The Population Council’s annual report highlights new work from one of the largest organizations doing research on the lives of adolescent girls in the developing world. Of particular note is the Council’s Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program, a four-year study launched in May which will involve 42,000 girls in seven countries – Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Tanzania, and Zambia. The aim is to evaluate successful strategies for helping girls avoid child marriage, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancies at a critical juncture in their lives. Council President Peter Donaldson writes that young girls are “one of the potentially most influential figures in the developing world.” A typical 12-year-old girl “in the next few years…will either abandon or continue her schooling, be pushed into marriage and childbearing, or develop a sense of proud ownership of her physical self… As her future is reconfigured, so is ours.”

In 2000, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325 to encourage gender parity within peacekeeping forces. More than a decade later, the longtime goal of achieving equal representation remains unmet, as women comprise only about three percent of UN military personnel. A fourth installment of the Providing for Peacekeeping project – a collaborative effort between the International Peace Institute, the Elliott School at George Washington University, and Griffith University – describes contemporary barriers to female integration. Key findings in Not Just a Numbers Game: Increasing Women’s Participation in UN Peacekeeping expose a lack of understanding by member states as to the benefits of female participation in peacekeeping missions and the prevalence of “social norms and biases that perpetuate gender inequality within the security sector.” Acknowledging the “serious impact that armed conflict has on women and children and the potential of women to contribute to all of the processes that aim to establish a durable peace,” the report recommends steps to increase understanding and mobilize political support around Resolution 1325.