Service, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the health products corporation Johnson & Johnson and others, WWF is promoting sustainable fishing techniques — data collection, for example, and an exchange program to encourage fishers to phase out gear that kills non-targeted fish and damages marine habitat. At the same time the project brings health services directly to villagers who otherwise face long and expensive trips on bad roads and often even risk running across armed poachers in this troubled region. (The recent armed defeat of the Islamic Courts movement in adjacent Somalia brought a stream of escaping Islamists — and the attention of the U.S. Navy off-shore — to this part of Kenya as recently as January 2007.) Among these health services is the provision of a range of contraceptives, including birth control pills and hormonal injections.

“A mother’s priority is sustenance,” one village woman told visiting researchers from Population Action International (PAI), noting the economic benefits of smaller families and the enhanced chances of surviving and thriving when women pause for a few years between births. “Nothing is going to stop us from using family planning now.”

This is an integrated approach to sustainable community development, one that links the conservation of natural resources that are critical to livelihoods and well-being to a sector that may seem at first glance far from the environment: reproductive and other primary health care provision. Most often found in rural areas — from which millions of people migrate annually to cities, often because economic prospects are so bleak — such integrated community development projects are documented in a few urban areas as well. Often introduced in areas that have special biological values — around parks and other protected areas, for example, where many animal and plant species are endangered — these projects can arise anywhere communities wrestle with challenges to their well-being that relate both to environmental degradation and a lack of access to reproductive health services.

And such projects are found in every region of the developing world, with dozens of individual projects described and documented since the early 1990s. First attempted in the 1950s, the strategic linkage of natural resource conservation with improvements in reproductive health services stands at something of a crossroads in the early 21st century. This essay introduces an array of written resources on the linkage that have been published over the last decade by PAI , all available for download. And it covers as well some of the highlights of the history of the concept and assesses the prospects for its future.