Showing posts from category population.
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Stephanie Hanson Reports on PHE in Agricultural Development and Rwanda’s ‘One Acre Fund’
›Driving from Kigali into rural Rwanda, the hills that flank either side of the paved road are covered with bananas, maize, coffee, and beans under cultivation. Most Rwandans are farmers, using any bit of available land to feed their families and generate income. In this country—the most densely populated in Africa—little arable land is left untended.
My organization, One Acre Fund, offers loans and education to smallholder farmers in Kenya and Rwanda. We work with 18,000 farmers in three districts in the southwestern and western part of Rwanda, where we are know as Tubura, which means “multiply” in Kinyarwanda.
Though One Acre Fund is not a traditional population, health, and environment (PHE) project, agricultural development work inherently is PHE work, particularly in Rwanda, which faces significant population and environment challenges.
Our farmers have small plots of land because Rwanda’s population density is so high—375 people per square kilometer, higher than Japan—leaving only .13 hectares of arable land per person. They struggle to grow enough food because it’s difficult to support a big family on a small piece of land, especially without access to high-quality seed and fertilizer.
When farmers don’t grow enough to ensure basic food security for their families, their children are malnourished, which makes them more susceptible to illness.
Finally, agriculture both depends on and affects the environment. Farmers need favorable growing conditions—good soil and adequate rainfall—for a good harvest. Sustainable agriculture practices, such as composting and preventing soil erosion, ensure the environment remains healthy to support future farming.One Acre Fund is acutely aware of the challenges that our farmers face due to high population density, food insecurity, and environmental degradation. We offer a service model that addresses all the needs of a smallholder farmer: financing, farm inputs, education, and market access.
When a farmer enrolls with One Acre Fund in Rwanda, she joins as part of a group of 6-15 farmers. She receives an in-kind loan of seed and fertilizer, which is guaranteed by her group members. One Acre Fund delivers this seed and fertilizer to a market point within two kilometers of where she lives. A field officer provides in-field training on composting, techniques to prevent soil erosion, land preparation, planting, fertilizer application, and weeding.
Over the course of the season, the field officer monitors the farmer’s fields. At the end of the season, he trains her on how to harvest and store her crop. One Acre Fund also offers a harvest buyback program that farmers can choose to participate in.
On average, One Acre Fund farmers double their farm income per acre in one growing season. Ninety-eight percent of our farmers repay their loans, which are due several weeks after harvest.
With their increased harvests, One Acre Fund farmers are able to feed their children, which reduces malnutrition. Anecdotally, we also know that One Acre Fund children experience less illness; this year, we are working to incorporate health indicators into our monitoring and evaluation work.
At a harvest buyback last month, I met many farmers who had benefited from One Acre Fund’s services. One woman, Tamar, had sold 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of beans at the previous season’s buyback, which earned her roughly 132,000 Rwandan francs ($235 USD). She told me that she was using the money to build a bigger home for the six of her ten children who lived at home.However, Tamar really wanted to buy a cow, but she knew that she would not earn enough money this year to afford one. With so many children, she struggled to earn enough money to invest in something that might generate additional income for her and her family.
Another woman, Medeatrice, had also made $235 USD from the sale of her beans. With that income, she had opened a small shop with her husband in a nearby market. Unusually for Rwanda, where the average woman has 5.5 children, Medeatrice only had one, a three-year old boy named Prince. I asked her if she planned to have more children.
“I only want one more child,” she told me. “If I only have two children, it is easy to educate and to take care of them.”
The Rwandan government has invested in educating its population on family planning, but it will take time for birth rates to drop. For now, families with five, six, or nine children are not uncommon.
However, research shows that when women have increased access to economic opportunities, birth rates drop. One Acre Fund is focused on helping Rwanda’s families increase their harvests so that they not only have enough to eat, but they can start investing in their futures.
Guest Contributor Stephanie Hanson is the director of policy and outreach at One Acre Fund.
Photo Credit: Rwanda’s hills and Medeatrice, courtesy of Stephanie Hanson. -
Local Case Studies of Population-Environment Connections
›“The role of intergenerational transfers, land, and education in fertility transition in rural Kenya: the case of Nyeri district” in Population & Environment by Karina M. Shreffler and F. Nii-Amoo Dodoo, explores the reasons for a dramatic and unexpected decline in fertility in rural Kenya. In one province, total fertility rate (TFR) declined from 8.4 to 3.7, from 1978 to 1998. The study found numerous contributing factors for this decline, which occurred more quickly and earlier than demographers expected, but land productivity seemed to be the primary motivator. A growing population and the tradition of dividing family land among sons made continuing to have large families unrealistic for these Kenyan families. “Family planning is, therefore, not the primary causal explanation for limiting the number of children, but rather serves to help families attain their ideal family sizes,” the authors conclude.Also in Population & Environment, “Impacts of population change on vulnerability and the capacity to adapt to climate change and variability: a typology based on lessons from ‘a hard country,’” by Robert McLeman, explores the potential for human communities to adapt to climate change. The article centers on a region in Ontario that is experiencing changes in both local climatic conditions and demographics. The study finds that demographic change can have both an adverse and positive effect on the ability of a community to successfully adapt to climate change and highlights the importance of social networks and social capital to a community’s resilience or vulnerability. McLeman also presents a new typology that he hopes will “serve the purpose of drawing greater attention to the degree to which adaptive capacity is responsive to population and demographic change.”
SpringerLink offers free access to both these articles through August 15. -
An “Aye” for an “Aye”: Everyone Has a Right to Be Counted
›July 12, 2010 // By Kayly Ober
Around the world, countries from Afghanistan to Papua New Guinea to the United States are taking part in their decadal census, leading the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) to select the theme “Everyone Counts” for World Population Day 2010, which was celebrated on July 11.
Everyone has the right to be counted, because “censuses and population data play a critical role in development and humanitarian response and recovery,” said UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid in her World Population Day message. Obaid added that “with quality data we can better track and make greater progress to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and promote and protect the dignity and human rights of all people,” especially among vulnerable populations like women, girls, the poor, and the marginalized.
USAID similarly supports quality data collection, which it says plays a critical role in advancing voluntary family planning in the developing world. For the last 25 years, USAID has funded the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program, which collaborates with national health ministries to collect data on family planning, child and maternal health, disease prevalence, and other health indicators.
This invaluable data is made freely available for public use, which can foster new research in the field and stimulate innovative approaches to addressing public health issues. Praising the DHS program, Gapminder Foundation Director Hans Rosling told a Wilson Center audience last year that “statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them.”
Accurate census counts are also important elements of “good governance, transparency and accountability,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon in his World Population Day message. “Population data helps leaders and policy-makers to make informed decisions about policies and programmes to reduce poverty and hunger, and advance education, health and gender equality,” he said.
But no one is suggesting that coming up with reliable population data is an easy task. As Sean Peoples and Elizabeth Leahy point out in the May/June 2009 issue of World Watch magazine, issuing population projections can be a risky business:In the 2008 Revision of World Population Prospects, the UN Population Division projects that our planet will grow to 9.15 billion people by 2050. Yet this medium-variant projection is just one of several possible scenarios released in this latest round of number crunching. The low- and high-variant projections—7.96 billion and 10.5 billion, respectively—could instead become reality, given uncertainties in the developing world due to factors such as inconsistent data collection, weak health system infrastructure, and low government capacity.
The goal, then, is to make sure everyone counts. -
Is the Third Pole the Next Site for Water Crisis?
›July 1, 2010 // By Tara InnesThe Hindu-Kush Himalaya area may host future water crises as glaciers melt, population rapidly increases, and competition over scarce water resources intensifies, says a recent report from the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College.
Himalayan glaciers – often called the “third pole” because they house the greatest volume of frozen water outside the polar regions – provide the headwaters for 10 major river systems in Asia. Despite clear evidence that the HKH glaciers are receding, recent controversy over the 2007 IPCC report has sidetracked the discussion from the degree of glacial melt and its impacts on the surrounding environment.
Glacial melt sends more water into the rivers in the rainy season, and less water in the dry season. This variability will increase both floods and droughts, which in turn can damage agriculture and create food shortages. Melting glaciers can also create “glacial lakes” that are prone to sudden bursting, causing disastrous flooding downstream (ppt).
According to The Waters of the Third Pole: Sources of Threat, Sources of Survival, climate change is already having significant impacts in the Himalayan region, intensifying natural disasters and the variability of the summer monsoon rains, and increasing the number of displaced people and government attempts to secure water supplies from its neighbors.
Rivers of People: Environmental Migrants
One of the major consequences, the report argues, could be “growing numbers of environmental migrants,” which the authors define as “people moving away from drying or degraded farmland or fisheries, and the millions displaced by ever-larger dams and river-diversion projects”—and including the Chinese government’s forced “‘re-location of people from ecologically fragile regions.”
Today, about 30 million (15 percent) of the world’s migrants are from the Himalayan region, the report says, warning that “in the next decade, should river flows reduce significantly, migration out of irrigated areas could be massive.” But the authors acknowledge that reliable estimates are rare – a problem pointed out in The New Security Beat.
However, it is clear that the region’s population is growing and urbanizing rapidly: By 2025, one-half of all Asians will live in cities, whereas one generation ago, the figure was one in 10. This incredible shift, says the report, places “some of the greatest pressures on water through increased demand and pollution.”
Water War or Water Peace?
The Waters of the Third Pole warns that growing scarcity could “raise the risk of conflict in a region already fraught with cross-border tensions.” While interstate tensions over water have been minimal to date, they could potentially increase in areas where significant percentages of river flow originate outside of a country’s borders – in 2005 Bangladesh relied on trans-boundary water supplies for 91 percent of its river flow, Pakistan for 76 percent, and India for 34 percent. Intra-state conflict is also expected to increase. The report notes, “In China alone, it has been reported that domestic uprisings have continued to increase in protest about water management or water-quality issues.”
However, the water-conflict link remains shaky within the scholarly community. As Dabelko recently told Diane Rehm about the region, “There are prospects for tensions, but quite frankly, water is difficult to [obtain] through war. It’s hard to pick it up and take it home.”
The report points out some areas in which water may actually pose an opportunity for regional cooperation rather than conflict, such as developing knowledge-sharing networks like the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development. The presence of such networks may help establish channels of communication and aid in diffusing other cross-border tensions. But the authors caution that “environmental cooperation generally lags far behind economic cooperation in the HKH region.”
The report concludes that policymakers must move the region higher on the humanitarian agenda; construct a framework for action that includes non-intrusive international support; and more thoroughly address knowledge and communication gaps.
Photo Credit: “Annapurna ways, Nepal,” courtesy of flickr user rakustow. -
U.S. Navy Task Force on Implications of Climate Change
›What about climate change will impact us? That’s the question the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change is trying to answer. Rear Admiral David Titley explains the task force’s objectives in this interview by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at their recent “Climate Change and National Security” event on the Hill.
The task force is part of the military’s recent efforts to try to better understand what climate change will mean for the armed forces, from rising sea levels and ocean acidification to changing precipitation patterns. In the interview, Admiral Titley points out that for the Navy in particular, it is important to understand and anticipate what changes may occur since so many affect the maritime environment.
The Navy’s biggest near-term concern is the Arctic, where Admiral Titley says they expect to face significant periods of almost completely open ocean during the next two to three decades. “That has huge implications,” says Titley, “since as we all know the Arctic is in fact an ocean and we are the United States Navy. So that will be an ocean that we will be called upon to be present in that right now we’re not.”
Longer term, the admiral points to resource scarcity and access issues and sea level rise (potentially 1-2 meters) as the most important contributing factors to instability, particularly in places like Asia, where even small changes can have huge impacts on the stability of certain countries. The sum of these parts plus population growth, an intersection we examine here at The New Security Beat, is something that deserves more attention, according to Titley. “The combination of climate, water, demographics, natural resources – the interplay of all those – I think needs to be looked at,” he says.
Check out the AGU site for more information, including an interview with Jeffrey Mazo – whose book Climate Conflict we recently reviewed – discussing climate change winners and losers and the developing world (hint: the developing world are the losers).
Sources: American Geophysical Union, New York Times.
Video Credit: “What does Climate Change mean for the US Navy?” courtesy of YouTube user AGUvideos. -
‘Interview:’ Educate Girls, Boys, To Meet the Population Challenge, Say Pakistan’s Leading Demographers
›June 25, 2010 // By Russell SticklorPakistan is at a major demographic crossroads. With a youth-heavy population of some 180 million and an annual population growth rate around 2 percent, the country’s population is projected to swell to roughly 335 million by mid-century. Such explosive growth raises major questions about Pakistan’s future, from looming food and water scarcity, to yawning inequalities in the nation’s educational and economic systems. Some warn that these problems threaten to drive a new generation of disaffected Pakistani youth toward political and religious radicalization.
Recently, I asked a number of leading Pakistani demographers visiting the Wilson Center how their country could best achieve more sustainable population growth rates and effectively harness the economic potential of Pakistani youth.
Educate Girls
Zeba Sathar, Pakistan country director for the Population Council in Islamabad, told me empowering girls through education represents one of the most important means of reducing the total fertility rate, which currently stands at four. “When children are educated—particularly when girls are educated—they take care of their fertility and their family size themselves,” Sathar said.
Yet securing educational opportunity for Pakistani girls has often been an uphill battle, largely due to entrenched social norms. Yasmeen Sabeeh Qazi, Karachi-based senior country adviser for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Population Program in Pakistan, pointed out that a traditional preference for male children in Pakistani society has meant girls do not often receive the same level of family resources as males. This phenomenon has historically fed gender inequality, she said.
“Since boys are preferred, girls are not given the same kind of attention and nutrition, especially in the poorer and less-educated families,” Qazi told me. “But as the education level goes up, you see that this divide starts narrowing.” For Qazi, one of the keys to heightening educational access for girls is to increase both the quantity and quality of schools in rural districts, where two-thirds of Pakistanis live.
Decentralize Family Planning Services
Others I spoke with emphasized improving access to reproductive health and family planning services in rural and urban areas. The federal government’s relatively recent move to delegate operational authority for family planning services to the provincial or district level has encouraged many, such as Dr. Tufail Muhammad with the Pakistan Pediatric Association’s Child Rights & Abuse Committee in Peshawar.
Muhammad said the ongoing decentralization—which he described as “a major paradigm shift”—is meant to increase ownership of population planning policies at the local level, and therefore lead to more effective implementation because “the responsibility will be directly with the provincial government.” Once capacity is established at the local level to design and implement those policies, Muhammad added, “supervisors, administrators, and policymakers will be very close to [family planning] services.”
Manage the “Youth Bulge”
Yet despite the fact that both the public and private sectors are taking steps to address Pakistan’s growth issues, the population crunch will intensify before it potentially eases. Even assuming that greater educational opportunity for girls and increased local control over family planning services help drop Pakistan’s total fertility rate, the sheer size of the current youth bulge—two-thirds of the country’s population is under age 30—means population issues will inform every aspect of Pakistani society for decades to come.
In discussing the current state of Pakistan’s education system, some speakers also asserted that the influence of madrassas, or religious schools, over the student-aged population has often been overstated. Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan’s former finance member and recent senior scholar at the Wilson Center, said during the panel discussion that inaccurate enrollment estimates created “the impression that the system is now dominated” by those institutions. He noted that more recent figures place madrassa enrollment at just five percent of the total student population.
With a majority of Pakistani students enrolled in regular public schools, he insisted that “public policy in Pakistan has to focus on public education” in order to prevent those students from slipping through the cracks. The problem, he added, was that “the education that they are receiving is pretty bad. It really does not prepare them to be active participants in the workforce and contribute to the economic development of the country.”
Still, most of the experts sounded optimistic about Pakistan’s potential to mitigate some of the adverse effects associated with the near-doubling of the country’s population during the next 40 years. By starting to more openly address an issue that the government and the powerful Pakistani media have long preferred to ignore, they seemed to agree the country is taking a big step in dealing head-on with its looming demographic challenges.
“I don’t look at the Pakistani population as a burden, but rather as an asset,” remarked Burki. “But it has to be managed.”
Photo Credit: “School Girls Talk in Islamabad,” courtesy of flickr user Documentally. -
‘Dialogue Television’ Explores Pakistan’s Population Challenge
›It’s difficult to imagine a scenario for a stable and peaceful world that doesn’t involve a stable and peaceful Pakistan. The country is among the world’s most populous and is also home to the world’s second largest Muslim population, making it the only Muslim majority nuclear state. Its history has been characterized by periods of military rule, political instability, and regional conflicts. This week on dialogue host John Milewski explores the nation’s changing demographics and what they may tell us about near and long term prospects for this vital U.S. ally with guests Michael Kugelman, Zeba Sathar, and Mehtab Karim.
Watch above or on MHz Worldview.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Wilson Center’s Asia Program. Much of his recent research and programming focus has involved demographics in Pakistan. He is a regular contributor to Dawn, one of Pakistan’s major English language newspapers.
Zeba Sathar is Pakistan country director at the Population Council in Islamabad. Prior to joining the council, she was chief of research in demography at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and a consultant with the World Bank.
Mehtab Karim is a distinguished senior fellow and affiliated professor with the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Additionally, he is a senior research fellow at the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, specializing in global Muslim demographics. Previously, he was a professor of demography at Aga Khan University in Karachi.
Note: A QuickTime plug-in may be required to launch the video. -
Brookings’ “Taking Stock of the Youth Challenge in the Middle East”
›Samantha Constant and Mary Kraetsch of the Brookings Institution have created a handy visual aid to understanding the Middle East’s demographics. The interactive flash graphic shows select economic and demographic information as you scroll over each country, including GDP per capita, youth percentage of the population, secondary school enrollment rate, and unemployment figures. Clicking on each country brings up a more detailed fact sheet that breaks down economic, education, and demographic statistics.
The companion write-up to the map stresses the importance of these figures to youth-inclusive development. Citing the 2009 UN Arab Human Development Report, the authors point out that the region will need to create about 51 million jobs by 2020 to account for youth entering the work force and already high unemployment rates.
The report does however shy away from some of the Middle East’s most difficult demographic challenges. Iraq and the West Bank are mentioned as areas that will continue to have large youth bulges, but Yemen, which has far and away the most troubling demographics in the region, is not mentioned at all. Adding “total fertility rate” as a statistic, which shows the average number of children born to an average woman over her lifetime, might illustrate these trouble areas more clearly. As illustrated by data from the Population Reference Bureau, Yemen (5.5), the Palestinian Territory (4.6), and Iraq (4.4) all have noticeably higher total fertility rates than other countries in the region, which helps explain why their demographic problems will continue.
The inclusion of total fertility rates would also help make a stronger argument for closer attention to be paid to women’s rights issues, as generally better women’s rights translates to lower total fertility rates, which help draw down youth bulges over time. The report only briefly mentions that more research is needed to create better paths for young women to become productive members of society with “greater career opportunities beyond traditional roles.”
The map does mention that information will be updated on a regular basis so it is worth checking back to see what it added to this useful primer.
Sources: The Brookings Institution, Population Reference Bureau.
Interactive Map: “Understanding the Generation in Waiting” courtesy of The Brookings Institution.
