Victoria to Chilwa: Integrated Development Successes at the Lake Basin Scale

On February 10, 2014, the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program hosted an event on Integrated Development in Two African Lake Basins. Panelists reported on programmatic and project-level successes, showing the benefits of integrating population, health and the environment for sustainable development. 

Lake basins are characterized by unique cultures, rich biodiversity and their own set of social and environmental challenges, which are often intertwined. Integrated approaches to population, health and the environment (PHE) have seen successful implementation in the Lake Victoria basin of East Africa and the Lake Chilwa Basin in Malawi. While these important watersheds differ in geography and size, both face severe environmental degradation and growing populations that are increasingly dependent on the basin’s natural resource base.

In East Africa, the Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC) has successfully harnessed political support for regional-scale, integrated coordination of PHE components. The commission works closely with the governments of the five East African Community (EAC) member countries to ensure economic integration and sustainable development of this shared basin. Through advocacy, collaboration and research, the LVBC has made this type of integrated development possible. PHE was well accepted by ministers in each EAC country, where top-down political buy in is an important approach to overcoming the problem of discrete, uncoordinated, low impact projects that currently flood the basin.

The Lake Chilwa Basin Climate Change Adaptation Program shows the importance of PHE to integrating health and family planning with environmental work in Malawi. This project trains key stakeholders and communities for ecological monitoring, fish and crop processing and conservation agriculture to ensure sustainable livelihoods. However, a main challenge is the lack of participation by women in these communities, due to health problems caused by poor sanitation and the environmental stressors at the heart of the project. Child care, access to family planning and health treatment were cited as important complements to the environmental work being done in the basin. Despite donor pushback, integrating health into this environmentally-focused project is crucial for its success. When you’re sick, you can’t participate in climate change adaptation.

These programs and projects saw a need for integrating health and population into their planning to achieve their environmental objectives, and while both experienced challenges with implementation, they have revisited the African proverb that it takes many hands to build a roof.