Colleges and universities with the appropriate expertise should be enlisted to provide technical assistance, particularly in the fields of women s health and occupational hazards, in areas such as food processing and farming. American churches could provide assistance to rural women s associations and establish cooperative programs. Land law and land administration practice should be reformed to recognize and reinforce community management of common property resources, protecting those resources against both private appropriation and abuse and manipulation by the state. This reform should involve the creation or recognition of clear and defensible community property rights in those resources. It will be important to work with existing local land administration institutions to the extent possible, including customary institutions, but in a critical fashion that seeks to redress some of their serious shortcomings, for instance their frequent denial of equal tenure rights to women.
Health is a human right, linked to social, cultural, economic, civil, and political rights.
Health problems need analysis in the context of global interdependence and international politics. There is need to look at how climate changes will dislocate populations and cause food shortages, how changes in economic and social policies affect the delivery of health services, and how the escalation of ethnic politics and armed conflicts impact health and human rights. The U.S. needs to go out of our way to build science and technology capacity. One way in which this can be done is by involving more African experts and specialists in projects that affect their future and that of the rest of the globe, such as in biodiversity surveys. Many of the customary routes for engaging in educational exchange and scientific cooperation have narrowed or even closed in recent years, as our finite, more closely watched funds have been diverted to the former Soviet Union and other priority geographic areas, as well as to alternative purposes altogether.