Ensuring access to family planning is not only a matter of human rights, but can also play a key role in protecting the health of mothers and children. Maternal health experts and program directors met at the Wilson Center on July 31 to discuss the role family planning takes in women’s health in developing countries, what successes family planning programs worldwide have had so far, and what can be done to expand services. Sarah Craven, chief of the UN Population Fund’s Washington office, moderated the event.

In a recent post on the new United Nations population projections, I discussed the risk in assuming that countries in sub-Saharan Africa will progress through the demographic transition at a pace similar to other regions. Making this assumption is questionable because fertility decline in Africa has generally proceeded more slowly than in other parts of the world, with several cases of “stalls” and even small fertility increases over time.

Sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps the riskiest place for a woman to give birth. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), African women comprise approximately 56 percent of the maternal deaths and 91 percent of HIV-related maternal deaths worldwide every year. In order to bring life into this world, women in Africa literally must put their own lives on the line.

As world population pushes towards nine billion by mid-century and millions are elevated to the global middle class every year, demand for water continues to grow as well. More people need more water for drinking and household use, but also for agriculture, mining, energy, and industry. With water often cited as a limit to growth and potential crisis point, the World Resources Institute has released the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, which details various types of water stress around the world in impressively detailed fashion.

The United Nations biannual population projections are some of the most (if not the most) widely used numbers in demography. Researchers and policymakers alike rely on the figures to plan for present and future challenges. But few consider the story behind the statistics. Where does the data come from? The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recently released a short documentary on conducting censuses in challenging environments, with a spotlight on Indonesia, Chad, the Palestinian Territories, Belarus, and Bolivia.

The original version of this article appeared on Foreign Policy.

It’s not often that a change in accounting rules could reduce the probability of war. But that’s exactly what happened at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month.

On August 22, the SEC finally enacted long-overdue regulations requiring any oil company that is publicly listed on a U.S. stock exchange to report the tax, royalty, and other payments it shells out to foreign governments where it operates. Previously, companies were able to conceal this information, enabling a culture of corrupt payoffs that kept the petrodollars flowing into authoritarian leaders’ coffers – even where it directly contravened U.S. interests.

The original version of this article, by Jill Hagey, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.

Over the past few months, the Sahel drought has sparked attention of news media and concerned citizens around the world. Throughout this media blitz, I have been struck by the sharp contrast between this coverage and how the devastating effects of malnutrition are usually portrayed. Malnutrition is often overlooked in favor of more “newsworthy” diseases, and it takes a crisis to focus our attention on this public health issue. Yet an emergency such as this drought – affecting more than 18 million people, including nearly 2 million children – is difficult to ignore.

Each year, 350,000 women die while pregnant or giving birth, as many as two million newborns die within the first 24 hours of life, and there are 2.6 million stillbirths. Sadly, the majority of these deaths could be prevented if poor and marginalized women in developing countries had access to adequate health facilities and qualified health professionals. In fact, according to the new UNFPA report, State of the World’s Midwifery 2011: Delivering Health, Saving Lives, just doubling the current number of midwives in the 58 countries highlighted in the report could avert 21 percent of maternal, fetal, and newborn deaths.