This PopPov network brief by Shareen Joshi of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service examines the emerging evidence base for answering three questions about the relationship between reproductive health (RH) and three important areas of human capital development:

• Do healthier women with fewer children invest more in human capital?
• Do women participate more in labor markets?
• Does better RH increase a woman's ability to earn and save more, and thus help her and her family escape poverty?

Go to PRB's website to download and read the full brief.

This PopPov network research brief highlights the findings from recent studies on teenage childbearing in South Africa, in which analysts examined the causal relationships between teen fertility, educational attainment, and health outcomes in urban and rural regions in South Africa. The studies use data from:

• The Cape Area Panel Study, which examined the effects of teen motherhood on the education outcomes of women as well as health and educational outcomes of children born to teen mothers in metropolitan Cape Town.
• The Africa Centre Study, which focused on the educational and health consequences of childbearing for black South African teen mothers in the rural KwaZulu-Natal region.

Go to PRB's website to download and read the full brief.

In this video interview, PopPov researcher Gervais Beninguisse of IFORD Cameroon shares research findings on the relationships between poverty and unmet need for reproductive health services among adolescents and youth in Central Africa.

Click here to view the interview.

In a video interview, William Dow of the Berkeley School of Public Health describes his PopPov-related work, an impact evaluation of a combined social and psychosocial intervention in southern Tanzania. Click here to watch the interview.

"Incentivising Safe Sex: A Randomised Trial of Conditional Cash Transfers for HIV and Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention in Rural Tanzania," co-authored by Dow, fellow PopPov researcher Damien De Walque, and other colleagues, was recently published in BMJ Open. Read the journal article here.

In this video interview, PopPov researcher Kelly Jones of the International Food Policy Research Institute discusses research findings from Ghana that show how the Mexico City Policy (the "Global Gag Rule") had unintended consequences for induced abortion and unintended pregnancies, especially for the poorest and least-educated.

Click here to view Jones's interview and here to read her paper.

Congratulations to Hewlett/IIE dissertation fellow Gil Shapira for being awarded the 2012 Dorothy Thomas award by the Population Association of America (PAA). The Dorothy Thomas award is presented each year of the PAA annual meeting for the best graduate student paper on the interrelationships among social, economic, and demographic variables. Shapira's paper, "How Subjective Beliefs About HIV Affect Lifecycle Fertility: Evidence From Rural Malawi," was praised for its "rich and innovative" data, "novel" methods, and "strong policy implications."

A recent issue of the NWO-WOTRO newsletter Research for Global Development features researchers Pieter Hooimeijer and Ignace Habimana Kabano. They discuss how investing in reproductive health services can be another way to quickly and effectively improve quality of life.

An article in The Atlantic magazine cites PopPov researchers David Bloom and David Canning's work on the demographic dividend. Europe's dearth of workers shows that the continent's problems are as much demographic as they are financial.

PopPov researcher David Bloom commented on “Global Health in Foreign and Development Policy,” a white paper highlighting challenges and establishing priorities for Norwegian policy on global health towards 2020 with particular focus on three priority areas:

• Mobilizing for women’s and children’s rights and health
• Reducing the burden of disease with emphasis on prevention
• Promoting human security through health

See the English summary of the paper here and browse photos of the launch here.