López-Cevallos Receives $1.12 Million NSF Grant to Study Impacts of Water Governance on Children’s Health in Five Countries
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Associate Professor of Community Health Education Daniel López-Cevallos has been awarded a three-year, $1.12 million grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a multinational examination of the relationship between water governance systems and the health of young children, amid a backdrop of global climate change.
The ultimate goal of the YAKU project—yaku means water in Kichwa, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Ecuador—is to improve the health and well-being of children and reduce under-age-5 mortality by strengthening community participation in the water governance structures.
This project marks the latest in continuing international research on community participation in the governance of resources led by López-Cevallos.
With core collaborators including Fundación Octaedro in Ecuador and the Water Resources Planning and Management Research Center (GESPLA) in Brazil, López-Cevallos’ project is focusing on three countries in the Andean region (Ecuador, Peru and Chile) and two in the North African Maghreb (Morocco and Tunisia). The team will work with community and university partners.
The researchers will examine the demands on water resources in these regions and consider the impacts of climate change. “One key aspect of this project is mapping that out in the Andean region and comparing that to the Maghreb region,” López-Cevallos says.
Bernardo Cañizares, executive director of Fundación Octaedro, explains that in a context of global environmental change, a central objective is “to understand the mechanics by which local water governance affects the well-being of communities and how these communities are being involved—or not being involved—in decision-making in managing water resources.”
The project is funded under the NSF partnership with the Belmont Forum, a group of funding agencies, international scientific councils and regional consortia that support “transnational research to help understand, mitigate and adapt to global environmental change.”
López-Cevallos and team will gather socioeconomic data and information on water governance, water-related health risks and infant mortality. Then they will propose a modeling framework to simulate the response to different interventions aimed at improving the water governance structure.
“It’s larger than just the mortality issue,” López-Cevallos says. “Mortality is a good indicator, not just of child health, but also of the overall performance of health systems in a country or region and of well-being amongst the most vulnerable. And then we’ll connect the issue of community participation with the health outcomes in the five countries we’re studying.”
The team will build on the work being done at GESPLA, part of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sol. Professor Guilherme Marques, who will use systems dynamic modeling to create the simulations, says it isn’t clear which elements of water governance structure most directly impact infant mortality in low- and middle-income countries, especially among rural communities.
“A better understanding of this will allow us to improve our water resources and environmental and sanitation policies, starting with the actions with the greatest impact,” Marques says.
López-Cevallos says the researchers hope their findings will help provide evidence of the type of water management systems—be they public, private or a mix —that facilitate the most community involvement and best health outcomes.
“If our hypothesis is correct that more community participation leads to better health outcomes, we will look at how it is being manifested in the different regions, because that can serve for cross pollination within and across the regions for ways in which communities can be enabled to participate in decision-making around water governance.”