How mobiles may help Africa.

The main way of retaining water in Africa is by the use of a hand pump. However it is thought that at any one time over 30% are broken and out of action.

This means that there are alot of people without access to water which is worrying due to the dependence that we as humans have on a resource taken for granted in places such as the U.K.  It was only last week that a letter was sent detailing the fact that water would be turned off between the hours of midnight and 5am for repairs and so many people were complaining even though they had no need for that water and those repairs are maintaining our high standards of living! People in Africa are lucky if they have water that is semi clean for a few hours a day.  

Any how that is besides the point, it is though that currently more Africans have access to mobile networking facilities than do to advanced clean water systems. The latest idea is to fit hand pumps with mobile transmitters that send a signal when any one device is broken by measuring the flow and movement of water and the hand pump itself. If faulty a signal is to be sent to a head office where a mechanic will be sent out. 

Now if you ask me this is all well and good but yet again another unsustainable idea that we have come up with. if they have access to mobile networking then surely it would be better to equip someone in each village with the skills to fix the pump and a hand held device to receive the alerts these skills could then be transferred from generation and give them more skills to retain jobs with in life. 

We need to stop encouraging a dependence outside of communities and first start to create complex communities that are completely self-sufficient in sustaining high levels of well being and can score high on the HDI (human development index). 

However although i have seen the darker side to this article i believe it is an improvement and the target for meeting the millennium development goal for access to clean water has already been met! that is 2.5 years ahead of target! However, we cannot stop here as over 200million people still have no access and there are still many more goals to be reached including the rights to basic sanitation. 

First module of OU

So it seems it has practically been since forever that i last wrote a blog which also means it has been forever since i left college!!

Since finishing college last year i have moved house 3 times and job once...Whilst this is going on i have been doing my first module of my natural science degree, called exploring science.

This module has been compulsory to my degree and is also the base of many more and therefore contained very little earth science based subjects and instead a lot of very intense Chemistry and Physics--which does actually underpin an awful lot of everything within our surroundings.

This first module has taken me 9 months and is the equivalent to half a year at uni. I am currently waiting to see whether or not i have passed the last piece of work i submitted, thus whether or not i passed the module.

I have just started another module, this is only worth 10 credits, the frozen planet. As you can imagine from the title the module is closely linked to the t.v. series.

As i go through this module i hope to look more into the issues raised and therefore compose blogs about them.

Title Change

So the eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that A. We've now changed the title of our blog and B. We didn't actually post anything during the summer holidays, we all need a break though right?

The principal reason for the change of name is because neither of us are strictly doing a geography degree but rather degree schemes that encompass all of the Earth Sciences, this means that this blog will now be filled with Geology and Environmental Science posts as well as Geography which should make it more interesting and helpful to everyone. Now I can't remember exactly when Vix starts her course but my move in date for Lancaster is the 1st October so after freshers week I shall begin to blog regularly once again, expect a lot of climate change, edaphic topics and geological systems amongst other stuff.

I also reckon that the spike in our views this week has been Millie directing new geography students to this blog. If I were you I'd start my own geography blog, my grades improved drastically once I started writing it and I wish I'd started it in my first year. Geography went from being my worst subject at AS to my best at A2, blogging is definitely a great revision tool!

Why's East Africa heading into Famine?

Alright then lads and lasses it's been 4 weeks since I've posted anything on the blog. Four long weeks where I'm sure you checked the blog everyday with eager anticipation on what would happen now that both me and Vix have left.

So then, What has caused the (arguably) inevitable famine that's about to sweep through east Africa? 


It has routes in colonialism as matters in Africa always do but overwhelmingly it's to do with the misuse of crops and the changing climate. The crops used currently by nations in Africa aren't sustainable and are based on 'western' cash crops that are used to feed the western world. This means that many of the crops don't grow to their full potential as they're not suited to the conditions this has resulted in a call for traditional crops and animals to once again be used. There was an excellent article in last months National Geographic that highlights the problems that reduced crop diversity can cause and what can be done to rectify the situation http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/07/food-ark/siebert-text. Agricultural development is also to blame for the impending famine, or a lack of it. Current technology is too expensive to be used in LDCs and the agricultural techniques themselves are also outdated. Practices such as monocultures which are used sparingly in MDCs are common practice in LDCs and are leading to reduced yields.

The changing climate happens on such a small, seemingly unnoticeable scale to anyone but scientists that the media almost never contributes it to global climate change yet it's having dire consequences on populations around the world. Current droughts in the east of Africa are being caused by a warming of the Indian Ocean due to global climate change. The impact of global climate change on rainfall patterns is clear if a quick google search is undertaken. East England, France, Russia, Australia, India, East Africa etc. have all experienced recent droughts. This when coupled with dramatically increasing populations in India and East Africa is leading to more and more famines.

What a cheery way to get back into the blog...

Unit 4B

I’m not actually doing the unit 4B re-sit but I thought it’d be helpful if I went through some of it. I’ve picked something that everyone should have looked into; if you haven’t then I’ve done it for you.

http://www.dfid.gov.uk/Where-we-work/Asia-South/Bangladesh/

What does the Department for International Development do for Bangladesh?

Well according to their website the aims are to:

• Encourage private sector investment
• Ensuring the government is capable of financing and delivering social services
• Getting more children into better schools            
• Improving family planning and reducing maternal deaths

These aims can be interpreted as showing that the DfID want to improve equality throughout the country to create a more stable nation. Improving equality has many positive impacts; the biggest being that it empowers women thus giving them a voice. The increased choices in life women get once empowered can lead to a reduced birth rate, which reduces the dependency ratio and creates a more manageable population. This can be seen to be working as from 2008 to 2011 the birth rate has dropped by 6 from 29 to 23 (CIA world factbook). A more manageable population is useful when trying to deal with the preparation and aftermath of a cyclone.

The DfID are also investing a lot of money into education. 25% of the £148.8 million spent in Bangladesh in 2009-2010 was spent on education. That’s £37.2 million; the amount of money spent can be linked to the development module and to South Korea who also improved education to encourage high-tech TNCs into the country. TNCs have both positive and negative (as you should have written in the exam on Tuesday!) impacts and these will also apply if TNCs move into Bangladesh.

The general aim is to create a stable developed country that can look after itself without having to rely on aid from other nations.

There are also some useful links from the website that you should probably at:

• http://www.dfid.gov.uk/Media-Room/Case-Studies/2011/Letting-girls-decide-Tackling-child-marriage-and-early-pregnancy-in-Bangladesh/ Illustrates how the DfID are helping to empower women.
• http://www.dfid.gov.uk/Media-Room/Case-Studies/2010/Sowing-the-seeds-of-scuba-rice/ This shows what can be done to reduce the agricultural impacts of cyclones and flooding.
• http://www.dfid.gov.uk/Media-Room/Case-Studies/2009/Bangladeshs-women-learn-the-art-of-flood-survival/ Shows how empowering and educating women can help to reduce the impacts of flooding. 

Because I haven't been to the Unit 4B workshops I don't know what you have or haven't done, if this has been helpful then let me know and I'll do more of things like this. If it hasn't, let me know what would be helpful and I'll see if I can get round to doing it. 

END part 2!

so james seems to have done an end blog...so i feeel i will join!

Well firstly to say this is simply the end of another geography learning step! therefore by no means is it the last of the blog, just the end of college...

Firstly, if you read this as part of Richard huish college, do you find any of it useful? If you are reading it as an AS of huish and are wondering whether or not to set up a blog for what you learn...I say do it! i wish we had started this at the beginnig of A2 and therefore had a whole years worth of work, it would have been an awesome revision source. Also if you start it now you will be revising throughout the year which has to be better than doing it all in June! Right? So yeah just do it see if you can find some more people to share the blogging with and its college, not school everyone does some weird things especially for the subjects they love, so it doesnt matter what others think!

What an idea this was, it started as a joke and seems to have now become a pretty serious thing and Millie gets way to carried away with her posts...but did we really expect anything else?

I agree with James that Millie and Nick deserve a huge thanks for the past few weeks with dealing with all our questions (and our cheek) whilst we worried about the exam, at least we are finished now and dont have to teach for 6 weeks! Oh and Millie i am most sorry if all this cake eating has caused you to put on weight and hope it hasnt involved you having to buy a whole new wardrobe!

Finally to my brilliant Geography class, you guys are pretty awesome even if some of you seem to forget that the lesson is on (yes thats right it is at the same time EVERY single week--crazy stuff!) i hope that you have enjoyed the lessons as much as we have and that even if you don't go on to do earth science you have an awesome time and may even occasionally read this.

Much love to all

End

So the exam is over. How'd everyone find it?
If you did the tectonics essay I hope the Haiti and Chile case study helped!

I don't have much to say, just thank you really. Thanks to everyone who's supported the blog, particularly our geography class and thanks to everyone who's read the posts. Thanks to both Nick and Millie for all the effort they've put in over the past couple of weeks in revision classes and having to put up with me for pretty much all of them. Especially thanks to Millie who's idea it was for this blog in the first place. I think it has started something bigger, in college anyway, where revision and extra help can be more interactive and accessible. We all know the geography facebook page is much better than moodle.

Of course most of all thanks to Vicky who's been my blog writing partner and has unrivaled enthusiasm for the subject!


If anyone has any comments about the blog, what you've found useful, what wasn't useful etc. then please could you let either me or Millie know as it'll be a great help for next years blog writers.

James