PRB Webcasts

Nafis Sadik has had an unequaled international career as a champion of women's reproductive health and rights. Sadik joined the United Nations in 1971 and served from 1987 to 2000 as the executive director for UNFPA, becoming the first woman to head one of the United Nations' major agencies. Since 2001, she has served as the Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific for the UN Secretary General. Sadik has consistently called attention to the importance of addressing the needs of women, and of involving women directly in making and carrying out development policy, particularly important for population policies and programs. Sadik talked with PRB as part of PRB's celebration of the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, and discussed the accomplishments and unfinished work for women she has witnessed in her career, how HIV/AIDS affects women, the importance of mentors and parental support in her life, and how reproductive health is crucial to women's rights and well-being.

Kakenya Ntaiya was born in a rural village in southern Kenya, one of eight children. When she was 5 years old, her parents arranged an engagement to a local boy. She was to be circumcised before becoming a teenager to signify the end of her education and the start of married life. It seemed that a future of working on her rural family farm was set. But she made a deal with her father: She would agree to be circumcised only if he would allow her to finish high school. He agreed. She then negotiated with the village elders to do what no girl had done before: leave her village to go to college in the United States. Kakenya is now finishing her Ph.D. in education. Kakenya was the first youth adviser to the United Nations Population Fund, and she has traveled around the world to speak on the importance of educating girls, particularly as a means to fight the practices of female genital mutilation and child marriage. And, she started the only primary school for girls in her home region. The school has 95 girls in grades 4 through 6 and six teachers, and accepts 30 new girls each year. In this interview, Ntaiya discusses the opportunities that come with education for girls in her community, the effects of early marriage on girls' livelihoods, and how the practice of FGM/C has changed in Kenya. (Passed by Kenya's parliament in 2001, the Children's Act outlaws various forms of violation against children, including FGM, for females 18 and younger.)

Susan Cutter is a distinguished professor of geography at the University of South Carolina where she directs the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. Cutter researches what makes people and the places where they live vulnerable to extreme events such as hurricanes or tornadoes, and how vulnerability and resilience are measured, monitored, and assessed. In this interview, Cutter discusses disaster vulnerability and resilience, how these are measured, and how their measurement helps inform disaster preparedness and recovery.

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in Florida's history. Four hurricanes caused $45 billion in damages and widespread population displacement. About 1.6 million people evacuated their homes—and many had to more than once in the year. Based on sample surveys with 11,000 residents in heavily hit areas, Stanley Smith has found new results on how the hurricanes affected communities, the demographic impact of evacuation, and what lessons these effects have for future disaster relief. In this interview, Smith discusses the demographic impact of the 2004 Florida hurricanes, the ensuing evacuations, and how these effects compare with Hurricane Katrina, along with recommendations for future disaster and evacuation preparedness based on his research.

A wide range of antipoverty programs have been in place in the United States for decades, and millions of Americans depend on them. How effective have these programs been? Are they wasteful or efficient? In this interview, Robert Moffitt, the Krieger-Eisenhower professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, dicusses the various types of U.S. antipoverty programs and policies and how the current recession will affect these programs.

Family planning and reproductive health is an important, and often overlooked, component of poverty reduction. To study this connection further, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation supported the creation of the PopPov Research Network, a group of academic researchers and funders that examine how population issues affect economic well-being. By studying how population policies can be used for poverty reduction and economic growth, the network aims to increase the interest of these issues within the academic and the funding community.

In this interview, Sara Seims, program director of the Population Program at the Hewlett Foundation, discusses the PopPov Network, ongoing research on population and poverty, links between family planning and poverty reduction, and how this research will be used in poverty reduction programs and policy.

Working parents in the United States face complex decisions on the type of care to provide for their children while they are at work, and child care costs continue to rise. As more families include working mothers, child care has become the norm in the United States. Almost two-thirds of preschoolers are in some kind of regular child care arrangement. The U.S. Census Bureau's recent report "Who's Minding the Kids?" tracks data on child care arrangements by income level, race/ethnicity, family arrangement, and more. The report provides an analysis of data released in February 2008. These data show the number and characteristics of children in different types of child care arrangements, the differences between child care for preschoolers and older children, and the extent of self-care. Information is also provided about the cost of child care arrangements and the number of fathers providing care for their children. Additionally, the report examines new topics such as summer child care arrangements for both preschoolers and grade-schoolers.

In this interview, Lynda Laughlin, a family demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau and author of the report, discusses trends in child care over the past 20 years, how families deal with increasing facility-based care costs, and how extended families still play an integral role in caring for children.

There are more than 16 million children in immigrant families in the United States, and they are one of the most rapidly growing segments of the U.S. population. Most are U.S. citizens who were born in the United States to foreign-born parents. They face complex cultural and social challenges, navigating between their parents' backgrounds and traditions, and their local communities. They also face unique challenges in terms of health and education and they are at the heart of several key U.S. social and policy issues. In this interview, Jennifer Van Hook, professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University and Jennifer Glick, associate professor of sociology at Arizona State University discuss why it is important to examine how immigrant children are faring, the health and education challenges facing immigrant children, their future prospects, and important unanswered research questions.

With Millennium Development Goal 6, the international community pledged to "combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases" throughout the world. Worldwide, 1.4 billion people are infected with one or more of these less-known "other diseases." They come from the poorest of the poor who live on $1.25 or less per day, mostly on farms and in urban slums of the developing world. While these diseases have serious adverse effects on communities and exacerbate poverty, there are limited resources available for their research and treatment. In this interview, Peter Hotez, distinguished research professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine at The George Washington University, and president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, discusses neglected tropical diseases and their impact on developing countries. In what way do these diseases affect poor countries and what are some of the possible options for their control and elimination?

Most of what we hear in the media about how the recession is affecting individuals and families in the United States is based on broad population surveys. These tell us what has happened since the recession started but there is not as much reporting based on data tied to the events that led up to the recession. However, data from The American Life Panel shed some light on how the recession and events leading up to the recession have affected Americans. Michael Hurd, director of the Center for the Study of Aging and a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, has studied the economics of aging and the elderly; savings, wealth, and retirement; Social Security; and U.S. labor markets. According to Hurd, the current recession is the worst since the Great Depression because it has affected three major sectors of the economy: housing, the stock market, and the labor market. In this interview, Hurd discusses how the declines in each of these sectors have affected older Americans, the kinds of data we need to look at to assess the effect of the events that led up to the recession, and who has such data.