In sub-Saharan Africa, efforts to meet the Millenuim Development Goals (MDGs), improve access to drinking water, reduce gastrointestinal illness, and other development strategies have and continue to involve the privatization of environmental resources and services. In the late 1980s, southwestern Ugandan pastoralist communities experienced dramatic decreases in access to land and water through privatization and conservation policies aimed at promoting economic development. Using the frameworks that were originally proposed within research on natural hazards and the social construction of vulnerability, the two Ugandan policies of land privatization and conservation may be considered to be 'political hazards.' These hazards may have altered aspects of social and biophysical vulnerability by impacting access to resources or altering coping strategies in the pastoralist communities. The ultimate goal of this project is to understand the implications of land privatization and conservation practices for health and vulnerability in the communities experiencing these development projects. By collecting infectious disease incidence data and demographic data, and by conducting semi-structured interviews, an understanding of the incidence and dynamics of health and disease may be fostered. The resulting understanding faculitates the connections of specific economic development policies and vulnerability, which may result in an increased risk of infectious disease, expressed as an increased disease incidence rate. The specific aims of this project are to: 1) Test the hypothesis that higher vulnerability is associated with increased infectious disease incidence; 2) Test the hypothesis that high vulnerability preceding the political hazards is associated with high vulnerability after these hazards; 3) Identify the self-perceived root causes of social and biophysical vulnerability; and 4) Explore discordant instances of vulnerability and health.
This framework broadens the scope of medical geography to include health, vulnerability and the environment in the context of access to resources and power dynamics. The proposed research will contribute to understanding the potential connections between scales, from national economic development policies and transnational ideologies to diverse health outcomes within communities. In addition, this research will be an important contribution to the science of vulnerability, testing the creation of a vulnerability index. The resulting connections between vulnerability and health may call for new trajectories for development, which facilitate equality and empowerment of people to use available material and social resources to lessen vulnerability and bring sustained improvement in the quality and health of their lives. Examination of the factors that make people and places vulnerable can guide public policy development and improve current efforts to increase access to safe drinking water, reduce mortality associated with environmental infections, and meet the MDGs, while bearing implications for the push to meet those goals through privatization and individualism.
This award is co-funded by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering.
