Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship Program
by Sierra Gladfelter – Zambia
July 2016

In Zambia, Sierra is supporting the monitoring and evaluation component of the ‘City Learning Lab processes’ Zambia Red Cross Society program. This includes supporting the facilitation and documentation of the First Lusaka Learning Lab for the Future Resilience for African Cities and Lands (FRACTAL) project, including contribution to the development of a learning framework and establishing a learning baseline, researching background materials and preparing reading materials in collaboration with the FRACTAL team and documenting learning during the Learning Lab interactions and compiling a learning report.

As we dodge potholes on the highway from Kazungula to Sesheke, the bush smolders on the shoulders of the road. Men pause in the heat of the day from clearing brush, squatting in small patches of shade on the side of the road. When I ask the Zambia Red Cross Society (ZRCS)’s Disaster Management Officer, Samuel Mutambo, seated beside me about the fires, his brow furrows. We are in the midst of a week monitoring activities associated with the Building Resilient African Communities (BRACES) program supported by the American Red Cross and are on our way to check on communities and deliver materials for the implementation of local action plans in Kazungula and Mwandi districts. Samuel, still troubled by the sight outside our window, launches into a thoughtful explanation. The forest burning is common here I come to learn, along with many other areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. According to Zambia’s Energy Regulation Board, approximately 75% of Zambians live off the grid without electricity (a rate that rises to 95% in rural areas), where firewood serves as one of their only forms of fuel, heat, and light.

“While rural Zambians often shoulder the blame for statistics on the growing rate of deforestation (according to the Times of Zambia, now approaching 300,000 hectares per year), the reality is not so simple.”

Even in Lusaka, Zambia’s rapidly developing capital, people who live with modern conveniences and access to more sustainable fuel alternatives often choose charcoal for cooking traditional dishes over their outdoor charcoal stoves. This urban consumption of forest resources has been exacerbated by the growing frequency of power cuts and load-shedding in urban areas which leaves vast swathes of Lusaka without power on a daily basis. Getting a meal on the table often means lighting up a bag of charcoal. Rural communities, like those along the road between Sesheke and Kazungula, serve as suppliers in a market currently estimated to be worth more than US $100 million (Ngosa, 2014).

The Zambia Red Cross Society (ZRCS)’s BRACES project seeks to combat such ‘destruction of the environment’ by empowering communities to manage local forest and land resources in ways that build rather than erode their resilience. While this aim is noble, its implementation is not always so straightforward on the ground, particularly when the approach depends on residents identifying their own needs through community action plans. This becomes evident during our first stop in a cluster of huts in the community of Sikaunzwe. We are delivering axes to the local head of the Satellite Disaster Management Committee (SDMC), so that remote communities gardening in the bush could clear a track to the main road to get their goods to market. Not having known exactly what we were delivering, I have to laugh at the profound irony as we, as part of a climate resilience intervention, stack hatchets in the shade of a hut that also has dozens of bags of charcoal waiting to be carried to the highway. I ask Samuel, trying to suppress the doubt in my voice, how we know that the axes will be used to clear the road and not in the production of local charcoal (certainly more profitable than selling tomatoes and okra!).

Samuel laughs. He knows where I am going. He assures me that the axes will be used for widening the road so that buyers may better access the vegetables grown through the BRACES program. Here, SDMCs carefully manage the tools they are provided and they cannot just be used for anything. Still, even Samuel admits that the possibility of the axes being used for other means remains. This, however, is the compromise he and others must be willing to make if they take seriously the self-proclaimed needs of communities. They have to learn to trust in order to build a reciprocal exchange with communities. The longer I have time to reflect on my own internal conflict over distributing axes, which could very well be used to exacerbate the forest’s felling, however, the less crazy it feels. Anything less than this commitment to local self-determination, I came to realize, would be paternal and colonial, another unidirectional intervention rooted in ‘education’ and coercion that so often occurs in the development industry and that the ZRCS works hard not to reproduce. When they give a community tools, they never have full control over how the community uses them. In the end, the lesson becomes about having a relationship that does not breed doubt but trust. Read more …

Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship Program
by Sierra Glatfelter – Zambia
June 2016

In Zambia, Sierra is supporting the monitoring and evaluation component of the ‘City Learning Lab processes’ Zambia Red Cross Society program. This includes supporting the facilitation and documentation of the First Lusaka Learning Lab for the Future Resilience for African Cities and Lands (FRACTAL) project, including contribution to the development of a learning framework and establishing a learning baseline, researching background materials and preparing reading materials in collaboration with the FRACTAL team and documenting learning during the Learning Lab interactions and compiling a learning report.

The truck fishtailed in deep sand as we rumbled out an unmarked track into the bush toward Sikaunzwe, a community situated along the Zambezi River on Zambia’s southern border. As an intern in Zambia for two and a half months through the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, I was traveling with the Zambia Red Cross Society (ZRCS)’s Disaster Management Officer, Samuel Mutambo, and District Project Officer, Emmanuel Mudenda. We had left the ZRCS field office in Kazungula, six hours from the capital of Lusaka in Zambia’s southern province, almost an hour ago to monitor community interventions as part of the Building Resilient African Communities (BRACES) program supported by the American Red Cross. The objective of this program is to increase the security and resilience of rural communities in the three southern districts of Kazungula, Mwandi and Sesheke, which are particularly vulnerable to droughts and flooding within the Zambezi River Basin.

Key to BRACES’ goal of achieving local resilience is the diversification of livelihood strategies to sustain households economically through times of climactic variability and deep uncertainty. While this region of Zambia has benefited from investment by the Red Cross in early warning systems for floods due to its proximity to the Zambezi River, the communities here are currently struggling through an extended period of drought (see: New York Times article, Climate Change Hits Hard in Zambia, an African Success Story). Since one of the interventions under BRACES is to support the development of small-scale sustainable agriculture, my colleagues were particular keen on learning how beneficiaries were coping with the lack of water. Climbing out of the truck in Sikaunzwe, we bushwhacked through neck-high grasses to several plots carved out of the bush above a sandy wash. Dry except for a few stagnant pools, this water source continues to sustain more than a dozen gardens strung along its banks. Scrambling down into the channel, we found two women crouching near a pit that they have dug into the sand. Using a bowl, they dished water into a bucket. When it is full, they carried it up the bank to irrigate their crops.

Following the women into their gardens, we found the plots dominated by tomato plants, heavy with green fruits and lashed to stakes for support. Once ripe, these will be carried to the road to sell to buyers. I am reminded of my eight-hour bus ride from the capital of Lusaka; every time we pulled off the road women would emerge from patches of shade, raising plates of stacked red tomatoes to the bus window. This is one way small pockets of cash come to circulate in the region’s villages. BRACES, in an effort to support the expansion of income at the household level, supports farmers by supplying them with a variety of seeds and irrigation equipment. As a result, even those farmers who had been gardening for decades were able to expand their diversity of vegetables under production. Some had even begun to find a pathway out of poverty. One farmer, we spoke with outside the village of Kawewa, had entered the BRACES program with only a few plants. However, the following year with access to a pump and irrigation tubing provided by the program, he was able to exponentially expand his land under cultivation. Following him through freshly tilled fields, we listened to him describe the crops he planned to plant this season and the calculations of his anticipated profits.

While this farmer’s tale deeply resonates with resilience, not all gardens offer such financial advancement.

“Many barriers impede the translation of seeds into crops, and ultimately into cash. It is not a simple story of merely having the motivation.” Read more …