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

Robert Engelman

Congress Steps Up

The first two or three years of the new century marked a time for change and some retrenchment in this work. The main reason: an exodus of private funders. The year after September 11, 2001, saw dramatic declines in the assets of most of the foundations that had supported the implementation, monitoring and documentation of PHE projects. Almost all left the field entirely for other missions and pursuits, with only the Packard Foundation continuing a small stream of grants, many of them for bringing key projects to a stately close. (In February 2007, however, a renewal of the foundation’s support seemed possible. Sahlu Haile, Ethiopia representative of the Foundation, gathered key analysts, practitioners and funders to Addis Adaba to consider current activities and future directions for the PHE linkage.)

Had it not been for an unexpected development on Washington’s Capitol Hill, it’s more than likely that support for integrated project and the work surrounding them would have evaporated entirely. Although a new administration had just taken over the Executive Branch and was less open to spending on international family planning than its predecessor, some Democrats and Republications in Congress were open to a novel use of appropriated family planning dollars. Senate appropriations committee and PAI staff worked together to craft a directive that marked a historic first in the 40-year U.S. government history of support for international population and family planning: a legislative programmatic linkage of population and environment designed to work on both sets of issues in tandem.

In the words of a brochure (updated version available online soon – out-of-date version still available) PAI later crafted to explain this new U.S. government directive and inform NGOs about the possibilities for funding:

“In 2001, Congress allocated $368.5 million for spending on family planning in its annual foreign appropriations act. 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 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.”

As a result of this activity, USAID is now allocating between $1 million and $2 million annually to support groups such as WWF and Conservation International in linking with reproductive health service providers to link their work with natural resource conservation in key projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Such partnerships are the rule: Environmental and community development organizations rarely directly offer health services directly, preferring to collaborate with organizations that already have that expertise.

And what of the results of the PHE linkage in communities, now incredibly enough about to enter its second half century? In the years that followed Congress’s initial directive to fund integrated projects in areas where biodiversity was threatened by human activities, the appropriators language “urg[ing] USAID to develop performance goals and indicators which promote cross-sectoral collaboration” in PHE programming.