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Prospects for Gender Parity in UN Peacekeeping Forces, Evaluating Girls’ Empowerment Efforts
›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.”
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A Season for Motherhood: The Role of Family Planning in Improving Maternal Health
›Ensuring access to family planning is not only a matter of human rights, but can also play a key role in protecting the health of mothers and children. Maternal health experts and program directors met at the Wilson Center on July 31 to discuss the role family planning takes in women’s health in developing countries, what successes family planning programs worldwide have had so far, and what can be done to expand services. Sarah Craven, chief of the UN Population Fund’s Washington office, moderated the event.
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Taliban Return Threatens Gains in Girls’ Education, Says Razia Jan
›“There has never been a school for girls in this area; no one really offered them this option,” says Razia Jan in this week’s podcast. “Whenever I see these girls and I talk to my students, I can’t tell you how honored I am that my girls are getting educations.”
Since 2008, Jan has managed the Zabuli Education Center, an all-girls school located in Afghanistan’s Deh’Subz district. With the support of her organization, Razia’s Ray of Hope Foundation, the school provides free kindergarten-through-ninth-grade education to 400 Afghan girls.
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Flooding in Uttarakhand Shows Why India Needs to Take Environmental Security More Seriously
›The disastrous flooding in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand this summer, which claimed more than 6,000 lives, was the outcome of a changing climate and poorly planned development. It was also another case in point of the increasing importance of environmental security in India – especially for the military.
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Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti on Opportunities for Transatlantic Cooperation on Climate Change, Energy
›“We’ve got real pressure on key natural resources: food, water, energy, and land,” says Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s special representative on climate change, in this week’s podcast. “But what we haven’t got, if I can use the words of Winston Churchill, we haven’t got ‘action this day.’”
“Morisetti spoke at the Wilson Center on June 6 for the launch of The Climate and Energy Nexus: Challenges and Opportunities for Transatlantic Security, by CNA and the Royal United Services Institute. As climate change threatens stability in some places, energy security has emerged as a key vulnerability to Western militaries’ abilities to respond to conflict and assist in disaster relief operations, says Morisetti.
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India’s Assam Shows Second-Order, Dangerous Effects of Climate Change in South Asia
›August 13, 2013 // By Ashley ZieglerTo use the military parlance, climate change is often considered a “threat multiplier,” challenging stability and development around the world by exacerbating underlying conditions of vulnerability. South Asia is one region that faces multiple stressors that have the potential to feedback off each other.
Higher temperatures, more extreme weather, rising sea levels, flooding, and increased cyclonic activity in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea are reshaping the environment, warns the Center for American Progress (CAP) in a report.
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Babbage, The Economist
Cloudy With a Chance of War?
›August 8, 2013 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article appeared on The Economist’s Babbage blog.
Earth’s climate is changing, whether you like it or not. As it does, other changes – like rising sea levels or falling crop yields – follow. It is easy to see how this might lead to conflict. Competition for ever scarcer resources such as arable land and its bounty can turn ugly. As the price of food rises the poor, who spend more of their income on it, are hit more than the rich, exacerbating income inequality and leading to disaffection, resentment and, possibly, violence.
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The Great Anatolia Project: Is Water Management a Panacea or Crisis Multiplier for Turkey’s Kurds?
›During the Gezi Park protests last month in Istanbul, Turks and Kurds dismissed historical mistrust and banded together against Prime Minister Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism. Some have suggested the newly unifying cause has strengthened momentum for a long-standing solution to Kurdish autonomy and rights in Turkey. Still it may be water that the fate of Kurdish ambitions is most tied to, rather than officials in Ankara or protestors in Istanbul.
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