Showing posts from category *Blog Columns.
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One Country, Two Stories: Marc Sommers on Rwandan Youth’s Struggle for Adulthood
›Almost an entire generation of Rwandans is confronting the prospect that they are going to be failed adults, said Marc Sommers, a fellow with Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program and visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center.
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Much Ado About Conflict? Climate’s Links to Violence Reexamined
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Violence is on the wane in human affairs, even if slowly and irregularly. Could climate change reverse this trend? Pundits and politicians have raised the specter of havoc caused by rising temperature, erratic patterns of rainfall, and rising sea levels. In this way, so the story goes, climate change will produce famine and mass migration that threatens political stability and provokes violence. However, to date there is little evidence that the meteorological or agricultural conditions associated with climate change are actually a major source of violence.
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Fourth World Water Development Report Released by UN
›The beginning of last week’s World Water Forum in Marseille also marked the release of UNESCO’s fourth edition of the World Water Development Report. Chief amongst the challenges outlined in the new report are meeting demand from growing population and consumption. Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of water usage, according to the report, and globally we will require 70 percent more food over the next 40 years, introducing the possibility of overtaxing already-stressed water resources – all while adapting to climate change. There are substantial gains to be had in increasing farm-to-table efficiency, especially in developing countries, the authors sagely point out, but the supply challenge remains a huge one.
This year’s edition also adds several new sections, including on women and water. “The crisis of scarcity, deteriorating water quality, the linkages between water and food security, and the need for improved governance are the most significant in the context of gender differences in access to and control over water resources,” write the authors. “These challenges are expected to become more intense in the future.”
The integrated nature of today’s water issues is a highlight throughout the report. “Accelerated change” will create new threats and “interconnected forces” create uncertainty and risk, but UNESCO emphasizes that if policymakers are made aware of these issues, ultimately “these forces can be managed effectively and can even generate vital opportunities and benefits through innovative approaches to allocation, use, and management of water.”
Image Credit: Water Management Institute, via figure 15.5 from UNESCO World Water Development Report. -
PBS ‘NewsHour’ and Pulitzer Center Examine Water Shortage and Health Issues in Ghana and Nigeria
›The PBS NewsHour continued its collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on international reporting last week with an episode on water infrastructure in Ghana and Nigeria. The coverage is especially apropos on World Water Day.
Correspondent Steve Sapienza spoke to reporters in Ghana and Nigeria to highlight long-running access and sanitation issues in both countries caused by poor infrastructure that has not kept up with growth.
Ameto Akpe is a local reporter for Nigeria’s BusinessDay, where her stories “target the contradiction of a country with immense oil wealth and great water resources that are not reaching their citizens.” In the city of Makurdi, capital of the north-central Benue State, she reports on the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on either high-priced water delivery or untreated water drawn straight from the Benue River.
“The previous attempt to build a water treatment plant ended in scandal in 2008,” says Sapienza, “with an unfinished treatment facility and city officials unable to account for $6 million.”
“Unfortunately, the waterworks is only half of the solution to Makurdi’s water problem,” writes Akpe on the Pulitzer Center. “The other half is a system of pipes to deliver the water to the people – and that project is just a twinkle in the eye of a handful of contractors and bureaucrats.”
In Ghana, metro TV reporter Samuel Agyemang explains similar access and sanitation issues in the capitol of Accra and its suburb of Teshie, where some residents have waited decades for piped water, despite substantial foreign investments.
The Pulitzer Center’s Peter Sawyer explains in a companion piece that “the population of Accra has grown enormously in the past several decades. But the water supply system has not grown with it.” As a result, the Ghana Water Company is constantly playing catch-up to provide water to communities, many of whom do not understand how to demand accountability from their officials, says Agyemang.
According to UN estimates, Ghana’s population has increased by more than 10 million people since 1990. Nigeria is one of the fastest growing countries in the world, with 158 million people currently and the UN medium projection estimating a possible 389 million by mid-century.
Reporter Ameto Akpe will be speaking about Nigeria’s water and sanitation problems at an upcoming all-day event on Nigeria at the Wilson Center, scheduled for April 25.
Sources: PBS NewsHour, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, UN Population Division. -
Hotspots: Population Growth in Areas of High Biodiversity
›More than one-fifth of the world’s population lives in biodiversity hotspots – “areas that are particularly rich in biodiversity and endemic species,” said John Williams of the University of California, Davis, at the Wilson Center on February 29. And those populations are growing faster than the global average. Add to that the fact that “biodiversity continues to decline globally, despite increasing investments in conservation,” said David Lopez-Carr of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the need for new approaches to conservation becomes evident. [Video Below]
Williams and Lopez-Carr were joined by Dr. Vik Mohan, director of the sexual and reproductive health program for Blue Ventures, a London-based conservation nongovernment organization that works with communities on the remote western coast of Madagascar.
To respond to the demands of the communities and to better protect biodiversity hotspots, the speakers argued that conservation efforts need to incorporate health and livelihood services directed at the growing populations living nearby.
A Complex Relationship
“The relationship between population and biodiversity loss or conservation is a pretty complex relationship,” said Williams.
He offered Latin America and the Caribbean as an example of the multiple factors that can affect how population and biodiversity interact. Population growth in the region has slowed, and agricultural expansion is driving habitat loss as the population ages and urbanizes and as increasing per capita GDP contributes to higher levels of consumption.
In the Indo-Pacific region, stretching from East Asia to Australia, high population growth coupled with economic growth has coincided with an increase in the exploitation of rare species for illegal trade, according to Williams. And in Africa, where the population is growing quickly but without comparable economic growth and amid high levels of instability, subsistence drives ecological exploitation.
Biodiversity and Family Planning in Madagascar
“People who live in the biodiversity hotspots are typically poorer, typically have poorer access to healthcare than their counterparts in the cities or in the world at large, and typically have poorer health than those counterparts,” said Mohan.
Blue Ventures has been working in Madagascar since 2003. The island is one of the most biodiverse areas in the world; 80 percent of its plant and animal life is endemic, meaning it exists there and nowhere else, said Mohan. At the same time, Madagascar is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest growing countries, with a population growth rate of 2.9 percent and an average total fertility rate of 4.6 children per woman.
Blue Ventures initially came to the country to improve conservation in the island’s coastal villages, where residents survive largely on subsistence fishing. But once there, the group quickly found that the population was “growing so rapidly that in spite of our best conservation efforts, the demand for those finite coastal resources [was] outstripping supply,” said Mohan.
“The number of people who are going out to catch fish to feed their to feed their families is going up exponentially, and those fisherman are having to work harder and harder to catch smaller fish that are farther and farther down the food web.”
Realizing that trend, Mohan said that “just by asking a few very basic questions, we unearthed a huge unmet need for healthcare and a huge unmet need for family planning in particular.”
In response, Mohan and his colleagues opened up a family planning clinic in Andavadoaka, one of the villages Blue Ventures serves. On the clinic’s first day, Mohan said, “20 percent of all women of reproductive age came asking for contraception.” Following that opening, they “rapidly found [that] this unmet need was mirrored in every single village along the coast that we worked in,” he said. Since then, modern contraceptive prevalence, initially about seven percent, has increased four-fold, while birth rates have fallen by about one-third. All in all, Mohan said, the population of the Velondriake region, where Blue Ventures operates, is five percent smaller now than it would have been without the group’s family planning services.
Rural Areas Driving Population Growth
Across the developing world, Lopez-Carr said that unmet need for family planning “remains significantly higher” in biodiversity hotspots. Given that high unmet need, especially in Africa, it is easy to infer that “conservation may be less sustainable…if it does not consider health,” he said.
In his ongoing research on population and biodiversity, Lopez-Carr looks at how fertility rates compare in and out of hotspot areas and between regional and local levels. At the country and province level, “high-value conservation areas do not have unusually high total fertility rates (TFRs),” he said. But at more localized levels, “in the most remote rural areas, TFRs remain high, and in many cases, in the most remote rural areas, the demand for family planning is still very low,” indicating that these areas are still in the early stages of their demographic transitions.
The fact that the sub-state picture can look so different from the state-level picture means that there is more work for researchers to do, said Lopez-Carr. “Where the fertility rates are highest is where we have the least data,” he said, and that has significant implications for understanding future population growth.
Looking at UN population projections, the world’s net population gains will be in its poorest cities, he said, but “virtually all this growth is going to be from migration, fueled by remaining high fertility in rural areas.” And “virtually all of that growth will be predicated upon the timing, magnitude, [and] pace of the fertility transition in rural areas.”
Better understanding the demographic picture in rural areas is therefore critical – not just to improving health and preserving biodiversity in the world’s hotspots, but to honing down more accurate global population projections as well.
Event ResourcesPhoto Credit: “Fisherman Carries Day’s Catch,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
The Middle East Program
Reflections on Women in the Arab Spring
›The Arab Spring has fascinating and powerful demographic and gender undercurrents. Last year, demographer Richard Cincotta counseled observers to pay close attention to the demonstrations: if they featured young women – as opposed to being dominated by young men and boys – it’s a sign that democracy may be on its way. To mark the occasion of International Women’s Day last week, the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program gathered observations from a cross-section of regional voices on how women have fared thus far.
Excerpted below is the entry from Moushira Khattab, former Egyptian ambassador to South Africa and the Czech and Slovak Republics, and former minister of family and population:As the global community celebrates International Women’s Day, we must hail the heroic and pivotal role Egyptian women played to make the January 25th Revolution an inspiration for the world. They joined men and took to Tahrir Square calling for freedom, dignity, and social justice. They rallied around the cause of pushing the train of political change. One year later, Egyptian women find that the train of change has not only left them behind, but has in fact turned against them. It is ironic that the revolution that empowered a country, and made every Egyptian realize the power of their voice, stopped short of women’s rights. Sadly, the only march that was kicked out of Tahrir Square was that of women celebrating 2011 International Women’s Day. Women were beaten, subjected to virginity tests, and stripped of their clothes in the very same Tahrir Square.
Download the full set of reflections from the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program.
Dormant conservative value systems are being manipulated by a religious discourse that denies women their rights. Calls for purging the sins of the old regime necessitate a reminder of the positive outcomes of laws that, although enacted under that old regime, have liberated and enhanced women’s status, including prohibiting female genital mutilation and child marriage. We also need a reminder that such gains are only a step towards these rights, and are the outcome of collective hard work along generations. Against the background of parliamentary elections, defenders of women’s rights have backed down, while young revolutionaries don’t have women’s rights on their agendas. The most telling indicator is the shameful and meager representation of women in Egypt’s post-revolution parliament. Among a handful of elected female MPs, one declared that her top priority is to repeal the law granting women the right to seek divorce.
With religious parties controlling it, the question becomes: Will this parliament be willing and able to produce a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all Egyptians regardless of gender or religion? Dare we dream that Egyptians in 2012 could have a constitution equal to that put in place by South Africans in 1996? -
Kavita Ramdas: Why Educating Girls Is Not Enough
›“I’m a big proponent of girl’s education. I believe that it’s a very important and a very valuable human rights obligation that all countries should be meeting,” said Kavita Ramdas, executive director for programs on social entrepreneurship at Stanford University, at the Wilson Center. However, “in the past seven to eight years we have found ourselves in a situation where there’s kind of an enchantment with girl’s education, as though it were the new microenterprise magic bullet to solve everything from poverty, to malnourishment, to inequality.”
“The outcomes that we ascribe to girl’s education…are not anything that I would argue with,” she said, yet, this enchantment “has happened simultaneously with a significant drop in both funding and support for strategies that give girls and women access to reproductive health and choices, particularly family planning.”
This is a problem, said Ramdas, because we cannot rely on education alone to do all the heavy lifting required to empower women.
“I think it’s important for us to recognize that there are societies where girls and women have achieved significantly high levels of education in which gender inequality remains,” she said, “for example, places like Japan and Saudi Arabia, where you have high per capita income, high levels of education, and yet…where women and girls are still marginalized and on the edges in terms of decision making.”
“I don’t think we have to wait for one to be able to do the other,” she said. “As we support programs for girls’ education, we also need to demand that those programs be buttressed by strong programs in adolescent health, strong programs in sex education, strong programs that actually provide girls and women with access to family planning and contraception.” -
Africa’s Demographic Challenges, Genderizing Food Security and Climate Responses
›Gender and Climate Change Research in Agriculture and Food Security for Rural Development is a detailed training guide produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The guide’s purpose is to support “work to investigate the gender dimensions of responding to climate change in the agriculture and food sectors…to improve food production, livelihood security and gender equality.” The authors write that “the number of hungry people in the world could be reduced by more than 100 million if women in rural areas were given equal access to the same resources as men.” The guide focuses on sensitizing researchers and practitioners “to the links between socio-economic and gender issues” and provides a suite of tools for gathering data about the gender and climate change aspects of agricultural development. Along with concrete tools to understand and address gender inequities in agricultural development, the report adopts a nuanced social definition of gender in which “people are born female or male, but learn to be women and men,” keeping the focus squarely on the socio-economic and political barriers to full equality.A report from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, Africa’s Demographic Challenges: How A Young Population Can Make Development Possible, argues that “if mortality and fertility decrease” across the African continent, there will be a “demographic bonus.” If nurtured through ample investment in human capital, this bonus may become a “demographic dividend,” as growing numbers of working-age people participate in the economy. The report argues that taking advantage of this demographic window, however, requires policy actions that both encourage fertility reductions and foster economic development throughout the continent, declaring boldly that “high birth rates and development are mutually exclusive.” Thus, according to the authors, the pathway to development is supporting the empowerment and education of women and girls, strengthening reproductive health services, and ensuring that both young women and young men are able to engage socio-economically within their societies. Though the report’s argument that demographic change can be critical for development is convincing, the form, strength, and causal direction of these linkages at times becomes confused.
