Recent research has quantified that large dams are linked to more than a million malaria cases each year. How can dam builders and operators, be encouraged to work with relevant government agencies to mitigate the public health threats, not just malaria, that large dams pose?
Managing transboundary river basins is a huge challenge. Even if there are no overt tensions between countries, local communities and national governments tend to act out of self-interest.
Droughts and floods cost us hundreds of billions of dollars each year in food loss and property damage. What’s worse? The costs stand to rise as water variability increases in many parts of the world.
Foreign direct investment in African agriculture could bring great benefits, but there are risks too. Nowhere is this more true than in sub-Saharan Africa where, for many, land ownership is still seen as the key to a secure income.
New innovations are revolutionizing the measurement of water productivity. Farmer Ahmed may not know it yet, but he is a water productivity champion in Morocco.
Cacti could be the new jatropha. There is a buzz in some biofuel circles that these desert succulents are set to become the next wonder energy crop -- yielding prodigious quantities of biomass for biogas fermentation to generate electricity in the semi-arid lands of Africa and elsewhere.
The draft outcome document from the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa rightly mentions that efforts to end hunger and malnutrition need to be scaled up and that ecosystems need to be protected for the benefit of all. Irrigation, however, is not mentioned at all.
While Ethiopia hosts a global discussion on aid finance this week, a long-running dispute with its neighbours over how to share the Nile could be reaching a peaceful conclusion.
What information is needed to make better development decisions? Which set of interventions will maximize a nation’s capacity to meet the new Sustainable Development Goals and how will we measure progress?
How will the world’s poor farmers be helped to adapt to oncoming climate change? What will prevent the rural inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa from starving as their crops shrivel in the predicted mega-droughts? The answer, apparently, is insurance.
The widely cited “fact” that women in Africa provide 60-80% of the labor in agriculture is the latest of a set of claims that have been called into question about women’s contributions in agriculture based on new data from six sub-Saharan African Countries.
The Nairobi-Tana Water Fund comes at a time when water is more expensive than fuel for the majority in Nairobi; when more valuable topsoil is washed away in Noachian proportions; and when available science predicts radical shifts in climate. There is little scope left for debate and conjecture.
