MDG #7 - Ensuring Environmental Sustainability

Millennium Development Goal (MDG) # 7 aims to mobilise communities worldwide to strive toward three targets meant to ensure environmental sustainability:

• to integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources;
• to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water; and
• to have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by increasing access to secure land tenure.

This edition of The Soul Beat deals with communication projects, materials and strategic thinking documents from Africa that contribute towards achieving this Millennium Development Goal. It covers sustainable resource management, access to water and sanitation, access to land and housing and also offers information related to environmental advocacy and the role of the media.

Click here for more information on the Millennium Development Goal #7 and all of the MDGs, please see the section on our website The Millennium Development Goals -Overview

To learn more about the Millennium Development Goals, you can also visit United Nations Millennium Goals

CONTEXT

1. Africa Environment Outlook (AEO)

Past, Present and Future Perspectives

This report provides a detailed assessment of the current state of the environment in Africa. It indicates discernible environmental trends and examines the complex interplay between natural events and the impacts of human actions on the environment. Against this background, the report analyses the effects of environmental change in terms of human vulnerability and security, presents a set of scenarios for Africa's future and gives recommendations for concrete policy actions to steer the region, ultimately, towards the most favourable of those scenarios.

SUSTAINABLE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

2. Communication and Natural Resource Management: Experience/Theory

This 106-page book is offered as a tool for people interested in communication and natural resource management who seek a better understanding of how different theories and strategic change principles relate to actual practise. This publication relates a variety of theories and change principles to a series of real initiatives from different parts of the world including Kenya and Namibia.

3. Spreading Solar Cooking: Field Guide

This guide, published by Solar Cooker International, is for people and organisations who wish to spread solar cooking to benefit people and environments. It looks at how to introduce solar cooking to an interested community highlighting how local participation and empowerment are keys to the success of the project and to avoiding waste of scarce resources. This guide is based on three refugee projects in Kenya and Ethiopia and a national project in Zimbabwe as well as experience collected from individuals and grassroots groups promoting solar cooking worldwide.

4. An Easy Guide To Sustainable Development

By the Foundation for Education, Science and Technology (FEST)

This publication is aimed at educating learners on issues relating to sustainable development. It includes information related to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002, but is relevant for use outside the WSSD. The guide contains chapters on Biodiversity, Food, Security and Agriculture, Technology, Climate Change, Water, Energy, Health and Pollution.

5. Co-partnership in Forest Management: The Gwira-Banso Joint Forest Management Project in Ghana

This paper, published in the Environment, Development and Sustainability Journal in 2001 presents findings of an evaluation of the Joint Forest Management Project initiated by two timber companies in collaboration with local authorities and farmers in Gwira-Banso, Ghana. The goal was to develop a sustainable forest management system in the region that supports both economic development and environmental quality. The study found that communication, financial support, tree planting, multiple land use, and benefit sharing are essential for co-partnership in forest management. Although the project had a lot of support from the local community, a number of factors made the continued support of local people a challenging task, including questions of immediate livelihood sources and tenure arrangements.

6. Sustainable Energy Africa

This is an organisation that promotes sustainable energy approaches and practices in the development of South Africa and Africa.

7.Conserve Africa Foundation (CAF)

An environmental non-governmental organisation, CAF aims to promote and implement sustainable development practices, policies and strategies in Africa.

WATER AND SANITATION

8. Sanitation in my Neighbourhood - Madagascar

This project is a children's photo competition aimed at raising awareness of water and sanitation issues in Madagascar. The project organiser, WaterAid International and its partners believe that lack of sanitation causes the loss of many working days and school days due to ill health every year. Children took photographs, either at school or in their communities showing the sanitation problems and solutions as they saw them. Photographs showed dirty water sources, examples of bad and good hygiene behaviour, new latrines and safe water points in the community.

Contact wateraid@wateraid.org

9. Roundabout PlayPumps - South Africa

This project involves playground roundabouts (or merry-go-rounds) that, when played on by children, pump water from a borehole via an underground pump into an elevated water storage tank. While enabling local families to benefit from clean, accessible water, the tanks also carry health messages and advertising for the local community.

Contact TrevorF@roundabout.co.za

10. Gender and Water Development Report 2003: Gender Perspectives on Policies in the Water Sector

by Chancellor F., Hussein M., Lidonde R. A, Mustafa D. and Van Wijk C.

Sustainable water management and gender equity are mutually supporting and interdependent. This report analyses four major water sectors - water for nature, sanitation for people, water for people, water for food - and provides strong arguments for the contentions that involving men and women in influential roles at all levels can hasten the achievement of sustainability in the management of scarce water resources. It also shows that managing water in an integrated and sustainable way can contribute significantly to better gender equity, by improving the access of women and men to water and water-related services to meet their essential needs.

11. Managing Mobilisation? Participatory Processes and Dam Building in South Africa, the Berg River Project

This 42-page paper examines the participatory processes which led to the building of the Berg River Dam in South Africa's Western Cape province. The government-led formal participatory processes initiated by government stand in contrast to the mobilisation of environmental activists against the building of the dam. The case study illustrates that in this case the creation of formal participatory spaces both subverted and neutralised resistance to the building of the dam on the part of the environmental movement as well as civil society. This paper examines participation in South African water and development debates in the context of global discourses on water, natural resource management and development.

12. Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) - Africa

The Nile River is shared by ten countries and serves as home to an estimated 160 million people within the boundaries of the Basin, while almost twice that number, roughly 300 million live within the ten countries that share the Nile waters. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) aims to facilitate cooperation in managing shared ecosystems among the governments of countries bordering the river, and their non-governmental organisations and communities. These countries include Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Contact nbisec@nilebasin.org OR mmsuya@nilesec.org

LAND AND HOUSING

13. From Colonisation to Consultation: Regulating Use of a Pastoral Zone in Samorogouan, Burkina Faso

In the pastoral zone of Samorogouan, Burkina Faso, local village authorities and farmer organisations have developed a new approach to land management. Through a process of consultation, they have formulated a set of management rules to improve tenure security.
Research from the International Institute for Environment and Development, UK, and SNV Netherlands Development Organisation in Burkina Faso reviews how local groups began the process of reconciliation and cooperation to create a locally applied legal framework for land tenure.

14. Uganda Land Alliance- Uganda

This is a consortium of national and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and individuals aimed at ensuring the equitable distribution of land and the subsequent reduction of poverty in Uganda. The alliance's objective is to enhance access, control and ownership of land by poor and marginalised men, women and children, through the promotion of fair policies and laws for the protection of land rights.

Contact ula@africaonline.co.ug OR coalition@ifad.org

15. ICTs in Development - Who Benefits?

Use of Geographic Information Systems on the Cato Manor Development Project, South Africa

by Nancy Odendaal

This case study explores the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in the process of development, land reparation, and restitution on the Cato Manor Development Project in Durban, South Africa in the year 2000. The report shows that technical inequalities are often embedded in the development project where access to technological knowledge becomes a determining factor in the development process. It focuses on an instant where the legitimacy of the project was challenged by former residents, removed from the area during the Apartheid era, and the role of information technology in resolving that conflict. The paper deals with the fact that GIS is not necessarily a value-free tool, but can influence development decisions contrary to the expectations of those affected by it.

THE ENVIRONMENT, ADVOCACY AND THE MEDIA

16. African Network of Environmental Journalists - Africa

This network seeks to promote public understanding of environmental issues in Africa by improving the quality, accuracy, and intensity of environmental reporting. The organisation aims to increase the coverage of environmental issues in the media in Africa and to enhance the capacity of African journalists to report on environmental issues through workshops, networking, information sharing and institutional development.

17. EarthWire Africa

The Environmental News Portal

EarthWire/Africa is an online resource which offers free daily overviews of environmental news from 14 countries in southern Africa which include Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Republic of Congo, Seychelles, Swaziland, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. This online resource is intended for use by government officials for briefings on daily environmental news, journalists following current issues, students and researchers looking for information on the state of the environment, and by anyone interested in current events and the environment.

18. People's Law: Ideas For Resource Rights Campaigners: Power Tools Series

by Kyeretwie Opoku and Elijah Yaw Danso

This tool based on experience in the forestry sector in Ghana, allows resource rights campaigners working in community mobilisation to better manage media and legal strategies. It contains ideas about what legal systems are, or are not, and how they work. It also explores ways of using communication to empower campaigners and contains guides on how to integrate legal strategies into resource rights campaigns without unduly ceding control to legal professionals who campaigners use or employ.

19. Building a Better Future Together: An Advocacy Booklet for the Environmental Justice Network Forum

This Advocacy Booklet has been developed to assist the Environmental Justice Network Forum's (EJNF) national and provincial structures, task teams and partner organisations by providing a guide for effective campaigning. The booklet introduces the principles of effective advocacy work and suggests strategies for bringing about policy and practice changes through deliberate civil society action. The booklet covers issues such as what advocacy is, why advocate, who should advocate, who one should advocate to and gives detailed steps on how to advocate.

EVENTS

20. Africities 4 Summit: "Building joint actions for the effective realisation of the Millennium Development Goals in African Local Governments"
(Sep 18-22 2006) Nairobi, Kenya

21. The Nile Development Forum 2006: The Role of the River Nile in Poverty Reduction and Economic Development in the Basin
(Nov 12-17 2006) Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

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The Soul Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.

Please send material for The Soul Beat to the Editor - Anja Venth aventh@comminit.com