The world’s climate is changing, and is projected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The impact of climate change will be particularly felt in agriculture, as rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and increased pests and diseases pose new and bigger risks to the global food system. Simply put, climate change will make food security and poverty reduction even more challenging in the future.
Despite the fact that women represent about half of the global population, produce the majority of global food supply, and perform 60% to 80% of the agricultural work in developing countries, women own less than 20% of land worldwide.
Written laws often fall short of adequately protecting women’s tenure rights; while in some countries, formal national laws explicitly discriminate against women. In post-disaster rehabilitation and reconstruction, women face particular hurdles to secure tenure and shelter. Even in areas with strong protections of equality and non-discrimination, displaced women often struggle to assert their property rights.
On March 8, 2016, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, Habitat for Humanity International launched its first global advocacy campaign, “Solid Ground,” which envisions a world where everyone has access to land for shelter. Promoting gender equality and addressing inequitable or unenforced laws, policies, and customary practices affecting women’s rights to security of tenure and inheritance, has been a primary focus of the campaign.
Now mid-way through the campaign, Solid Ground has grown to include 37 national Habitat for Humanity organizations, 17 partner organizations, an active microsite solidgroundcampaign.org (and in Spanish, SueloUrbano.org), and has provided direct financial assistance to country programs working on gender and land issues. In its first year, over 1.3 million people are projected to have improved access to land for shelter through the Solid Ground campaign with a goal of reaching 10 million people, especially women.
Through a variety of efforts to build capacity, mobilize allies, influence policymakers, and work together with our partners, we are seeing signs of progress being made to achieve successful outcomes in helping facilitate women’s land ownership and empowering women to understand and achieve their rights. A sampling of some strategies, cases, and upcoming plans are highlighted below.
In many ways, girls’ education is a success story in global development. Relatively simple changes in national policies – like making primary schooling free and compulsory – have led to dramatic increases in school enrollment around the world. In Uganda, for example, enrollment increased by over 60 percent following the elimination of primary school fees.
As more young people have enrolled in school, gaps in educational attainment between boys and girls have closed. According to UNESCO, by 2014, “gender parity (meaning an equal amount of men and women) was achieved globally, on average, in primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education.”
Yet, more than 250 million children are not in school. Many more drop out before completing primary school. And many young people who attend school do not gain basic literacy skills. These challenges remain particularly acute for poor girls.
In a new paper, published in Population and Development Review, we explore recent progress in girls’ education in 43 low- and middle-income countries. To do so, we use Demographic and Health Survey data collected at two time points, the first between 1997 and 2007 (time 1), and the second between 2008 and 2016 (time 2).
Despite much progress over the last two decades, girls still have lower levels of educational attainment on average than boys at the secondary school level in Uganda. In part this is because many girls are married or have children before the age of 18—often before they are physically and emotionally ready to become wives and mothers. Educating girls, ending child marriage, and preventing early childbearing is essential for girls to have agency, as future wives and mothers, and for Uganda to reach its full development potential.
On September 20th, 2017, a young hunter, in his 30s, arrived at a health center in Kween District, located in Eastern Uganda, on the border with Kenya. He had symptoms of fever, bleeding, diarrhea, and vomiting. Within 5 days he was dead. Two weeks later, his sister also showed up at the same health facility: she had similar symptoms. Within a week, she too was dead. Posthumous samples confirmed that she had Marburg Virus Disease (MVD), one of the most virulent pathogens known to infect humans. On 19th October, the Ugandan government notified WHO and publicly announced an outbreak of MVD. Not long after this announcement, MVD claimed another victim – this time, the hunter’s brother.
The importance of soil health in agrarian societies is indisputable – soil health has a direct relationship with agricultural productivity and sustainability. Yet, its highly complex nature renders it much more challenging to measure than other agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers or pesticides. Household surveys, particularly those in low-income contexts where agriculture is the primary means of livelihood, have generally relied on subjective assessments of soil health – and for good reason. Subjective assessment is relatively inexpensive, and alternative methodological options have historically been prohibitively expensive. Recent advances in rapid low-cost technologies, namely spectral soil analysis, however, have increased the feasibility of integrating objective plot-level soil health measurement in household surveys.
This new Guidebook provides practical guidance for survey practitioners aiming to implement objective soil health measurement via spectral analysis in household and farm surveys, particularly in low-income smallholder farmer contexts. Two methodological experiments, in Ethiopia and Uganda, provide the foundation for this Guidebook. In each study, plot-level soil samples were collected following best-practice protocols and analyzed using wet chemistry and spectral analysis methods at ICRAF’s Soil-Plant Diagnostics Laboratory, in addition to a subjective module of soil health questions asked of the plot manager. The Guidebook offers (i) a comparison of subjective farmer assessments of soil health with laboratory testing, and (ii) step-by-step guidance on how to implement spectral soil analysis in a household- or farm-level survey, from questionnaire design to soil sample collection, labeling, and processing.
The Guidebook is the result of collaboration between the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) team, the World Agroforestry Centre, the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia, and the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.
For practical advice on household survey design, visit the LSMS Guidebooks page: http://go.worldbank.org/0ZOAP159L0
One of the most storied topics in agricultural economics, dating back to Chayanov’s work on Russian peasants published nearly a century ago, is the inverse relationship between scale (in terms of farm or plot size) and (land) productivity - commonly known as the IR.
The 2018 World Development Report (WDR), Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, launched this week. While it draws on research and collective experience—both from within and outside the World Bank—it also draws on the personal experience of the team members, including the two of us. What inspires the focus on learning for all is that we both have seen the possibilities of widely shared learning, but we’ve also seen what happens when those possibilities aren’t fulfilled.
Who doesn’t enjoy an afternoon at the movies? Yet sometimes a cinema screening can be more than just fun. An experiment in Uganda demonstrates how an inspiring, relatable figure in a movie can actually help students to pass their math exams.
We all benefit from role models, whether it’s in school, work, or our personal life. A role model shows us how we can be more or achieve more. In Madagascar, a role model (in this case, an “educated person with high income, who grew up in the local school district”) sharing her life story at a school significantly increased students’ test performance. (Notably, the effect only materialized when the role model had come from a poor background, not when she came from a well-off background.) In Uganda, women who work in male-dominated sectors – and subsequently make much more money – point to the importance of role models in showing them they can succeed.
Value for money is the defining international aid mantra of our age – and rightly so. These are fiscally straitened times in donor economies. We need to ensure that every last aid dollar delivers results for the world’s poorest people. But what price do you put on hope?
That’s a question I hope donors ask themselves after gathering in June 2017 in Kampala, Uganda for a Solidarity Summit on refugees convened by the President of Uganda, Yoweri K. Museveni, and the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. The international community pledged $352 million, which Guterres said was a good start.
