The UN World Food Programme has had to halve the rations to refugees in several African refugees camps, although it has already been doing that in other camps, since May in Uganda and Tanzania. The reason is a funding shortfall mainly due to donor fatigue. Most camps restrict the movement of the refugees making it difficult for the camps to develop some kind of self sufficiency. On the Kenya-Somalia border lies the Dadaab camp, there since the 1990’s, a camp set up for 90,000 which now has over 500,000. At a recent conference addressing the future options for the camp, exploring ways to making it more self sufficient was forefront on the agenda, but there was no consensus, because Somalis aren’t allowed to work in Kenya. And then there’s us, with what appears to be soft antiseptic lives, where we are free to indulge delicacies and whims, where every kitchen among those I know displays abundance and where too many of us waste food if not other necessities. I wonder, do we savor what we eat more than the refugees do their meager rations? They must envy us. We may not envy them, yet have so much to learn from them.
June 2012
-
Family Planning And Increased Maternal Mortality
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation along with the UK government and the UN Population Fund are sponsoring a family planning summit to address how to close the gap with the more than 200 million women, largely in the less developed countries who want to use family planning methods but have no access to them. The reasons are multiple, cultural barriers, family constraints, lack of money, lack of availability, lack of trained personnel. But the results seem to be that not being able to control the number and spacing of their children appears to lead to increased maternal mortality as well as a host of problems related to poor or non-existent maternal health. For every mother who dies research shows that 20 more suffer from chronic ill health and disability. In addition, the life chances of these women also affect the lives of their children as well as the strength and health of their communities. Family planning is a strong tool to help combat these problems. It is the basis of solving many ills and is not expensive particularly for the returns it provides in terms of aid and development. Bill and Melinda Gates seem to already know that when something can save lives and decrease suffering as easily as family planning, it deserves to be more widely used. Let’s hope those who’ve been objecting will benefit from their point of view.
-
Future Earnings As Colleteral For Education Costs!
Luigi Zingales is an economics professor at the University of Chicago, the kind I’ve seen quoted in articles. He recently wrote an opinion piece for the NYT suggesting that instead of borrowing money for their college education, students could use their future earnings as collateral for the investors that would sponsor them with venture capital or hedge funds. Mr. Zingales has potential guidelines in mind, and argues that this would not be indentured servitude since the transaction would be voluntary. He also argues that subsidizing education is a drain on the economy, and makes a startling point since at least in part it contradicts his premise that a true market system, for which he’s obviously in favor, equalizes opportunity. It is difficult to see how since those who would be affected would more than likely not be those who would end up as high earners, but would be members of the middle class. This debt, by whatever name, would presumably be one more encumbrance and brake on their realizing their already tarnished dreams of home ownership and all the attendant expenses of such a home and family, and would be far from equalizing opportunity. Besides would such a system be an improvement over the present one? As to the indentured servitude argument, the reality of such an encumbrance and its consequences would trump the qualification he seems to put on it that it would be an individual choice. What about share cropping? What kind of choice was involved there? Education benefits the entire society. In fact part of our crisis is the lack of trained personnel in several areas such as engineering. As such subsidizing education in whatever forms can be considered self protection, if not self interest. Whether or not Mr. Zingales agrees with any of the objections to his idea, one must ask him if he would choose such a system for his own children?