POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT CURRICULAR NEEDS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD: A SYNTHESIS OF QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE FINDINGS*
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* This paper was prepared by C. Stephen Baldwin, TSS Specialist for Training in Population
and Development,
Population Division, DESA, United Nations, New York, NY 10017, USA (Tel. No.
212-963-8394; Fax No. 212-963-2147; e-mail baldwins@un.org). The views
expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those
of the United Nations.
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Rationale
The 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)
spelled out clearly through its Programme of Action, perhaps for the first time, the full scope
of
the population and development area. Many practitioners were already somewhat aware of the
field's new breadth and depth, previously rather awkwardly fragmented between the
"demographic" and "reproductive health/family planning" disciplines. One of ICPD's many
positive achievements was to specify what the governments of the world meant altogether by
"population", as the end of the twentieth century approached.
Among the new priority areas of concern formally identified for attention by the world
community were: population and the environment; empowerment and status of women; the
diversity of family structure/composition; indigenous people; reproductive rights/health,
HIV/AIDS/STDs, and human sexuality; gender relations; and primary health care/the health care
sector generally. In addition, a new emphasis was placed on children, particularly
girls;
adolescents; persons with disabilities; indigenous and internally displaced persons; as well as
documented and undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers.
Accompanying these new priority areas, and in many cases helping directly to create their
new-found urgency, was a secular trend in emphasizing individual people---not as
mere targets of
programmes and plans, but as their very raisons d'être. To a significant
extent, in some regions
and countries of the world, this was reflected by a major shift in the way governments operated
to
provide goods and services to their constituent populations. Both plans and their implementation
tended to stem from and focus on the lowest levels of administration, where people actually live
and work.
Since much of this change has occurred in a short time, and since population and
development practitioners have become aware that the academic training which had served
them
no longer appeared entirely matched to the task of serving the new priorities, it was decided to
investigate the situation systematically, as a "cutting edge" priority of the author's UN/UNFPA
Technical Support Specialist training responsibilities. Specifically, we sought to determine
whether the providers of population and development training--at least in the developing world--
were reflecting in their teaching a more, or less, conventional treatment of population and
development issues, as they trained current cadres of population and development students. We
would measure this from the contents of current population and development curricula, as well
as
seek the viewpoint of carefully-selected expert practitioners with a familiarity of the situation
in
each of the developing world's regions.
This over-all goal was thus further divided into two segments, both based on data
collected
from the developing countries themselves. The first, which synthesized the views of twenty-nine
highly experienced professionals around the developing world, reported its findings at the May,
1996 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA), in a session which was
suggested and co-organized by the author, focusing on the population and development training
situation world-wide, and not just in developing countries. Following incorporation
of the PAA
session's feed-back, as well as inclusion of a number of new experts/countries in the study, an
expanded version was released in June, 1996 as a UN/DESIPA/Population Division/UNFPA
Technical Support Services Report by the author, entitled "Curriculum Needs: Perspectives From
Developing Countries".
Concurrently, a number of leading institutions in every region of the developing world,
chosen for their widely-acknowledged reputation for general excellence and experience in
providing instruction in the population and development field, provided empirical data (detailed
curricula) on this subject, using as a general framework for their responses a questionnaire
outline which was included in the initial contact letter. Supplementing these responses was a
selection of comparable data available to the author from a companion TSS project, the so-called
comprehensive "Handlist" of institutions providing population and development training around
the world.
Accordingly, a total of some fifty institutions' curricula were ultimately examined, both
interregionally and from each of the world's major developing regions (Latin America and the
Caribbean, Africa, West Asia, and Asia and the Pacific). To repeat: our purpose
was to
determine, at every level of instruction reviewed (short-term, undergraduate, diploma,
certificate, MA, and Ph.D.-level, as and where relevant), the existing balance between
"traditional" and "non-traditional" or "new" elements of each curriculum.
For these purposes, courses considered "traditional" were those which would have been
familiar at the time of training to anyone trained in this area over the last approximately two
decades (if not longer). Examples included, but were not limited to, the analytical elements and
techniques of formal demography and relevant mathematics/statistics, as well as more traditional
considerations of: population policy; historical demography; population and development;
modeling; data collection/analysis; population theories; mortality/fertility/ migration/nuptiality/
population composition; basic sociology, economics, statistics, geography etc.; and even basic
computing/informatics and simple family planning. Since detailed course contents were not
always available for examination in this connection, assignment of particular curriculum
elements to the respective areas selected was frequently done on the basis of interpreting course
titles alone.
The results of this study, in turn, were released through the author's September, 1996
Technical Support Services Report entitled "Population and Development Curricula: A Selective
Developing Country Review".**
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Process
This paper is a final step in the process of determining the present state of the developing
regions' institutional training in the population and development field. It compares and
synthesizes the results of the preceding two investigations--first qualitative judgments, then
quantitative findings--in order 1) to arrive at a more definitive and reliable basis from which,
2), to make some suggestions which developing countries may wish to consider in addressing
their own often widely differing population and development curriculum situations.
Accordingly, the next section of this paper compares and contrasts the two investigations'
findings globally; in the Latin America and Caribbean region; in Africa; West Asia; and, finally,
in Asia and the Pacific.
Fortunately, our sole expert respondent for global programmes is also centrally
responsible
for the global UNFPA training programme which provided us the greatest amount
of hard curricular data (the balance coming from the only interregional training institution
providing population and development training, the Cairo Demographic Center, or CDC). Not
surprisingly, therefore, the assertion that "The Population Fund's approach to providing training
in the Population and Development...area in the various developing regions of the world---Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, to date---is characterized by a flexibility which reflects
both the
rapidly changing nature of the field and the widely differing needs of different areas; as well as
by an effort to 'assure that each course includes an essential core of theoretical and
methodological subjects which would afford students better understanding of P&D
interrelationships'"1/ is fully borne out by examining the curricula involved.
Regarding the 'essential core' approach and "...the nature of 'traditional'
courses offered
everywhere in the Global Programme, ...very much the same kinds of material is offered, and
that
(too) is...(un)surprising, given the fact that this programme is, after all, centrally coordinated
and
sponsored and that it deals with the same subject-matter and the same kinds of people regardless
of the areas from which they are drawn...(T)he operating rationale is that a certain amount of
basic
population/equipment knowledge and tools has to be provided to participants
regardless of the
countries and regions from which they come, and the differences therein, before material more
accurately reflecting topical conditions and challenges in the individual countries can be
presented.
This is...borne out by the kinds of courses found: introductions to demographic analysis, to
population projections, basic mathematics and statistics, population theories and policies, and
computing."2/ (Thus it may be wrong to conclude, as we did on the basis of the earlier
qualitative
assessment, that "the Fund's 9-month post-graduate diploma training programmes appear to have
more in common their target audience...than their curricula" 3/.)
As for the programmes' alleged 'flexibility' and the fact that they have
"'...undergone an
ongoing monitoring and evaluation process that resulted in significant changes in terms of course
content and structure, scope and coverage, training approach and teaching methods' since (their)
establishment"4/, most interesting to note here, after examining the actual curricula involved,
is
the geographical---even regional---nature of the major differences found. In Africa, on one
hand,
the programme previously provided by ISS in the Netherlands and now given at the University
of
Botswana, reveals a curriculum which is heavily traditional: 10 traditional to 3 non-traditional
courses provided. And, on the other, the INSEA, Morocco offers only a single traditional
course,
while its predecessor, at the University of Louvain, in Belgium, offered none at all. For the
rest,
there also seems to be a distinct 'Latin American' bias in favour of the non-traditional, with the
ratio of traditional to non-traditional courses previously taught at CELADE, Santiago standing
at
7 to 10, and for its inheritor, the University of Chile, 6-14.
With respect to the content of global non-traditional courses, in general "...
there are two
distinct kinds of 'non-traditional' courses provided, and the differences conform to regional i.e.
geographical differences that popular wisdom has long recognized. On the one hand, there is
a
'Latin American' emphasis on people to be noted---an emphasis that includes
gender, culture,
socio/economic/political change, and equity; all without prejudice to the finer points
of the
population/development formulation, such as population and environment, health,
education,
employment, and urban development. For the rest, the emphasis tends to be almost exclusively
on
these 'finer points' of population and development themselves, with particular emphasis on the
development axis---geographical levels of development, strategies, and with respect
to particular
developmental aspects such as the environment, agriculture, food, resources, energy, health,
basic
needs etc." 2"Curriculum Needs....", p. 4.5/
As for the other global programme examined, that of the interregional
UN/UNFPA-supported Cairo Demographic Center (CDC), the various course offerings tend to
follow a pattern
which will become more familiar as we progress through our examination of curricula in other
regions: at lower levels, where students for the most part receive their first formal training in
the
population and development area, there is a heavy emphasis on the traditional, presumably in
order
to provide the basic tools required by any student, both to function as a population
specialist and
to be able to deal effectively with less traditional courses later on. In the CDC case, these do
in
fact follow as a gradually increasing proportion of over-all higher level programmes: first, the
Special Diploma and, thereafter, the Graduate Diploma in Population and Sustainable
Development. In the latter, in fact, we find that "... the specifics and complexities of
population
interrelationships with aspects of over-all human development---resources and environment,
women, migration and regional planning, social policies etc---can be and are explored, in
courses
such as Women Issues in Development: Gender Focus; Population, Resources, &
Environment;
Population Dynamics & Development Planning; and even, on the outer edge of the
population/development construct itself, Development Strategies and Policies and
Communication & Development." 6/ (Our emphasis).
The over-all qualitative assessment of this region as a region emphasized its
diversity.
Within this diversity, a continuum of countries was recognized, running from "...those to be
found
in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and possibly Cuba, where resources tend to be comparatively
plentiful; training programmes are many, varied, and relatively well-established; and where, as
a consequence, there is already considerable variety in individual programmes, and differing
needs of the field are met more on an individual institutional basis than by efforts to capture all
perceived needs in a single programme...(to) the other end of the spectrum, exemplified by
Honduras... and the Dominican Republic, (where there) is a situation of greater flux and
ambivalence, brought about by a combination of scarcer resources, less institutional commitment
and thus fewer programmes; greater corresponding dependence on outside resources and
priorities; and a more urgent felt need to respond to all current demands for training in
a
single programme...Somewhere in the middle of this country spectrum can be found a
number
of relatively very new programmes, as in Chile and Costa Rica; efforts to establish
new
programmes, as yet unsuccessful, after old graduate specialization programmes ended (Colombia
and Peru) as well as similar efforts to establish new programmes (Ecuador and Panama); and
a
few sporadically reviving training and research programmes about which not much is yet known,
as in Bolivia and Paraguay."7/
For the present, and presumably even more in the future, a region-wide shift in priorities
to "improving the lot of individuals, rather than on meeting numerical targets"8/
5, accompanied
by increasingly decentralized planning and development, and a related emphasis on social
programming and more focused social polices; implies more graduate-level training
which will
simultaneously equip students to "adapt(ed) to...market requirements" and "perform competent
population projections at the various geographic and sectoral levels increasingly required, as well
as analyses of the causes/consequences of major demographic phenomena such as migration,
fertility, and mortality." 9/
With regard to the 'country spectrum' in the region which was stipulated in our initial
qualitative assessment, based on experts' views, we find more than enough country-level data
to justify the existence and nature of such a continuum. As mentioned above, at one end there
is the "considerable variety" to be found in countries where there are comparatively many
training programmes and where the pressure of competition often leads individual institutions
in different ways, as each interprets the competition in providing effective attractions for their
share of the over-all 'market'.
Thus, the extensive descriptive treatment of Brazil's CEDEPLAR programme, which
concludes that this institution, under pressure from others in the country "focusing more on the
social sciences"10/ (i.e. with substantially more non-traditional curricula), is
providing
"'training in quantitative methods...(as) an academic 'niche' in which further investment is
required'...a niche which CEDEPLAR has both the competence, in terms of staff strength, and
impetus, in terms of the competitive factors just mentioned, to fill." 11/ On
closer examination
of this institution's MA and Ph.D. curricula, we find that there is an even balance between the
traditional and non-traditional at the Masters level, but at the Doctorate the ratio is even higher:
18 to 7.
Two Argentinean institutions, the University of Lujan and the University Nacional de
Cordoba, lean even further in the direction of the traditional, with balances of 11-1 and 13-4,
traditional to non-traditional, respectively; while two of the four Mexican institutions examined,
the Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas and the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Hidalgo,
are found with ratios respectively of 12-3 and 17-0. The two remaining programmes in Mexico
are increasingly non-traditional over-all: 13-9 for El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, and 11-23
for the FLACSO programme. As explained at length in our initial examination, the UDIP
Programme at the Faculty of Economics of the National Autonomous University of Honduras
has been through a series of difficult changes; in its latest incarnation "...the previous one-year
graduate programme is likely in the near future to be replaced...by one which reduces
emphasis
on formal demographic techniques...provides more social science theory...(and) offers 'more
training in the formulation and evaluation of social projects and programs...."12/
(emphasis
supplied). Finally, the two planned programmes at the Universidad Mayor de San
Simon, in
Bolivia, will also be heavily non-traditional in content.
The quantitative analysis of curricular data thus seems, in general, to bear out the
experts' more qualitative (but also based on a thorough knowledge of the regions' academic
programmes in this area) judgments, roughly to the effect that newer programmes, as well as
those which find themselves alone in providing population/development training in a particular
country, will be more non-traditional in nature. In addition, in countries with many
programmes, these will tend to be varied in content and thus in their traditional to non-traditional
course ratios, as each place seeks to carve out a share of the potential 'market' of persons
wishing to work in the broad population and development field.
Thus the original investigation's conclusion seems borne out by the second study's data---
that both present and, especially, future needs in the region will be for a variety of programmes,
reflecting a complex of market requirements including that for 'lifetime learning', intensive
exposure-type training for professionals in other fields, and more traditional offerings for
'bread-and-butter' demographers. Also supporting, with particular regard to its examination
of the
non-traditional courses themselves, is the finding that their " 'fine-tuning'... is not only with
respect to aspects of the population variable----the demographic processes as well as society itself
and social change, even the State itself---but also many different aspects of human development,
involving the social sciences generally, with special emphasis on history, sociology and
economics,
and, often in extended detail, on labour force, resources, environment, and health."
13/
At the regional level in Africa a number of institutions are working in the population and
development training area. The two most dominant in terms of size, length of experience, and
staff depth, are the UN/UNFPA-supported IFORD, for Francophone Africa, located in the
Cameroon; and its Anglophone counterpart RIPS, located in Ghana. While many look to these
as well as other, more recent and smaller regional/subregional institutions (like the
PHRDA/IDEP programme in Senegal) to provide leadership and assistance to the region's
country-level programmes, and there is even "...some sense, particularly among such major
donors as the Population Fund, that graduate-level training in the field should be concentrated
at the regional/sub-regional level, to maximize the application of limited resources available for
training in this area, there is no clear consensus (yet) on such a strategy in the region." 14/
Furthermore, the qualitative assessment of IFORD's programme in the first
investigation as well as the detailed analysis of the RIPS programme conducted separately by its
own Acting Director, another informant, and the author (in the second study); suggest that while
both institutions have made commendable steps in the direction of incorporating more of the
'new" population and development priorities into their respective curricula, this has not yet been
sufficiently successful to qualify either of them, without considerably more input and
authoritative, sanctioned change in any particular substantive direction(s), to fill the roles
expected of them by country-level institutions.
IFORD, for instance, was "(v)ery traditionally oriented during its initial years, up
to
about 1984...(and while its) curriculum expanded the burgeoning P&D orientation begun
around
1984 and attracted students from a broader background and with an interest in interdisciplinary
research" 15/, it is generally regarded as still being primarily oriented, in terms
of students and
thus the content of its curriculum, towards "...French-speaking African statisticians who then
serve(d) in various capacities in government census and statistical offices."16/
Ibid
As for RIPS, our own analysis reveals that, in its current Masters curriculum, there are
24 traditional to only 5 non-traditional courses to be found. One expert respondent characterizes
recent (after the 1993/94 academic session) changes as including "...new or newly-emphasized
areas in the curriculum (such as) kinship/family/cultural diversity; gender issues in the African
developmental context; more economics; 'beefed-up' treatment of human reproductivity,
genetics, and fertility regulation; family formation and status of women; population policies and
programmes; and reproductive and family health". Ibid; p. 14 17/ On the other
hand, its own Acting
Director concludes that present "...areas of inadequate/incomplete attention include:
sustainability of economic growth; poverty; need for more male
treatment in gender courses;
and need for more concentration on: the family; indigenous peoples and persons
with
disabilities; human sexuality; the reproductive health needs of adolescents; internally
displaced
persons; migration more from the perspective of ICPD recommendations vis-a-vis documented
and undocumented migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, displaced persons etc.; and more and
better IEC." Ibid18/
Insofar as country programmes in Francophone Africa are concerned, the
fact that we
were unable even to obtain sample curricula from Francophone programmes, except for one
from North Africa (the University of Oran's Institute of Demography, in Algeria),
tends to bear
out our expert respondent's judgment that French-speaking Sub-Saharan African Countries
(FSSAC) are "...still primarily dependent on developed country institutions for population
training at the MA and Ph.D. levels. An important exception to this is (or was) the large and
well-developed programme at the University of Kinshasa, in Zaire, which only a few years ago
contained perhaps the largest single aggregation of population-trained Ph.D.s in all of Africa,
but which has fallen upon difficult times recently due to the critical internal situation of
Zaire." 19/ The University of Oran programme is also traditional in nature at
both the
undergraduate (3-1, traditional to non-traditional) and Masters (18-2) levels, with only its
Diploma-level curriculum balanced between the traditional and the non-traditional. A
proposed
DEA-level course in Dakar does "...contain(s) strong elements of post-ICPD relevance,
including: one course on project preparation, two on Women and Development;
one on the
psychology of reproduction and contraceptive technology; one on health and sexually- and
fertility-linked risks; one on maternal and infant health, two courses on fertility which stress
social, cultural and economic determinants; one on family planning; one on youth; one on IEC;
and six separate courses on various aspects of the interactions between population and
development policies. (But) (a)t last reading, the project had been delayed and is now likely to
see life as a Senegalese rather than sub-regional undertaking." Ibid20/
Thus the earlier conclusion seems to be borne out, namely that the "French tradition of
training in this area has been rigorously quantitative and concentrated more on the direct needs
of statistical and census units, rather than on the individual set of concerns and questions that
have come to particular prominence since ICPD, in English-speaking Africa...(and) (a)t the
country level in Francophone Africa,...in particular for the coastal area countries
of Senegal,
Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, Togo and Cameroon, (where) population training is primarily provided
'not as "P&D" training courses but as parts of curricula in sociology, geography,
economics and
sometimes medicine.' (Locoh, 1996: 3)."21/ Ibid; p. 21
As for Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa, the situation reported in our earlier analysis
seems well-documented by our examination of various levels' curricula in ten countries, namely
that:
"'Between 1965 and 1966 only 15 African universities taught demography and
statistics. Today, most Universities offer courses in population
studies/demography... at the
undergraduate and graduate levels for local students as well as students in the entire sub-Saharan
African' region (Addo, 1996; emphasis supplied). Many of these programmes, particularly
those that have been supported by the United Nations system---as in Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya,
Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, the Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, and
Zimbabwe---provide 'contact'-style undergraduate introductions to population, at a general
review level, in
a variety of departments and faculties, both inside and outside the social sciences. Some, as in
Malawi, Lesotho, and Swaziland, provide actual majors or double major programmes in
population, while a smaller number, as in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, the Sudan, Tanzania, and
Uganda, add to such programmes full-fledged Master's and even burgeoning Ph.D.
programmes...From the curricular viewpoint, most programmes are still in an understandably
early stage of reacting to the areas highlighted by the ICPD et seq
population-relevant
recommendations and strategies...(and) with few exceptions the courses offered reflect a fairly
traditional, if not conventional, view..'The dominant pattern is that...demography course
contents have tended to give more prominence to technical demography. Yet discussions of
world population problems fall squarely within the realms of substantive demography with
all
its social, economic and cultural underpinnings' (emphasis supplied)."
22/
At the undergraduate level in Anglophone Africa, unlike the situation in
most of the rest
of the developed and developing world, a substantial amount of training in the population and
development field still takes place. The author examined six curricula, while one additional
curriculum, for the University of Ghana, was reported on in the prior paper, based on
descriptions from an expert informant. The courses at this first level of serious and systematic
exposure to population/development concepts and techniques largely stress the traditional. The
traditional/non-traditional ratio of courses ranges all the way from the entirely traditional (two
institutions) through 6 to 1, 3 to 1, and, exceptionally, 1-3. In addition, the courses at the
University of Ghana are reported to have remained virtually constant in content for those that
are more technical/statistically based, while "...social and particularly micro-level issues
increasingly dominate the focus of both undergraduate and graduate population training."
Ibid; p. 17 23/
The situation at the Diploma and Certificate levels is quite
similar: the University of
Nairobi (possibly because it is one of the oldest and best-developed programmes) has an even
course balance between traditional and non-traditional, while the remaining three institutions
provide curricula which are entirely traditional, at the Diploma level, as does one of the three
(the University of Sierra Leone) and one other (the University of Botswana), in the Certificate
curriculum.
Finally, at the Masters level, we find the same pattern of traditional courses'
dominance.
Only the University of Nigeria, Nsukka was found to have a primarily (in fact, wholly)
non-traditional curriculum, with a ratio of 0-6, traditional to non-traditional courses. This is
followed "...by the University of Botswana's proposed course, at 12-5, Addis Ababa University
(12-4), RIPS (24-5), Makerere University (13-2)..., the University of Nairobi (8-1),
the University
of Oran (18-2); and the entirely traditional offerings of the Universities of Pretoria
(4-0) and
Zimbabwe (7-0)." 24/
There is an important footnote to be added with regard to curricula at all levels, but
especially at the Masters, provided by the Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics' (ISAE)
Department of Population Studies, at Makerere University in Uganda. Based on a
comprehensive
one-year process (which will be described in greater detail later in this paper) of first assessing,
then responding to, the nature of present-day demand for persons trained in
population/development, revised Postgraduate Diploma and M.A. in Demography programmes
were drawn up in detail, containing at least a dozen non-traditional courses. It bears
emphasizing
that the need for persons trained inter alia in these areas was not discovered in a
theoretical
fashion, based on some demographer's best guess, post-ICPD, of what would be useful in
Uganda. On the contrary, while trained population scientists were involved in drawing up the
suggested new curriculum, and also in the process of assessing needs which preceded this, it was
responses from Government of Uganda population personnel at all levels; foreign and domestic
NGOs involved in population work; and former students that gave initial impetus and shape to
the proposed course 'translations' that followed.
For the future, there are many serious constraints to effecting change in sub-Saharan
Africa, including: scarce resources; short supply of well-trained professionals and, especially,
professionals qualified to teach; scarce opportunities for short-term retooling/updating of
teachers; scarcity of appropriate materials for teaching; and, related to the teaching crisis, low
funding/low priority of research, utilizing local data which could and should be incorporated
directly into the training process. "This latter, combined with the absence of funds for textbooks
even from the outside world, and the minimal efforts currently being invested in developing new
curricular materials based on African data, tends to emphasize even more the already existing
drift towards staleness in curricular content." 25/
At the undergraduate level in this region our qualitative assessment
highlighted the
(then) planned University of Jordan double major programme's inclusion of a number of
non-traditional courses. The actual curriculum contained 8 required, 5 elective, and possibly
3
ancillary traditional courses and 12 required, 5 elective, and at least 2 (Population, Food and
Environment and The Fiqh of Personal Statute) non-traditional ones; for a remarkable over-all
ratio of approximately 16-19, traditional to non-traditional. Unfortunately, we have no actual
curricula from the other BA-level programmes in the region in the Sudan (Universities of
Khartoum and Gezira) and Morocco (INSEA), but if they are indeed, as characterized
qualitatively by our expert informant, mostly "'one or two courses...within the context of first
degree programmes' in disciplines such as 'statistics, sociology, economics, anthropology, and
geography'"26/ ; it would seem reasonable, based on what we have observed
in other regions,
and for similar reasons, to conclude that these courses are also quite traditional in nature. In
the
event, the one other example which we do have, from Egypt's Institute of Arab
Research and
Studies, has 4 wholly traditional courses.
At the Diploma level we have no judgments at the qualitative level and only
a single
actual curriculum sample to examine at the quantitative---presumably because there are as yet
few, if any, such programmes in this region. As for the single programme known to us, that
of Lebanese University, its "...two programmes---one a Specialization in Demography, the other
a Demographic Expert Diploma---are respectively 5-3 and 3-1 traditional/non-traditional in
character; not much can be concluded from this...except to note that, once again, significant
elements of the non-traditional are to be found at the 'specialization' level, as might be
expected." 27/
Finally, at the Masters level , the qualitative expert judgment was that
"(t)raining...is
'more diversified and complex'"28/ , but for the most part programmes "follow 'a
conventional
approach' concentrating on 'the study of formal demography'". 29/ Actual
results of examining
the curricula concerned are worth reporting in their original form:
"At the MA level, two programmes are relatively non-traditional in nature. That offered
by the University of Jordan, with 5 required and 4 elective traditional courses and 4
non-traditional
electives (thus 9-4 overall) seems more nearly like the emerging, notional international "norm"
in
terms of balance, while the Haceteppe University programme in Turkey (and for that matter its
Ph.D. courses, for which we have details---5 required + 3 elective traditional courses vs. a
required
workshop and 3 elective non-traditionals, or 8-3 over-all) has basically the same balance between
the traditional and the non: 6 required + 8 elective (14) vs. 2 required and 6 elective (8). Some
of
the non-traditional Turkish courses---such as Human Ecology, Theories and Programs in
MCH/FP
Services, Analytical Approaches to Fertility Control, Demography of Health, and Socioeconomic
Structure of Turkey---suggest (from their titles as well as available brief course descriptions)
considerable sophistication in the post-ICPD sense, and this is more than borne out by the details
available on the three elective courses: Population in International Relations (which includes a
module on "conflict and population"); Sociological and Psychological Aspects of Family
Planning
and Fertility (including "husband-wife communication" and "means of mass media"); and
Demography of Women, Marriage and the Family (which inter alia examines
"reproductive
preferences", "intrafamilial relationships", "child socialization", "gender roles", and
"measurement
of marriage"!). While the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Department of Demography's MA
course is relatively traditional in nature (10-3, traditional to non-traditional), both Aleppo
University's (Syria) and the Hebrew University's other MA-level programme are apparently
entirely so, with 5 courses each in this category and none in the non-traditional area."
30/
It is really unsurprising that a 'region' containing such a large and variegated portion of
the world's people should be so diverse in the nature of the population and development training
it provides. The wonder is that any trends, within or between individual countries,
can be
traced. In fact, however, at one end of a regional continuum may be found "a distinct regional
'flavour'... perhaps captured best by the case of the International Institute for Population Studies,
or IIPS, in Bombay...(whose) reputation... for being highly formal-demography-oriented and,
within that definition, heavily quantitative in its approach, is a valid one ".31/ A number
of
other institutions, particularly in South Asia (including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
and Nepal) and even, in one case, Southeast Asia (Thailand; Mahidol University); were found,
from an investigation of their Diploma- and Masters-level curricula (and even BA offerings, in
Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan) also to "...demonstrate an almost entirely traditional
orientation".32/ Somewhere in the middle fall a number of institutions in India (such as the
Jawaharlal University in Delhi, the Sri Venkateswara University, and the Centre for
Development Studies) whose curricula are approximately balanced between the traditional and
the non-traditional.
At the other end of this continuum "(m)ost interestingly, it is China that takes the lead
as
a country, over-all, in the comparative 'modernity' of its course offerings at the Masters level,
with Peking University providing an even split between traditional and non-traditional (7-7),
Sichuan University's Institute of Population Research inclining in a slightly more traditional
direction with 6-3, and the Institute of Population Research, Fudan University, having only one
traditional to four non-traditional courses." 33/ As for the rest of Asia, our
earlier more
impressionistic view that "...(e)lsewhere in Asia, it must suffice to say, there is simply great
diversity. In the Philippines and Thailand... there are numerous training programmes both at
the undergraduate (particularly in the former) and graduate levels, (and) many curricula contain
quite well-developed modules of 'post-ICPD' content, while others are more traditionally
oriented...." 34/ was only partially substantiated by the ensuing review of actual curricula.
There, we found a perhaps surprising uniformity (with the single exception of one
MA course
at Mahidol University in Thailand; the other two are heavily non-traditional) in
non-traditional/balanced curricula in each of the three countries examined: Thailand, Indonesia,
and
the Philippines, all most important contributors to the region's over-all stock of training
resources in the population and development field.
As a consequence, a more accurate regional summary is based on more extensively
reviewing actual curricula, which "...appears to confirm popular conceptions of the relative
Asian
sophistication in the population/development area as well as, within the region, something of a
split
between the South Asian (more traditional, mathematics/statistics-oriented) and Southeast Asian
(more non-traditional) countries being evident."35/ Nevertheless, the conclusions of the
earlier
analysis as to future curricular needs are also substantiated from the quantitative review.
Substantively, more courses are required in such areas as: (c)hild survival/safe motherhood;
women's status/gender perspective; health, especially reproductive health; effective
public and
private sector employment market response, like Business Demography;
population/environmental interactions; causes/consequences of population change;
and
"...(s)ocial and cultural anthropology and ethnography courses which might help to unravel the
more dynamic interactions of the fertility/mortality transition as well as people's responses to
it. This, so that social policies, IEC and technology might become people-oriented,
rather than
driven by mere economic development goals."36/ In addition, the scope of this
training should
be enhanced by emphasizing population education and exposing professionals from other fields
to population and development concepts.
** A limited number of copies of both of these publications can be obtained from the author,
on request; please
address C. Stephen Baldwin, TSS Specialist in Training for Population and Development,
Population Division,
Department for Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), United Nations Secretariat, DC2-2070,
New York, N.Y.
10017, USA (Telephone No. 212-963-8394; Fax No. 212-963-2638 or 963-2147; cc:mail
<baldwins@UN.org>on
the Internet).