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A More Prosperous World: Investing in Family Planning for Sustainable Economic Growth
›“There is a close relationship between fertility rates and health on one hand, and economic growth on the other,” said Peter McPherson, President of the Association of Public Land-Grant Universities and former USAID Administrator, at the final event in a three-part series on the role of population and family planning in supporting economic growth, health, and education.
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Nicaragua and the Fading of Latin America’s Youthful Clusters
›After four months of political unrest and more than 250 deaths, the calls for Nicaragua’s embattled president Daniel Ortega to step down are escalating. One of political demography’s most robust statistical findings tells us that countries where an authoritarian government rules a youthful population, any change in regime typically yields an autocracy or at best, a partial democracy. Only very rarely has a liberal democracy emerged immediately after a rebellion in a youthful country (one with a population with a median age under 26 years). Given this, if Ortega is ousted from office, what type of leader should foreign affairs analysts expect to replace him?
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Family Planning Can Mean Big Progress for the Sustainable Development Goals—And Here’s How
›As the UN High-Level Forum on Sustainable Development continues this week, member states and civil society are taking a hard look at countries’ progress toward securing safe drinking water, sanitation, and adequate housing. Achieving these and the other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires recognizing the synergies among them—including the role that reproductive health and family planning can play. You may ask, “Why does family planning matter for the SDGs not related to health?” The answer is that it is one of the most cost-effective investments for achieving the SDGs. Increasing access to family planning provides sweeping social, economic, and environmental benefits for every dollar spent.
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Everybody Counts: New Podcast Series on How Global Population Trends Shape Our World
›From mass urbanization to massive refugee flows, high fertility to record low birth rates, global population is changing in unprecedented ways. “Everybody Counts,” a new podcast series hosted by Rhodes College Professor and Wilson Center Global Fellow Jennifer D. Sciubba, launches a lively and thoughtful conversation about the ways human population shapes our world and how we live today.
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A Firm Foundation: Contraception, Agency, and Women’s Economic Empowerment
›According to a raft of experts, empowering women to be economic actors would change quite a bit. The UN Secretary General set up a High-Level Panel on it; Melinda Gates keeps talking about it; and the World Bank and Ivanka Trump recently launched an initiative to unlock billions in financing for it. Targets related to women’s economic empowerment cut across multiple Sustainable Development Goals, including advancing equal rights to economic resources, doubling the agricultural productivity and incomes of women who are small-scale farmers, and achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all women.
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Mapping Refugees and Urban Job Opportunities
›Although most of us picture refugees living in remote, dusty camps, as many as 2.1 million of the developing world’s working-age refugees reside in major urban areas—where they should have greater access to employment opportunities. However, according to a new report from the Center for Global Development, finding employment remains “one of the major unmet needs identified by refugees.”
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A More Resilient World: The Role of Population and Family Planning in Sustainable Development
›“Community mobilization, local capacity-building, and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development. And that for us includes resilience,” said Franklin Moore, Africare’s Chief of Programs, at a Wilson Center event on family planning and sustainable development. As rapid population growth intersects with challenges like food insecurity and water scarcity, communities in developing countries need not only the capacity to absorb short-term shocks, they also need transformative capacity to address long-term challenges.
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Faith in Family Planning: Healthy Timing and Spacing of Pregnancies
›“When you enable a family to be able to time and space their children, you actually improve the overall health of that family,” said Dr. Alma Golden, the Deputy Assistant Administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, at a recent Wilson Center event on the role of faith-based organizations in family planning. Faith-based groups are an “irreplaceable asset,” said Dr. Golden, when it comes to fighting stigma and marginalization and promoting positive health behaviors.
Showing posts from category demography.