by Kate Gilles and Marissa Pine Yeakey, policy analysts
World Contraception Day “centers around a vision for a world where every pregnancy is wanted,” with a goal of enabling “young people to make informed choices on their sexual and reproductive health.”
Access to contraception is a global issue, for women and men of all ages. Meeting the contraceptive needs of young people is especially important because they are at a critical transitional stage. Providing young people with youth-friendly reproductive health information and services, including comprehensive contraceptive services, will empower them to achieve their goals and reach their full potential. These services are especially critical in sub-Saharan Africa, where the need for contraception and other sexual and reproductive health services is among the highest in the world, yet access is among the lowest.
Last year the United Nations focused the world’s attention on the growing impact of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) on low- and middle-income countries. In regions where infectious diseases are still common, diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory diseases, and cancer are rising at an alarming rate. These diseases will swamp health care systems; and increasing urbanization and development will only accelerate the strain. What can be done?
NCDs share four risk factors: tobacco use, excessive alcohol, poor diet (and obesity), and sedentary lifestyle.
by Adriana Biney, PRB 2012-2013 Policy Communication Fellow
Adriana is a second-year doctoral student at the Regional Institute for Population Studies at the University of Ghana.
“Long-term goals: To become a philanthropist and start an NGO that caters to the needs of orphans in Ghana and developing nations all over the world.”
I wrote this goal for the 2005 City College of New York’s Honors Year Book, after graduating with a BSc in chemistry. A few years later, I transitioned into the world of population studies but still wondered about the feasibility of me improving the lives of disadvantaged populations in Ghana. Then, the PRB Policy Fellows Program came along…
Natural Increase in Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian website en.for-ua.com (Aug. 27, 2012), the country’s Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov, said that births will exceed deaths in 12 to 18 months. He also said that increasing the population size is a task for the government. Natural decrease, that is, more deaths than births, reached its low point in 2000 when deaths exceeded births by 373,000 and the total fertility rate (TFR) [1] was just 1.1 children per woman. But by 2011, natural decrease had been more than halved to -162,000 and the TFR had risen to 1.46. In the first half of 2012, births totaled 248,520, 7 percent more than in the first half of 2011; and deaths declined to 340,428, 1 percent less than in 2011. Azarov implied that “state aid programs for births and the development of medicine” will cause natural decrease to turn into natural increase. But increasing births in 1.5 years seems like a tall order given the remaining gap between births and deaths.
Foreign Births in the U.K. Just over one-fourth of births in England and Wales in 2011 were to foreign-born women, reports the Telegraph (Aug. 30, 2012). Births rose slightly to 723,913 but all of the increase was attributed to immigrant women because births to British women fell by 0.4 percent. The data are from the Office for National Statistics. In London, over half of births were to non-British women. Poland was the leading country of origin for immigrant mothers giving birth. Other countries in the “top 10” were Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Somalia, Germany, South Africa, China, and Lithuania. The total fertility rate for immigrant women was 2.29 compared to 1.90 for British women. Read the rest of this entry »
The latest Cote d’Ivoire 2011-2012 DHS-MICS is the fourth DHS in the country since 1994 and shows a stall in fertility decline for at least 12 years. The survey interviewed 10,060 women ages 15-49 and 5,135 men ages 15-59 from December 2011 to May 2012. For urban women, the TFR was 3.7 and, for rural women, who were over half of the sample, 6.3. For the three-year period preceding the survey, the total fertility rate (TFR)[1] obtained was 5.0. For urban women, the TFR was 3.7 and, for rural women, who were 54.3 percent of the sample, 6.3.
Note: TFRs are for the three years before the surveys except 1994, which is five years. *AIDS Indicator Survey (MEASURE DHS) Source: DHS surveys.
by Shonel Sen, PRB 2012-2013 Policy Communication Fellow
Shonel is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics & Demography in the Departments of Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics & Demography, at the Pennsylvania State University.
Two small weeks for a workshop, one giant leap for policymaking—when I applied for the PRB Policy Fellows Program in the middle of spring, my idea of policy implications for my research was perhaps a paragraph tucked into the end of my dissertation; however, after the first leg of the program in the summer, that outlook evolved significantly. I discovered that just asking an interesting question, solving a crucial problem or being convinced of its policy relevance is not enough. One has to pull the research out of its academic cocoon and put it out there in the world in the hope that the findings may get translated into policy, the recommendations may actually get implemented, or at the very least, the work may be heard by someone.
I am training to be an economist and a demographer and am interested in finding noncoercive ways to reduce excessive childbearing and to ease the burden of a rapidly growing population. After years of hearing the graduate school mantra of “the more technical, the better,” when I was told to drop words like “utility” and “above replacement fertility” from my vocabulary and replace my pretty equations and complicated tables with simple graphics, my knee-jerk response was not exactly very appreciative. But once I overcame my rebellious reflexes and battled my linear thought process, the listening, learning, and growing began. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past few months, the Sahel drought has sparked attention of news media and concerned citizens around the world. Throughout this media blitz, I have been struck by the sharp contrast between this coverage and how the devastating effects of malnutrition are usually portrayed. Malnutrition is often overlooked in favor of more “newsworthy” diseases, and it takes a crisis to focus our attention on this public health issue. Yet an emergency such as this drought—affecting more than 18 million people, including nearly 2 million children—is difficult to ignore.
Sahel, Africa. Photo: Center for International Forestry Research / Flickr.
As the third in a series of droughts in less than a decade in the Sahel, this crisis has affected parts of Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal. This year, the region experienced low rainfall, locust attacks, and violence in Nigeria and Mali. Grain production decreased by one-fourth, and prices increased to the point where few people can afford the food they need. The violence in Nigeria and Mali has prevented people from moving to areas with better harvests, and thousands of refugees have settled into countries without the resources to feed them.
What many may not know is that every year more than 475,000 children die in the region from nutrition-related causes, even when there is no crisis. In fact, the Sahel region has one of the highest rates of stunting—or chronic malnutrition—worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »
by Funmilola OlaOlorun, PRB 2012-2013 Policy Communication Fellow
Funmi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
In my humble opinion, this quote in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, sums up the messages we received during two-week workshop for PRB’s 2012/2013 Policy Communication Fellows. “Less is more” we were told time and time again. Challenged to move beyond our academic approach to communicating research findings, we were stimulated to write in a simple, conversational way that would keep our audience begging for more. We prepared for our prime moment with a policymaker—whether it was a 60-second elevator speech, a 5-minute chat, or a 12-minute presentation—and determined the main message of our research. We were encouraged to continually ask ourselves questions such as: What must I say to make my case? What can I leave out? What are my key messages? What do they imply? What recommendations can I make from these?
We were a dozen Fellows, a blend of economics, demography, sociology, geography, and medicine. We represented 12 graduate schools. We had to alter our way of thinking to understand why a policy audience is unique. Starting with a fresh slate, we were led—first with baby steps, and then with leaps and jumps—how to best translate our research into a format that could be easily digested by policy audiences.
I first became interested in family planning and reproductive health during a class on health and developing countries in college. It was fascinating to me to learn how access to reproductive health has far-reaching health, economic, and societal impacts. However, I didn’t start focusing on the particular reproductive health needs and rights of young people until I studied abroad in northern Nigeria. There, I met young women and men who had frighteningly incorrect information about sexuality, pregnancy, and HIV. In the market, I saw 12- and 13-year-old girls who were dressed to advertise their eligibility for marriage, and I was told they would begin childbearing within the next year or two. When I graduated from college and started in my position as a Policy Fellow in USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, I brought these lessons with me.
In early August, the International AIDS Conference took place in Washington, D.C., a city with the highest AIDS diagnosis rate and the second highest rate of new HIV cases among major metropolitan areas in the United States. While public health officials are consistently monitoring the epidemic and designing programs and policies to win the battle against HIV in our nation’s capital, one of the highest at-risk populations—sex workers—are being arrested for possession of condoms as evidence for soliciting sex. The criminalization of condoms is undermining million-dollar public health efforts, endangering the lives of sex workers, and contributing to an ever-growing HIV epidemic.
One of the key issues addressed at the International AIDS Conference is the battle between successful interventions to prevent the spread of HIV and law enforcement policies that counterattack the progress made. Many sex workers fear they will be arrested if they have condoms, so they have unprotected sex with clients. Outreach workers have also been targeted by the police for promoting prostitution by providing condoms to sex workers.
The District of Columbia government has demonstrated a commitment to improving its response to the epidemic by focusing on treatment, the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS, and prevention to stop new infections which include the distribution of condoms.
But at the same time, D.C. is enforcing strict anti-prostitution laws such as “prostitution-free zones” that allow police to arrest two or more people who are “reasonably believed” to be congregating for the purposes of prostitution in certain areas of the city that have high rates of prostitution arrests.
