The Concept: RH/NRM to Improve Human Well-Being and Environmental Sustainability

Over more than three decades, dozens of community-based development and conservation projects have experimented with a seemingly unlikely innovation: combining efforts to help communities manage and conserve their natural resource base with efforts to improve their access to family planning information and services, maternal and child health care, and prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. While the two sets of activities – one called natural resource management, or NRM, and the other called reproductive health, or RH – may seem unrelated, project experience appears to have demonstrated synergies that contribute to social and environmental objectives shared by USAID, NGOs and communities themselves.

In many developing countries, the sparsely inhabited lands in and around forests and coastal areas are seen as a last frontier for economic opportunity that is scarce elsewhere. For communities with little access to land and jobs, these remote areas represent abundant land with fertile resources, often with non-existent or little enforcement of property titles. Men, women and their families migrate to these areas to carve out new farms to cultivate or capitalize on waters where fishing appears to promise a livelihood. But such forest and coastal areas also tend to be areas high biological value, containing habitat vital for a rich diversity of plant and animal species. Many of these are vulnerable to extinction when humans come to dominate the ecosystem. Due to the distance of such habitats from urban centers and other densely populated areas, there typically is little access to health, education, and other government services. In such remote and biologically diverse areas, women and their partners often have needs for reproductive health services, especially family planning, that local governments are unable to meet. Often, the conservation organizations working with these communities are the only institutions able to link these remote communities to health services.

Increasingly, conservation organizations or those working in community development in those areas receive requests from these communities to provide such services, including family planning. For many of these organizations, such requests can pose problems. Many NGOs understandably worry that helping to improve access to family planning will involve them in “population control” or simply extend them into areas well beyond their expertise, niche and mission. Many that have responded to requests for help with family planning – usually through partnerships with reproductive health NGOs or government health agencies – have nonetheless found that a positive response can be helpful to their own missions.

Women and men in control of their own reproduction tend to improve their ability to manage multiple other aspects of their lives: their ability to learn new farming techniques, to gain functional literacy, or simply to become better stewards of the water, soil, forests and fish on which their lives depend. Fatalism about the future recedes when couples learn that they can make their own decisions about childbearing, rather than leave these decisions to God or fate. And meager incomes can go further when new arrivals in a family are the result of conscious choices rather than random chance. The process of working on decisions about reproduction, many NGOs have found, also tends to improve both gender relations and the status of women generally. In turn, these outcomes help achieve environmental and other objectives in community-based projects.

Convinced of the importance of linking natural resource management with reproductive health, Congress added the key words “including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species” to the annual foreign assistance appropriations bill’s spending allocation for family planning activities to encourage USAID to invest in such cross-sectoral programs. This important language has appeared in all subsequent foreign appropriations legislation and has resulted in USAID’s continued commitment to funding linked population and environment programs.

As a result of these legislative directives, over the past five years USAID has identified several organizations with the capacity and the interest to carrying out cross-sectoral projects in areas of developing countries critical to the survival of the earth’s biodiversity. Important lessons regarding the complexity of integrating population and environment programming have resulted from this initial start-up phase of funding. Operations research has been conducted to test the hypothesis that addressing population and environment concerns in an integrated way produces better development outcomes than addressing population and environment individually through single-sector programs. As a result of this first phase of investment in Population, Health and Environment (PHE) projects, USAID is especially interested in building on these past lessons to promote more sophisticated approaches to integrating population and environment. These approaches must include a rigorous monitoring and evaluation component from the earliest stages of the project design in order to demonstrate the benefits of the integrated approach.

There is no fixed budget for this activity, which resides in the agency’s Population and Reproductive Health (PRH) office. However, this office has a full time coordinator for PHE initiatives who seeks to improve inter-office communication and collaboration within USAID itself and its field offices to fund PHE initiatives. In addition, USAID seeks interactions with field-experienced NGOs interested in working, probably in partnership with others, in facilitating reproductive health service deliver to communities inhabiting areas rich in biodiversity.