POVERTY, GENDER, AND YOUTH PROGRAM
Seminar Series 

2007 Schedule

Seminars are held from 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm at the Population Council, One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (on Second Avenue between 47th & 48th Streets), in the John D. Rockefeller seminar room (JDR-A) on the 9th floor. For further information on seminars or to be added to the seminar announcement mail list, please contact seminar organizer Sajeda Amin. 

14 November 2007
Speaker: Ragui Assaad (bio)
Regional Director, West Asia and North Africa
Population Council
Title: "Poverty and the labor market in Egypt: A review of developments in the 1998–2006 period"

We examine in this talk the dynamics of the Egyptian labor market in terms of employment and pay over the period 1998–2006 in an attempt to understand their implications for the evolution of poverty during that period. The findings point to a marked improvement in labor market conditions both in terms of access to paid employment and higher earnings. Labor force participation rates are up, unemployment is down, and employment growth has generally grown much more rapidly than either the working age population or the labor force. Earnings have also increased for wage and salary workers, with the proportion of wage workers whose earnings fall below a pre-defined, poverty-related poverty line falling significantly from 62 percent in 1998 to 45 percent in 2006. Despite these improvements in labor market conditions, poverty rates appear to be stagnant at best. We attribute this relative stability in poverty rates to an increase in self-employment and unpaid labor in family enterprises, where earnings have declined in real terms. We use the longitudinal aspect of the data to examine transitions across different labor market states, including high and low pay jobs.

This talk is based on a paper written in conjunction with Rania Roushdy.

18 October 2007
Speaker: James F. Phillips (bio)
Senior Associate
Population Council
Title: "An introduction to baobab demography: Evidence-based reproductive and child health program development in Ghana”

By unanimous consensus of the United Nations, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) define global objectives for poverty reduction and health improvement by the target year 2015. Yet, at the mid-point in the time remaining from 2000 to 2015, no country in sub-Saharan Africa is on target with the maternal and child health MDGs. This presentation discusses an initiative in Ghana that reduced childhood mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters in less than a decade—a pace of survival improvement that national health programs must replicate if MDGs are to be attained. The approach used represents a synthesis of Michigan social research traditions—demographic experimental research developed by Ronald Freedman and colleagues for the Taichung experiment and open systems theory developed by Daniel Katz, Robert Khan, and colleagues for organizational research. A process of social, experimental, operational, and scaling-up research in Ghana marshals these traditions for evidence-based national health sector reform.

It is common knowledge that ancient and vibrant African social institutions structure community life by organizing systems of leadership, communication, consensus-building, risk sharing, and resource allocation. Yet these institutions and traditions are largely ignored by the planners, implementers, and funders of formal programs. Simple-to-implement procedures for social learning were used to change health service operations in three rural communities of northern Ghana. Drawing insight from exchanges that configure social networks in African villages, “under the baobab tree,” a process of dialogue, was used to clarify traditional institutional supports for organizing community-based reproductive and child health services. Dialogue and appraisal were combined with demographic research to calibrate program action as service systems were developed.

Following the “baobab” social engagement phase, a large-scale factorial experimental study was launched to assess the fertility and child-survival impact of alternative community health and family planning service strategies. By 1999, results indicated that childhood mortality and fertility rates were reduced in experimental areas, a finding that has expanded with passing time. By 2003, results showed that posting nurses to communities reduced childhood mortality rates by half; extending experimental services into comparison areas reproduced survival impact. Adding community- mobilization strategies and volunteer outreach to the community nursing approach led to a 15 percent reduction in fertility, corresponding to a one birth reduction in the TFR. General improvements in safe motherhood indicators produced an 80 percent reduction in maternal mortality in 12 years.

To examine the sustainability and transferability of the Navrongo model to other districts, a replication project was launched in Nkwanta District of the Volta Region in 2001. The research agenda shifted from demographics to open systems appraisal of the replication process. By 2003, Nkwanta findings demonstrated that the Navrongo service model could be transferred to a non-research setting thereby accelerating family planning and safe motherhood coverage and doubling immunization coverage. Guided by “baobab” approaches to adapting strategies to local circumstances, similar results were demonstrated in replication studies in Abura Asebu Kwamenkesi District of the Central region, and eventually repeated in five other district replication trials. Research coordinated by stakeholders at levels of the system generated consensus for operational change and support for systems reform. This process began when preliminary evidence showed that the Navrongo approach was producing results.

In 1999, the Government of Ghana adopted the Navrongo system as the national model for health service reform and launched a scaling-up program in 2000 that is known as the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative. Launched to accelerate implementation of the national poverty reduction policy, CHPS was operating in 109 of Ghana’s 138 districts by mid-2007, of which 38 had developed services for over a third of their populations. By mid-2007, nearly all 138 of Ghana’s districts had elements of the CHPS approach in at least one pilot “baobab process” start-up community.

22 March 2007
Speaker: Leticia Marteleto (offsite bio)
Research Investigator, Population Studies Center
University of Michigan
Title: "Childbearing and schooling in South Africa: Evidence from panel data"*

South Africa's total fertility rate is fewer than three births per woman and declining. However, we find that more than 35 percent of 20–22-year-old girls have given birth at least once. At the same time, school enrollment rates are high among young South Africans, but other dimensions of schooling are still lagging behind. In this talk, analyses of the relationships between schooling and early childbearing in South Africa will be presented. Information from the 2002 and 2005 waves of the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a survey of 4,800 young people in Cape Town, will be used. The results indicate the significance of family conditions and educational achievement for understanding the transition to parenthood. The data also point to the importance of measures of schooling that go beyond school enrollment, grade repetition, and years of schooling. Although the gender gap in schooling has closed, and youth are finishing primary education, other significant challenges remain in terms of providing quality education and well-being to South African youth.

* Authors: Leticia Marteleto, David Lam, and Vimal Ranchhod

16 January 2007
Speaker: David G. Victor (offsite bio)
Director, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, Stanford University
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Senior Fellow
Stanford Professor of Law, Woods Institute Senior Fellow
Title: "Global warming and wilderness"

Nearly all research and public debate about global warming focus on its impacts on the human environment such as crops, timber-producing forests, and coastal areas that are vulnerable to rising sea levels. Yet those impacts are likely to be the easiest to manage because the built environment is already managed heavily. This talk will focus on the area where the impacts from global warming are likely to be much greater—on remote, unmanaged parts of nature, or "wilderness." Global warming may require humans to intervene to manage these areas, thus ending the concept of wilderness as we know it. The talk will place this discussion within the context of current research on climate impacts as well as the efforts by historians for more than a century to probe the boundary between built environments, such as cities, and more remote landscapes in the country and wilderness.

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