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

March 1, 2007

Robert Engelman

And indeed, the name problem to some extent encapsulates the question of the future of this linkage — or some future linkage like it. Perhaps the issue is neither just health (including reproductive health), or just environment, but overall human well-being that takes in poverty alleviation, secure livelihoods and their interconnections with gender, health, and environmental and social sustainability. Might there be some way to link all of these together in projects that take advantage of the fact that they are all integrated in individual lives and communities, even if not in donor agencies and the missions of non-governmental agencies?

Would governmental and private donors line up for that ambitious concept, when sectoral problems such as HIV/AIDS, civil conflict, refugees, and democratization all cry loudly — and sometimes more successfully than conservation, food security or reproductive health — for funding?

But first, some history.

Early Roots, and a Decade of Documentation

In 1996, PAI staffer Robert Engelman interviewed a rural couple in the Philippines, Timoteo and Delia Llena, who managed dozens of species of plants and animals on one hectare of land on the island of Cebu. The husband mentioned learning about family planning from the same organization that shared wisdom on improving agriculture techniques, World Neighbors. Engelman made a quick calculation, based on the ages of their two adult children, that this must have been in the late 1950s. It was, Timoteo assured him. By the 1970s, World Neighbors was working with the Family Planning Association of Nepal to provide methods not only of improving animal fodder and providing clean water and low-polluting energy but of introducing family planning methods to remote communities in the eastern foothills of the Himalayas.

World Neighbors at the time was an organization that “just did” rural development, with little documentation of its work and its impacts. The organization , like most in development, takes the need for documentation much more seriously today and has since published several reports and manuals on the reproductive health/natural resources management linkage. But the basic idea of such linkages, then called “population and natural resources” became the subject of a series of reports published in 1989 by the IUCN-World Conservation Union. These documented 11 integrated projects from Brazil, Burkino Faso, Congo, Costa Rica, the Gambia, Honduras, Kenya, Madagascar, Nepal (including the World Neighbors project there), Pakistan (including the urban Orangi Pilot Project, which carries on today) and Thailand.

PAI summarized two of these studies (now out of print) in a reference collection, published in 1992 in preparation for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and titled Population and the Environment: Impacts in the Developing World. The organization worked prominently with InterAction, a coalition of dozens of U.S. development organizations, which convened four inter-American conferences on population and environment projects in the early 1990s in Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras and Chile. Unfortunately, a shortage of funds and other problems cut short an effort to document the results of these conferences and the population-environment integration concept itself.