Sustainability Challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa II

Child malnutrition is a major sustainability challenge in many rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Although many different types of interventions have been promoted in the past decades to reduce child malnutrition in the region, it is not always clear whether they are effective in reducing it (and its long-lasting effects). This chapter examines the relationship between household crop production, diet diversity, and nutritional status of children in areas that have received interventions from an NGO (World Vision) and areas that have not received such interventions. We focus on areas where the Gwiza Nutrition Project was implemented and use primary data on food intake, socioeconomic status, and height/weight of local community members. Results suggest the high prevalence of stunting among children below 5 years, which highly relates to their developmental stage. Furthermore, diets in the area are characterized by a limited variety and a high dependency on starchy foods. Overall, there are important linkages between household agricultural production, food security, and nutritional status of children in rural Rwanda. Appropriate interventions should seek to improve household agricultural production and intra-household resource allocation to combat child malnutrition in the area.

Uganda has experienced numerous weather shocks in the past years, which have often caused crop failure and loss, with devastating food security outcomes, especially for smallholders. We analyze the impact of exposure to extreme weather events on household consumption expenditure per adult equivalent. We study the effects of droughts, floods, pests, and diseases on a random sample of 200 urban households from the Kumi Town Council, Teso sub-region. Results from the propensity score matching (PSM) estimations indicate that exposure to weather shocks reduces real household consumption expenditure per adult equivalent by 17%. We further find that the effects of these weather shocks vary by gender of the household head. In particular, fixed effects estimates reveal that the consumption decline is larger among female-headed households. This could presumably be due to their relative inability to adopt effective coping strategies and their lack of access to resources such as land and paid off-farm employment. We also find a higher likelihood that household engages in off-farm employment, borrows money, or receives remittances in order to cope with the different weather shocks. However, our results indicate that only remittances and asset sales temporarily safeguard households from consumption decline following a weather shock. Strategies seeking to increase household resilience to weather shocks would, therefore, be paramount, considering ongoing climate change in the country. Strategies that augment the livelihoods of female-headed households would be particularly important toward this end.

Climate change adversely affects agricultural production in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) such as Kenya. This can have important ramifications for local livelihoods and food insecurity and has often been linked to the erosion and loss of Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK). For instance, changes in agrobiodiversity management due to the dominance of modern agricultural practices based on a few commercial crop varieties can have important implications for food security, especially in areas that are severely affected by climate change. Many communities throughout SSA depend on (and are custodians of) such ILK practices, which are maintained through various traditional resource management systems regulated by traditional institutions, customary laws and cultural values. This chapter identifies and documents ILK practices and innovations that can enhance agricultural productivity and food security in the face of climate change in coastal Kenya. We focus on the five Mijikenda communities of Digo, Giriama, Duruma, Rabai and Chonyi. Household surveys, key informant interviews and focus group discussions were used to elicit the local livelihoods, as well as the prevailing patterns of climate variability, food security and ILK practices (including agrobiodiversity conservation). The study reveals that the five local communities widely use farming-related ILK practices and innovations to improve crop productivity and ensure food security in the face of climate change. Some of the most common practices include crop diversification, early planting, adoption of drought-tolerant and fast-growing local varieties, crop rotation, conservation tillage, domestication of wild food and medicinal plants and use of bio-pesticides. Despite some evidence of ILK erosion, the local communities mobilize effectively their cultural values and customary resource management and governance systems to preserve and use such ILK practices. There is an urgent need to integrate such ILK practices and innovations into relevant policies and climate change adaptation strategies at the local, national and international levels, as a means of enhancing livelihoods, food security and agrobiodiversity conservation.

Sustainable sanitation services are still unavailable to most people in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) despite decades of implementing very diverse sanitation projects across the continent. Using a Sustainability Science lens, this chapter identifies through an extended literature review the drivers and shortcomings of business-as-usual sanitation approaches that tend to fail in SSA. As one of the main challenges for the success of sanitation project is the creation of an enabling environment, we attempt to identify some of the critical elements that could support the development of such an environment. Subsequently we identify characteristics and competencies conducive to breaking the cycle of failure and to developing sustainable sanitation systems. We use data from key informant interviews with sanitation implementers, focus group discussions with sanitation facility users and visits to sanitation project sites in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The sanitation approaches explored, although different, are all characterized by their adaptation to the local context, community participation, built-in mechanisms that ensure financial viability, use of technologies that are culturally appropriate and emphasis on environmental sustainability. We offer several policy and practice recommendations for the development of successful sanitation governance structures for national governments, external support agencies and project implementers. The examples discussed in this chapter show promise, but do not guarantee success, as all solutions will require several iterations to adaptate to the local context, as well as financial and governance support, to be scaled up.

Access to clean, affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is one of the greatest sustainability challenges currently facing sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This is largely due to the fact that most households in the region continue to rely on traditional biomass energy to meet their cooking energy needs. Despite its importance for the poor that cannot always afford modern cooking options, traditional biomass energy has been associated with negative environmental, economic, social, cultural and health impacts. This is especially true when the biomass is obtained through unsustainable practices and burned in inefficient cookstoves in poorly ventilated spaces. However, interventions seeking to reduce these impacts through the promotion of efficient technologies and/or the substitution of traditional cooking options with cleaner fuels have thus far had limited success in SSA. This chapter focuses on bioethanol as a cooking fuel that could overcome several of the negative sustainability impacts of traditional biomass fuels for cooking. We synthesize lessons from case studies spanning the demand side (in particular a site of ethanol stove adoption and use in Maputo, Mozambique) and the supply side (in particular a site of sugarcane ethanol production in Dwangwa, Malawi). The results suggest that some trade-offs emerge during the production of sugarcane feedstock between provisioning, regulating and cultural ecosystem services. These are mediated through land use change associated with the conversion of agricultural land and woodland, for large-scale irrigated sugarcane production. On the other hand, various factors have affected the adoption and discontinuation of ethanol stoves by end users, with cost being the most dominant. We argue that the sustained adoption of clean stoves and the sustainable production of feedstock can support progress for several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Government support, use of existing marketing structures, awareness creation and aftersales services were all found to be important in establishing a successful bioethanol fuel and stove distribution chain. On the supply side, there should be efforts to understand and minimize to the extent possible the trade-offs that arise from sugarcane production.

Landscape fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss, reducing the capacity of landscapes to provide essential ecological functions and ecosystem services. Landscapes that are fragmented and severely disturbed by human activity may also be vulnerable to alien invasive species that cause further loss of biodiversity. This chapter provides a preliminary study of the potential of the introduced cacti Opuntia spp. (predominantly O. ficus-indica), to enhance landscape connectivity and provide ecosystem services in the semi-arid areas of southern Madagascar. Through the analysis of high-resolution satellite images and the development of spatial models, we demonstrate that the deliberate planting of Opuntia hedges can enhance landscape connectivity. Through ecological surveys we investigate the extent to which the hedges are visited and used by birds and insects. For birds the Opuntia spp. hedges do not seem to play a significant role as corridors. For flowering visiting insects, there is a significant correlation between insect abundance and flower density. We argue that despite being an introduced alien species, Opuntia hedges may help in maintaining viable populations for several endemic species. At the same time, Opuntia hedges possibly provide key ecosystem services that can be crucial for human livelihoods and endemic species in the region. Our study underlines that landscape management interventions based on introduced species can have some potential benefits for biodiversity conservation in sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar in particular, but need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the underlying environmental and socioeconomic contexts.

Mining is an integral component of many national economies in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Even though mining can contribute substantially to local livelihoods and regional and national economic growth, it has also been linked to many negative sustainability impacts. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to ongoing discourses on mining sustainability in SSA, especially related to the societal impacts of mine decline and closure. Using the case of Kabwe town in Zambia, the chapter draws on resilience thinking to analyse the different stages of mining operations and outline the short- and long-term outcomes of mine closure on mine-dependent communities and identify possible policy actions and practical solutions to mitigate them. We employ the concept of the adaptive cycle, which is a central notion in resilience thinking. In particular we employ the adaptive cycle as an analytical frame for understanding the evolution of mining operations and categorizing changes that have occurred over time due to mine closure. Based on data from historical sources and in-depth interviews with various stakeholders and local residents, the chapter shows that the unexpected mine closure has had significant negative socio-economic outcomes for the mine-dependent community. Many of these negative outcomes were mediated by earlier failures to consider the eventuality of mine closure (and plan against its impacts) at the levels of the national government, local government and mining company. Based on these insights, the chapter demonstrates how resilience thinking can provide policy and practice recommendations to develop measures and interventions to mitigate the negative outcomes of mine closure.

Current research suggests that knowledge co-production processes offer an alternate and enduring approach to addressing urban sustainability challenges. This chapter explores the potential of such alternative approaches to knowledge production for informing urban management and tackling the different sustainability challenges that cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face. The aim of this chapter is to extract the main lessons learned from how knowledge co-production approaches were established to engage with urban sustainability challenges in SSA cities and eventually unfolded. We draw on three applied and transdisciplinary urban research projects conducted at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, spanning the neighbourhood, city and national urban policy scales. We identify some of the key aspects of these urban knowledge partnerships related to the quality of the knowledge collaborations and their influence on outcomes. We adopt an analytical framework based on the criteria of legitimacy, credibility and salience to explore these relationships between collaboration and outcomes. The findings show that context and history are key variables in shaping each knowledge co-production partnership. Whilst urban policy change is often slow, the data and outputs generated through these knowledge collaboration and co-production processes can serve to increase the confidence and commitment of urban stakeholders in addressing urban sustainability challenges in SSA.

Achieving sustainable development requires evidence-based policy development using the best and most up-to-date data and scientific understanding of the underlying sustainability challenges. However, science appropriate to facilitate policy development is scarce, and, even when available, it is rather challenging to convert it into policy. The interface between science and policy is traditionally poorly understood from both the side of the scientists and the policy-makers. This is a long-recognised problem, which has influenced multiple efforts to develop tools and processes to facilitate science-policy interfaces. These tools can take many forms, including scientific papers, policy briefs and decision-support tools. Recently “scientific assessments” have become prevalent, particularly in science-policy interfaces in the environmental field. However despite their promise, scientific assessments can be cumbersome in facilitating science-policy interfaces, largely due to their structure and underlying processes for synthesising policy-relevant knowledge. This chapter explores some of the aspects that can improve the effectiveness of scientific assessments in science-policy interface processes, aiming at tackling sustainability challenges in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It uses the experience gained through the author’s recent engagement in various related science-policy interface processes relevant to sustainable development in SSA.

The sustainability challenges that sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) faces tend to be multidimensional and span multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the inherent difficulty in solving them, such sustainability challenges also offer opportunities for achieving progress on multiple SDGs. This concluding chapter summarises the main characteristics of the different sustainability challenges covered in the two edited volumes. We identify three common underlying themes between chapters, namely, (a) the emergent trade-offs between energy, agriculture, environment and the economy; (b) the low resilience and adaptive capacity to environmental and socioeconomic change; and (c) the constraints and opportunities for designing and implementing solutions to multidimensional sustainability challenges. It is argued that the emerging field of sustainability science is well positioned to lead the research agenda for both understanding and solving the most pervasive sustainability challenges in the continent. In order to achieve this, there is a need to (a) increase the output and visibility of African scholars and facilitate creative collaborations with researchers outside SSA, (b) invest in the development of state-of-the-art infrastructure for research and education, (c) create comprehensive educational curricula offering theoretical and practical tools to tackle sustainability challenges and (d) integrate more meaningfully African voices and perspectives in sustainability research and education. Arguably, the development of new research funding mechanisms, by Africans and for Africans, can usher a new wave of research that can truly address the prevailing sustainability challenges in the continent.