In both cases, I’m much less disappointed by the failure than by what those failures represent: lack of community consultation; designs not informed by prior experience or technical background; and, even if they had both “succeeded,” the reach of these ideas was merely local. Out of the three geographic regions and thirteen countries we were funding, we had only one major Big Idea success story, in my view: our funding allowed our West Africa team to get a seat at the table and inform the planning and implementation of large-scale dam projects. Dam construction is going to increase in coming years, and planning these projects with some sensitivity for and attention to the tens of thousands of poor people who will feel the impact is vital.
A GOOD DAM PROJECT
The Akosombo Dam was built in Ghana in 1965, flooding the lands and homes of eighty thousand people. It created the largest man-made lake in the world and secured Ghana’s electricity supply. Since then, West African countries have built more than 150 large dams. With GWI’s backing, a nonprofit organization called the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) spearheaded a study examining the social impact of several dams and turned that data into something it used in an advocacy effort in West Africa, in close partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is made up of hundreds of conservation-oriented NGOs around the world.
Dam projects are on the upswing again as countries grapple with food insecurity, climate change, and other pressures to create additional energy sources. The people in the region most affected typically do not have a voice in the process, and there is considerable debate over how much these massive infrastructure projects benefit the vast numbers of people who are displaced. At regional planning meetings, IIED and IUCN provided impact studies that had hard evidence of elements that planners needed to keep in mind to ensure equitable treatment of the people affected and that the project’s objectives are actually met. For example, after a major dam was completed in Mali in 1981, displaced farmers were theoretically given improved land resources and irrigation technology when they were resettled. However, they were not trained how to farm rice instead of the wheat they had previously grown under a rain-fed system. The result was that they did not know how to produce this crop, and so they failed. In some cases, they just abandoned their plots or had them taken away.
This work is not a “typical” NGO project. It’s not about building anything concrete or installing equipment. It’s about the soft resources that can mean the difference between success and failure for tens of thousands of people who have few advocates. It’s about working with the policy makers who can effect real change that outlives the activities. Because of this research, IIED and IUCN can show governments and dam project planners that a training component for this kind of shift is essential. Also, thanks to work that GWI helped support, the Niger Basin Authority adopted some principles to assess and manage social and environmental impacts of future plans to manage a river system that runs through nine countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. This is the kind of big-impact thinking we’d hoped to achieve. This is what we think of as transformational change at scale: Big, positive, sustainable progress for large numbers of people.
The problem is, the money allocated to dam-related work made up just 2 percent of our entire investment in GWI so far. That’s not even close to a passing grade.
We have subsequently relaunched GWI. We challenged all the participants to reimagine the next five years as informed by what they have learned to date. We asked them to come back with new proposals centered around the one or two Big Ideas in their regions. We eliminated the bulky committee oversight. We asked the lead NGO in each region to define who they thought were the best partners to achieve the strategy, while requiring each to allocate funds to coordinate learning and advocacy on a global scale. Since our primary mission as a foundation is food security, we pulled back the scope to focus on water for agriculture.
In all cases, we required the new plans to use our funding to knit together the best ideas and experiences from across the sector, while also identifying critical research and information gaps. Our partners are shifting to focus on policy-related initiatives so that governments will focus more on rain-fed agricultural systems that could improve food security for huge numbers of smallholder farmers across several countries. We hope to build networks of experts who can inform and use the evidence base we build to advocate for solutions to better manage water use for agriculture and meet the water needs of small farmers.
In rain-fed areas, collecting water for small-scale irrigation systems can be backbreaking work. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
The good news is that we learned our lessons faster than we would have in a more traditional, bureaucratic, consultant-heavy approach, so I’m optimistic that we can make progress going forward. But we have to be willing to identify and admit to what did not work. We are packaging the first five years’ worth of lessons learned, to help inform everybody trying to make a difference in improving access to water. If we come back to the conclusion that today’s NGOs largely cannot break out of the boxes they’ve created for themselves without a lot more direction and management, well, we’ll have some decisions to make. Do we see a path where it makes sense for us to create that management support and infrastructure? Or do we need entirely new models we haven’t seen or tried yet?
Time will tell if GWI’s new structure and focus will unleash the Big Idea change that originally inspired us.
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I. There are thousands of broken wells all over Africa, and there is growing frustration because too many organizations measure whether a new water source has been created as “improved access” but do not measure if water is flowing from it five years later.
PART 4
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Challenges We Need to Figure Out
You’ve just read about some lessons we’ve learned through trial and error or by witnessing or experiencing good intentions that did not deliver. In this section, the stories involve challenges where we are going in eyes wide open to the difficulty, but we’re experimenting and trying some new approaches to creating a more sustainable future for struggling populations. Some stories are about questions that will demand research; others involve new ideas for challenging a failing status quo.
Story 27
Elephants and Experts
In 2012 I was drawn to visit the Okavango Delta in Botswana by a startling statistic. I had to understand it for myself.
I had visited the region before and was excited to go back to the Okavango, a 6,500-square-mile oasis created by the annual flooding of the Okavango River. It is so vast, so undeveloped, and so biologically diverse that it is a wildlife photographer’s dream. More significantly, it is one of the planet’s most important ecosystems, and the region is home to considerable food insecurity and thousands of smallholder farmers.
It was August, the winter dry season, and much of our helicopter journey from Maun Airport was over a bland, grayish combination of savanna and floodplain crisscrossed with animal migration tracks. As we neared the delta, more wildlife appeared: there were giraffes ambling across open stretches, zebras grazing near isolated water holes, small groups of elephants with their young camped under the few shade trees, and a herd of African buffalo at least one thousand strong. All on an enormous expanse of land.
However, once we reached the delta itself, the wetlands exploded with bright, colorful life. Lush green weed beds and other vegetation lined both blue- and brown-tinted waterways in the flooded area. Hippos splashed in marshy pools, flocks of cranes and other birds soared over the wetlands, and a giant crocodile with a silvery, log-like back swam up what could have been a channel of strong coffee. Many pools were choked with lilies and sported algae blooms of the more exotic colors from the Crayola 64 box, such as raw sienna and goldenrod. Concentrations of salt formed from annual flooding and evaporation dotted the landscape with white patch
es. Gray termite mounds were everywhere.
I was headed to a remote camp where researchers our foundation is helping support are working on a complex and unusual conflict related to food security. As we descended on an open field by the researchers’ camp on a small island, I saw something peculiar along the perimeter: a clothesline of what looked like baby-sized black pants swinging in the breeze. I would soon learn those lines had nothing to do with laundry—and everything to do with that statistic and the tense standoffs we were there to investigate.
Anthropologist Amanda Stronza from Texas A&M University’s Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Sciences and her two colleagues from the Healthy Ecosystems and Livelihoods (HEAL) Initiative met us and steered us to a small table they’d set up with drinks and fruit. Dr. Stronza is collaborating with two other scientists: Dr. Anna Songhurst, a conservation biologist who studied at the Coulson Lab at Imperial College, University of London, and her husband, conservation ecologist Dr. Graham McCulloch. Dr. Songhurst directs the Okavango Elephants and People Research Project.
Indeed, the main topic of our visit and that incredible statistic involved elephants. Botswana has the largest free-ranging elephant population in Africa, with the highest densities occurring in this northern region of the country. There are roughly 130,000 elephants in all of Botswana, but Dr. Stronza pulled out a map and pointed to our location: a triangular area, roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park, called the Okavango Panhandle. She explained that it is in a section that abuts the Namibian border and is not far from Angola. The local elephant population, swollen from the years of civil war in Angola that drove many elephants south, is exploding. Meanwhile, the human population is growing rapidly too, at more than 1 percent per year. According to Dr. Stronza, in this study region, right now there are approximately fifteen thousand elephants and fifteen thousand people.
Botswana has the largest free-ranging elephant population in Africa. The area we visited had roughly one elephant for every human. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Given the expanses of land, that might not seem like such a huge problem. But it is. Each day during the dry season, water becomes increasingly scarce out in the remote bush, and many of the animals migrate to the delta on paths that take them right past farmers’ fields and settlements and across the area’s few roads. It can create situations that remind me of the TV sci-fi series from the 1970s Land of the Lost, where a family tries to co-exist with dinosaurs. Conservationists call the resulting issues “human-wildlife conflict,” or HWC. “You have people and elephants trying to stay out of each other’s way, but they are competing for basic resources,” Dr. Stronza explained.
HWCs are not unique to Botswana. In Africa, wherever agriculture encroaches on or abuts animal habitats, farmers battle crop raiding by all kinds of animals, from monkeys to porcupines. But in one sense, the elephant conflicts erupting in the Okavango are different from many HWCs I’ve heard about and investigated elsewhere in the world. In many situations, numbers of cheetahs or gorillas have plummeted to near-extinct levels because local people are deforesting habitats or poaching the animals. In 2012 the widespread poaching of African elephants to fuel a skyrocketing market for ivory in Asia was a widely covered story, and in some areas, elephant herds were dwindling rapidly. In Cameroon in early 2012, poachers slaughtered more than three hundred elephants in just one month, and a few months later rangers at Garamba National Park in the DRC discovered twenty-two dead elephants they believed had been shot from helicopters.1 The continent as a whole may be losing tens of thousands of elephants to poachers annually now.
However, the scientists we visited explained that while there is some illegal poaching in the Panhandle area, that has not been a significant factor in terms of the elephant-related issues. Botswana is considered one of the most conservation minded of African countries, with a thriving ecotourism industry. Its government promotes photographic safaris as opposed to trophy hunting. (Not long after we left, the government announced it was going to outlaw all trophy hunting by 2014.)
The particular conflict we were trying to understand in the Okavango Panhandle is mostly about there being too many elephants raiding the crops of subsistence farmers, and confrontations have turned deadly for both.
One of the reasons we traveled here was to see a dramatic, usually daily phenomenon at this time of year. The elephants spend much of their day in the bush, miles away from the people and their crop fields. But during the dry season, the bush “pans,” or watering holes, evaporate away to muddy puddles and, eventually, to dry, hard dirt. Late in the day, the elephants begin to move. Scores, even hundreds, of elephants at a time walk to well-trod paths and begin their trek to the Okavango River to drink. You can see their migration paths from the air: they walk by crop fields and homes, they cross roads, they trudge—even swim—through canals. They pluck tasty branches from mopane and other local trees as they go, leaving behind a path of destruction and broken vegetation. And when corn and other crops are ready for harvest, they sometimes go into the fields and consume and trample a subsistence farmer’s livelihood.
I have seen many different road signs in my life, but I have seen a sign warning of elephant crossings in only one place—Botswana. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
“THEY SEEM TO KNOW”
Elephant experts sometimes joke that these animals are like “six-ton squirrels.” They are intelligent, perceptive, and determined, and can be aggressive in pursuit of food or to protect their herds. They can be crafty in evaluating their surroundings and outfoxing attempts to thwart them. And some researchers have even reported what they call “spite” crop raiding, where elephants will trample and wreck a planted field without even eating any of the food grown on it.2 Crop raiding occurs throughout Africa and Asia wherever elephant habitats are near agriculture, but the concentration of elephants and humans here, and the increase in both populations, is cause for concern. And what the researchers at our meeting explained next was sobering.
We had scheduled our visit to include a drive at dusk along a common elephant pathway near a local village. I had seen photographs of these massive migrations, with the elephants passing by cars and structures. Schoolchildren coming home sometimes even play a potentially lethal version of the game Red Rover, dodging their way through the thundering line of gray tree-trunk-sized legs.
“I have some sad news,” Dr. Stronza said. “Sad in a number of ways, but I think it means we are not going to be able to show you the elephant crossing.”
Dr. Songhurst then continued: “Last week a female elephant got into a farmer’s grain storage area, and she was shot and killed by the farmer. That was on Monday. On Thursday a woman was walking near the area where the elephant was shot. They don’t know exactly what happened, but they think the woman somehow surprised a female elephant, possibly from the herd of the dead elephant; it chased her down and mortally wounded her. The woman was alive when they found her, but it took hours for an ambulance from the nearest town with a hospital to get here, and she died by the time she got to the hospital. So the Department of Wildlife went out and found the elephant. They identified her by the blood on her tusks, and she was part of a larger breeding group. They killed the whole group. Six elephants.
“This woman was the sixth person killed by an elephant since 2006. The effect right now is that the elephants have stopped coming down during the day.”
“Wait a minute,” I asked. “All the elephants ‘know’ about this incident? All these thousands of elephants, many of whom were miles away when the woman was killed or the group of six elephants was killed, have communicated to each other that it is now dangerous to come down as a group for water?”
“They seem to know,” Dr. Stronza replied with a nod. “The villages know, the elephants know. It’s a tense time.”
When elephants kill people, people kill elephants. As human/elephant conflict increases, it will result in casualties for both groups. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
We talk
ed at some length about the region and its issues, which are far more complicated than just too many elephants. In some ways, the backgrounds of the researchers we met with reflected this complexity. The elephant expert Dr. Songhurst said that she had been captivated by elephants since she was a little girl. One irony of her work here is that she doesn’t spend much time with elephants but, rather, she spends time with the farmers, trying to help them protect their crops without resorting to harming the animals. Dr. McCulloch’s original research was on birds and broader issues of ecosystems and habitats.
Dr. Stronza, however, is a social scientist; she works on the people side of the equation, and has spent two decades in the Amazon and other research sites studying how and whether ecotourism and wildlife management can be done with an appreciation for the issues and the well-being of local communities in a region. She is trying to understand the issues and customs we often lump under “culture clashes” that need to be factored into helping a community take ownership of solving these complex problems. A wildlife management model sometimes called “fines and fences” or the “Yellowstone model”—revolving around fencing off protected areas—can seem like a good idea to preserve endangered species and wild places. But it can have negative consequences for local people, and even for the animals.
One of Dr. Stronza’s initial research efforts in Botswana was to study trophy hunting and evaluate whether a professional, regulated trophy hunting industry might support animal conservation. “It seems counterintuitive to talk about killing for sport as a solution for conservation,” she acknowledged, “but it’s not so simple.” There is an argument to be made, she continued, that a well-organized, limited trophy hunting operation can be run in a sustainable fashion with practices such as quick, humane killing and not shooting mother elephants with young offspring. In some situations, it is an economy that employs local people whose families have been trackers and skinners for generations. “These people are not criminals,” Dr. Stronza emphasized. Allowing the revenues from the licenses for limited numbers of trophy hunters to flow back to the communities (by charging expensive fees that are shared with local villages) makes the community feel invested in protecting the resource. It can even discourage poachers. However, there are trophy hunters who do not follow ethical policies, and their misdeeds rightfully enrage local people and conservationists alike, Dr. Stronza pointed out.
40 Chances Page 23