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Archives for FrontLines

New FrontLines Shows How USAID Tackles Climate Change Across the Globe

Posted by  on Friday, October 2nd 2015     
Casimiro Antonio, right, deputy chief of party for the Coastal City Adaptation Project in Mozambique, shows community members how vulnerability maps can be useful. / Gilberto Muai, CCAP/USAID

Casimiro Antonio, right, deputy chief of party for the Coastal City Adaptation Project in Mozambique, shows community members how vulnerability maps can be useful. / Gilberto Muai, CCAP/USAID

In the new edition of USAID’s FrontLines magazine, read how the Agency is working to help people around the world prepare for and react to the rising temperatures and unpredictable weather that are the hallmarks of climate change. Some highlights:

Also in this issue we have a bonus: FrontLines is hosting a new photo contest. This time we’re asking you to send us your best images that showcase the ways USAID is helping women and girls around the world. The deadline is Oct. 30.

FrontLines: Science, Technology, Innovation and Partnerships

Posted by  on Monday, June 1st 2015     

Frontlines banner

Read the latest edition of USAID’s FrontLines to learn some of the ways the Agency is tackling the world’s toughest challenges—like poverty, disease and climate change—by applying science, technology, innovation and partnerships. Some highlights:

  • Mobile banking is slowly spreading across sub-Saharan Africa—a region where banks are scarce, but cell phones are plentiful.
  • Three Egyptian girls show their smarts in an international competition after attending USAID-supported schools that specialize in new ways to teach science, technology, engineering and math.
  • With a hackathon, Ukrainians show the world how they can pool their ideas and resources to come up with solutions to help 1 million displaced countrymen.
  • Don’t judge the looks of this contraption that resembles a diver’s wetsuit until you see how it is saving new mothers’ lives in Timor-Leste.
  • If you think tropical storms are the biggest threat to Caribbean nations like Jamaica, think again. USAID is helping Jamaica’s farmers prepare for an equally devastating and recurring menace—drought.

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FrontLines: Foreign Aid Impact in U.S. and Abroad

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 1st 2015     

A worker at the Banko Gotiti Cooperative in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's Region of Ethiopia holds a handful of ripe red Yirgacheffe coffee berries. Credit: Marcelo Pereira / USAID Agribus Market Develop

Read the latest edition of USAID’s FrontLines to learn some of the ways entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, diaspora groups and others work hand-in-hand with USAID to help the Agency fulfill its mission in countries around the world—and how those efforts boomerang back to the United States. Some highlights:

  • More than 500 billion cups of coffee are consumed each year on this planet and Ethiopian growers are hard at work to get more of their brews in the hands of U.S. coffee drinkers
  • From farmers to disease detectives, USAID supports a wide swath of people in several Asian countries as they go about their critically important work of identifying viruses before they can become pandemics.
  • Playing matchmaker between Jamaican youth and successful Jamaicans in the U.S. is leading to a marriage of the ‘entrepreneurial’ minds.
  • She attended primary school in a refugee camp. Now this South Sudan native is earning a master’s degree in the U.S. so she can go back home for a mission close to her heart—boosting girls’ education.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Rucker is a writer at USAID.

FrontLines: The End of Extreme Poverty

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 2nd 2014     

FrontLines March/April 2014: The End of Extreme Poverty
Read the latest edition of USAID’s FrontLines to learn about the Agency’s plans for eliminating extreme poverty within the next two decades. Some highlights:

FrontLines: Energy/Infrastructure

Posted by  on Wednesday, February 26th 2014     
FrontLines January/February 2014: Energy / Infrastructure

Read the latest edition of USAID’s FrontLines to see how the Agency invests in energy and infrastructure projects around the world. Some highlights:

An Ethiopian-born entrepreneur from Canada was hoping to operate a mining facility in his homeland, but his plans were thwarted by one thing — a lack of energy to power the mine. Read how Nejib Abba Biya and the Ethiopian Government, with support from the United States, are working to use the country’s natural geothermal energy as a reliable, renewable power source.

Electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week is the new — and welcome — normal for residents living in Haiti’s Caracol Village.

Waiting and waiting and waiting for a web page to load — that is so 1990s. Just ask the residents and aid workers at the refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, where high-speed Internet access is only a click away.

It’s Sri Lanka’s version of “Back to the Future” as some of its citizens embrace rainwater harvesting, a practice dating back to the 5th century that today has a 21st century, enviro-friendly appeal.

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New Learn-to-Read Method in Yemen Shows Early Promise

Posted by  on Thursday, April 18th 2013     

This blog is part of a series focused on USAID’s innovative approach to reaching Millennium Development Goal #2: Achieve universal primary education. The theme “Room to Learn” highlights programs and priority countries where access to education is now a reality.

A teacher points to clearly-drawn Arabic characters on a blackboard and the third-grade girls at Aisha School gleefully make the corresponding sounds. A few minutes later the room grows quieter as the girls focus to simultaneously pronounce and write the letter corresponding to its sound. At a nearby school, first-grade boys stumble over themselves to get to the blackboard in time to point at the character that matches the sound their teacher just pronounced.

The students in schools in the Amran govenorate, just outside Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a, are learning to read using a phonics method developed by the Yemeni Ministry of Education with USAID support.  In less than one year, students, parents and teachers alike have embraced the Yemen Early Grade Reading Approach, or YEGRA. “It’s a miracle, the teaching of reading is suddently demystified,” said the principal of a school.

Students at the Aisha School. Photo credit: Emily Walker, USAID

YEGRA focuses on intensive teacher training in a method that teaches first- through third-graders to read using phonics. Each lesson is 70 minutes long, and follows a set procedure, which includes reviewing a familiar story, reading stories aloud, focusing on the sounds that make up words, and writing. The program has also produced brand-new grade-appropriate teaching materials, including readers that children can take home to practice with their parents, and handbooks that help both literate and illiterate parents to support their children’s learning.

Until last year, Yemeni children were taught to read using word recognition and corresponding pictures, but the technique was clearly not effective; when USAID tested young students in 2011, it found that fewer than one-third of third-graders were able to read.

After just eight weeks of the YEGRA method, which has been implemented in 380 of Yemen’s schools, first graders could decipher 10 words per minute – the goal in first grade is to identify 30 words per minute. And, an informal analysis in the governorate of Taizz found that first-grade students could read just six words per minute prior to YEGRA, but after nearly three months of YEGRA lessons, 97 percent of the first-grade students were able to read 20 words a minute.

Ministry of Education and USAID teams visited three Amran schools in March and saw YEGRA’s dynamism firsthand – students were eagerly answering questions and following along in the lessons. They also attended a teacher training, where teachers for grades one through three throughout the region learned interactive teaching techniques and methods for futher engaging students in reading. By next school year, at least an additional 3,000 to 5,000 teachers will be using the YEGRA method.

USAID, in partnership with Yemen’s Ministry of Education and local governments, is also making education more accessible to Yemeni children, and especially girls, by rehabilitating schools to  improve sanitary conditions and make it safer to go to school. USAID has rehabiliated more than 200 schools throughout the country since November 2011, with a particular focus on those in conflict-affected areas. An estimated 280,000 students were unable to go to school during the recent conflict in the southern governorate of Abyan and its aftermath. Together with the Ministry of Education and the Governor of Abyan, USAID completed a major rehabilitation of 10 schools in Abyan, and will rehabilitate and furnish a total of eighteen over the coming months. Next school year, students in Abyan will not only be back in school but they will for the first time learn how to read and write at grade level with YEGRA.

One-third of out-of-school girls in the entire Middle East and North Africa region reside in Yemen and only 53 percent of girls who begin primary school complete basic schooling. Our early education programs in Yemen target both boys and girls, and the Ministry of Education is convinced  that these educational improvements will not only ensure that students can read with comprehension and go on to learn other subjects, but will also increase enrollment and lower dropout rates, especially for girls.

After the success of the first year of YEGRA, the Ministry has initiated reforms to its educational curriculum and is committed to taking the program nationwide with the continued support of USAID and other donors. As this generation of boys and girls learns to read and goes on to master other subjects, the increase in girls’ enrollment should continue to grow. Better access to schools and higher literacy rates will provide greater opportunities for Yemen’s girls. Read more about our work to improve girls’ enrollment and educational opportunities in Yemen.

Photo of the Week: Pumping Water to Urban Nigeria

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 10th 2013     

Three young boys look to be having some fun while they use a public standpipe in Bauchi town, Nigeria. This is one of the sites where town residents retrieve water since few have water taps at their homes. In December 2011, USAID’s Sustainable Water and Sanitation in Africa project signed an agreement with town officials to help them expand and improve services to residents. Demand for water in urban areas like Bauchi exceeds 200,000 cubic meters per day—nearly four times the volume the town’s water utility is currently able to pump to its customers. Photo is from Emily Mutai, SUWASA.

Read the recently released FrontLines issue to learn how USAID is working to provide safe water to the millions who live without this vital resource, and how unique approaches to wipe out neglected tropical diseases are faring.

FrontLines Year in Review: Children’s Saviors on the Front Lines

Posted by  on Thursday, January 10th 2013     

This is part of our FrontLines Year in Review series. This originally appeared in FrontLines May/June 2012 issue as a special section.

Front-line health workers are the first and often the only link to health care for millions of children in the developing world. They are the most immediate and cost-effective way to save lives, and foster a healthier, safer and more prosperous world. The developing world has experienced remarkable declines in maternal, child and infant mortality in recent decades, thanks in large part to the contributions of those who bring the most basic health services and education into the communities of the world’s underserved.

Millions of people are alive today because a midwife was by their side when they gave birth, or they were vaccinated as infants by a nurse, or because their families learned from a community health worker to adopt healthy behaviors like breastfeeding, hand washing, birth spacing and sleeping under a mosquito net.

While progress is being made thanks to the training and deployment of health workers in many countries, there are still too few health workers to reach the millions of families who urgently need care. Millions of children still die every year from preventable causes. The World Health Organization estimates a shortage of at least 1 million front-line health workers, particularly in Africa and parts of Asia.

Community health worker Rosalina Casimiro meets with children in Nampula province, Mozambique, to demonstrate how to purify water prior to drinking. Photo credit: Luisa Chadreque, Pathfinder Nampula

A million more health workers could save many millions more if they had proper training and support.

Many of the interventions that have proven most effective in saving lives require health workers with some kind of training to deliver them. Front-line health workers do not need to be highly educated to be successful. Experience in many countries has shown that health workers with basic schooling plus several weeks of well-designed training, followed by on-the-job supervision, can master the skills needed to diagnose and treat common illnesses, promote lifesaving health practices, and counsel families about family planning, nutrition and hygiene.

Some front-line health workers are midwives, nurses or private providers such as drug-shop dispensers. Many are community health workers who are selected by—and working in—their own communities. To ensure acceptance of these health workers by their communities, they must respond to local norms and customs. Some front-line workers are compensated for their work, either through the formal health system or by the communities they serve; others are volunteers motivated by non-monetary incentives, including flashlights and bicycles, as well as a sense of pride in their work, and increased status in their communities. Many female front-line health workers, in particular, note that their role has helped increase the respect they get from their families, friends and neighbors.

Major killers of children such as diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and newborn complications can often be prevented or treated close to home by a well-trained health worker who is armed with basic tools and skills, and is part of a functioning health system.

How many die each year?

  • 7.6 million children under 5 die every year, 3.1 million of them during their first month of life.
  • Major causes of death among children are pneumonia, which causes 1.6 million 1.4 million deaths each year, and diarrhea, which causes 1.3 million 800,000 deaths each year. Malnutrition is estimated to contribute to more than one-third of deaths among children.

“For more than 40 years, USAID has helped children throughout the world grow into healthy, productive adults. Progress in child survival has long been, and remains among the Agency’s major accomplishments,” said USAID’s Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health Robert Clay.

USAID-funded initiatives save the lives of approximately 6 million children under 5 each year. The stories from Madagascar, Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Bangladesh and Timor-Leste highlight some of the health workers who are saving lives in their communities, and individuals whose lives have been touched—through USAID support—by these saviors on the front lines.

Members of the Frontline Health Workers Coalition contributed to this article.

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FrontLines Year in Review: A Right to Land

Posted by  on Wednesday, January 9th 2013     

This is part of our FrontLines Year in Review series. This originally appeared in FrontLines July/August 2012 issue.

Property rights are proving to be a solid foundation for economic empowerment for individuals, corporations and nations, and a potential solution to shore up food security in developing countries. International guidelines adopted earlier this year address this issue.

New international guidelines adopted earlier this year are expected to pave the way for “landowners” to establish clearer rights to land and other resources in developing countries. That seemingly simple act—multiplied many times over in countries across the globe—could have profound consequences for the economies of developing countries, and reverse the trend of speculators snatching land without permission from the people who have historically considered it their own.

Asilya Gemmal, 14, of Gure Tebeno Union, proudly displays her land certificate obtained from the Ethiopian Government with USAID assistance. Photo credit: Links Media

Land grabbing, as it is often called, happens every day in the developing world where weak laws and policies allow businesses and governments—through naiveté or outright greed—to latch on to property that belongs to someone else, and to sell or lease it to the highest bidder.

Adopted in May by the U.N. Committee on World Food Security, the 35-page document (PDF) sets out principles to guide countries in designing and implementing laws that govern property rights over land, fisheries and forests for agricultural and other uses.

As it is officially known, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security is designed “so that both investors can invest with some kind of certainty that their investments will be secure and, at the same time, those people who hold the resources or the assets—the people who have the land in the countries where we work—will also have some certainty that they will be able to benefit from the investments that are made,” says Gregory Myers, USAID’s division chief for land tenure and property rights and chair of the negotiations for the guidelines.

USAID is keenly interested in the guidelines, not only because of the inherent economic benefits of secure property rights for individuals and communities, but because of what that can mean for the Feed the Future initiative, the U.S. Government’s effort to ramp up agricultural development in food-insecure countries.

“In many ways, that’s really at the heart of our (Feed the Future) strategy—on one hand encouraging the private sector, and on the other hand supporting smallholder farmers,” Myers said.

“Between 800 million and a billion people go to bed hungry at night, and the number is growing,” he explained. “Clearly, we need to do something to promote agriculture … but that means there has to be investment in agriculture. So the bottom line is that we have to find a way to bring private-sector investment into this equation. And the only way that’s going to happen sustainably and in a way that’s not going to lead to a lot of violence or conflict is that we’re going to have to address the issue of property rights.”

Read the rest of the article in FrontLines.

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FrontLines Year in Review: Catching Ethiopians Before They Fall

Posted by  on Wednesday, January 2nd 2013     

This is part of our FrontLines Year in Review series. This originally appeared in FrontLines May/June 2012 issue.

Despite one of the region’s worst droughts, no famine struck rural Ethiopia last year. The drought’s impact was lessened by a food-and-cash-for-public-works program USAID supports and helped design. Today, one of Africa’s largest social safety nets does not just protect against chronic food insecurity, it helps communities weather the future.

It is December 2011, and life goes on as normal in the arid highlands of Tigray, the northern Ethiopian region whose burnt siennas, giant cactus flowers, and peaks and canyons could easily be confused with those of the American Southwest. Here, donkeys carry grain and pull packs on the side of the road. Farmers work their fields. There is no sign of a crisis.

Normality is not typically a measure of success, but in this case, and in this particular region, it is. Beginning in early 2011, a severe drought decimated parts of East Africa, leading to a June declaration of famine in parts of Somalia.

The drought was considered in some parts of the region to be one of the worst in 60 years, affecting more than 13.3 million people in the Horn of Africa. The month before the official drought declaration, USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) warned: “This is the most severe food-security emergency in the world today.”

In Tigray, a region held hostage to annual alternating dry and wet seasons, the impact has been minimal. The reason, according to many who live there, is a riff on the same theme: Because of “safety net,” they say, things are OK.

A beneficiary of the USAID-supported Productive Safety Net Program living near the Mai-Aqui site, in Tigray, Ethiopia. Photo Credit: Nena Terrell.

“Safety net,” which several Ethiopian ethnicities know by its English term, refers to the flagship food-security program designed by the Ethiopian Government, USAID and other donors after another severe drought hit the country in 2003.

The Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), as it is officially called, originated as part of a new approach to address chronic food shortages through scheduled food or cash transfers to chronically food-insecure populations in exchange for labor on public works projects.

“The food ensures families living on the edge are not forced to sell off their assets, mainly livestock, in order to feed their families. The labor, the quid pro quo for those fit enough to partake, is channeled into public-works projects designed to improve communities as a whole,” says Dina Esposito, director of USAID’s Office of Food for Peace.

As a result, crucial infrastructure—roads, watersheds, canals, terracing, irrigation systems, schools and health clinics—has been built or rehabilitated with the labor of the food insecure.

According to USAID/Ethiopia Mission Director Tom Staal, as the program was being designed in consultations led by the Ethiopian Gov­ernment, donors realized the need to not just respond to crises as they happened, but to build up resilience among the most vulnerable communities, giving them the ability to weather the inevitable dry stretches on their own.

“Before PSNP, those in chronic need were provided assistance through emergency programs,” says Scott Hocklander, chief of USAID/Ethiopia’s Office for Food Assistance and Livelihood Transitions.

“While this food aid saved lives, it did not contribute to development activities or address the root causes of food insecurity.”

Today, because of the safety net, approximately 8 million people receive assistance in a timely and predictable way…[continued]

Read the rest of the article in FrontLines.

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