Health of People and Environment within Lake Victoria

“In these remote, resource dependent areas of the world, the interconnectedness between the health of people and the health of the environment is undeniable,” Sono Aibe, Pathfinder’s Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives.

Empowering families to meet their health needs and sustainably manage natural resources on which they depend will ultimately improve quality of life and conservation of fragile ecosystems.

With support from USAID and funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, Pathfinder is working with the Ecological Christian Organization, Conservation through Public Health, and OSIENALA (Friends of Lake Victoria) to implement an integrated Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) project in Kenya and Uganda. The project aims to reduce threats to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem degradation in the Lake Victoria Basin while simultaneously increasing access to family planning and sexual and reproductive health to improve maternal and child health in project communities. The project will develop and test two scalable models for building capacity and promoting an integrated set of PHE interventions, which will be adopted by communities, local governments, or national governments.

In January 2013, project staff, donors and technical partners met in Kampala for an annual meeting to discuss project progress, visit project sites, and to take a first look at results from the baseline data. The baseline data is being further synthesized for dissemination. Additionally, the teams in Uganda and Kenya are expected to participate in upcoming population, health, and environment conferences in Ethiopia and Rwanda to promote the project. In January the team welcomed a population, health, and environment fellow, who will be stationed in the Pathfinder Uganda office for the next two years, thanks to the support of the Global Health Fellows Program II.