Showing posts from category development.
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Yemen Beyond the Headlines: Women’s Health and Well-Being, Foundations of a Fragile State
›Part one of the “Yemen Beyond the Headlines: Population, Health, Natural Resources, and Institutions” event, held at the Wilson Center on May 18.
“Ultimately, whether Yemen is able to achieve its goals for social and economic development, will to a large extent depend on its future population growth and size,” said Gary Cook, senior health advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development, in his opening address on Yemen’s population and development challenges at the Woodrow Wilson Center. [Video Below]
Cook was joined on the opening panel of the all-day conference, “Yemen Behind the Headlines: Population, Health, Natural Resources, and Institutions,” by Dalia Al-Eryani, former project officer for Pathfinder International’s Safe Age of Marriage Project, and T.S. Sunil, professor of sociology at the University of Texas San Antonio, to discuss issues related to population, reproductive health, and child marriage. Drawing speakers and participants form the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, the conference was part of the Wilson Center’s HELPS Project, a multi-year effort to deepen understanding of links among health, environment, livelihoods, population and security.
Yemen’s Population and Development Challenges
Since 1950, the population of Yemen has increased from 4.3 million to 24 million, with an annual population growth rate above three percent, Cook said. High fertility drives Yemen’s rapid population growth, with an average total fertility rate (TFR) of 5.5 births per woman. Rates are even higher in rural areas and among women with limited or no education, he said.
Future population growth will have tremendous impacts on the country’s economy, education, health, and natural resources, said Cook, and “there is a very large gap between the high fertility assumption and the low fertility assumption.”
An additional 1.5 million new people will be added to the labor force and 29 percent less income per person will drop by 29 percent by 2035 if current fertility rates persist, said Cook. Though Yemen has a national population policy that outlines TFR targets of 3.3 in 2025 and 2.1 by 2035, the latest UN Population Division projections suggest these expectations are optimistic. Education and health demands and expenditures will increase greatly, while per capita arable land and water will decrease, exacerbating ongoing land and water scarcity in Yemen.
“We do not have enough local and external resources to address the needs of a rapidly expanding population,” said Cook. “Helping couples who want to limit and space their births will also help the nation,” he added.
Law, Culture, and Child Marriage
“Enforced by law and culture alike,” early marriage in Yemen is common, said Al-Eryani, with over 50 percent of Yemeni women married before they are 17 years old, and 14 percent before they turn 14. Opponents of child marriage argue that children are neither emotionally nor physically ready for marriage and that the practice increases health risks and lowers educational opportunities for girls.
Currently, Yemen has no minimum age for marriage law, and recent attempts to pass such a law have failed, said Al-Eryani. “The practice never really has been questioned.”
“There is a belief that child marriage is a good thing – both for the girl and for the family,” she said. Early marriages are a way to build family honor and tribal ties, and many poor families see opportunity for financial gain in the form of a dowry. “These families see no socially acceptable alternatives for the girl…and all of this is supported by the belief that Islam condones child marriage,” she said.
Through awareness sessions, health fairs, and school plays, the community-based Safe Age of Marriage Project has helped to change social norms around child marriage in two districts in Yemen.
After participating in the program, community members were significantly more likely to believe that delaying marriage gives girls more educational opportunities, empowers them to make decisions, and promotes healthy pregnancy and children, Al-Eryani said. Child marriage was banned in one of the communities, and the marriages of 53 girls and 26 boys were canceled as the result of the project. In the future, she hopes involving more religious and local leaders could further increase the program’s impact.
Youth and “The Reproductive Health Transition”
“When we talk about fertility transition, we only talk about the number of children born,” said Sunil. “A reproductive health transition takes into account not just total fertility rate, but a number of different dimensions.”
Women should have the freedom to decide if, when, and how often to reproduce, said Sunil, through access to safe, effective, affordable, and acceptable family planning methods. They also should have access to quality maternal health care throughout pregnancy and birth, he said.
“It’s a popular belief that Islamic societies with poor and limited resources are not compatible with a reproductive health transition,” said Sunil. “But the onset of a reproductive health transition is underway in Yemen.”
While the transition in Yemen is progressing more slowly than in other countries in the region, many positive trends can be seen among the country’s youth, said Sunil. Trends indicate a drop in fertility rates, especially among younger women; marriage of girls under 15 years old has declined; and contraceptive use among young women age 15 to 24 has increased significantly.
Government and international donor agencies “must capture the growing momentum among the younger cohort” and meet demands for better education, postponement of marriage, and healthcare services, said Sunil. Continued focus on adolescent reproductive health will be the key to achieving the reproductive health transition, he concluded. “From an economic and human perspective, the growing young population in Yemen is potentially a tremendous asset.”
See parts two and three of “Yemen Beyond the Headlines: Population, Health, Natural Resources, and Institutions” for more from this Wilson Center event.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UNICEF, U.S. Agency for International Development.
Image Credit: “Young girl with her mom – Sanaa,” courtesy of flickr user fveronsei1. -
USAID Egypt’s Health and Population Legacy Review
›On May 23 the Middle East Program, ECSP, and the Global Health Initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Center, along with the Global Health Technical Assistance Project, hosted a panel of speakers discussing the past 30 years of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s health and population initiatives in Egypt, as outlined in the new Egypt Health and Population Legacy Review. Geoffrey Dabelko, director of ECSP and coordinator of the Global Health Initiative at the Wilson Center, moderated the event. [Video Below]
Peter McPherson, former administrator of USAID during the Reagan administration, and George Laudato, the administrator’s special assistant for the Middle East, presented on the historical context behind USAID in Egypt and the results of their efforts. McPherson pointed to three lessons that can be drawn from the recent report:- “Big payoffs” require long-term efforts; and
- Economic support for a country can have a dramatic impact; but
- The host country’s commitments and investments are still important.
Motaz Zahran, political counselor for the Embassy of Egypt, noted that USAID efforts were “just one sector of a fruitful partnership” between the United States and Egypt that he hoped would continue. He said the success story outlined by the report was reflective of improvements in coordination and addressing specific goals.
Other panelists outlined the successes of USAID in Egypt as related to their own areas of expertise. Leslie B. Curtin, co-author of the review and an expert in demographics and health outcomes, noted the dramatic improvements in a range of health sectors, in particular the rise in contraceptive prevalence and immunization rates and decrease in both maternal and infant mortality rates.
Nahed Matta, MD, senior maternal and newborn health officer at USAID, focused on improvements to the quality of maternal health, which she said were made possibly through better technology and increased fact-gathering to identify the key factors regarding maternal health trends. Sameh El-Saharty, MD, senior health policy specialist at the World Bank and Health Legacy Review Committee member, credited the increased number of health professionals in Egypt, better information gathering on health systems, and restructured models of health insurance, as successful strategies.
Concluding the session, Amie Batson, deputy assistant administrator for Global Health at USAID, discussed the lessons that other development initiatives can draw from the legacy of USAID efforts in Egypt. She highlighted the importance of country ownership, in which the developing country engages with other institutions and religious and political leaders at both national and local levels, and of policies that fund routine monitoring and evaluation. She also outlined the possibilities of innovation and south-to-south sharing on the local and international scale, referencing inroads made by two recent initiatives: the “MAMA” mobile device program, launched by Secretary Clinton in May 2011 to assist with disseminating maternal health information, and the Saving Lives at Birth initiative, launched by USAID in partnership with several other organizations in March 2011.
Laura Rostad is an intern for the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Image Credit: Adapted from cover of the Egypt Health and Population Legacy Review, courtesy of USAID; cover photo courtesy of Leslie Curtin. -
Environmental Action Plans in Darfur: Improving Resilience, Reducing Vulnerability
›Many villagers in Baaba, a community of 600 in South Darfur, remember a shady forest of mango and guava trees that provided food and a valuable income for the villagers and a pleasant picnic spot for people in Nyala, the nearby state capital. Over the last decade, that forest has degraded into eroded brush dotted by the occasional baobab – a transformation that is unfortunately a familiar sight throughout Darfur.
Most of Baaba’s trees have become firewood and charcoal for the people living in nearby internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Baaba’s residents, who themselves returned from the camps to try to rebuild their lives at home, struggle to coax enough food from the soil, which has largely eroded away following deforestation. Afraid to venture any further than necessary from home for fear of violence and banditry in the countryside, they farm and graze the same land year after year without fallow periods – further depleting the soil and driving yields ever lower.
Baaba is like hundreds of Darfuri villages, which face a brutal mix of insecurity and environmental decline that leaves them one poor harvest away from being forced into the IDP camps. Baaba, however, is also a pilot participant in a new approach – the Community Environmental Action Plan – that aims to rehabilitate the local environment, enable people to sustainably manage natural resources, and ultimately to make communities more prosperous and resilient.
Most of Darfur has always been marginal land where farming and herding provide a meager livelihood and natural resources are few. Even before war broke out in 2003, soaring population growth (total population has quintupled since the 1970s) was putting intolerable pressure on the land, water, and trees of Darfur. The conflict in Darfur has since heavily disrupted traditional methods for sharing and maintaining natural resources, leading to environmental devastation. The worsening effects of climate change – though hard to separate from local environmental depletion – are also beginning to disrupt weather patterns and farming. The disheartening result is that even where fighting has subsided and displaced persons return home, they often find that the land no longer sustains them.
Traditional humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects are ill-suited to help, since persistent insecurity deprives humanitarian actors of access to communities for weeks or months at a time. Environmental decline didn’t start the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, but it threatens to prolong it and put a sustainable peace out of reach.
Community Environmental Action PlansThe International Organization for Migration (IOM), mandated to work on IDP and return issues in Darfur, aimed to address these challenges with Community Environmental Action Plans (CEAPs) in three pilot villages. CEAPs build comprehensive local capacity, enabling communities to manage natural resources sustainably and address environmental problems themselves without relying on outside support. The ultimate goal is to build the resilience and adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities. IOM worked with Baaba and two other villages to implement CEAPs, in partnership with the Swiss-based environmental NGO ProAct, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the government of South Darfur, and Darfuri environmental organizations. The project, funded by the Government of Japan, ran from early 2009 until mid-2010.
The CEAP process trains communities to understand the connections between a healthy ecosystem and a prosperous community and to promote livelihoods by rehabilitating the environment. Each participating village formed a CEAP governance committee, which was then trained to understand the environment as a single integrated system and to see how damaging one resource like trees can devastate other ecosystem services – such as pollination, groundwater retention, and soil fertility – that enable and promote human livelihoods. The communities then identified essential needs, including reforestation, water harvesting, and improved sanitation, and worked with IOM to develop appropriate responses. These activities were all implemented by the villages themselves, with technical and material support from IOM and its partners.
Building Local Capacity
The communities built low-tech but highly productive tree nurseries, producing and planting over 200,000 seedlings to restore damaged land and provide a sustainable wood supply. Local women learned how to make highly fuel-efficient stoves using locally available materials, cutting their need for firewood and allowing them to sell stoves in the nearby Nyala market.Farmers received extensive training in sustainable agriculture techniques, including water harvesting, composting, agro-forestry, and intercropping (mixing complementary plant species together in the same fields). Volunteers were trained in effective hygiene practices and built latrines for each household. Water committees were trained to repair and maintain the villages’ indispensable but fragile water hand pumps, ensuring a more reliable source of drinking water. Each of these activities was governed by a community committee, including women and youth, trained to manage the projects for the benefit of the entire community and continue the work after the project’s end.
Through this approach, all three villages significantly boosted their livelihoods and agricultural productivity while becoming less dependent on the unsustainable exploitation of their fragile environment. The CEAP approach benefits greatly from focusing on capacity-building and local implementation, which fosters a strong sense of community ownership that persists after the project ends. Equally important, CEAPs attempt to address most or all of a community’s environmental issues simultaneously, reducing the risk that neglected environmental problems – particularly agricultural failure – will critically destabilize and displace a community in the future.
A Replicable Model
CEAPs aren’t a panacea, particularly in the conflict-prone areas where they are most needed. Insecurity, particularly a series of abductions of humanitarian workers from several organizations in 2010, cut off IOM’s access to the communities late in the project. Though the core activities were completed by working through local partners with more reliable access, the security situation left few opportunities for follow-up activities. Longer-term threats, particularly unrestrained population growth – which requires a comprehensive approach that includes addressing unmet need for family planning services – could undo much of the good that CEAPs accomplish.
Though insecurity prevented IOM from continuing the project, other organizations including UNEP are implementing and refining the CEAP approach elsewhere in Darfur and other regions in sub-Saharan Africa. As climate changes intensifies and the potential for related conflicts looms, the CEAP approach should be considered as a powerful and flexible tool to rehabilitate the environment and strengthen vulnerable communities.
Paul Rushton is a consultant for the International Organization for Migration, Sudan, and worked as a Programme Officer managing the CEAP projects in South Darfur from 2009 to 2010.
Sources: International Organization for Migration, UN.
Photo Credit: Camels graze in a destroyed and degraded village in Western Darfur, courtesy of UNEP; and pictures from CEAP sites in Southern Darfur, courtesy of Paul Rushton. -
“The Second Front in the War on Terror”
USAID, Muslim Separatists, and Politics in the Southern Philippines
›For some years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the existence of violent Muslim separatists on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao gave U.S. officials significant cause for concern. In 2005, for example, the U.S. embassy charge d’affaires to the Philippines, Joseph Mussomeli, told reporters that “certain portions of Mindanao are so lawless, so porous…that you run the risk of it becoming like an Afghanistan situation. Mindanao is almost, forgive the poor religious pun, the new Mecca for terrorism.” During the Bush administration, officials referred to the region as a “second front” in the War on Terror: the region was once seen as a “new Afghanistan” that “threatened to become an epicenter of Al Qaeda.” [Video Below]
Nevertheless, as noted by Wilson Center Fellow Patricio Abinales at an Asia Program event on May 11, U.S. efforts to co-opt and pacify separatist guerrillas have proven remarkably successful in some areas of the islands. Some commentators have highlighted the role of the U.S. military in bringing a relative sense of security to troubled regions, noting that Mindanao presents a “future model for counterinsurgency.” However, Abinales’s research shows the military activities have had little effect, often because troops are stationed far from potential areas of conflict. Instead, it is the civilian side of the American presence that has dampened conflict in the war zones of the southern Philippines.
Abinales specifically explored the factors behind the success of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) program in demobilizing and reintegrating 28,000 separatist guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), as well as the long-term political consequences of this accomplishment.
“Arms to Farms”
Usually, USAID programs are organized on the basis of grants for specific and limited projects. In contrast, GEM arose as a long-term umbrella organization that oversees the disbursement and management of American funding across a number of long-term projects. Coordinators are trained directly in Mindanao and are encouraged to “go native,” living in the area and becoming part of the community. GEM prioritizes cultural understanding, respect for community leaders, an appreciation of the important role that women play in local societies, and sensitivity to potential divisions within separatist groups and their security concerns vis-à-vis the Philippine government.
There has often been a general tendency for aid organizations to associate the demobilization of warring groups with disarmament. While Philippine officials on Mindanao have sometimes tried this approach, cash-for-guns amnesty schemes have opened up opportunities for corruption and have not been particularly effective. Understanding that one of the major concerns of guerrilla rebels is exploitation by corrupt government officials, GEM established an “Arms to Farms” scheme, whereby Muslim rebels are trained to engage in agriculture, but are not encouraged to put away their weapons. In this way, the program keeps potential guerrillas and Al Qaeda recruits busy with legitimate and peaceful economic activity, while it assuages their concerns about the threat from corrupt government officials, who may otherwise take the fruits of agricultural labor by force.
In fact, Abinales noted that one of the keys to GEM’s success is that the organization has never submitted to the official local authorities, and has largely been allowed a free reign by Manila to conduct its activities on Mindanao. It is precisely because the state has not been successful in delivering welfare regimes which provide stability to the area that GEM is seen as an alternate source of development and security in the region. Moreover, because of GEM’s activities, other American officials are allowed relatively free access, and are even welcomed into areas where the authority of the Philippine government holds no sway. Most of GEM’s activities are conducted with the MNLF, which has maintained its own official treaties and agreements with Manila since the 1970s. However, the American organization is beginning to enter the territory of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a splinter group of the MNLF that rejects relations with the national government outright, but one whose leaders are jealous of the development gains the MNLF has made under GEM.
Abinales was quick to point out that although GEM’s activities have been successful, they are tailor-made to specific circumstances. It is therefore difficult to present them as a generalized model that can be applied to other separatist conflicts. Nevertheless, Abinales’s work suggests that government agencies working on counterinsurgency efforts elsewhere might do well to examine the benefits of the flexible civilian approaches to conflict resolution formed with a deep understanding of the concerns of the specific communities involved.
Bryce Wakefield is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. -
Watch: Edward Carr on Delivering Development and Rethinking Assumptions
›May 13, 2011 // By Schuyler NullWhile visiting West Africa first as an archaeologist, Edward Carr, an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina and author of Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future, found that the villages in which he was working were far more resilient to the impacts of climate change than he expected. Increased frequency of drought, declines in rainfall, severe storms – these challenges are the sort of thing that can “totally destroy someone’s livelihood in a year,” he said in an interview with ECSP, “yet they were surviving and surviving really, really well.”
That experience and others challenged his understanding of “how I thought the world was supposed to work, how I’d been taught the world was supposed to work, versus what I was actually seeing happen on the ground,” said Carr. “I became so struck by what people were dealing with in the current context that my interest started to shift much more towards what they were doing now.”
Now serving as a AAAS fellow and the climate change coordinator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Carr said he is trying to change how the U.S. government does development.
“The last 13 years of my career have been trying to figure out what’s actually happening on the ground first,” Carr said, and that led to writing Delivering Development.
“One of the key arguments I have is that the world does not work the way we assume it does – we are fundamentally misunderstanding what’s happening for most people living out, especially in rural areas, in the developing world,” said Carr. “The challenges they face are significant but not necessarily the ones we’re aimed at.”
For example, said Carr, “we see rising food prices globally and…the presumption is that the poorest people in the world are going to get really hammered by this.” But, he said, “That’s not entirely true, because a lot of the poorest people in the world living in rural areas have an option to just disconnect from markets completely – they go total subsistence if they need to.”
There’s an assumption that people shouldn’t be disconnecting like that, but, Carr pointed out, when new places are integrated into larger markets, “we’re also integrating them into new sources of risk that they may not be very well equipped to manage, and that becomes a really significant challenge.”
“We’re starting with the fundamental assumption that markets can be a solution, without necessarily really looking carefully at how markets can be part of the problem,” said Carr. -
Ten Billion: UN Updates Population Projections, Assumptions on Peak Growth Shattered
›May 12, 2011 // By Schuyler NullThe numbers are up: The latest projections from the UN Population Division estimate that world population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050 – a slight bump up from the previous estimate of 9.1 billion. The most interesting change however is that the UN has extended its projection timeline to 2100, and the picture at the end of the century is of a very different world. As opposed to previous estimates, the world’s population is not expected to stabilize in the 2050s, instead rising past 10.1 billion by the end of the century, using the UN’s medium variant model.
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Family Planning as a Strategic Focus of U.S. Foreign Policy
›May 11, 2011 // By Wilson Center Staff“Family Planning as a Strategic Focus of U.S. Foreign Policy,” by Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, was an input paper for the Council on Foreign Relations report, The Role of U.S. Family Planning Assistance in U.S. Foreign Policy. Excerpted from the introduction:
Comprehensive policies that incorporate demography, family planning, and reproductive health can promote higher levels of stability and development, thereby improving the health and livelihood of people around the world while also benefiting overarching U.S. interests. U.S. foreign aid will be more effective if increased investments are made in high population-growth countries for reproductive health and family planning programs. These programs are cost-effective because they help reduce the stress that rapid population growth places on a country’s economic, environmental, and social resources.
Family Planning and Reproductive Health Programs
Family planning and reproductive health programs have successfully reduced the world’s population growth rate, propelled economic development, and improved women’s lives across the world. When people, and especially women, are given the opportunity and technology to limit their family size, they often choose to do so.
Population trends are motivated by three demographic forces: fertility, mortality, and migration. Although they can have dramatic effects on national and local populations, mortality and migration in particular have relatively little influence globally. Across the world, mortality rates have declined to a point where most children born today live to reach their own reproductive years, though much work remains to reduce the effect of communicable diseases and improve nutrition among the young. Meanwhile, three percent of the world’s population currently lives outside of their birth-countries. Therefore, while migration is increasing and an important demographic force, it does not occur at a scale large enough to significantly affect global-level demography.
Fertility rates currently are – and in the short-term will remain – the most important driver of global demographic trends. The total fertility rate, or average number of children born to each woman, has been estimated at 2.7 for the period between 2000 and 2005, a decline from 3.6 children per woman in the early 1980s. Given this decline, population projections generally assume future declines in fertility rates. For example, the widely cited “medium-fertility variant,” which is the United Nations’ projection of a world population growing from 6.9 billion in 2010 to 9.1 billion by 2050, relies upon an assumption that the global fertility rate will decline by 24 percent to two children per woman. However, if fertility rates remain constant at current levels, the world’s population would reach 11 billion by 2050. Fertility rates, whether they decline or remain at current levels, are not distributed evenly among countries and regions.
Continue reading or download the full report, “Family Planning as a Strategic Focus of U.S. Foreign Policy,” from the Council on Foreign Relations. -
Population and Environment Connections: The Role of Family Planning in U.S. Foreign Policy
›May 11, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko“Population and Environment Connections,” was an input paper for the Council on Foreign Relations report, Family Planning and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ensuring U.S. Leadership for Healthy Families and Communities and Prosperous, Stable Societies.
Current global population growth rates are not environmentally sustainable and the increasing demands of a growing global population are increasingly straining supplies of food, energy, and water. The expected consequences of climate change will stress resources further. Population growth dynamics compound challenges presented by increased resource consumption from a rising global middle class, making the world’s population, and the quality and quantity of natural resources, top priorities for governments and the public alike.
Governments and multilateral organizations must recognize the relationship between resource demand, resource supply, and resource degradation across disparate economic and environmental sectors. Formulating appropriate and effective responses to growth-induced resource complications requires both a nuanced understanding of the problem and the use of innovative approaches to decrease finite resource consumption.
Family planning and integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) approaches offer opportunities to address such concerns. These efforts recognize the importance of population-environment linkages at the macro-level. They also operate at the household, community, and state levels, empowering individuals and decreasing community vulnerability by building resilience in a wider sustainable development context. PHE approaches embrace the complex interactions of population, consumption, and resource use patterns. To paraphrase Brian O’Neill, a leading scholar on population-climate connections, PHE approaches offer a way forward that is neither a silver bullet nor a red herring. Addressing population-environment links is an essential step to tackling global sustainability crises.
Download “Population and Environment Connections” from the Council on Foreign Relations.
