For someone who was lucky enough to grow up and live in a country where guns aren’t household objects, it is difficult to understand America’s addiction to guns and the political resistance to gun control measures despite support for some controls within the general public. The recent failure of the US government to pass the Manchin-Toomey bill, a relatively limited move to strengthen background checks when purchasing guns in the US, demonstrates how difficult it will be for the substantial gun control laws to be passed in America. The bill itself is not straight forward to understand if, like me, you’re not used to reading government legalese but you can read the full text on Senator Toomey’s website and simpler explanations can be found in the accompanying press release and on the Politifact website. Ultimately, the measures were voted down much to the frustration of President Barack Obama who noted, “there were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.” Bizarrely, the Southern region director for Organizing for Action (Obama’s grass roots campaign organization) whose job was to build up community support for gun violence prevention legislation was shot by a stray bullet only days after the amendment failed. Image Credit: Mista Stagga Lee, flickr In addition to strengthened background checks, one of the proposals in the failed measure was to establish a 12-member National Commission on Mass Violence to conduct a comprehensive factual study of incidents of mass violence.

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Gun Control, Woopty Doo!

via Texas Medicaid Debate Complicated By Politics And Poverty : Shots – Health News : NPR.

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US government MIA on global polio campaign

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Flights were delayed by up to two hours across the country on Monday…Airline executives were furious over how the Federal aviation agency handled the government-inflicted chaos, and privately said the agency was seeking to impose the maximum possible pain for passengers to make a political point. The airline executives in this NYT story are using a venerable and plausible theory of how government agencies behave in response to budget cuts. An agency would strategically cut areas that make the public howl in pain so as to increase the probability that the cuts will be reversed. If the agency cut areas that did not directly affect the public, it risks the public and politicians saying “good riddance” and making the cuts permanent.

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The political economy of why your flight is two hours late today

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We all knew it. We saw this coming in Haiti and talked about it in Egypt, when 5 Ushahidi maps popped out the day before the elections. But the Kenyan elections are somehow different, and the reason why they are, is that the possible outcome is indeed a civil unrest that could bring the country years back to 2007.

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At a panel session during the 4th Conference of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) held in Washington, DC, a group of distinguished speakers and leaders on health in China – from the China Medical Board, top universities and the Ministry of Health – were tasked with discussing and elaborating on China's role in global health. The speakers briefly discussed China's history in international health activities (their first deployment of medical teams to Africa dates back to 1963!), different kinds of partnerships in global health – particularly among universities, and examples of current and upcoming initiatives. In sum, the panel suggested a promising future for China’s role in global health. But when a question was raised (by me) about the size of financial/development assistance for global health from China, either to Africa or globally, none of the distinguished panel members had an answer.

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Sizing Up China’s Role in Global Health Aid to Africa

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Oxfam: Inequality is a political problem, requiring a political solution

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Can you tell me about yourself and your work a bit?

I’m British, I worked for 10 years in Chad for SIL. I now live in Kenya, my wife and I live there. My current role is that I do international relations, external relations. I spend a lot of my time talking to international and intergovernmental organizations, to try and help them think about the language and culture components of development.

Tell me something about SIL, and how you all became so involved in advocating for minority language communities.

We started out as a group of Christians who wanted people to be able to read the Bible in their own language. However, in order to do that, they had to develop a whole load of other skills and competencies related to analyzing how a language works. So we developed a whole load of linguistic skills, and then other people wanted to acquire those skills. So we started running training schools. But it’s grown from that into a language development NGO.

It does seem like of your work is focused on developing literacy tools for minority language. What about languages (or groups of people within a minority language community, such as women) for whom their native language might be mostly oral?

Women in particular usually have less social mobility, particularly in socially conservative societies. Women—-girls—-usually get less exposure to official languages than boys and men do. Therefore women and girls benefit more from local language literacy and opportunities than boys do, because boys can generally make more of the official educational system, if it’s in the official language.

Again, we’re primarily speaking to a global health audience here. So, with that in mind, why do languages matter? From the standpoint of someone who wants to reduce child mortality rates, for example.

Well the obvious first answer is the communication aspect. If the mothers can understand the message about, say, oral rehydration solution for babies that have diarrhea, they are obviously going to be better equipped to follow the instructions.

I think also there’s the question of trust. You are more likely to trust a health professional if they speak your language and understand your culture. So the more trust there is between patient and provider, the more likely you are to get compliance.

Do you think that some of the charges of “non-compliance” in global health are really just lack of understanding and language/culture barriers?

I also have to say, it’s a bit of a cop-out for health professionals to say that these people don’t care for their children. Every funeral I’ve been to, the mother cries for the child. It’s not that they don’t care.

I remember my wife telling me, she had a conversation with a new mother in Chad. This new mother was expressing the [colostrum], because she wanted to get rid of [it] to get to the good stuff. When my wife explained, no that’s the good stuff, that’s what they really need, the mother said, “Why does no one tell us these things?”

When we lived in Chad, 90% of women were illiterate, which had a huge impact on the amount of information they had. One of the major motivations for women’s literacy classes is that they really want to understand better how they can look after themselves and their families. It’s a basic desire that every parent.

With the materials that UNESCO and SIL have developed about MDGs and language development, how has that message played to the development community? Do the people you talk to get it?

It’s beginning to play well. I’ve been surprised at how long its taken for these things to catch on. It seems that the development community is rapid and fast-moving. However, at the same time, new ideas are relatively slow to catch on.

We published this booklet, Why Languages Matter, in 2008, linking the role of language to achieving the MDGs. Also, with UNESCO we’ve come up with another similar booklet, which gives a strong impression.

I think that development agencies have tried to introduce concepts that are too foreign for the people they are trying to reach. Different cultures understand the world in different ways. There’s an aboriginal group in Australia, the Kuuk Thaayore,, who have a highly developed feel for ordinal directions. So rather than say “my right ear hurts” they’ll say “My NW ear hurts”. Or if they were facing the other way they’d say “my SE ear hurts”. And the way they think about space also affects the way they think about time. Whereas English speakers tend to conceptualize time as running from left to right (because we read that way), the Kuuk Thaayore visualize time as running from East to West. The more alien a development intervention appears to a people the less likely they are to trust it and own it. The closer it fits with their sense of how the world works, with their language and culture, the more likely it is that they’ll commit to it and try to make it work. I read a good quote from UNESCO this morning,

“Cultural approaches to development increase the relevance, sustainability, impact and efficacy of interventions by responding to local values, traditions, practices and beliefs”

So that’s why we are trying to make explicit the connections between language and culture and development goals.

This all seems so obvious and straightforward, and yet as you say its been slow to play. I wonder why this is? My own experience with this has been that language is always a minor technical appendix to any larger development implementation plan.

I think the main reason is that it is hard work. 40% of the world’s languages don’t have a writing system. Development agencies are under pressure from donors to get results, and they just don’t have the linguistic skills or time. So the simplest thing is just to use the official language. Very often they’ll use a local interpreter. But these interpreters just happen to speak both languages, they’ve never been trained in interpretation or translation, and so a lot of information gets lost in the process.

I wonder if another problem might be the lack of hard data showing that local language implementation has, for example for the global health audience, measurable impact on health outcomes.

When I’ve been doing advocacy with the World Bank, they say to me, well you’ve got lots of nice stories, but it’s all anecdotal, and we can’t base policy on anecdotes. In the particular area that we are interested, which is mother tongue based multilingual education, we are now running longitudinal studies under rigorous scientific conditions to demonstrate this. You are right, there is a lack of hard data. In November 2010, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling upon governments, NGOs, and the intergovernmental agencies, to do research to better understand the relationship between culture and development.

In our experience, it’s been hard to run these studies, because it seems so ethically suspect to provide services to a minority language community in the dominant language, that there is no control group.

Yeah, we have a similar problem. One of the reasons that we have had a hard time getting longitudinal data on multilingual education, is that the children in the local language school were enjoying school so much, attendance and tests scores went up, everything was going so well, that the parents in the control school didn’t want to carry on. That in itself is evidence, however.

Where do we stand in terms of examples of good, effective collaborations between the development industry and language and culture advocates?

I would say that it is still in the early days. Two years ago, World Vision decided they needed to pay attention to local languages. They asked us to work with them on that, and our chief multilingual education expert now sits on their education committee. The World Bank also conducted a review of their education programs, and concluded they were doing a good job of improving access but not improving outcomes. So, two years ago, for the first time, they added to their policies that the language of instruction is an important component. So we are seeing these things starting to come to fruition.

Where can global health practitioners interested in local language development learn more about these issues?

We have running training workshops for UNESCO and for UNICEF to help train their staff in these issues. Its beginning, people are beginning to take interest. In the area of health, we’ve produced a lot of content in local languages. Over the last 70 years we’ve produced about 11,000 of those are in local languages. We have recently put this digital archive online. So you can go there and put in the name of a language and pull up a list of all the documents we’ve produced in a Language and Culture Archive. So, for example, there might be a booklet in a local Mayan language about malaria, or what to do when a child has diarrhea, or how HIV gets spread, those kinds of things. In a local language, for local people to read. That might be of interest to your community.

I wanted to end this interview by getting your perspective on language loss, which we haven’t specifically addressed so far. What does it mean for development when languages disappear?

The warning call for language loss was sounded about 20 years ago. In 1992 the linguist Michael Krauss wrote a paper entitled “The World’s Languages in Crisis” in which he likened endangered languages to endangered species. He estimated that as many as 50% of the world’s languages are no longer being learned by new generations of speakers, leading him to conclude that “the number of languages which, at the rate things are going, will become extinct during the coming century is 3,000 of 6,000.”

Parents say, our language is of no value and our children are going to be best served if they grow up monolingual in Spanish. And so they deliberately withhold their language from their children, thinking they are doing them a good turn. You only need to have that happen for a few generations and the language is gone.

Last year SIL published a paper marking the 20th anniversary of Michael Krauss’s paper. We’re a bit more optimistic particularly for African language, because a large proportion are at that vital level. Whereas in the Americas where you are working, 60% of America’s languages are either in trouble or dying. Whereas in Africa only 16% of the languages are in trouble or dying. So language endangerment is a much bigger threat in the Americas than in Africa.

I think the community of people who love human linguistic diversity get these arguments. But say I go to a meeting with a bunch of elite policy folks, and they say, “So what? It would be better and easier if everyone just spoke Spanish or English.”

If language were only a means of communication, I would say absolutely. But language is so much more than just a means of communication. It’s a key component of our identity.

Dave Pearson has worked for minority language development with SIL International for 30 years, including 10 years in Chad. He is based in Nairobi, Kenya and is currently SIL’s Permanent Representative to UNESCO. Dave advocates with governments and international and intergovernmental organisations to create a positive policy environment for linguistic diversity.

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PRI The World: US aid to Syria is too little, too late