For a country that once made headlines for famine, poverty, and war, Ethiopia is gaining a reputation as a development leader on the African continent. In just over 10 years, the country has slashed child mortality rates by half, rising in global rank from 146 in 2000 to 68 in 2012. More money is being spent on health care, poverty levels and fertility rates are down, and twice as many children are in school.

Population aging and decline are frequently described as a threat to countries’ economic development and social stability. Evocative language, such as “demographic winter” and “graying of the great powers,” portrays the serious consequences that many observers envision as fertility and growth rates decline and the elderly comprise a greater percentage of the population. These concerns reach around the globe, including in Africa, which has the lowest percentage of elderly among the world’s major regions.

The Population Council’s annual report highlights new work from one of the largest organizations doing research on the lives of adolescent girls in the developing world. Of particular note is the Council’s Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program, a four-year study launched in May which will involve 42,000 girls in seven countries – Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Tanzania, and Zambia. The aim is to evaluate successful strategies for helping girls avoid child marriage, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancies at a critical juncture in their lives. Council President Peter Donaldson writes that young girls are “one of the potentially most influential figures in the developing world.” A typical 12-year-old girl “in the next few years…will either abandon or continue her schooling, be pushed into marriage and childbearing, or develop a sense of proud ownership of her physical self… As her future is reconfigured, so is ours.”

The demographic dividend – the idea that a decline from high to low rates of population growth can lead to dramatic economic gains – has become something of a buzzword in development circles. Sub-Saharan Africa holds the single largest block of remaining high fertility countries and while headlines tend towards the dramatic about demographic shifts there, less column space has been devoted to examining the underlying issues causing these shifts or the other changes that will be necessary for countries to benefit from them.

The original version of this article, by Natalia Machuca, appeared on USAID’s Impact blog.

A newly released nationwide health survey of Haiti shows continuing positive trends on key health-care indicators in particular those of Haitian women and children. The latest survey, undertaken by the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population, was conducted in 2012 and compares with the prior survey done in 2006. It shows steady improvements among key indicators despite significant health challenges in Haiti due to the 2010 earthquake and cholera outbreak. Of note were improved indicators for child vaccination and malnutrition, infant and child mortality, women’s health, and contraception use. The report indicated no increase in HIV prevalence, which remained steady.