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Prospects for Gender Parity in UN Peacekeeping Forces, Evaluating Girls’ Empowerment Efforts
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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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Coastal Resource Management, Family Planning Integration Build Resilience in Madagascar and The Gambia
›Growing awareness of the connected challenges of natural resource management, economic growth, and human health has encouraged more integrated models of international development. The experience of two organizations – TRY Oyster Women’s Association, based in The Gambia, and Blue Ventures, based in Madagascar – demonstrates the success of a community-based approach to building resilience, enabling communities to bounce back from adversity and establish a long-term basis for development. [Video Below]
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Taliban Return Threatens Gains in Girls’ Education, Says Razia Jan
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“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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Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti on Opportunities for Transatlantic Cooperation on Climate Change, Energy
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“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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Young People Are Transforming Afghanistan, Says Maiwand Rahyab
›“I would like to challenge the conventional and popular perceptions about Afghanistan and expose a deeper story of commitment and determination, of struggle and success, of hope and change,” says Counterpart International’s Maiwand Rahyab in this week’s podcast.
Today – almost 12 years after the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan – is the next generation of Afghans better off? With 26 percent of girls giving birth before age 18, 1 in 10 Afghan children dying before the age of five, and young people leaving the country in large numbers, this seems like a fair question.
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Mark Montgomery: More Data on Urban-to-Urban Migration Needed
›“If I ask you to consider the image in your mind of a migrant girl, probably you – like me – have a vision of a girl embarking from a rural village on a trek to the city,” says Mark Montgomery of the Population Council in this week’s podcast. But, “Is that what the empirical realities show?”
Perhaps not: “It is far more common for urban and migrant girls to come from other cities and towns than it is for them to come from rural villages,” he explains.
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Vulnerability View: GAIN Index Rates Climate Change Preparedness
›According to the UN, the planet has warmed faster since the turn of the century than any other period on record. Sea-level rise has also increased pace to 0.12 inches a year – almost double the rate observed during the 20th century. This “unprecedented” rate of climate change is expected to disproportionally impact developing countries, whose socio-economic, political, and physical landscapes make them particularly vulnerable to the effects. The GAIN Index, an interactive mapping tool recently acquired by the University of Notre Dame, can help policymakers prepare for these changes by comparing the climate change vulnerability and readiness of countries around the world.
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Afghanistan’s Youth and the Risks of Taliban Return [Part One]
›As the United States approaches its 2014 deadline for military withdrawal from Afghanistan, one often overshadowed aspect of the conflict is the hard-won progress made by previously marginalized segments of the Afghan population, particularly women, girls, and young people.[Video Below]
Showing posts by Jacob Glass.
