After years of largely being ignored in Washington policy debates, Pakistan’s “other” threats – energy and water shortages, dismal education and healthcare systems, and rampant food insecurity – have finally moved to the front burner.

For several years, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program has sought to bring these problems to the attention of the international donor community. Washington’s new determination to engage with Pakistan on its development challenges – as evidenced by President Obama’s signing of the Kerry-Lugar bill and USAID administrator Raj Shah’s comments on aid to Pakistan – are welcome, but long overdue.

The crux of the current debate on aid to Pakistan is how to maximize its effectiveness – that is, how to ensure that the aid gets to its intended recipients and is used for its intended purposes. Washington will not soon forget former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s admission last year that $10 billion in American aid provided to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda was instead diverted to strengthen Pakistani defenses against archrival India.

What Pakistani institutions will Washington use to channel its aid monies? In recent months, the U.S. government has considered both Pakistani NGOs and government agencies. It is now clear that Washington prefers to work with the latter, concluding that public institutions in Pakistan are better equipped to manage large infusions of capital and are more sustainable than those in civil society.

This conclusion is flawed. Simply putting all its aid eggs in the Pakistani government basket will not improve U.S. aid delivery to Pakistan, as Islamabad is seriously governance-challenged.

Granted, Islamabad is not hopelessly corrupt. It was not in the bottom 20 percent of Transparency International’s 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (Pakistan ranked 139 out of 180), and enjoyed the highest ranking of any South Asian country in the World Bank’s 2010 Doing Business report.

At the same time, the Pakistani state repeatedly fails to provide basic services to its population – not just in the tribal areas, but also in cities like Karachi, where 30,000 people die each year from consuming unsafe water.

Where basic services are provided, Islamabad favors wealthy, landed, and politically connected interests over those of the most needy – the very people with the most desperate need for international aid. Last year, government authorities established a computerized lottery that was supposed to award thousands of free tractors to randomly selected small farmers across Pakistan. However, among the “winners” were large landowners – including family members of a Pakistani parliamentarian.

Working through Islamabad on aid provision is essential. However, the United States also needs to diversify its aid partners in Pakistan.

For starters, Washington should look within civil society. This rich and vibrant sector is greatly underappreciated in Washington. The Hisaar Foundation, for example, is one of the only organizations in Pakistan focusing on water, food, and livelihood security.

The country’s Islamic charities also play a crucial role. Much of the aid rendered to health facilities and schools in Pakistan comes from Muslim welfare associations. Perhaps the most well-known such charity in Pakistan – the Edhi Foundation – receives tens of millions of dollars each year in unsolicited funds.

Washington should also be targeting venture capital groups. The Acumen Fund is a nonprofit venture fund that seeks to create markets for essential goods and services where they do not exist. The fund has launched an initiative with a Pakistani nonprofit organization to bring water-conserving drip irrigation to 20,000-30,000 Pakistani small farmers in the parched province of Sindh.

Such collaborative investment is a far cry from the opaque, exploitative foreign private investment cropping up in Pakistan these days – particularly in the context of agricultural financing – and deserves a closer look.

With all the talk in Washington about developing a strategic dialogue with Islamabad and ensuring the latter plays a central part in U.S. aid provision to Pakistan, it is easy to forget that Pakistan’s 175 million people have much to offer as well. These ample human resources – and their institutions in civil society – should be embraced and be better integrated into international aid programs.

While Pakistan’s rapidly growing population may be impoverished, it is also tremendously youthful. If the masses can be properly educated and successfully integrated into the labor force, Pakistan could experience a “demographic dividend,” allowing it to defuse what many describe as the country’s population time bomb.

A demographic dividend in Pakistan, the subject of an upcoming Wilson Center conference, has the potential to reduce all of Pakistan’s threats – and to enable the country to move away from its deep, but very necessary, dependence on international aid.

Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Photo Credit: Water pipes feeding into trash infected waterway in Karachi, courtesy Flickr user NB77.

The Economist published this week For Want of a Drink, its special report on water. The report, a compilation of 11 articles, is a mix of surveys of global management strategies, health impacts, and economic considerations on the one hand, and deeper looks into specific practices in Singapore, India, and China on the other. Most interesting for New Security Beat readers is the article “To the Last Drop: How to Avoid Water Wars.” The article states there have been “no true water wars,” but goes on to question whether the pressures of climate change and population growth could generate different outcomes in the future. While the challenges laid out are manifold, the article concludes that potential for cooperation is equally present. “The secret is to look for benefits and then try to share them. If that is done, water can bring competitors together.”

“Impacts of Population Change on Vulnerability and the Capacity to Adapt to Climate Change and Variability: A Typology Based on Lessons from ‘a Hard Country,’” appearing in the journal Population and Environment, is a study of societal resilience by Robert McLeman from the University of Ottawa. Beginning with a literature review of the connections between population growth and greenhouse gas emissions, McLeman then details how demographic changes can negatively affect resilience–the ability of societies to cope and adapt to climate changes. Based on empirical studies of small communities undergoing local climate and demographic changes in eastern Ontario, McLeman finds that simultaneous demographic and climatic change “increased stress on local social networks…critical to climate adaptation.”

Part of USAID’s FRAMEweb community, GeoExplorer is a visual aggregator of natural resource management (NRM) activities, best practices, success stories, and lessons learned. As of launch, GeoExplorer is home to 43 activities, each searchable by scale (e.g. local, national, or regional), sub-sector (e.g. forestry, water, wildlife), and topic (e.g. governance, livelihoods, and health).

GeoExplorer was designed to foster knowledge sharing among and between practitioners, program managers, and researchers. USAID expects the tool to help avoid cases both of repeating past mistakes and reinventing the wheel, serve as a guide for study trips to the field, build community exchanges, and foster networking. It is built on ArcGIS architecture that USAID hopes will allow for continual expansion, particularly through the addition of GIS layers that can empower users with greater search options and tools for cross-project analytic analyses.

“Population pressures and diminishing land holdings – due to high fertility rates, war and genocide, and subsequent migration – have caused a rapid decrease in the forested and protected areas and increased soil infertility and food insecurity” in Rwanda, USAID’s Irene Kitzantides told a Wilson Center audience.

Kitzantides, a population, health, and environment advisor and global health fellow, said “the population is projected to reach over 14 million by 2025” – nearly one-third more than today, due to the country’s high fertility rate of nearly 5.5 children per women–which could continue to negatively impact forests and food supplies.

Maternal mortality rates in many low income countries, such as India, are declining, according to a recent study by researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. According to the report, maternal deaths have fallen from 526,000 a year in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008. This news, while welcoming, has caused dissent among some global health activists who fear donors and policymakers will dismiss the issue and call into question the higher maternal mortality rates last reported by the United Nations. While concerns over monitoring and evaluation raise important methodology questions, this news must also serve as catalyst for world leaders and donors to take action and recognize that investing in women pays.

The data reported by IHME only concludes what maternal health advocates already know. “We know how to save women’s lives, we don’t need a cure…this is a political problem and political will is essential,” said Theresa Shaver, director of White Ribbon Alliance, at a Wilson Center event in December 2008. Greater funding for family planning and access to emergency obstetric care and HIV/AIDS services should all be included in a scaling up resources for improved maternal health programs. “Without HIV, annual maternal deaths would have been 281,500 in 2008,” said Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, in last week’s Lancet comments.

Investing in contraception and family planning services through vertical funding mechanisms can reduce maternal mortality rates by addressing all of a woman’s health needs at the time of service. To widen the platform of comprehensive services for women and their families, efforts to link public health services and offer more at one location should be expanded. “Many women have expressed a need for contraception and family planning services…when you offer family planning services on-site with HIV services, you have a huge uptake in family planning use,” shared Michelle Moloney-Kitts, assistant coordinator at the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at a the Wilson Center in December 2009.

Yet political will remains in short supply. “Despite strong advocacy efforts, political leaders have either ignored the call or failed to make the health of women in pregnancy a priority,” stated Horton. Six countries–Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan–account for over half of all maternal deaths worldwide, and increased investment in these countries will improve maternal health targets, such as Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 seeking to reduce maternal deaths by 75 percent.

Progress is possible and “policymakers are more likely to act on issues that they think they can do something about,” said Jeremy Shiffman, associate professor of public administration at Syracuse University, at the Wilson Center in March 2009. The maternal health community must rally around these positive findings and galvanize support for greater financial contributions. “Two decades of concerted campaigning by those dedicated to maternal health is working,” said Horton.” “[G]reater investment in that work is likely to deliver even greater benefits.”

Calyn Ostrowski is the program associate for the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative.

Photo Credits: A woman in India safely delivers her baby in the hospital through the Madhya Pradesh Health Sector Reform program. Courtesy Flickr user Department for International Development

“Population, Health and Human Settlements” is the second chapter in the Rwandan government’s Rwanda State of Environment and Outlook. The chapter highlights the Rwandan government’s recognition of the interconnections between population, health, and environment, noting that population “can influence the state of the environment” and pose strains “on available public infrastructure, limited land, and natural resources.” The chapter examines Rwanda’s population growth and distribution, the state of “environmental health” in rural and urban areas, and health indicators relating to child and maternal health and HIV/AIDS. It goes on to describe government strategies to “improve settlements and human welfare.” “As population pressure is one of the key drivers of environmental degradation and poverty,” the chapter’s authors write, “the implementation of the population policy, especially aspects that address high fertility rates, gender and reproductive health, migration and human settlements” is increasingly important.

“Policies that have the effect…of leading to lower fertility and to slower population growth can be considered ‘win-win’ from the climate point of view,” said Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at a recent Wilson Center event on his latest research. Yet while the connection between demographic change and CO2 emissions is implicitly understood among both researchers and policymakers, it “has not really caught on,” he added.

In response to critiques of earlier studies looking at demographic change and CO2 emissions—which the climate research community has faulted for their lack of sophistication, use of unfamiliar analytic approaches, and failure to clearly demonstrate the magnitude of the connection—O’Neill is using a novel, more rigorous approach that he hopes will provide a clearer understanding of the links between demography and climate change.

The Population Factor

To generate CO2 emissions scenarios for the next 100 years, O’Neill’s team used the Population-Environment-Technology (PET) Model, originally created by Lawrence H. Goulder and Michael Dalton of Stanford. The PET Model takes its basic assumptions on regional economic growth, technological development, change in population characteristics, and other factors from the IPCC’s A2 and B2 scenarios, but replaces each scenario’s singular population growth curve with high and low alternatives from the United Nations Population Division.

Like other climate models, the PET Model divides the world into nine regions. “You don’t want to treat economies—or the demography, the consumption patterns, the energy system, and so on—of sub-Saharan Africa the same as you do for the U.S. or EU,” he said.

What makes the O’Neill’s approach unique, however, is his attention to the sub-regional level. “Typically in these models…you break the world up into nine regions, but then you treat everyone in sub-Saharan Africa the same, everyone in China the same,” said O’Neill.

By drawing on data from detailed surveys of 800,000 households from 35 countries, O’Neill and his team demonstrated that the distinctions between urban and rural, older and younger, and smaller and larger households hold important implications for carbon emissions. This inclusion of demographic sub-factors allows a deeper degree of analysis than models that treat all households the same. They found that age structure, household size, and urbanization all altered emissions outputs.

Could Bending Population Growth Curves Reduce Emissions?

In the long run, the potential for demographic shifts to reduce CO2 emissions “is a big number,” said O’Neill. In the medium term, for example by the middle of the century, results are less clear. To compare population-related emissions reductions to other carbon-reduction opportunities, he evoked Socolow and Pacala’s “stabilization wedge” framework. The wedge framework posits 15 opportunities, or wedges, to eventually reduce CO2 emissions by 1 billion tons of carbon equivalent per year. They contend that implementing any 7 of the wedges could stabilize CO2 emissions by 2050 and, if followed by additional measures reducing emissions below today’s levels, would stabilize the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at 550 ppm and forestall the worst impacts of climate change.

Would reducing population growth equal a wedge? The full results, currently under review at a scientific journal, will seek to answer this question. “Slower population growth can’t solve the climate problem,” he concluded. “But it can certainly help.”