Sustainable motherhood?
In stitching these words together on Mother's Day weekend, my goal is to stress the value of education and health care for young women as a means of fostering sustainable human progress in poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa.
Many countries there have seen extraordinary strides (read David Brooks), but face the extraordinary social turbulence that can accompany rapid change.
The example of the moment, of course, is the horrific Boko Haram school raid and threat to sell more than 200 kidnapped girls. (As Rick Gladstone reported, one under-appreciated driver of this act is that "the buying and selling of women and children, particularly young girls, has long been an underlying problem.")
The intent of these terrorists is to deter families from educating girls, and is all the more terrible because it's already so hard for girls to continue in education in the region beyond the primary level. Just one of many impediments is the lack of toilets, which is a particularly important issue as girls enter their teen years.
Here are two areas that matter:
Maternal health is greatly facilitated by the same family planning capacity that can help a woman manage her fertility. When family planning came up at the Vatican conference on sustainable development that I attended last week, it was not just in the context of population growth. It is a means of fostering healthier and more resilient communities, which is particularly important in places that are implicitly vulnerable to climate hazards like severe drought. The World Health Organization has some helpful graphics showing the continuing toll (800 women dying daily of complications from pregnancy or childbirth) and ways to save lives.
The Woodrow Wilson Center held an event last year summarizing findings and policy options related to the role of family planning in improving maternal health.
Here's a taped discussion:
Secondary-level education for girls is critical for advancing the prospects for young women, yet is still the exception in many developing countries. (The girls kidnapped in Nigeria were in high school.) Invaluable research by Wolfgang Lutz and others at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria has demonstrated this repeatedly. The core work was laid out in an important 2011 paper in Science: Global Human Capital: Integrating Education and Population. Make sure to explore the interactive graphics on demographics and education access.
Here's an excerpt from a 2011 article on his work:
Universal secondary female education could…lower population growth and break the vicious circle of poverty and high population growth. During the 1950s Mauritius experienced population growth rates of more than 3 percent a year. Following a strong but strictly voluntary family planning program launched by the government during the 1960s, the total fertility rate fell from more than 6 to less than 3, one of the world's most impressive fertility declines.
The reason for this success, researchers believe, is that by 1962 more than 80 percent of all young women could read and write: a factor that increased access to family planning. Subsequently Mauritius experienced the benefit of the so-called demographic bonus through a decline in youth dependency combined with still very low old age dependency, resulting in a period of economic growth, investments in infrastructure, and further education. In Ethiopia women without education have on average 6 children, whereas those with a least junior secondary education have only 2.
On both fronts, there are great opportunities to make progress and make the efforts of Boko Haram and its ilk a last gasp instead of a building threat.
In parting, here's an excerpt from "No Woman No Cry" — a 2010 documentary on maternal health problems around the world directed by Christy Turlington Burns:
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