Risk and Vulnerability, Duncan Green

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    Photo: Morris Herson/Oxfam Voices of the Poor conclusion: ‘Anxiety emerges as the defining characteristic of insecurity, and the anxiety is based not on one but on many risks and fears: anxiety about jobs, anxiety about not getting paid, anxiety about needing to migrate, anxiety about lack of protection and safety, anxiety about floods and drought, anxiety about shelter, anxiety about falling ill, and anxiety about the future of children and settling them well in marriage.’ Egs of reinforcement: Studies in Malawi show how the famine of 2001–02 drove desperate women and girls to sell sex to survive, greatly increasing their chances of contracting HIV. More than 50 per cent of Africa’s food crises can be explained by armed conflict and the consequent displacement of millions of people

    Photo: Glenn Edwards/Oxfam Half of global cancer deaths are in developing countries, including (due to late diagnosis and lack of treatment) 95 per cent of deaths from cervical cancer

    Photo: Shailan Parker/Oxfam HIV and AIDS: In 25 years the disease has spread to virtually every country, with 65 million people infected with HIV and 25 million deaths from AIDS. In 2005, there were 38.6 million people worldwide living with HIV and AIDS: 4.1 million were newly infected with HIV that year, while 2.8 million people died from AIDS. Of the 2.3 million children living with HIV and AIDS globally, two million are African. Women aged 15–24 are six times more likely to carry the virus than men in the same age group

    Photo: Ami Vitale/Oxfam In 2007, a c ombination of child support, disability payments, and pensions was reaching approximately 13 million South Africans, out of a total population of 48 million. Total spending in 2007 amounted to $9bn – 3.4 per cent of GDP. Kyrgyzstan’s social protection system now comprises a social insurance fund from which old age and disability pensions are paid; a health insurance fund, which covers the costs of health treatment for the working population and for children and older people; and a social assistance system, which provides small amounts of cash assistance on a means-tested basis to people living below the poverty line. Although far from perfect, it shows that even a very poor country (in 2005 Kyrgyzstan’s annual per capita GDP was US$319) can run a social protection system that helps protect the most vulnerable. World Bank analysis suggests that, without the system, the extreme poverty headcount would have increased by 24 per cent, the poverty gap by 42 per cent, and the severity of poverty by 57 per cent. Furthermore, these levels of social protection do not represent an unsustainable drain on public resources: in 2002, they cost 3 per cent of GDP.

    Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam

    Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam

    Photo: Reuters

    Photo: Reuters

    Photo: Mi rjam van den Berg/Oxfam Novib Inequality: January 2001 was a bad month for earthquakes, with major tremors striking in India, El Salvador, and the northwest USA around Seattle. These three earthquakes were of similar orders of magnitude, but killed 20,000 people in India, 600 in El Salvador, and none in Seattle. Even allowing for geological differences, the explanation for such a huge disparity lay not in nature, but in poverty and power. Nature is neutral, but disasters discriminate. On average, the number of people affected by disasters in developing countries is 150 times higher than in rich countries, whereas the population is only five times greater. December 2004 tsunami: Over 227,000 people lost their lives and some 1.7 million were displaced. A massive, media-fuelled global response resulted, producing an estimated $13.5bn in international aid, including $5.5bn from the public in developed countries. Disaster Preparedness: Two months after Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans in 2005, killing around 1,300 people, Hurricane Wilma, at one point the strongest hurricane ever recorded, struck Cuba. The sea swept 1km inland and flooded the capital Havana, yet there were no deaths or even injuries in the city. Nationwide, 640,000 people were evacuated and only one life was lost. The six major hurricanes that rolled over Cuba between 1996 and 2002 claimed only 16 lives.

    Photo: HDPT Central African Republic Attitudes and beliefs on violence against women: In South Asia, We Can’s campaign to end violence against women works through people-to-people contact and a massive network of over 1,800 civil society organisations. Individual ‘change makers’ sign up to the campaign, promising to change themselves and to influence their family, friends, and neighbours on the need to end domestic violence and change attitudes towards women. They are armed with some basic materials, including resources suitable for those unable to read, such as posters addressing everyday forms of violent discrimination. In a process reminiscent of viral marketing, those they ‘convert’ become change makers themselves. So far, just over one million people have signed on. The campaign’s target is five million. In August 2002 in Nigeria’s Kaduna state, the epicentre of the country’s inter-communal violence where both Muslims and Christians see themselves as economically and politically marginalised, former militants from each community encouraged twenty senior religious leaders to sign a declaration of peace. Since then, these leaders have been credited with helping to restrain violence during state and federal elections, and have intervened in disputes in Kaduna schools, preventing minor arguments from turning into major incidents. 40 per cent of countries collapse into war within five years of signing peace deals.

    Photo: Jim Holmes/Oxfam A media-driven global system that raised over $7,000 per person affected by the 2004 tsunami, but only $3 per person affected by that year’s floods in Bangladesh. Food aid: high oil prices, transport can eat up much of the food aid budget – up to 40 per cent in Canada’s case in 2004, which helped to prompt a policy change to allow increased local sourcing. In addition, a third of the global food aid budget is wasted because the USA insists on processing food aid domestically and shipping it via national carriers. An OECD study found that t he actual costs of tied food aid transfers were on average approximately 50 per cent higher than local food purchases and 33 per cent more costly than procurement of food in third countries (so-called triangular transactions).

    Photo: Peter Goodbody In November 2001 around Kisangani, the scene of intense fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo that involved many civilian deaths, Amnesty International found ammunition cartridges for North Korean, Chinese, and Russian heavy machine-guns, Russian revolvers, South African assault rifles, Chinese anti-aircraft weapons, and Russian, Bulgarian, and Slovak automatic grenade launchers. At the time, the DRC was subject to EU and UN arms embargoes, which should have prevented the sale of all of these weapons. International efforts at arms control have long focused on nuclear and other sophisticated weapons systems, yet small weapons and light arms are the true weapons of mass destruction, responsible for some 300,000 deaths in 2003. C ollectively, countries in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa spent $22.5bn on arms during 2004, a sum sufficient to put every child in school and to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.

    Photo: Sean Sutton/MAG

    Photo: Sean Sutton/MAG

    Photo: AP/PA Photos

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    Risk and Vulnerability, Duncan Green - Presentation Transcript

    1. Book image
    2. Risk and Vulnerability Duncan Green University of Notre Dame September 2009
    3. Main messages
      • Risk and vulnerability are central to the experience of being poor
      • Shocks reinforce each other and have long-term impacts on health and well-being
      • Real (human) security lies through a combination of empowerment and protection by effective, accountable states
      • But the concept of security has been devalued by the war on terror
    4. Defining our terms
      • Vulnerability: reduced ability to cope with stresses and shocks
      • Risk: hazard x vulnerability
      • Human Security: the opposite of vulnerability, achieved through combination of:
        • Empowerment (active citizens)
        • Protection (effective states)
    5. Causes of vulnerability
    6. Causes of death worldwide
    7. Health and maternal mortality: one woman dies needlessly every minute
      • A woman’s risk of dying ranges from one in seven in Niger to one in 47,600 in Ireland
      • Children who have lost their mothers are up to ten times more likely to die prematurely
      • More progress on other health issues, e.g. access to water and sanitation, immunization, life expectancy
      • ‘ First world’ ailments such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are on the rise
      • Answer lies in investing in public health systems
    8. Pandemics such as HIV will persist, but can be contained
      • Illness and death drives individuals and families into poverty
      • At societal level, pandemics can set development back decades
      • New ‘zoonotic’ diseases may follow HIV in years to come (e.g. avian/swine flu, SARS)
      • Active Citizenship is particularly important for diseases that have no cure, like HIV
      • Political leadership can make or break response (Brazil v South Africa)
      • Global collaboration showed effectiveness in case of SARS outbreak of 2002/3
    9. Achieving Human Security: Social Protection
      • Social assistance: non contributory transfers (eg food stamps)
      • Social insurance: contributory transfers (eg pensions)
      • One of most effective ways to reduce vulnerability, esp. for the chronic poor (elderly, disabled etc.)
      • Response to failure of targeted safety nets/ food aid
      • Social protection bridges gap between emergencies and development – challenge to Oxfam
      • South Africa, Brazil arguing for universal basic income guarantee – could it work at a global level?
    10. How change happens: India’s employment guarantee scheme
    11. How change happens: India’s employment guarantee scheme
      • All rural Indians are now guaranteed 100 days work a year
      • Grew from activist legal campaigns in Rajasthan and spread of ‘rights consciousness’
      • Congress adopted scheme in 2004 election manifesto, not expecting to win
      • Sonia Gandhi and activism were crucial to ensure implementation after the election
    12. Hunger and famine
    13. Hunger and famine
      • Due to current food price crisis, hunger has risen to one billion, but famine deaths have fallen
      • Hunger reflects power and inequality
          • 400m people in developing countries are now obese
          • Amartya Sen: no famine has ever taken place in a functioning democracy
      • Undernourishment in foetus and infancy are particularly damaging
      • Dealing with hunger relies primarily on self reliance and effective accountable states
      • Current crisis driven by switch to meat, biofuels, climate change, oil prices, and possibly speculation
    14. The food price rollercoaster
    15. Natural disasters
      • Deaths have halved over last 30 years (to 200 a day) due to risk reduction such as early warning systems
      • Natural disasters highlight inequality– hit poor countries and communities hardest
      • Disaster preparedness and risk reduction require Active Citizens and Effective States
      • Improving ‘downward accountability’ is a priority
    16. Climate change could reverse that progress
    17. Conflict is both symptom and cause of poverty and inequality
      • Violence, poverty and inequality are interwoven – against women, crime, abuse by authorities, civil war
      • Progress on gender-based violence through legislation and women’s organization
      • After bloody 20 th C, post Cold War has left rump of 30 ‘poverty conflicts’ mainly in Africa
      • Conflict = failure of politics, but some have acquired economic logic of their own
      • Active Citizens: self organization to reduce conflict
      • Effective States: including providing livelihoods for ex-combatants
    18. The humanitarian system
      • Only 6% of total aid
      • Improving but still a mess. Main failings:
        • Too little too late, but CERF is hopeful
        • Distributed according to CNN or geopolitics, rather than need
        • Too many organizations. UN particularly byzantine
      • Humanitarian aid warped by food aid – expensive, demeaning and can undermine local agriculture
    19. Peace and peace-keeping
      • ‘Responsibility to Protect’ – an important UN achievement
      • Force should only be last resort
      • UN blue helmets up 6 x since 1998
      • Rich countries give $, poor ones give soldiers
      • Does UN need a standing military force?
      • Arms Trade Treaty needed
      • War on terror undermines peace-keeping/R2P
    20. How change happens: the landmines ban
    21. How change happens: the landmines ban
      • 1997 ban treaty has led to a sharp fall in deaths. In 2005 only Myanmar, Russia and Nepal acknowledged using them and producer countries were down from 50 to 13
      • Ban rode post Cold War wave of optimism
      • International Campaign to Ban Landmines worked closely with a handful of governments, e.g. Canada, Norway, Austria, and South Africa
      • Gained momentum by moving outside UN system and insisting on total ban – no watering down
    22. Human security through empowerment : South Africa’s T reatment Action Campaign
    23. Further Reading from the Blog
        • Climate change and natural disasters, http://www. oxfamblogs .org/fp2p/?p=232
        • Giving people cash after a disaster, http://www. oxfamblogs .org/fp2p/?p=170
        • Review of ‘War, Guns and Votes’, by Paul Collier, http://www. oxfamblogs .org/fp2p/?p=326
        • What would a global food security policy look like? http://www. oxfamblogs .org/fp2p/?p=141
        • Oxfam staff blogging under fire in Gaza, http://www. oxfamblogs .org/fp2p/?p=122
    24. Further Reading
      • From Poverty to Power, Part 4
      • Paul Collier, ‘War, Guns and Votes’
      • FAO. The State of Food Insecurity in the World (Annual), http://www. fao .org/ docrep /011/i0291e/i0291e00. htm
      • World Disasters Report (Annual), http://www. ifrc .org/ publicat /wdr2008/
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