by Jay Gribble, vice president, International Programs
With ICFP 2011 now underway, Wednesday morning’s plenary focused on the demographic dividend—the idea that through reducing fertility, the population structure can be modified and set the stage for economic development. Kenya and Indonesia were among the countries presented in the plenary.
Using data from the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, USAID’s Scott Radloff presented a population pyramid of Kenya’s age structure (see figure below); however, instead of showing the entire population in Kenya in one illustration, he showed the poorest quintile on the left side and the wealthiest quintile on the right. This presentation of data made me think of the demographic inequalities that exist within Kenya or any other country. In the poorest quintile, approximately 55 percent of the population was under age 15; in the wealthiest quintile, the population bulge was between ages 20 and 34—representing 35 percent of the quintile. Perhaps we can think of an emerging “middle-age bulge” rather than the “youth bulge” that we so frequently talk about. Whether we talk about Kenya or any other country, it’s important to remember that national-level statistics hide variations that exist within different segments of that population. And in response to these variations, policymakers need to target programs and interventions toward those most in need.
Source: 2008-2009 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey
I arrived at the sign-in table for the Youth Policy Communication workshop just before 9am, as dozens of youth from the U.S., Netherlands, Senegal, Liberia, Nigeria, Zambia, and other countries eagerly lined up to get their notebooks and join PRB in a day-long training session yesterday. “How to Participate, Communicate, and Advocate: A Pre-Conference Workshop to Increase Youth Participation in the 2011 ICFP” aimed to develop youth participants’ communications skills, whether it was developing a 60-second “elevator speech,” a PowerPoint presentation, or blog. Each of the youth involved are advocates for adolescent reproductive rights, working in their local communities, local NGOs, or large international organizations. All of us who were gathered in the room are dedicated to reaching policymakers with key messages to make the argument that small investments in family planning pay huge dividends for the wellbeing of societies. Since many ministers and policymakers are here in Dakar this week, what better way to kick off the conference than to hone messages that can reach this audience?
Participants take notes at the IFCP 2011 Youth Policy Communication Workshop. Photo: PRB.
In order to get from where we are (our current understanding and skills) to where we want to be (wider commitment and policy change), PRB focused most of the day brainstorming in small groups around four areas of communication: objectives, audiences, messages, and channels, in order to develop a policy communication strategy. Laying out objectives is the first step in the process but, as Alexandra Hervish, PRB policy analyst explained, it is often the most difficult step. What exactly do we want to achieve? What is the end goal? Discussion started from there. Next, the groups discussed audiences to reach — primary, secondary (those that influence your primary audience), and opposition. Then, specific, concise messages were developed, grounded in data and evidence. Finally, which communications channels to use was discussed: How will these messages be communicated? What tools will be used?
by Jay Gribble, vice president, International Programs
Two years after the first international family planning conference in Uganda, people have come from around the world again to focus on prioritizing family planning—what is the new evidence, what advocacy successes have transpired, and how do we continue to improve access to family planning. And sitting in the lobby, passing through the hallways, standing in the registration area, there is a sense of anticipation that some important things will be happening during the next few days. The International Family Planning Conference 2011 is hours from starting.
Participants receive Cycle Beads as part of their name badge holders when registering at ICFP 2011.
One of the key conference topics is youth. When we think about the fact that there are 1.8 billion people on the planet between the ages of 10 and 24—and that this number is expected to continue growing for at least 20 more years—we understand why addressing the needs of youth is critical to global development. With this wave of young people, access to information and services is critical so that they can avoid unplanned pregnancies, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections. Tapping into the strength of this young population will also be critical to economic development. And to help youth participants make the most of the conference, PRB has organized an all-day workshop on effective communications—developing messages, learning how to blog, effective presentation styles—all within the context of a communication strategy for getting and keeping youth issues on national and international development agendas.
From a demographic perspective, the global distribution of intrastate conflicts is not what it used to be. During the latter half of the 20th century, the states with the most youthful populations (median age of 25.0 years or less) were consistently the most at risk of being engaged in civil or ethnoreligious conflict (circumstances where either ethnic or religious factors, or both, come into play). However, this tight relationship has loosened over the past decade, with the propensity of conflict rising significantly for countries with intermediate age structures (median age 25.1 to 35.0 years) and actually dipping for those with youthful age structures.
Photo: antitezo/Flickr.
Why has this relationship changed? At least two underlying trends help explain the shift:
Over the last two decades, the deployment of peace support operations to countries with youthful populations has surged (described in a previous post on New Security Beat); and
Ethnoreligious conflicts have gradually, though noticeably, increased among a group of states with a median age greater than 25.0 years (including Thailand, Turkey, and Russia).
Countries represented by the latter trend share a demographic arrangement known as a “persistent minority youth bulge” – a rapidly growing, age-structurally youthful minority that is politically dissonant and regionally or residentially segregated within a more mature country-level population.
National level comparisons of total fertility rates tend to communicate the false impression of a world with demographically homogeneous states. When available, sub-national data present a very different picture.
I am a 20-year-old female and part of the largest generation of youth ever.
My generation is significant because of the specific health challenges that young people (ages 15 to 24) face—challenges that include health impacts from unsafe sex, coercion, violence, and tobacco, drug, or alcohol addiction. My generation has the highest unmet need for contraceptives and represents half of new HIV infections.
Although young people are vulnerable to many risks, we are also open to positive change. Life-long habits and attitudes are formed during childhood; therefore adolescence is an opportunity to influence beliefs and behaviors. If we are healthy, then we can be important contributors to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. If we are given opportunities, then we can improve human development and reduce poverty. Otherwise, the youth will represent a population of political instability and social unrest. If we act now by providing the right information and services, we can create positive change for the future. If we promote youth health issues and protect youth rights, then we can raise the youth to become educated, healthy, and productive adults.
In response to the growing importance of youth health, Youth Health and Rights Coalition held a discussion in June 2011 called “Why International Commitments Matter: The Importance and Implications for the Largest Generation Ever of Young People.” This discussion included panelists from International Women’s Health Coalition, PEPFAR, and a youth representative from Panama for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. One of the guest speakers used the example of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo to demonstrate the importance of international commitments. The 1994 conference at Cairo represents a significant change in population health priorities and perspective. The focus shifted away from contraceptives used to control population, and instead, the focus shifted to family planning as part of reproductive health and sexual health rights. At Cairo, population discussions expanded to include safe abortion, maternity care, emergency obstetric care, STI/HIV prevention, safe birthing practices, as well as education and economic opportunities. As a result of 1994 ICPD, global health initiatives adopted a human rights perspective, promoted human development, and applied gender mainstreaming.
As a rule, all taxis in Bamako are beaten up and about to fall apart. I am sitting in one of those when I ask the driver, Souleymane Togola, if he is setting aside money on a regular basis (a typically European or American question, by the way!) so that he will be able to replace his taxi one day in the foreseeable future. He explains that there is no way that he will be able to do so, since every cent he earns goes into the basic necessities for his family. His “family” being his wife, three children, and four students–close or distant relatives who have come to Bamako from their native villages to complete their secondary school education since the schools in their own villages do not offer the complete cycle of secondary education. Souleymane takes care of most needs of these students such as food, lodging, and transport, and sometimes clothes, school supplies, and pocket money. At present, there is very little reciprocity by the students’ own families. Souleymane’s wife transforms peanuts into a paste that is widely used in the Malian daily meal, which she sells in the neighborhood market, to supplement the family income. Souleymane hopes that in the future the students he supports will help him buy a new taxi, after they have finished school and hopefully found well-paying jobs.
On Dec. 16, 2010, the United States House of Representatives rejected that same bill.
Although Conor Williams of The Washington Post referred to it as “an easy vote”, the House blocked the proposed bill in a 241-166 vote. The bill would have required the U.S. Government to develop a strategy to reduce the practice of child marriage (with the ultimate goal of eliminating it entirely) and integrate prevention efforts into existing development programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would cost approximately $67 million over five years to implement.
Despite the disappointing outcome, efforts to end child marriage have garnered broad bipartisan support from Democrats and Republicans alike. Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Senator Olympia Snow (R-Maine) sponsored the bill in the Senate while Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) and Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) championed the legislation in the House of Representatives. This congressional commitment to protect the health and rights of millions of girls around the world remains strong, even after yesterday’s vote.
At the same time, there is strong global leadership in the fight to eliminate child marriage. The Elders—an independent group of global leaders brought together by Nelson Mandela who work together to address major humanitarian issues—continues to educate and engage national leaders, donors, and global institutions about the issue of child marriage. So far, The Elders have worked with CARE, Equality Now, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), International Women’s Health Coalition, NoVo Foundation, Population Council, Tostan, UNICEF, UNFPA, UN Foundation, Vital Voices, and The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, framing child marriage as a global development issue. This type of collaborative effort can have a real impact at the international, national, and local levels and hopefully will lead to the re-introduction and ratification of the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act next year. Indeed, the future looks promising.
by Alexandra Hervish, policy analyst, International Programs
Image used via Wikimedia Commons
On Dec. 1, 2010, the United States Senate unanimously passed the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act. The bill, introduced by Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Senator Olympia Snow (R-Maine), would require the U.S. Government to develop an integrated strategy to reduce the practice of child marriage with the ultimate goal of eliminating it entirely. In addition to increasing the government’s role to stop child marriage, the U.S. Department of State would be required to report on child marriage in its annual human rights report and integrate prevention efforts into existing development programs. With broad bipartisan support, the legislation now moves forward to the House of Representatives.
Currently, there are 51 million girls ages 15 to 19 married worldwide and an estimated 100 million girls will be married before age 18 over the next decade. Although the practice is prohibited by a number of international conventions and is a human rights violation, it remains widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East. At the same time, child marriage undermines nearly every Millennium Development Goal. It often marks the end of schooling for girls, leads to early childbearing and health risks for the mother and child, and perpetuates the cycle of poverty. These lifelong consequences threaten the economic, health, and social well-being of girls and women, families, communities, and nations.
While the international community has recognized child marriage as a serious development problem, many gender and youth advocates have called for greater political will and commitment from decision and policymakers to end the practice. This bill is an important step and highlights the U.S. Government’s commitment to protect the rights and change the lives of millions of women and girls around the world.
A recent NPR story on the biological basis for the sometimes confrontational, erratic, and seemingly irrational behavior of adolescents reminded me of my own experiences in raising adolescents (and gratitude that this particular stage of life is now behind me).
As Garrison Keillor recently reminded us, to be a parent is to live a life of constant silent prayer — prayer that everything will turn out all right. We know that adolescents don’t always exercise the best judgment, and now, at least, we have a better sense of why this is the case.
The Teen Brain – A Work In Progress
The physical evidence gathered from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), according to Harvard researchers Frances Jensen and David Urion, shows that the adolescent brain is only about 80 percent as developed as an adult brain.
In adolescence, the brain’s frontal lobe, responsible for such important functions as reasoning, planning and judgment, is not as well-connected to the rest of the brain by myelin, or “white matter,” as it is in an older individual. Because of the immaturity of their brains, adolescents are less capable than adults of rational thought processes.
White matter grows substantially over the course of adolescence, providing insulation that increasingly enables nerve signals to flow freely from one part of the brain to another. When the frontal lobe is fully connected to the rest of the brain, around age 25, the brain is more capable of “connecting the dots,” processing complex notions — such as that actions have consequences.
Brain development from age 5 to 20. Source: Paul Thompson, UCLA School of Medicine
Death and Disability Rates Double During Adolescence
If parents did not already intuit this, the difficulties that adolescents have in controlling their emotions and behaviors lead to a doubling in rates of death and disability during adolescence as compared with rates among younger children.
According to Ronald Dahl, Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, increased risk-taking, sensation-seeking, and reckless behavior lead adolescents to higher rates of traffic and other accidents, substance abuse, suicide, eating disorders, depression, violence, and risky sexual behaviors.
Although Dahl does not promote a mechanistic view of biology as destiny, he does note that the life trajectories established in youth can have a major impact on later life, and it is best to alter these trajectories in a positive direction while one can.
Youth Reproductive Health: A Politically Charged Issue
Adolescents who become unintentionally pregnant or become infected with HIV are certainly in for a life-altering experience, and usually not one that will be advantageous.
For at least 15 years, reproductive health advocates have called for “youth friendly services” to enable youth who are, or intend to become sexually active, to obtain the information and services they need to remain healthy.
The concept of reproductive health services for adolescents has been, and remains politically controversial. In 2004, ideologues charged that the Global Health Conference, an international gathering of health professionals held annually in Washington D.C., would be a platform that year to advocate for youth reproductive health services, instigating a last-minute withdrawal of federal funding for the conference from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
While the conference proceeded with funding from other donors, the action had a chilling effect on some federal grantees, who swept their websites clean of any potentially damaging information. U.S. programs for youth in developing countries supported under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, were firmly grounded in the “ABCs” — Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms, even as domestic research showed that abstinence-only programs had no long-term health benefits.
Meanwhile, in some African countries, one in five young women is HIV-positive and as many as one in two has been pregnant. In South Africa, 22 percent of young women attending antenatal care are both pregnant and HIV-positive. These astounding statistics have largely been unmoved by the infusion of PEPFAR and other funding for proscriptive youth reproductive health information and services. And politically shaped policies in the United States help maintain pregnancy, birth and abortion rates among adolescents that are the highest in the developed world.
An Evidence-Based Practice
How should societies respond to the knowledge that adolescents may not be capable of obeying our pleas to “just say no,” “abstain until marriage,” or “always use a condom”?
Adolescents are capable of understanding, if not fully controlling, their own immature thought processes. They need realistic, truly “youth-friendly” tools and resources to help them make better decisions and remain healthy and safe.
If, based on brain research, adults come to view adolescence less as a period of self-centered disobedience and more as a period of innate vulnerability, we will do a better job of providing youth with comprehensive, compassionate services and education. We will do whatever we can to help them navigate this vulnerable period without becoming pregnant or HIV-positive, or undergoing an unsafely performed abortion, and if such outcomes occur, we will aim to minimize the harmful life-altering consequences.
Our obligation is to protect as best we can, those who by virtue of their not-fully-realized intellectual capacity, are less able than we previously assumed to look out for themselves.
by Alexandra Hervish, policy analyst, International Programs
Recently, I participated in a PRB Discuss Online session (A Call to Action: Increasing Global Investments in Youth) with two of my esteemed colleagues, Jenny Truong from USAID and Brad Kerner from Save the Children. While the entire conversation was engaging and enthusiastic, one question was particularly important to me: “What strategies are needed to engage young people so that they are active participants of the ‘call’?”
When I think about this question, I immediately recall my days as a high school teacher. Although classroom observations by administrative personnel were routine, I found that the best insight about my teaching style came from my students. The feedback is often immediate, clear, and rarely requires a results framework (glazed eyes and blank stares are very powerful messages). Of course, I did not always agree with my students; but the fact that I listened to them and valued their opinions made our relationship much more productive.
From Washington, DC, hearing the diverse voices of young people from around the world is a bit more challenging—but not impossible. Below, I attempt to answer Mr. Awusabo-Asare’s question, offering some ideas for how we can incorporate young people’s views and voices into our daily work during the International Year of Youth:
Organize an exhibition that features the artistic work of young people from your local area. The exhibition can feature musical performances or visual art.
Host a brown bag or round table discussion with adults and young people to examine young people’s contributions to global issues and hear young people’s perspectives about development.
Create a web “information page” to promote the International Year of Youth and International Youth Day and to provide information about youth development issues (get some ideas from the International Year of Youth website).
Profile youth leaders. Provide an opportunity for young people to explain why they are a leader, an issue they are passionate about, and any success stories or challenges they have experienced (see UNICEF’s youth leadership profile form).
Sponsor a youth writing contest about a particular topic that is important to your organization’s mission. Encourage youth to create an article, play, short story, poem, or letter that focuses this theme (see the International Food Policy Research Institute’s youth writing contest here).
Call attention to a youth-led organization or initiative in a publication or on your website.
Organize a “digital storytelling” forum to encourage youth to tell their stories through the use of multimedia. Digital storytelling can include web-based stories, interactive stories, narrative hypertexts, audio clips, and short films (listen to a young person’s “Digital Diary” about AIDS in Jamaica here).
Visit a youth center or project that targets young people on your next trip to the field. Provide young people with an opportunity to discuss issues that are important to them and share these ideas with your co-workers, policymakers, and other practitioners.
Increase awareness about issues that are important to young people. Create resources for educators, policymakers, advocates, and students based on information that is collected from young people.
This list is hardly exhaustive. That being said, I encourage you to contribute your own creative ideas or share examples from your work. It is my hope that during the International Year of Youth and beyond August 12, 2011, we will find new ways to incorporate the energy and enthusiasm of youth into development initiatives.
