Climate Change - in Sierra Leone and in Canada

This week, as countries from around the world are working to negotiate a new agreement on climate change at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change taking place in Copenhagen, I thought it would be fitting to post something about climate change. I have found that there is generally very little talk about environmental issues here in Sierra Leone. This is not that surprising to me, and I’m sure is the case in other developing countries as well. Both your average person and the government tend to be focused on first meeting basic needs (food, water, shelter, health, education) before they can begin to think about environmental issues. Unfortunately, many environmental problems tend to have longer-term effects, which are generally less pressing than the urgent and immediate needs of survival today. However, environmental challenges, including climate change, will have an impact on the country’s ability to meet its development goals, if not right now, then certainly in the future.

Climate change is already having an effect in Sierra Leone. Over the past few years, changes in weather patterns have been noticeable. The rains are starting later in the year and continuing on longer. This affects farming patterns and timetables, and can reduce agricultural productivity. The longer wet season results in more mosquitoes, which spread malaria. The later start to the rainy season also has the potential to affect the provision of reliable power in the country from the Bumbuna hydro dam which has recently come online. Developing countries like Sierra Leone tend to have the lowest emissions and are the least responsible for causing climate change, yet they will likely experience more devastating effects from climate change (droughts, severe weather, food shortages, rising sea level, etc.) and have far fewer resources to be able to mitigate and adapt to these changes. This actually seems to be one of the big contentious issues in the discussions in Copenhagen – how much will rich countries help poor countries adapt to the problems caused by climate change.

A little more on the negotiations happening in Copenhagen: The intention at Copenhagen is for countries to reach a new agreement on climate change that will replace the Kyoto Protocol (set to expire in 2012). The Copenhagen negotiations are aiming to achieve agreement on greenhouse gas emissions targets (with the aim of bringing developing countries on board to mandated rather than voluntary targets), financial support for developing countries to help them mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change, and a carbon trading scheme. About 100 world leaders are attending (including US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but not Canada’s Stephen Harper) and all 192 countries will be represented. (Most of this info is from this BBC article). More info on the Copenhagen conference is available at http://en.cop15.dk/.

Although it is important to bring developing countries into any agreement on climate change, especially the big developing countries like China and India, in order to reach the targets being discussed (keeping global average temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius, or even 1.5 degrees), it is critical that developed countries step up and implement their fair share of reductions. Unfortunately, Canada’s reputation on climate change is currently pretty abysmal. Now, with the new Obama administration in the United States, Canada seems to be performing even worse than the United States under Bush, which is saying quite a bit. We’ve already been awarded the “fossil of the day” award in Copenhagen – awarded by a coalition of 450 environmental groups to the countries “doing the most to obstruct progress in the global climate change talks.” Canada is the only country to actually renege on the greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets it agreed to when it ratified Kyoto, and now has the lowest targets among developed countries (a 20% reduction by 2020, but from a 2006 base year – only a 3% reduction from 1990, the base year for Kyoto). This stinging critique of Canada’s actions on climate change (or lack thereof) by George Monbiot (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/01/the-urgent-threat-to-world-peace-is-%E2%80%A6-canada/) has actually made me feel embarrassed to be a Canadian.

All countries must do their part if we are to prevent global warming from having a devastating effect on the planet, and a disproportionate effect on the poor.

The Nova Scotia Gambia Association (NSGA) and their work in Sierra Leone

When Chris and I were travelling, we had the good fortune of travelling with a friend of mine from Nova Scotia, Andrea MacDonald. Andrea is the Executive Director of the Nova Scotia Gambia Association, which works both in The Gambia and here in Sierra Leone. In Sierra Leone, their project is called the Nova Scotia Sierra Leone Program (NSSLP). Andrea was here visiting some of NSSLP’s projects and invited us to travel with her. We went with her to Koidu, Kenema, Bo and then back to Freetown. This was a great way for us to see other parts of the country without going through the trials of using public transportation or paying a lot of money for a private vehicle. Some of the roads were pretty bad (as evidenced by the mud-soaked truck in the photo) and we were thankful to be in a 4x4 vehicle. So thanks Andrea!

Over the 5 days we spent travelling with NSGA, we had the opportunity to visit some of their projects, and I really wanted to say something about the work they are doing here. The NSGA’s work focuses on peer health education. Their motto is “learn and teach others”. The also do voluntary counselling and HIV testing in coordination with health services here. We were able to see some of their peer health education work in action. In Kenema we visited a boys school that had a peer health education program around HIV/AIDS and sexual and reproductive health. It was so neat to hear the boys that are the peer leaders in this program talk openly and without embarrassment about how you can get HIV, how to prevent it, how to have safe sex, and other topics that are so important to sexual health. These boys share this information not only with their peers at school, but also with their families and communities (many of them come from villages outside of Kenema). Without open and frank discussions on these subjects, health issues like HIV (with prevalence rates currently around 2%) and teenage pregnancy (already a big problem here) are sure to become more serious problems in the country.

(As an aside, one of the boys from this group in Kenema told me at the end of the session that he wanted to marry a white woman :-) I don’t think he was proposing to me, because I was there with Chris, just expressing his general dream!)

The project that NSGA is involved in in Kono District (the eastern part of the country) was really interesting to learn about. They are doing the HIV testing and counselling and peer health education component for a larger project that is run by the German Technical Cooperation, GTZ (GTZ has a similar role to that of CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, in Canada). This project aims to help youth that were displaced by the civil war to urban areas like Freetown, or to the diamond-mining areas, resettle in their old villages. A 3-month pilot project just finished, and GTZ aims to soon launch a five-year project to do the same work, resettling 30,000 youth.


This is how the project works: GTZ “scouts” find young people in Freetown, or in the mining areas in Kono that want to go back home but don’t have the means to go themselves. The scouts then visit the home communities and mediate with the villagers to ensure that the return will be accepted and peaceful (some of these youth may have been perpetrators of or witnesses to atrocities committed during the war). GTZ provides returnees with basic support in terms of transportation and getting set up with farming and housing when they return to the village, and works with them to educate them and the rest of the community in the areas of hygiene, water and sanitation, reproductive health and HIV. This education work is where NSGA comes in. They also work with district health teams to HIV counselling and testing for returnees and villagers.

With Andrea, we visited one of the villages where resettlement has taken place as part of the pilot project, the village of Gbematambadu (photo of villagers to the left), about 15km outside of Koidu (on a TERRIBLE road). The villagers and returnees talked about their experiences thus far (they had been back for about 3 months I think). Everyone generally seemed to be happy with the new arrangement. The returnees were able to feed themselves from their farming (as opposed to living on Le 1,000-2,000/day doing alluvial mining in the diamond areas), and the villagers appreciated having more young people around to share in the work. While there were certainly ongoing challenges (housing and education for the new influx of children seemed to be two big ones), the project seemed for the most part to be successful.

The whole concept of the project is very interesting, as the general assumption in the west is that anyone working and receiving a salary is better off than someone depending on subsistence agriculture, and that moving to an urban centre is better than being in a rural area. However, this GTZ project seems to demonstrate that this is not the case. In fact, rural communities have a lot to offer. Although subsistence farming has its own challenges and is by no means easy, at least people have a certain measure of control over whether or not they can feed their families. Trying to live in a city and pay for lodging and food for your family on only pennies a day (Le 1,000 = about $0.28 CDN) is pretty tough.

In addition, returning to their home communities offers people a support network that they likely did not have in Freetown or Koidu. From my own experiences here, I’ve seen that extended family networks are very important, especially in rural communities. If you live close to your extended family, when you are sick, they will take care of you. When your harvest fails, they will share their food with you. You help each other with work in the fields and in the house. Children take care of parents, grandparents take care of grandchildren, siblings take care of siblings. Again, it’s certainly not a perfect or an easy life, but the family and community networks in rural communities act as an essential safety net for people here, in a country where social services provided by the government are limited or non-existent.

At the community meeting, people talked about what they had learned from the peer health education program. Topics included prevention of sexually transmitted infections, child spacing, and basic sanitation. Some spot checks in different project areas have already seen some changes in behaviour (for example, always covering food and water to prevent contamination, hanging laundry up instead of laying it on the ground to dry, etc.). In a year or two, other bigger changes (such as in the birth rate or rate of STIs) will hopefully be visible as well.

I have more to say about rural communities and about both agriculture and mining in the country, but those will be topics for other posts. For more information about NSGA’s work in Sierra Leone and The Gambia, or to donate to NSGA, please see their website, www.novascotiagambia.ca.

Microfinance

On Friday I went to a meeting for women’s groups in the Northern province organized by SLANGO (Sierra Leone Association of NGOs). SLANGO is the national coordinating body for NGOs in Sierra Leone. The purpose of the meeting was to share information with women’s groups in the region and to try to connect them with NGOs that want to work with them.

The NGOs at this meeting were two local NGOs that offer microcredit. In several of the development blogs I follow (see list on the right), there has been quite a bit of debate recently about the merits of microcredit (does it actually lift people out of poverty?) and how it should best be done (non-profit vs. for profit), so it was interesting to me to hear about some of the programs offered and hear what the women here thought afterwards.

Both organizations focused on working with women and offered a variety of different types of loans, starting from about Le 300,000 (a little less than $100 CDN) all the way up to Le 20 million for bigger groups (e.g. agricultural associations). The loans had to be taken out to support or expand an agricultural operation, or to expand or start a business. Loans could be made to borrowers without collateral in groups, so that the people in the group serve as each other’s guarantee of repayment. Interest rates were low, 2-3% depending on the purpose of the loan. Each loan also included an element of forced savings – part of what the borrower repaid was put into a savings account, which they were able to access once the loan was fully repaid. Each organization also required borrowers to attend training/information sessions before borrowing so that they fully understood the process.

After the meeting, Sally and Mabinty told me that the conditions offered by these organizations were not feasible for women in Mapaki. There were a few reasons for this. The first is that the amount of the loans in general was too large – the women here are either engaged in small-scale agriculture and sometimes in petty trading as well and wouldn’t be able to either use such a large amount of money all at once, or earn back enough income to make the required payments in time. Another problem is that because Mapaki is located in a rural area, women here who do petty trading may only have the opportunity to sell their goods once a week at the nearest market in Mayalaw (at the junction of the road to Mapaki with the highway, 7 miles from here). This means it takes much longer for women here to generate income from an investment compared to someone in a town that is able to go to market every day.

The women from Mapaki who attended the SLANGO meeting in turn met with the rest of the women here in Mapaki to share the information. All the women here generally felt the same – that these programs would not work for them. However, there is still an interest here in microcredit. The CIDA project currently ongoing here (a project of cdpeace and Peaceful Schools International) includes a small amount of funding to support women’s groups, Le 320,000 ($100 CDN). The women in Mapaki decided that they will use this money to start their own smaller-scale microcredit project here in the village. This way it will be organized by them locally and can work with very small amounts, making the payments easier to achieve. The women will retain control over the money and can make decisions together about how it should be used. I think that this is a great idea and am looking forward to seeing how it works. This is a good example of how given a big of support, a community can find its own solution to development challenges.

Oh, and the meeting was also an excellent test of my Krio as I took the minutes. My comprehension is really pretty good. Now if I only I could learn to speak it a little better . . .

A visit to the farm

Yesterday Alpha took me to visit his farm. Alpha is a boy of 15 who lives here in Mapaki with his family. He and Carolyn were good friends, and he has come often to visit me as well. He is currently in the last year of Junior Secondary School (JSS) here in Mapaki. Alpha dreams of becoming a doctor one day, so he works hard at his studies.

I mentioned to him that I was interested in visiting some farms, so yesterday he brought me to visit. (Photo at right is of Alpha's father harvesting rice. See more photos of the farm at http://picasaweb.google.ca/clarepoulev/AlphaSFamilySFarm#) The family farm is close to Mapaki, only about a 5 minute walk down the road towards Maso, and then a climb up a path to the top of a hill. Alpha told me that his farm is probably smaller than the average in the village. I am rubbish at estimating area and distances, so I won’t try to guess how big it was, but it didn’t seem huge. Alpha told me that a farm’s size is really just limited by the amount of seeds a family has. Families save seeds to use in planting the next time, but of course they also need to eat so are limited in what they can save. If Alpha’s family had access to money for more seeds they would simply clear more land for planting.

The farms here are generally mixed crop farms. On Alpha’s farm was planted rice, sorghum, corn, cassava, a few types of beans, and some vegetables (I saw a few hot peppers and tomatoes). There are also palm trees for coconuts, palm wine and palm oil. Different cops are harvested and planted at different times, and even rice is generally harvested and planted 3 times per year (depends on the type of rice though). The staple crop here is definitely rice (there is a saying that a Sierra Leonean hasn’t eaten until he has had rice), so that is the majority of what is planted. Planting is not done in an organized way in the sense of rows or anything like that – my understanding is that seeds are just thrown and grow where they land. There is no form of irrigation available as far as I can tell – this is why the dry season here is also known as the “hungry” season, because food doesn’t grow as well without the rains.

Apparently Sierra Leone also imports a lot of rice, so people have really been affected by the increasing price of rice and other food commodities over the last year. The price of a bag of rice has increased from 100,000 LE to 120,000 LE. I noticed that the rice I ate at chop houses (restaurants) in Makeni was plain white rice, different from the rice we eat here in Mapaki, which is harvested from the fields.

When the rice is ready to be harvested, it is cut down with a machete and then tied up in little bundles and hung up for a few hours to dry. Once dried, it has to be threshed to separate the seeds from the stalks. Then it must be pounded to open up the seeds to get the grain for cooking. Maintaining the farm and harvesting and processing food are hard work. Generally, the whole family works on the farm. When we visited, Alpha’s father was there as well as his two sisters, Sine (sp?) and Alice. I think that Alice is the older sister, around 24, and the two little boys in my photos are hers. Sine is 19. People go to their farms in the morning and sometimes do not return until dark. Everything is done by hand or with basic tools. Children work on the farms as well as adults – they gather wood, clean, pound rice, etc. Now that Alpha is back in school after the holidays, he generally only works on the farm on weekends.