Hello there,
Welcome to my blog! I’m Megan. I’m a third year student reading BSc Economics and Geography at University College London (UCL). Watering CAN is an opinion blog inspired after two weeks of dabbling in a university module on water and development in Africa. More specifically, this blog is dedicated to analysing the relationship between water, food and development in Africa.
This blog will touch on how I intend to approach water, food and development in Africa.
We start by looking at the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (see fig. 1).
The UN SDG capture ideal outcomes that we as a humanity wish to achieve. Accepting development as a normative concept, these goals are at best beneficial, at worst idealistic. How these goals are achieved is often more controversial than the actual goal itself. Postcolonial critics of development for instance would argue that encouraging developing countries to be open to free trade to achieve SDG 8 may have been what worked for now developed nations but need not for developing ones in the 21st century. Achieving these goals require recognising that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for countries to develop.
Beyond recognising the unique environment that development is taking place in, the lens I’m adopting to analyse how and why we are approaching these UN SDG goals will involve an in-depth contemplation on human ecology. Human ecology assesses the interactions between people and their environment – rooted pragmatically in fundamental development challenges. It also seeks to integrate the knowledge from human and physical sciences – transcending traditional discipline boundaries. As a concept, it also recognises that these interactions occur at multiple scales in a myriad of ecosystem types.
As I proceed in my future blog posts to study the relationship between water, food and development in Africa I hope to be able to fully appreciate the diversity and unique opportunities and challenges that different parts of Africa offer. In my next blog post, I will be answering the question why water and food in Africa, taking a closer look at the physical and human landscape of Africa.