Showing posts from category family planning.
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Population-Health-Environment Video Featuring Lori Hunter Now on YouTube
›July 18, 2008 // By Sean Peoples“Population, Health, and Environment: Exploring the Connections,” an original ECSP video, offers a lively, brief, and accessible explanation of population-health-environment connections, with examples and photos from successful programs in the Philippines. Presenter Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado, Boulder, spoke at the Wilson Center earlier this year as part of ECSP’s PHE meeting series. View the video on YouTube, then rate it, comment on it, favorite it, or post a video response. -
Population, Health, Environment in Ethiopia: “Now I know my family is too big”
›July 16, 2008 // By Sonia Schmanski
In “Life in Abundance,” an article from the latest issue of Sierra magazine, Paul Rauber gives us an inside look at family planning in Ethiopia, speaking with women in urban and rural environments to understand what government support of family planning has meant in practice. The government’s official embrace of family planning is a sharp and welcome shift from the previous dictatorship’s ban on mentioning it, but this endorsement, welcome as it is, doesn’t guarantee funding. Consequently, family planning programming, robust in urban areas, has yet to reach much of the vast rural expanse of Ethiopia. It is also heavily dependent on outside donors and NGOs for funding.
Thanks to one of the highest fertility rates in the world—5.4 children per woman—Ethiopia’s population has quintupled in the last 70 years. It now stands at 77 million, and is projected to double by 2050. Other indicators are equally discouraging: Rauber reports that average life expectancy is 48 years, that one in eight children dies before reaching five years of age, and that half of all children are undernourished.
One group trying to improve these statistics is Pathfinder International, whose integrated population-health-environment program in Ethiopia aims to “boost family planning, healthcare access, and environmental-restoration efforts through improving the lot of women and girls.” Rauber notes that Ethiopian women with at least some secondary education have one-third as many children as women with no or little education. Ethiopia, he says, is ripe for such integrated interventions; two-thirds of women want but lack access to family planning, and only one in 10 rural women uses any form of contraception. Pathfinder’s program, strongly backed by communities, has been successful in enrolling women in literacy classes, testing for HIV, planting mango and avocado trees, and curbing female genital mutilation.
For a look at another integrated PHE program in Ethiopia, see ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko’s photographs of the Berga Wetland Project, which includes conservation activities oriented around the White-Winged Flufftail bird; a small health facility offering basic maternal, children’s, and reproductive health services; and a community school.
Ethiopia has hosted several large PHE events in recent months, demonstrating the country’s enthusiasm for the approach. In November 2007, more than 200 members of the PHE community gathered in Addis Ababa for “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development in East Africa,” a conference sponsored by the Population Reference Bureau and LEM Ethiopia. Rauber’s tour of Ethiopia, which also included substantial birdwatching, was jointly organized by the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, both participants at the November meeting. Also emerging from this conference, which ECSP helped organize, was the East Africa Population-Health-Environment Network, a group working toward “an Eastern African region where men, women, and children are healthy, the environment is conserved, and livelihoods are secure.” In May of this year, Ethiopia launched its national chapter of the network, the Consortium for Integration of Population, Health, and Environment, in Ambo.
Photo: Health workers in Ethiopia’s Berga valley, where families average seven children. Now, thanks to the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society’s Berga Wetlands Project, hundreds of local women get contraceptives from health worker Gete Dida, allowing them to limit their family size – and giving the area’s wildlife a chance at survival. Reproduced from Sierraclub.org with permission of the Sierra Club. © 2008 Sierra Club. All rights reserved. -
In Egypt, Record Food Prices Lead to Family Planning
›June 12, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoAt Egypt’s National Population Conference on Monday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—whose government has struggled to respond to recent civil unrest over skyrocketing food prices and bread shortages—told attendees that high population growth is a “major challenge and fundamental obstacle” to development. The following day, Egyptian Minister of Health and Population Hatem el-Gabali announced an $80 million national family planning program with the slogan “Two children per family—a chance for a better life.” Egypt’s current fertility rate is 2.7 children per woman.
With a population of 81 million, Egypt is the 16th most populous country in the world, and, according to Philippe Fargues of the American University in Cairo (AUC), excluding the desert, Egypt has the highest population density in the world—twice that of Bangladesh.
Is the government’s plan a productive long-term response to the food crisis? How can it be part of a larger package? Or is population a distraction from the real issue of corruption, as identified by interviewees in the Washington Post article where I first read about the programs.
I posed these questions to a demography and security listserv and got some interesting responses. According to Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University, a political scientist known best for her book Bare Branches on the security implications of imbalanced male-female population ratios: “Mubarak would do more to achieve his goal of 2.0 children per woman by a focused plan to raise the status of women, for example, by:- Outlawing polygamy, or erecting such high legal barriers to it that it becomes impractical
- Fully implementing CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women]
- Enforcing the ban on FGM [female genital mutilation]; 97% of Egyptian women are circumcised
- Educating women on a parity with men; the median number of years of schooling for men is 6.3; that for women is 4.4
- Raising average age at first marriage for rural women (current average is 19)
- Creating more parity in family law for women in matters such as divorce, inheritance, etc.—all of which can be found in CEDAW.”
“I don’t think population pressure is a distraction from the real issue of corruption; though the government of Egypt is indeed corrupt by developed-world standards (or maybe by any standard). Corruption, which is symptomatic of state weakness, limits the ability of the Egyptian government to address this problem credibly and effectively. But it doesn’t mean they are wrong about the problem.
I was actually struck by the modesty of official ambition to reduce the fertility rate from 2.7 (which is slightly above the world median, apparently) to 2.0 (which I’m guessing is pretty close to the middle). This assumes that, basically, a steady state population of, say, 100M Egyptians would be sustainable indefinitely. I’m not so sure of that. The impact of anticipated climate change on Egypt may prove quite formidable by the end of this century. I’m not sure a leveling off after some additional increase will do the trick….Too pessimistic? I hope so.” -
‘Fatal Misconception’: Fatally Flawed?
›Matthew Connelly recently published Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, a book that has chafed demographers and those working in the family planning sector. If Connelly had foreseen the attention his recounting of the population movement would garner, he might have taken more care to represent more sides of the story. He also might have talked to more living people, especially women, rather than relying so heavily on written archives.
Controversially, Connelly argues that family planning programs in the 20th century were responsible for only 5 percent of the fertility decline experienced during that time. His proof? That fertility levels were already declining before family planning programs began. On page 338, he writes, “Moreover, it could not be shown that even the 5 percent effect was actually caused by such efforts, or whether instead broader socioeconomic or cultural changes explained both the decline in parents’ preference for large families and government willingness to provide them with contraceptives (what economists call the endogeneity problem).”
But examples abound in which fertility declined drastically following the introduction of accessible contraception. For example, after officials in Iran revised the country’s family planning program in the late 1980s, fertility dropped from 5.62 births per woman to just above 2 today. Fertility had been declining since the early 1960s, but at a much slower rate.
In the early 1960s, the fertility rate in Brazil was 6.2. In the years after Planned Parenthood arrived and pharmacies began selling contraceptives, fertility fell to 3.5 births per woman. Today, Brazil’s fertility rate is around 2.35 births per woman, which is close to replacement level.
When women can choose for themselves when to have children, they often choose to have smaller families. The family planning movement has not been perfect, but it has frequently acted courageously to give women the choices they deserve. Its successes should not be overlooked.
Marian Starkey, communications manager at Population Connection, holds a master of science in population and development from the London School of Economics. -
In the Philippines, High Birth Rates, Pervasive Poverty Are Linked
›April 21, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarAn article in today’s Washington Post explores the interconnected problems of poverty and rapid population growth in the Philippines. Many factors contribute to the country’s high poverty rate, including corruption and traditional land ownership laws, but a birth rate that is among the highest in Asia is also significant. Eighty percent of the Filipino population is Catholic, and both the influential Catholic Church and the current government—in power for the last five years—oppose modern family planning methods. Filipinos are permitted to buy contraception, but no national government funds may be used to purchase contraception for the millions who want it but cannot afford it.
The situation may be poised to worsen, notes the Post: “Distribution of donated contraceptives in the government’s nationwide network of clinics ends this year, as does a contraception-commodities program paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development. For years it has supplied most of the condoms, pills and intrauterine devices used by poor Filipinos.”
Yet the story is not entirely gloomy. A recent brief by Joan Castro and Leona D’Agnes of PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. describes IPOPCORM, a development program that has successfully delivered family planning services to impoverished Filipino communities while simultaneously promoting environmental conservation and overall human health. Based on this success, some municipal governments in IPOPCORM’s service areas have set aside money in their budgets to purchase family planning commodities directly. A major conference in 2008 (building on an earlier conference in 2006) addressed population, health, and environment connections in the Philippines; featured speakers included former Congressman Nereus Acosta and Joan Castro. -
Weekly Reading
›The Population Reference Bureau recently published several new resources on global family planning, including a data sheet on worldwide family planning and an article by James Gribble examining trends and patterns in family planning in West Africa. Gribble also recently co-authored an article on the successes and failures of Peru’s family planning policy, particularly among the poor.
An article published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife (subscription required) found that crop destruction by wildlife in three villages in northeastern Tanzania significantly reduced both food security and household income. The article recommends implementing several incentives—including microcredit for non-agricultural activities—for conservation.
A report from the Center for International and Strategic Studies’ Global Strategy Institute examines the future of water and energy in an increasingly urbanized Asia, with a particular focus on China.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development released a summary of the proceedings at the first African Water Week, which took place March 26-28, 2008. -
Population Takes Center Stage in Online Climate Change Debate
›March 27, 2008 // By Sonia Schmanski“Images of overpopulation tend to reinforce racist stereotypes of the world’s poorest people, demonizing those who are the least responsible for global warming” and obscuring important questions about how well family planning and other policies actually combat climate change, argued Hampshire College professor Betsy Hartmann in a lively roundtable discussion on population and climate change hosted by The Bulletin Online.
Because one-third of all pregnancies are unwanted, and because some 200 million women desire family planning services but lack access to them, contributor Frederick A.B. Meyerson, an ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, argued that policies to reduce unwanted pregnancy must be a chief global priority. He called for the international community to “restore the goal of universal access to family planning as a top-tier priority, to protect both the climate and human wellbeing.”
Joseph Chamie, research director for the Center for Migration Studies, called this a “delay tactic” that would do little to slow climate change, and said the international community should instead focus on decreasing consumption in the developed world, noting that the average American creates nearly 20 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Indian. He added that the 200 million women Meyerson mentioned live primarily in regions of Africa and Asia where per capita emissions are so low that changes in fertility will have negligible impact on climate. Increasing access to voluntary family planning services could have greater effects in India or China, he said, where economic development has resulted in continually increasing per capita emissions levels.
John Guillebaud, emeritus professor at University College London, and Martin Desvaux, trustee of the Optimum Population Trust, resisted Chamie’s assertion, writing, “It’s not difficult to understand that one less person born into poverty is one less person who needs to be helped out of poverty—a development process that cannot occur without increased energy consumption and (in the medium term) more carbon-dioxide emissions per person.” They wondered whether the international community would be better off focusing on reducing absolute emissions or providing for a more equitable distribution of emissions by reducing it in more-developed areas and allowing it to increase in less-developed areas as a result of improved standards of living.
Pointing out that some credit smaller landholdings (the result of a growing population) with higher investment in soil conservation and better-managed tree densities in Rwanda, Hartmann highlighted the complexity in forecasting the consequences of population growth. Seemingly counterintuitive findings like this one pepper the debate, encouraging us to carefully analyze the mathematical models and projections we rely on.
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PODCAST – Linking Population, Health, and Environment in the Philippines
›February 6, 2008 // By Sean Peoples Effective development programs require multisectoral strategies, says Roger-Mark De Souza, and succeed by building local and regional partnerships and winning the trust and participation of individuals and communities. In the following podcast, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses integrated development approaches in the Philippines with De Souza, who is the director of foundation and corporate relations at the Sierra Club and formerly the technical director of the Population Reference Bureau’s population, health and environment program. De Souza shares his experiences of how local communities have successfully integrated environmental conservation and population issues to alleviate poverty and improve their quality of life. Many of the issues regarding integrated population, health, and environment approaches discussed in this podcast also appear in an article by De Souza in ECSP Report 10.
Effective development programs require multisectoral strategies, says Roger-Mark De Souza, and succeed by building local and regional partnerships and winning the trust and participation of individuals and communities. In the following podcast, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses integrated development approaches in the Philippines with De Souza, who is the director of foundation and corporate relations at the 
