Showing posts by Josephine Kim.
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PRB Maps the PHE World
›The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has created an interactive Google map that highlights population, health, and environmental programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) Map shows the locations of projects that combine improved health services, sustainable natural resource management, and ecosystem conservation.
According to PRB’s Maura Graff and Jason Bremner, “the map aims to give viewers both a sense of the scale of current PHE integration efforts, and specific information about individual organizations, projects, and their location.”
Clicking on a marker will reveal the title of a PHE program, a short description of its goals and outcomes, a link to its website, and the occasional picture of the project in action. A list on the left alphabetically catalogs all the projects based on region.
The map also provides the opportunity for those working on PHE projects in the field to find nearby projects in order to share experiences. For example, in Ethiopia, Population Media Center and DSW’s Youth to Youth could share lessons learned about disseminating information on the reduction of female genital mutilation, the importance of providing family planning services to young married couples, and the linkage between reduced family size and enhanced stewardship of social and natural resources.
Communities that understand how population, health, and environment are intertwined are more engaged and energized to make a difference. In a video interview with ECSP, Roger-Mark De Souza, director of foundation and corporate relations at the Sierra Club, explains that PHE projects are so effective because solutions to a community’s liked problems demand this logical integration. For example, while learning about the health benefits of birth spacing, father and mothers also learn how their family planning decisions can improve the economic and environmental prospects of the community.
Just like PHE projects themselves, the map is a work in progress; PRB is seeking to add PHE projects that are still active or ended after 2005. Please contact Maura Graff if you would like to add a project.
Josephine Kim is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. -
WomanStats Maps Gender-Linked Security Issues
›The WomanStats Project has published an array of maps depicting the challenges and conditions facing women worldwide today. The maps, which serve as a visual representation of the project’s database, cover gender-linked security issues such as: son preference and sex ratio, physical security, inequity in family law, human trafficking, polygamy, maternal mortality, discrepancy in education, government participation, intermingling between the sexes in public, and required dress codes.
These maps help researchers visually see correlations between two or more map themes. For example, Women’s Physical Security is moderately correlated to fertility rate, while Sex Ratio/Son Preference is not highly correlated to any other measures tested, such as women in the labor force, democracy, political rights, and economic rights. In addition to maps, the WomanStats Project’s database was used to create graphs that compare the scale values of Physical Security Clusters and Son Preference/Sex Ratio Distributions to the number of countries the scale level affected.
Some of the maps would benefit from additional functionality. For example, the “Women’s Physical Security” map broadly categorizes states based on high, medium, and low levels of security, but the legend is not linked to the definitions of these classifications. Another useful addition would be data tables that rank the countries for each theme. Such enhancements would better enable the viewer to perform empirical and spatial analysis of the status of women.
Overall, the WomanStats Project maps offer the viewer engaging visual depictions of how women’s lives vary across the world, and how countries compare to each other in terms of women’s security.
Josephine Kim is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.
Map and graph used courtesy of the WomanStats Project.
