Showing posts from category gender.
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Access to Contraception Could Reduce Maternal Mortality by One Third, World Bank Reports
›August 14, 2008 // By Sonia SchmanskiFertility rates worldwide have been on the decline for many years, the result of a steady decrease in desired family size. But more often than not, fertility rates have not fallen as quickly as desired family size, as access to contraceptives has not kept pace with increasing demand. Consequently, more than 75 million pregnancies each year are unintended, finds “Fertility Regulation Behaviors and Their Costs: Contraception and Unintended Pregnancies in Africa and Eastern Europe & Central Asia,” a World Bank discussion paper surveying decades of research from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. One fifth of these pregnancies end in induced abortion, fully half of which are classified as unsafe, meaning they are not attended by a properly trained health care worker or in an environment that conforms to minimum medical standards.
The costs of unsafe abortion are tremendous, financially and in terms of human lives. Approximately 67,000 women die annually from complications resulting from unsafe abortion, leaving more than 200,000 children motherless. Sexual and reproductive health issues constitute 20 percent of the global disease burden, and produce additional “direct and indirect costs to the individual woman, the woman’s household, the country’s health system and society as a whole.”
In Africa, post-abortion care can consume up to half of obstetrics and gynecology department budgets. The cost of this care is often much higher than the patient’s monthly salary. The authors report that “comprehensive family planning services to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce unsafe abortion in Nigeria would cost only a quarter of what is being spent in direct costs to treat post-abortion complications.” This point is taken up by author Margaret E. Greene is the latest issue of FOCUS, ECSP’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. She writes that “[r]obust, compelling evidence linking good reproductive health to poverty reduction,” as is offered in the World Bank report, will “support efforts to include it in country-level poverty reduction strategies and in the allocation of international poverty reduction funding.”
This situation repeats itself across the globe. In Central Asia and Eastern Europe, induced abortion is “the principal method of birth control,” due to the expense of importing Western contraceptives, the medical community’s stigma against oral contraceptives, and the availability of abortion result. In Russia, government concerns about low fertility led the government to dismantle its sex-education curriculum and to carry out widespread layoffs in the government-controlled offices of contraceptive manufacturers.
Without exception, the case studies in this discussion paper find significant financial benefit to increasing modern contraceptive availability. Inadequate access is “an important barrier,” the authors write, discounting the argument that the contraceptives are there and people simply don’t use them. DHS surveys worldwide find that cost has prohibited contraceptive use for fewer than 2 percent of the estimated 137 million women with an unmet need. Women have decided, it seems, that the costs of childbearing far outweigh those of contraceptives.
“It is imperative,” the authors write, “that policies and programs address the need for contraception globally – for all population groups but with special emphasis on those who are most disadvantaged.” Community insurance schemes to reduce out-of-pocket payments can help accomplish this. Other ideas include increased subsidies for basic health services and adjusted user fee policies. The report also urges expanded and improved provision of contraceptive information and services, as well as improved training for health care providers. The problem is not a lack of good ideas and policies, but a lack of political will.
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Climate Change, Natural Disasters Disproportionately Affect Women, Report Finds
›July 31, 2008 // By Sonia SchmanskiWomen “are the most likely to bear the heaviest burdens when natural disasters strike,” says a new report from the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), “Gender, Climate Change and Human Security: Lessons from Bangladesh, Ghana and Senegal.” The report also encourages governments to allow women to play larger roles as agents of preparedness, mitigation, and adaptation.
Climate change, the report says, “forms a major threat to human security at national and livelihood levels.” Because 70 percent of people living below the poverty line are women, their livelihoods are threatened most acutely by climate change and the natural disasters it is likely to make increasingly frequent and severe. In addition, women are often responsible for “tasks such as food collection and energy supply for the household as well as many care-giving tasks, such as caring for the children, sick, elderly, the home and assets.” In the wake of a natural disaster, these activities can become nearly impossible, and being responsible for them can prevent women from migrating from disaster zones, despite the burden of living where disaster has struck. This migration, the authors write, has significant impacts on those who stay as well as those who leave, as “the relocation of people has severe impacts on social support networks and family ties—mechanisms that have a crucial value for women.”
Losing over half a million citizens to natural disasters between 1970 and 2005 has given Bangladesh the highest disaster mortality rate in the world, and gender-neutral data collection makes it difficult to determine gender-specific outcomes. From the data that does exist, the report notes that following the cyclone and flood disasters of 1991, for example, the death rate among adult women (20-44 years of age) was 71 per 1000, almost five times higher than the rate of 15 per 1000 for adult men.
There is consensus that South Asia is among the regions most affected by climate change, the report says, and that Bangladesh is the most vulnerable country in the region. For the 80 percent of Bangladeshi women who live in rural areas and are solely responsible for water and firewood collection, food preparation, and family health care, the future appears increasingly imperiled.
A study published last year in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers confirmed that natural disasters decrease the life expectancy of women much more dramatically than men; that the more intense the disaster, the stronger this effect; and that the wealthier the women, the less they are affected by this phenomenon.
Even as women suffer disproportionately from climate change and natural disasters, the report says, “women are more often overlooked as potential contributors to climate change solutions,” and their ability to contribute to preparation, mitigation, and rehabilitation efforts is undervalued. The report recommends that countries develop National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) that involve women as contributors to adaptation processes and work toward “improving human security in the context of climate change from a gender perspective.”
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Weekly Reading
›“Women are key to the development challenge,” says Strategies for Promoting Gender Equity in Developing Countries, but “gender mainstreaming has been associated with more failures than gains.” Detailing findings from an April 2007 conference co-sponsored by the Wilson Center and the Inter-American Foundation, the report calls for a redesigned approach operating on multiple fronts. Blogging about the report, About.com’s Linda Lowen dubs the gap between women and men in developing countries a “Grand Canyon-like divide” compared to the “crack in the sidewalk” faced by Western women.
A Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on Angola—now Africa’s leading oil producer—tackles the familiar paradox of extreme poverty in resource-rich countries. Burdened by “an opaque financial system rife with corruption,” Angola’s leaky coffers are filling up with Chinese currency. As Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos put it, “China needs natural resources, and Angola wants development.” FastCompany.com’s “Special Report: China In Africa” criticizes the overwhelming Chinese presence in Africa: “The sub-Sahara is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.”
In Scientific American’s “Facing the Freshwater Crisis,” Peter Rogers writes that the demands of increasing population, along with increasingly frequent droughts due to climate change, signal rough waters ahead, and calls for major infrastructure investments to prevent catastrophe. Closer to home, Circle of Blue reports on a new era of water scarcity in the United States, and director Jim Thebaut’s documentary “Running Dry: The American Southwest” takes a look at the hard-hit region.
Pastoralists are socially marginalized in many countries, making them highly vulnerable to climate change despite their well-developed ability to adapt to changing conditions, reports the International Institute for Environment and Development in “Browsing on fences: Pastoral land rights, livelihoods and adaptation to climate change.” The paper notes that the “high rate of development intervention failure” has worsened the situation, and calls for giving pastoralists “a wider range of resources, agro-ecological as well as socio-economic,” to protect them.
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Weekly Reading
›An alert from USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network warns that despite generally good rains, “conflict, livestock disease, and high prices for cereals and other essential goods have minimized the extent to which pastoralists can benefit from these rains, undermining their recovery from drought and elevating their food insecurity, which is evidenced by alarming rates of child malnutrition in several areas.”
The UN Security Council held a special session on gender-based violence this week, and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof applauded the Council’s (belated) attention to the issue. ECSP recently sponsored an event on gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict situations.
East Timor’s citizens are demanding that the government revoke an MOU signed with an Indonesian company that would grant the company 100,000 hectares of land to plant sugarcane. -
‘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. -
Weekly Reading
›An article in Time magazine surveys the growing awareness of climate change’s links to traditional and nontraditional security threats.
“Unless some way can be found to stop the explosive rise in food prices generally, and rice prices in particular, we will see sharply higher mortality….This will not be mass starvation, with people dying in the streets, but it will be sharply higher infant and child mortality and weakened adults succumbing prematurely to infectious diseases,” said Peter Timmer, an expert on agriculture and development and a current Center for Global Development non-resident fellow, in an interview earlier this week.
A report on “How a Changing Climate Impacts Women,” a high-level meeting sponsored by Council of Women World Leaders, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, is now available online. Gro Harlem Bruntland and Mary Robinson, among other speakers, explained that women—who constitute the majority of the world’s poor—will be more vulnerable to many of climate change’s expected impacts, including reduced crop yields, the spread of infectious diseases, and increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters. -
Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in DRC Destroying Women, Families, Communities
›April 9, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffThe Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a film about sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), premiered yesterday on HBO. GBV is perhaps nowhere more prevalent than in the war-torn eastern provinces of the DRC, where untold numbers of women and girls—likely in the hundreds of thousands—have been raped, mutilated, and abused. GBV encompasses rape, sexual mutilation, and abduction into sexual slavery, and is often worsened by war and civil strife.
The Wilson Center’s Africa Program and Environmental Change and Security Program, in conjunction with Catholic Relief Services, recently hosted a discussion on GBV in the DRC. Kristin Kim Bart, a gender-based violence program officer at the International Rescue Committee, delivered a powerful presentation that outlined the nature and scope of the problem and offered suggestions for how to address it. She explained, “This rape is not about sexual desire—it is about the domination and decimation of the woman, her family, and entire community. And we have seen that it works as strategy of war again and again, and today in DRC.”
GBV can have severe health consequences, including traumatic fistula, severed limbs, transmission of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, and unwanted pregnancy, but “it is the social and psychological consequences of sexual violence that are sometimes the hardest to overcome,” said Kim Bart. “Survivors are stigmatized, shunned, rejected by their families and communities, and blamed for the violence they suffered.”
Despite this bleak picture, there is hope for women and girls who have suffered from GBV. NGOs like CARE and the International Rescue Committee have become increasingly active in providing health, psychological, and economic assistance to survivors, and governments and other donors have begun to make funding these services a higher priority. In addition, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) recently introduced the International Violence Against Women Act, which would make the prevention of violence against women a key priority in U.S. foreign assistance.
“The silver lining of this is that conflict opens a door to address and discuss what is usually a totally taboo subject,” said Kim Bart in an email to the New Security Beat. “And with the proper resources and technical expertise, we see small changes resulting from our work over time. We have witnessed communities begin to recognize the violence women and girls are facing [and] local health professionals treating survivors with care and compassion.” -
Reading Radar– A Weekly Roundup
›March 14, 2008 // By Wilson Center Staff“The relationship between natural resources and violent conflict is shaped to a large extent by the quality of the governance of those resources, which in turn is a correlate of good governance in general,” says In Control of Natural Wealth? Governing the resource-conflict dynamic, a report by the Bonn International Center for Conversion. “Furthermore, our results confirm the assumption that good (resource) governance increases state stability and, in countries that had experienced violent conflict, the duration of peace.”
Peri-Urban Water Conflicts: Supporting dialogue and negotiation, a report by the Netherlands’ IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, explores water conflicts on the outskirts of three developing country cities: Cochabamba, Bolivia; Chennai, India; and São Paolo, Brazil.
“Poverty Reduction and Millennium Development Goals: Recognizing Population, Health, and Environment Linkages in Rural Madagascar,” published in Medscape General Medicine, evaluates Madagascar’s progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals and discusses how the government’s plans for the country’s development address the linkages between poverty, population, health, and environment.
According to a study carried out by Michael Ross of UCLA, vast oil wealth tends to diminish women’s rights. “Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions,” writes Ross.
The Economist reports on the global effects of China’s growing hunger for natural resources—including oil, copper, grain, and timber. “Some non-governmental organisations worry that Chinese firms will ignore basic legal, environmental and labour standards in their rush to secure resources, leaving a trail of corruption, pollution and exploitation in their wake.”