The population, Health and Environment approach acknowledges that people do not live their lives in single sector, instead everyday they make decisions and face challenges across health, livelihood, education and the environment. The consortium is a civil society network or consortium established to contribute for sustainable development via integrating socioeconomic and environmental concerns of the community. The consortium is concerned on how the community’s livelihood, resilience, contribution to its existence can be strengthened.The Ethiopian Herald recently made a stay with Negash Teklu, Consortium’s Chief of Party to know few points the approach the consortium follows and its impact. Enjoy the reading.
Why do you prefer to integrate population, health and environment together? What impact will it bring?
In our planet, continent, country, society, the basic problems of the community are articulated be it social, economic and environmental aspects. So, we are addressing the social, economic and environment component in an integrated way. Above all, cities are suffered from limitation of energy. They have been facing various challenges in relation to power outage. Countries like Ethiopia get power from one source. Due to shortage of power, the government is forced to provide power in shift. Though the country is providing the power required by the development using such a system, it could not solve the problem once and for all.
Applying a sector based approach, no one cannot solve the multifaceted problem of a household reside within a community. Looking it from this perspective, we choose population, environment and health expressing it from socioeconomic and environmental parameter.
In the Ethiopian context, the population dynamics is a crucial issue. Without addressing the population dynamics, ensuring sustainable development is unthinkable. The entirety population of Ethiopia before 40 and 50 years were not exceeded 30 million, but these days the figure exceeds more than three fold. The population growth from the context of Ethiopia unless harmonized with other developmental issues, it will be beyond the carrying capacity of the economy, environment and social existence we have. So from that perspective we included population, including that economic concerns, health, environment contextualized to the Ethiopian reality.
Would you explain to our readers how sustainable development ensures through enforcing this approach?
As you understand from our development, any community be it in Ethiopia, South Africa, America, the household interest, demands are from social or economic or environmental. You cannot satisfy a household simply by fulfilling a social component- health. If you give them, let alone 100 percent even 1000 percent health alone cannot sustain them. Equally, if education and food only won’t make them exist. So, they have a multifaceted demand. If we really care for them fully, we need to have a multifaceted intervention package. But, as a country, the approach we follow worldwide is sector based approach.
We have education, health, agriculture which are salient even the UN institutions are similar even the ministries we have. But, in reality a household, the community’s interest are multifaceted. They need to be integrated and comprehensively addressed. It is from this scientific understanding and approach; it shows how you are committed really to alleviate the problem of a community and household in a true sustainable way. If we address, the multifaceted concerns in an integrated, comprehensive approach your commitment towards the real solution for the community. It is from this perspective we are trying to integrate projects at filed, policy level and we can really rapidly solve the problem. You can see our planet. There are many trial of development, we had the millennium development, and it cannot achieve its goal. The major assessment that was reached is, the reason millennium development goal failed was, it was not addressing people’s interest in a comprehensive, inclusive and integrated manner.
That is why sustainable development came as a solution bringing 17th goals that compressively address people’s interest. It is from this perspective we are trying to bring integrated approach as a solution in Ethiopia because it can really improve our developmental approach, it can improve poverty alleviation in a rapid sustainable way. It is from this principle we are trying how our projects start by alleviating a household problem in an integrated way. The package we organize is not one intervention in one household. As a package, we bring family planning, gender, health, livelihood, environmental issues even the governance of the family in a way we alleviate their problem in a right way so that by having a sustainable household, we can have a base for sustainable development in our Kebele’s, Woreda’s and Zone’s, Regions and as a country.
So far, you are promoting the PHE approach throughout Ethiopia, so how do you evaluate it? Is it effective?
Since its inception, following this approach is not an easy task. Because the mentality, the system we are having, highly cemented sector based approach on salient approach. So to change this attitude or system, it demands wrong evidences that really can convince policy makers, the society, the intellectuals and professionals who are highly cemented on sector based mentality. So initiate our approach, we started at Woreda level with the limited budget, we can access which was not possible when we start our approach asking for integrated approach was very difficult because, every donor, government institution, UN intuitions they are more interested on the sector based approach.
But by following strong advocacy work and bringing strong evidences, showcases from the pilot projects we initiated not only within Ethiopia even in other parts of the country, as I said before even millennium development were assessed in away their failure was how their weakness in bringing in answering, delivering, responding the multifaceted problem of the community only by sector based approach. The coming of sustainable development globally is a big boost to our approach. In that we contributed towards that from the beginning, we are participated with our partners globally and developing SDG indicators.
We were trying to showcase our experience in Ethiopia. So the project we initiated over the past 11 to 12 years, we have seen big results how a household can be sustained through an integrated approach. Not only the household even we have improved the communities livelihood and the communities sustainability be it on their environment area, rehabilitation because the approach we follow is, if we are working on the Woreda we showcase a household sub-village, in the village we work in has practical example how a household improve his life started from his backyard making it green, vegetables in his farm and making it also green farming area where soil erosion is minimized because of terracing system plantation they follow, watershed they live in and the landscape they are in, have improved and making their life more meaningful and sustainable where they are able to send their children to school.
Because they have income and provide, support their nutritional value has improved, their health are improved, their environment has improved, even their productivity has improved in a way they bring to market to sell their products so that they saved income and become maintain their leaving condition from one year to the next and so in a way their living condition .
So, in implementation perspective, there is limitation because there is still gap in fully understanding the importance of integrated approach as government level. Yes, the establishment of the National Planning and Development Commission is one step forward. But are they really bringing the coordination of line ministries needed in a way they alleviate the communities, the
landscape, the ecosystem, and different society is bringing concerns or demands still it is with a big gap.
But, progressively, there is improvement. when compared the mindset of the people now and that of ten years before. In that context, our advocacy, our evidence and trying to convince the government in a way they can apply it in a better way still it demands more work not only at PHE, all civil society organization, and all stakeholders need to coordinate their activities they need to collaborate, the partnership should be strengthened. It is the only solution for our country.
I think your organization has been facing many challenges in terms of enforcing such an integrated approach, could you list some of them?
We initiated this approach in 2008 as legally established consortium. If you see the trend of our fund generation in all those years, it was incremental, progressive but not in a way we planned in every our strategic plan, in every yearly plan. If we plan to implement in a wider level, we were not getting the fund which were expected as per the level of the challenge. Even in the progress we had, because of minimal budget we had, we cannot fulfill the communities demand which was not possible to fulfil their interest.
In those all 13 years the harsh environment such as drought, flood have been happening but more than, more than anything climate change aggravating in the project we were working in. conflicts have also been happened. In this situation, if you are following a comprehensive integrated approach and it should build the resilience of the society are working comprehensively not only towards livelihood, climate change and flood happen in the area including towards conflict happening in the area, in that level we never got enough support.
The biggest challenge we faced was, the understanding of policy makers, partners donors, and on the ground the level of the problem does not match even though we have correct line which can convince many people but the resistance and the negative attitude, the aggravated problem we see in all the areas we work was not to the level of our expectation. In fact sometimes it frustrates you because you have the correct solution, but you are not supported in a right way. These are the major challenges in totality. Yes we have grown in the last years. In the first five years, we were only implementing our projects in a pilot level. But now we are working in landscape in eco-region level and programme level.
Ethiopia follows sustainable development is not for the sake of period or other countries it is for its existence. The agriculture, energy problem we have it is from our interest we need to align sustainable development adopted and contextualized to our context if we apply it we will be an example in solving our problem and at the same time being a show case to the other world.
Thank you very much.
It is my pleasure.
The Ethiopian Herald July 16, 2020
BY GIRMACHEW GASHAW
