Tune in to our podcast to hear expert speakers on the links between global environmental change, security, development, and health. The Environmental Change and Security Program is a part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the living, national memorial to President Wilson established by Congress in 1968 and headquartered in the District of Columbia. It is a nonpartisan institution, supported by public and private funds, engaged in the study of national and world affairs. The Center establishes and maintains a neutral forum for free, open, and informed dialogue. For more information, visit www.wilsoncenter.org/ecsp and www.newsecuritybeat.org.This podcast was formerly titled "Friday Podcasts From ECSP and MHI," and included contributions from the Wilson Center's Maternal Health Initiative (MHI).
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English Description: (In this episode, ECSP's Claire Doyle and Jennifer Nguyen from the Wilson Center's China Environment Forum are joined by Obert Bore. Obert, who serves as the Business & Human Rights Program Lead at the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, is an expert in international trade, Chinese investments in Africa, and natural resource governance. He has been a leader in advancing policy reforms to strengthen human rights protection for communities impacted by mining.
In this conversation, Obert sheds light on the critical mineral sector in Zimbabwe, highlighting recent critical mineral investments and some of the environmental and social challenges associated with them. He also shares strategies and recommendations to promote sustainable and responsible mining practices and ensure the expansion of Zimbabwe’s mineral sector is an opportunity for development.)
Mining for Change: Obert Bore on Human Rights and Development Amid Zimbabwe’s Mineral Boom
Friday, February 21, 2025 • Duration 27:53
In this episode, ECSP's Claire Doyle and Jennifer Nguyen from the Wilson Center's China Environment Forum are joined by Obert Bore. Obert, who serves at the Business & Human Rights Program Lead at the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, is an expert in international trade, Chinese investments in Africa, and natural resource governance. He has been a leader in advancing policy reforms to strengthen human rights protection for communities impacted by mining.
In this conversation, Obert sheds light on the critical mineral sector in Zimbabwe, highlighting recent critical mineral investments and some of the environmental and social challenges associated with them. He also shares strategies and recommendations to promote sustainable and responsible mining practices and ensure the expansion of Zimbabwe’s mineral sector is an opportunity for development.
Environmental Cooperation in the Middle East: A Conversation with Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed
Monday, July 15, 2024 • Duration 32:31
In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, Wilson Center Global Fellow and environmental journalist Anneliese Palmer speaks with longtime leader in regional environmental diplomacy and Executive Director of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed. In their conversation, Dr. Hamed unpacks the opportunities and challenges of climate and environmental diplomacy, environmental peacebuilding efforts in Gaza and the Middle East, as well as his role in Jumpstarting Hope, a project that works to provide essential services such as safe drinking water and sustainable electricity to communities in Gaza.
Sandra Ruckstuhl on Capturing Practical Lessons on Water, Conflict, and Cooperation
Thursday, December 13, 2018 • Duration 24:29
We realized “there was a need for a toolkit on water,” says Sandra Ruckstuhl in this week’s Water Stories podcast, “with a focus of conflict and conflict mitigation, but also peacebuilding.” Ruckstuhl, a consultant for the World Bank who has researched water programs in Yemen and the Middle East, helped the Wilson Center produce USAID’s Water and Conflict toolkit, which documents examples of successful development interventions focused on water and peacebuilding.
“We have lots of assumed peaceful outcomes from projects, but very little of it has been measured and documented,” says Ruckstuhl. “We would do a real service to the field if we really started documenting and measuring this kind of information so we can inform better and better practice in this area.”
Ruskstuhl and her team worked to ensure that the toolkit could be used by practitioners without professional training or formal education in conflict studies. “When we are talking about peacebuilding,” Ruckstuhl says, “we are boiling it down to collaborative governance—and that also is transferrable to different sectors.”
“When we are designing and implementing some development investment, we’re injecting ourselves into a system,” in which water management, health, food, and other public services are interconnected. Ruckstuhl calls for more incentives that would push practitioners to foster cross-sector connections, which would allow different sectors to work together more collaboratively.
Project designers must consider all the stakeholders involved, including governance institutions, which in many circumstances are dominated by men. “The constructive role women can play in the household, in these governance institutions, in the decision-making for things like water allocation…that knowledge and that capacity of women can be missed,” says Ruckstuhl. Integrating gender concerns more effectively would contribute to more equitable water management, so she proposes educating communities on the value of including women in projects focused on water and conflict.
Aaron Wolf on Transboundary Water Conflict and Cooperation
Friday, November 30, 2018 • Duration 21:50
“Countries—even countries that don’t like each other much—have, and continue to have, conversations over water resources, even when they won’t about other issues,” says Aaron Wolf, Director of Water Conflict Management and Transformation at Oregon State University, in this week’s Water Stories podcast.
Wolf’s research shows that water stress—instead of spurring wars between countries—can actually bring them to the negotiating table. “Water creates horrible suffering, human destruction, ecosystem degradation, and very, very little political violence,” says Wolf.
Tensions can rise, however, when an upstream country wants to build infrastructure (such as a hydroelectric dam) that would impact the people downstream. “It is not that the dam itself that causes the problem; it is the dam in the absence of an agreement about how to mitigate the impacts of the dam,” says Wolf.
Many treaties do not account for greater variability in flow arising from droughts or floods—both of which will be exacerbated by climate change. In the Middle East, “there are droughts that were so bad that the Israel-Jordan water agreement had nothing in text to deal with that. Fortunately, their relationship was solid enough that they could adapt based on their personal relations,” says Wolf.
To identify these gaps, Wolf and his team developed the Basin at Risk project, which provides a quantitative, global-scale exploration of the relationship between freshwater resources and conflict, as well as indicators to measure cross border tension. “With those verified indicators, we were able to look at basins in the next three to five years. Fortunately, most of those are no longer at risk precisely because the global community did what it does best—they help with the institutions, they help build the river basin organizations, and the treaties, and so on,” says Wolf.
Cultivating Meaningful Youth Engagement in Sexual and Reproductive Health Programming
Wednesday, November 7, 2018 • Duration 12:47
“We need to mainstream young people into the decision-making process,” said Senator Nikoli Edwards, age 25, of Trinidad and Tobago at a recent Wilson Center event on engaging youth to protect their sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Where it’s not a matter of, ‘let’s bring a young person into the room as an afterthought,’ but it should be written that a young person has to be a part of the discussion or has to be contributing in a significant way.”
As a young person, “your expectations have been heightened, you have been encouraged to do all of this great work, but where are the institutions, where are the support mechanisms, where are the opportunities?” asked Edwards. The panelists unanimously agreed that high expectations for young people to serve and agitate for change have not been met with endless opportunities to engage.
Although many organizations have celebrated young peoples’ input, they still need to be more intentional about how they engage youth, said Cate Lane, Senior Technical Adviser at Pathfinder. Oftentimes, “we engage young people, we solicit their input, we ask them to tell us what they need and what they want,” she said. “We rev them up. They’re excited, and then we’re like, ‘thanks so much for your input,’ now we’re going to go implement our project.”
“When we are talking about youth participation, we should think about the diversity of young people,” said Dr. Ilya Zhukov, Global Focal Point for Comprehensive Sexuality Education at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Bringing key populations of young people, including LGBTQ+, HIV positive, and disabled youth, to name a few, together with decision-makers can ensure that health programming is informed by those it is meant to serve.
“When your opinion and your thoughts are influencing real documents that will then influence your education—that is a real thing,” said Lada Nuzhna, Youth Representative at Teenergizer!. Exchanges between young people and organizations working to promote adolescent health and rights should be a two-way street. “We need to see this not as a one-way street of us soliciting information from them, but as an opportunity for them to develop skills, networks, to gain access to things that they wouldn’t normally gain access to,” said Lane.
Adolescence is a dynamic period in life that can pose challenges to the longevity of youth project engagement. “If we engage young people, we can’t expect that they are going to be with us for the next five years because they are in school, they’re working, getting married,” said Lane. However, mechanisms such as youth advisory boards and councils could enable organizations to consult periodically with young people to ensure programs are responsive to their needs. Experts agreed that a system to bring youth into the conversation on a regular basis is necessary to cultivate meaningful youth engagement, in addition to allocating resources—financial and human—to ensure that adolescent sexual and reproductive health programming is effective and responsive. “We should bring young people to the table and involve them not only in discussion but in the development and implementation of programs,” said Zhukov. Governments, leaders of organizations and policymakers should continue to think about how to meaningfully engage with young people as partners. “I think it’s something we have to tackle,” said Lane. “There has to be this sense of partnership, where we meet each other in the middle.”
Eliane Razafimandimby: Improving the Quality of Maternal and Child Care
Friday, October 12, 2018 • Duration 08:10
“Even in a weak system without a quality improvement structure, it is possible to support district managers and facility providers to measure and improve quality care,” said Eliane Razafimandimby, Chief of Party of USAID’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) in Madagascar, at a recent Wilson Center event on improving the quality of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child healthcare (RMNCH).
Madagascar is currently in the early stages of improving the quality of its RMNCH care. After failing to meet the maternal and newborn Millennium Development Goals by 2015, the government created a roadmap to achieving the maternal and newborn MDGs by 2019 and mandated MCSP to support the Ministry of Health in strengthening its health system to reduce maternal and newborn mortality.
In order to have an impact on quality, “we needed to engage with the health system at different levels,” said Razafimandimby. A systems approach required emphasis on policy at the national level, capacity-building and data usage at the district/regional level, and targeted service-delivery support and community engagement at the facility level.
The ambitious task of assessing quality of care and implementing change involved nearly two-thirds of the country, across 16 regions and 80 districts. Quality care indicators monitored at more than 600 facilities showed promising reductions in maternal and newborn mortality.
Health facilities implemented preventative measures to improve quality. Having a newborn station in the operating room after a C-section allowed midwives to care for the baby without having to carry him or her to the neonatal unit for care, which was often located in another building. This small change facilitated more immediate newborn care as well as greatly reduced the risk of infection. Other improved outcomes were linked to significant increases in antenatal screening for preeclampsia and the adoption of postpartum family planning methods before discharge from a facility. “These improved outcomes were not only seen at the primary facility level but also at district and regional hospitals,” said Razafimandimby.
Despite success at the facility, district, and regional levels, national progress is slow. “Development of a national quality strategy and structure remains a high priority for Madagascar,” said Razafimandimby. “To be able to sustain and continue improvement work, national level leadership is really essential.”
Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue: Moving from Laundry Lists to Bottom Lines
Friday, August 3, 2018 • Duration 13:31
“A lot of the advocacy of family planning has been built around establishing a long list of the many ways in which family planning can be relevant” to other development goals, says Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue of Cornell University in our latest Friday Podcast. While comprehensive accounts of the ways family planning access benefits communities, these “laundry lists” are not “clear, synthetic, or integrative,” he says.
Instead, Eloundou-Enyegue proposes that development planners focus instead on four “bottom lines” to more clearly communicate the importance of family planning across all sectors.
The first bottom line is financial: “Take people through the savings that they are going to achieve with each dollar that is invested in family planning,” said Eloundou-Enyegue.
The second bottom line is equity, which appeals to stakeholders who seek to promote justice in communities. Inequalities in fertility, income, and family structure “translate into very large inequality among children that will lead to even wider, larger inequality in the next generation,” Eloundou-Enyegue says. “Family planning can play an important role in breaking this intergenerational cycle.”
The third bottom line Eloundou-Enyegue proposes is durability, which appeals to visionary leaders through the dividends that family planning offers over multiple generations. In addition to the immediate benefits, there is a second dividend, when the current working age population reaches retirement with greater savings, and then a third dividend comes from greater investment in the early childhood development of the next generation.
The final bottom line is demand, particularly from youth: “There is actually a very large demand for family planning among youth if we return to the full meaning of ‘family planning,’” says Eloundou-Enyegue, focusing not just on births but on the course of one’s entire life. “Planning families for youth, and African youth, today, who are very concerned about their futures, is to think about how to plan their transition into work,” including developing skills and leadership.
“There is room there to incorporate family planning in a large vision which is concerned about planning futures, planning families, naturally, and planning lives,” says Eloundou-Enyegue.
Jocelyn Ulrich: Enhancing Public Health to Unleash the Economic Power of Women
Friday, July 27, 2018 • Duration 11:56
Healthy Women, Healthy Economies is a global initiative that aims to unleash the “economic power of women by bringing governments, private sector, and other civil sector actors together to improve women’s health,” says Jocelyn Ulrich of EMD Serono, the U.S. branch of Merck KGaA, Darmstad, Germany, in our Friday Podcast. Providing for women’s health needs enables them to “join, thrive, and rise” in the economy, “bringing prosperity home to their families and communities.”
This partnership was established in 2014 within the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum by the 21 APEC economies, led by the United States and the Philippines, and members of the private sector. The project sought to address significant barriers to women’s full participation in the workforce, which include non-communicable diseases related to reproductive health and the dual responsibility of the workplace and caregiving for children and elderly parents.
The partnership engaged in a comprehensive literature review and created a toolkit for governments and private sector actors to address these hurdles, with specific recommendations: • Improve access to sexual and productive health services • Increase awareness of services for voluntary family planning • Provide high-quality maternal, sexual, and reproductive health services • Protect against discrimination
Since 2015, the project has convened workshops to track progress against the toolkit’s policy goals. One of the advantages to working under the auspices of APEC is engaging high-level ministers in women’s health.
The toolkit’s policy recommendations align with the Sustainable Development Goals. “Sustainable economic growth really can’t be achieved if we’re leaving half of the population behind,” says Ulrich.
Franklin Moore: Fostering Local Innovation Through Community Organization
Friday, July 20, 2018 • Duration 15:40
Africare’s work has been built on a “strong belief that community mobilization and local capacity building and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development, and that, for us, includes resilience,” says Franklin Moore, Chief of Programs for Africare, in a podcast from a recent Wilson Center event. “Community engagement, capacity building, and looking at locally driven behavior and social change is what empowers communities.”
Africare organizes community committees to identify innovations and behavior changes to make themselves more prosperous and resilient, including climate-smart agricultural techniques and women’s empowerment.
In Niger, agro-pastoral communities rehabilitated land through the use of zai pits and half-moons, traditional farming techniques that retain rainwater for crops. Along with planting drought-resistant cowpea and forage sorghum, these steps enabled the communities Africare worked with to stockpile 57,000 tons of animal forage. During the 2011 drought, these communities were able to feed their livestock using the stored forage even when grazing land was degraded. Livestock death rates dropped 14 percent, and communities that might have otherwise had to sell off their livestock were able to keep them.
Engaging women is key. “In Niger, food security committees are required to have at least 30 percent of their members [be] women,” says Moore, and in Zimbabwe, women make up 80 percent of Africare’s food distribution committees, because in these communities, “food distribution is really something females know a whole lot more about than males.”
Child spacing also contributes women’s empowerment by improving women’s health and ability to participate in livelihood activities. Africare’s “husband schools” teach men about the importance of reproductive healthcare. “When we talk about child spacing, it is critically important that the men know as much or more about this as the women do,” Moore says.
Community-based capacity building programs can change lives. “The organization of the community affects what the community is doing, who the community is, and in fact the size of the community,” says Moore.
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