In yesterday’s posting, reference was made to the World Bank’s list of “fragile states.” As part of its Low-Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS) initiative, the World Bank targets “fragile states,” defined as “countries facing particularly severe development challenges such as weak institutional capacity, poor governance, political instability, and frequently on-going violence or the legacy effects of past severe conflict.”
While the World Bank’s definition of “fragile states” does not encompass “demographic pressures,” almost all of the 33 states presently on the list have, as The Economist recently pointed out, high fertility rates.
Ten of the nations on the list of “fragile states” have TFRs above 6.0 (Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Timor). Eight more have TFRs between 5.0 and 5.9 (the Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Cote d-Ivoire, Eritrea, The Gambi, Guinea, Nigeria, and Togo). Only five have TFRs below 4.0 (Cambodia, Myanmar, Tonga, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe).
Kenya is not presently on the World Bank’s list of fragile states, but given the recent political violence it soon may be. Jim Hoaglund, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece (“An Establishment Teeters, in Kenya and Beyond”) that has application to many of the states currently on the “fragile states” list. He wrote:
Other people’s violence is not a deep concern for most of us, particularly if it occurs in remote Africa or overpopulated Asia. But the outbreak of tribal killings and widespread rioting in Kenya hits me where I live.
Kenya’s plight “hits” Hoaglund because he once resided there as a foreign correspondent. He laments that Kenya is but one of many countries that he has worked in that have succumbed to violence and disintegration. Many of them are poor countries, often former colonies, which have yet to make the “demographic transition” to slower population growth and greater prosperity. He writes that,
…developments in Kenya may herald the onset of a new, much unhappier era—one that will be marked by the total breakdown of the post-colonial structures that attempted to recognize African, Arab and Asian nationalism while protecting Western economic and interests. If the Kenyans cannot make this formula work, it is hard to see how other, less prosperous nations can.
Many factors will determine whether “fragile states” escape Hoaglund’s “new, much unhappier era,” but one of the most important factors is whether family planning services are made more widely available to couples in these countries who desire them. That’s not the job of the World Bank; that’s the job of the U.S. and other “donor” countries that have reduced, in real terms, their commitment to international family planning assistance over the past decade.
Most of us, as Hoaglund’s column suggests, are removed from the turmoil and troubles that afflict Kenya and other “fragile states.” We need perhaps, like Hoaglund, to focus more on the “fragile lives” that suffer when we fail to help.
