World Wildlife Fund - Successful Communities from Ridge to Reef: Population-Health-Environment Analysis

WWF is conducting in-depth interviews with population, health and environment (PHE) practitioners around the developing world to inform an analysis of PHE programming approaches. This worldwide analysis will contribute to knowledge, tools and increased capacity that will enable conservation and health organizations including WWF to prioritize efforts and increase their effectiveness in this field. The PHE analysis aims to develop and strengthen field PHE approaches and scaling-up strategies.

Development Challenge
Integrated development programs, because of complexities inherent in implementing activities in different disciplines, present challenges in developing best practices, tools for programming, and systems for monitoring and evaluation, and that can be applied broadly. The PHE field is no different. After a dozen years of PHE experience by different organizations in countries around the globe, practitioners have expressed a strong need to collect lessons learned, articulate best PHE practices, and generate programming tools.

Approach
WWF is implementing USAID-supported PHE project activities in four countries: Madagascar, Kenya, the Philippines and Nepal. The WWF experiences in these countries will provide valuable inputs to the PHE analysis, but the analysis also draws on results from other health and environment projects of WWF and of other conservation organizations. The analysis complements and develops synergies with other USAID-funded reproductive health-environment activities in the PHE field, for example those of Conservation International and the Jane Goodall Institute. There is also close collaboration with Population Reference Bureau (PRB), drawing on its research and capacity-building experiences, and with PRB action research programs in PHE. The worldwide analysis will produce conclusions with respect to the value of reproductive health actions in meeting biodiversity conservation goals, and evaluate different approaches for the same.

Activities
WWF engaged field partners in a participatory planning activity that informed the design of the analysis. Data is gathered through in-depth interviews with PHE project managers and other PHE field practitioners, and reviews of reports and documents from PHE projects around the world. Key analysis areas are:

• review of the value-added of integrated PHE approaches
• identification of factors contributing to effective PHE partnerships
• review of opportunities for scaling up PHE approaches beyond the site and landscape levels
• dentification/development of tools for PHE .

Based on information gathered through this activity, WWF will develop a decision-making framework and tools for conservation field practitioners. Finally, WWF will use the analysis to inform approaches for capacity building activities in population-health-environment work, especially in the conservation sector, providing technical support to population-health-environment projects in WWF field sites as well as undertaking networking and outreach on population-health-environment issues.