River Basin Development: Dilemmas for Peasants and Planners

In the Gambie River Basin, as in other parts of West Africa, the more effective utilization of the river system is seen as a key means to increase and intensify agricultural production and avoid reliance on the importation of fossil fuels. River basin development has been part of donor-proposed solutions for coping with Africa's food crisis. This paper examines how planners in West African nations are caught between the donors and their own rural populations. The dilemmas for planners revolve around how to attain the necessary outside resources and funding to construct a series of dams, and how to increase both the presence and the power of the state in the rural areas. The dilemmas for the peasantries are to keep the state at bay while using both donor and national state programs and resources to increase the income and security of rural life. To illustrate the interactions between national planners, donor agencies, and rural populations, the paper examines the Gambie River Basin Development Organization (OMVG). Four nations are represented in the OMVG: The Gambia, Guinea-Conakry, Senegal, and Guinea-Gissau.Center for Research on Economic Development, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100693/1/ECON164.pd

Brief reflections on water law, water rights, water discourse and the Zambizi Valley

A research paper on water governance on the Zambizi Valley bordering Zimbabwe & Zambia.This paper briefly explores how the old water regime has affected the eastern Zambezi Valley and comparable areas. It is meant to contribute to a sense of the variations in water use and water problems in Zimbabwe. Each paper in this volume represents research conducted in different parts of Zimbabwe and therefore demonstrates differing perspectives on water management issues. The major exception is that of the ZIMWESI team who have all worked in the Eastern Highlands. In the broad consideration of Zimbabwe's water management issues, these differences and variations are analogous to upstream and downstream water users. Like water users, we see the system differently depending upon our perspective and position. In this spirit, I present a slightly different case and perspective than the others presented in this volume. The Zambezi valley's environment is quite harsh; marked by extreme seasons, very high rates of evapo-transpiration during the dry season and great variability in rainfall from year to year. Within the valley, there is little formal irrigation although it has been the site of major development interventions. Like many communal areas in Zimbabwe, no one in the eastern Zambezi Valley has any legal right to withdraw water from the major rivers. The only legal water rights are, in fact, those of the parastatal, the Agricultural and Rural Development Authority (ARDA), which runs two large estates, one already irrigated, the other to be irrigated this year. It is not dear, however, that lack of water rights per se has blocked small-scale farmers from irrigating their land as much as the terrain and lack of capital. Small-scale farmers in other areas (particularly the eastern highlands) irrigate their land without legal water rights by simply digging furrows to divert water.1 In addition, valley residents hand irrigate their riverine fields and gardens despite laws barring such stream bank cultivation

Achieving a More Egalitarian Water Allocation System in Zimbabwe

A number of major changes have affected water use in Zimbabwe. These include an increased urban population putting heavy pressure on the inadequate and poorly maintained water infrastructure resulting in serious environmental concerns including deteriorating water quality; a land reform programme that has dramatically reduced the number of large-scale farmers and given rise to new smallholder and medium farmers in resettlement schemes and an increase in mining that has become an important water user and a significant polluter. The rural communal areas comprising almost half the land area and population have also been neglected. With the current water crises in Zimbabwe there is a clear opportunity to address these issues and to establish a more efficient, effective and equitable allocation of water between the wide range of existing and emerging water users

Introduction to the Special Issue – Flows and Practices: The Politics of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in Southern Africa

For the past two decades, IWRM has been actively promoted by water experts as well as multilateral and bilateral donors who have considered it to be a crucial way to address global water management problems. IWRM has been incorporated into water laws, reforms and policies of southern African nations. This article introduces the special issue 'Flows and Practices: The Politics of IWRM in southern Africa'. It provides a conceptual framework to study: the flow of IWRM as an idea; its translation and articulation into new policies, institutions and allocation mechanisms, and the resulting practices and effects across multiple scales – global, regional, national and local. The empirical findings of the complexities of articulation and implementation of IWRM in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda form the core of this special issue. We demonstrate how Africa has been a laboratory for IWRM experiments, while donors as well as a new cadre of water professionals and students have made IWRM their mission. The case studies reveal that IWRM may have resulted in an unwarranted policy focus on managing water instead of enlarging poor women’s and men’s access to water. The newly created institutional arrangements tended to centralise the power and control of the State and powerful users over water and failed to address historically rooted inequalities.publishedVersio

Learning from Southern Africa on Fair and Effective Integrated Water Resources Management

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been promoted by international donors, global water organisations and financers as the answer to the water crisis in the Global South. Yet the experiences of countries in southern Africa including Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe suggests that IWRM has failed to adequately address issues of inequality. More needs to be done to ensure that water reforms are informed by a better understanding of specific political and social country contexts and are driven by the needs of local communities

Starting the conversation: land issues and critical conservation studies in post-colonial Africa

This thematic issue brings together the scholarly fields of critical conservation studies and African land issues, a relationship largely unexplored to date. The alienation of land for conservation purposes, introduced to Africa under colonial rule and still taking place today, has fundamental impacts on the politics of land and land use, and is contested in contemporary nation-states - including those that are attempting to implement land restitution and reform. The contributors explore these issues in a range of African contexts. Three key themes are identified: the problematic constructions of ‘community’ by outside agencies; spatial exclusion and the silencing of local voices; and the neoliberalisation of conservation spaces. In contributing to new perspectives on these themes, this thematic issue shows how discourses and practices of conservation, increasingly shaped by neoliberalism, currently impact on land ownership, access and use. It further highlights some important historical continuities. These trends can be observed in transfrontier conservation areas, on state-owned land used for conservation and ‘green’ initiatives, but also on private land where conservation is increasingly turned to commercial purposes.International Bibliography of Social Science

Building a Predictive Model of Low Birth Weight in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Prospective Cohort Study

BACKGROUND: Low birth weight (LBW, \u3c 2500 g) infants are at significant risk for death and disability. Improving outcomes for LBW infants requires access to advanced neonatal care, which is a limited resource in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Predictive modeling might be useful in LMICs to identify mothers at high-risk of delivering a LBW infant to facilitate referral to centers capable of treating these infants. METHODS: We developed predictive models for LBW using the NICHD Global Network for Women\u27s and Children\u27s Health Research Maternal and Newborn Health Registry. This registry enrolled pregnant women from research sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Kenya, Guatemala, India (2 sites: Belagavi, Nagpur), Pakistan, and Bangladesh between January 2017 - December 2020. We tested five predictive models: decision tree, random forest, logistic regression, K-nearest neighbor and support vector machine. RESULTS: We report a rate of LBW of 13.8% among the eight Global Network sites from 2017-2020, with a range of 3.8% (Kenya) and approximately 20% (in each Asian site). Of the five models tested, the logistic regression model performed best with an area under the curve of 0.72, an accuracy of 61% and a recall of 72%. All of the top performing models identified clinical site, maternal weight, hypertensive disorders, severe antepartum hemorrhage and antenatal care as key variables in predicting LBW. CONCLUSIONS: Predictive modeling can identify women at high risk for delivering a LBW infant with good sensitivity using clinical variables available prior to delivery in LMICs. Such modeling is the first step in the development of a clinical decision support tool to assist providers in decision-making regarding referral of these women prior to delivery. Consistent referral of women at high-risk for delivering a LBW infant could have extensive public health consequences in LMICs by directing limited resources for advanced neonatal care to the infants at highest risk

The evolution of the cytoskeleton

The cytoskeleton is a system of intracellular filaments crucial for cell shape, division, and function in all three domains of life. The simple cytoskeletons of prokaryotes show surprising plasticity in composition, with none of the core filament-forming proteins conserved in all lineages. In contrast, eukaryotic cytoskeletal function has been hugely elaborated by the addition of accessory proteins and extensive gene duplication and specialization. Much of this complexity evolved before the last common ancestor of eukaryotes. The distribution of cytoskeletal filaments puts constraints on the likely prokaryotic line that made this leap of eukaryogenesis

The complex politics of water and power in Zimbabwe: IWRM in the Catchment Councils of Manyame, Mazowe and Sanyati (1993-2001)

In the mid-nineties Zimbabwe formed participatory institutions known as catchment and sub-catchment councils based on river basins to govern and manage its waters. These councils were initially funded by a range of donors anticipating that they could become self-funding over time through the sale of water. In this article, we explore the origins of three of the councils and the political context in which they functioned. The internal politics were shaped by the commercial farming elites who sought to control the councils with a 'defensive strategy' to keep control over water. However, external national political processes limited the possibilities for continued elite control while simultaneously limiting water reform. Despite significant efforts to alter the waterscape, fast track land reform which began in 2000 led to the undermining of the first phases of IWRM and water reform and to the privileging of land over water. The economic foundations for funding the new participatory institutions were lost through the withdrawal of donors, the loss of large-scale farmers able to pay for water and the economic and political crises that characterised the period from 2000 to 2010