Professor Pam Smith’s Lessons from a Decade’s Research on Poverty: Innovation, Engagement and Impact

Lessons from a Decade’s Research on Poverty: Innovation, Engagement and Impact

10^th anniversary conference of the
ESRC—DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research

16—18 March 2016, Pretoria, South Africa

I participated in this exciting conference last week. I was invited because I am a Co-I in one of the projects in this programme. Dr Radha Adhikari and I recently posted a blog about our research “New Norms and Forms of Development” on international aid in Maternal and Child Health in Nepal and Malawi, funded by the ESRC (The Economic and Social Research Council) and DFID (The Department for International Development) http://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/nursing-tales/

During the three day conference I chaired a session on Childhood Nutrition and Public Health which included two stimulating presentations and a discussion which took me back to my community nurse teacher roots in Tanzania and Mozambique.

Rob Hope from Oxford University presented ‘new insights into the relationship between rainfall and water use using innovative hand pump monitoring technology’. Mary Amuyunzu-Nyamongo and Daniel Lang’o (African Institute for Health and Development) spoke about Tackling child nutrition and health through community-led interventions: lessons from an informal settlement in Kenya; Alice Lakati (Amref health Africa) Discussant reflected that the presentations:

• Clearly demonstrated the challenges to public health in sub-Saharan Africa and the positive effects of safe water and nutrition on the health and wellbeing of the community.
• Disease surveillance and baseline nutritional ‘before and after’ data are needed to demonstrate the effectiveness of interventions individually and collectively and their potential to reduce morbidity and improve food security.
• Business skills and social support enable communities to take control of their lives.

For me the presentations highlighted some key issues about women’s lives and gender:

The effective use and maintenance of hand pumps saved many hours of women’s time collecting water and prevented girls missing school especially during a drought.

Participatory action research supported women to gain farming, craft and business skills. They were twinned with mentoring groups who facilitated them to work as a team. The women reported on the positive impact of the training on their lives which enabled them to think differently and take decisions.

Conference Website
Different forms of social media, art and visual images are being used to convey the messages of the entire conference which you can see on the conference website http://bit.ly/22hUMCp

You will see images of an artist at work capturing highlights of the conference through images and words such as these: Good news for qualitative researchers!