Aimed at young people, this booklet presents key points from the 2006 Human Development Report on water scarcity and its effects on human life. The report is user-friendly, using photographs and illustrations, stories from young people, basic data on the health effects of poor-quality water, and examples of efforts to bring water to poor communities.

This technical paper has been produced by the African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW) to support the implementation of the Strategic Framework for Water Security and Climate Resilience Development, developed by the African Union through AMWOC. The framework itself seeks to help with the identification, development and mainstreaming of ‘no/low regrets’ investment strategies, and to make development planning activities more resilient to climate change.

Corruption is a serious problem in many developing countries that are rich in oil and other natural resources. This is central in explaining why resource rich countries perform badly in terms of socioeconomic development. Transparency has recently been viewed as a key factor in reducing corruption and other dysfunctions in natural resource rich countries. The paper addresses the relationship between transparency and corruption, with an emphasis on oil rich countries.

This paper starts from the optimistic assumption that the policies required for environmentally sustainable economic development are known but difficulties surround their implementation. The paper argues that in the low-income countries differences in the natural resource endowment are an important and hitherto neglected cause of tardy environmental policy improvements.

What does community based natural resource management (CBNRM) mean for Mozambique's poor?Through the case study of Derre Forest Reserve in Zambezia province, this paper explores the theory and practice of CBNRM, an approach which has been widely promoted in southern Africa, and is central to elements of the Mozambican forestry and wildlife policy of 1999.The paper examines the history of community involvement in forest use in the reserve, and the changing nature of local organisations.

This book is a challenge to those who see the drylands as naturally vulnerable to food insecurity and poverty. 

It argues that improving agricultural productivity in dryland environments is possible by working with climatic uncertainty rather than seeking to control it – a view that runs contrary to decade of development practice in arid and semi-arid lands.

Across China, Kenya and India – and most other dryland countries – family farmers and herders relate to the inherent variability of the drylands as a resource to be valued, rather than a problem to be avoided. 

Overview of the relationship between gender, poverty and water. The first section explores how, in every corner of the globe, women play a central role in managing water supply and distribution. It also examines how access to water and sanitation has implications for women’s health and economic activities.

Participatory mapping, commonly used in participatory development, plays an important role in helping marginalised groups by making visible the association between land and local communities, highlighting important social, historical and cultural knowledge as well as presenting geographical feature information.

Mineral wealth often detracts from, rather than enhances, the economic performance of developing countries, a phenomenon known as the “resource curse”. The need to finance basic government expenditure, as well as rent-seeking behaviour by individuals and interest groups, puts pressure on developing country governments to spend mineral revenues rather than reinvest them.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is sparking renewed interest and debate on issues such as transparency of government – company contracts, reporting on revenues from natural resources by company and by project, and reporting on revenue expenditure.

This paper relays that the renewed outbreak of violence in North Kivu in the second half of 2008 saw the long running insecurity in Eastern DR Congo become the top global news story for two weeks as another humanitarian crisis unfolded before the world. The intense media scrutiny resulted in a plethora of stakeholders working, as the authors assert, to portray the conflict in ways that best fitted their own agendas; in particular, the region’s mineral wealth was implicated as contributing in the violence.