Posted May 1997
Cairo
7-13 December 1996
Arab Regional Population Conference
Reported by Marcela Villarreal, Senior Officer (Population and Socio-cultural Research), FAO Women and Population Division
The Arab Regional Population Conference, organized by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), was hosted in Cairo on December 7-13, 1996. It was the first conference of this type for this region and had 25 regular sessions, covering a wide range of population topics, mostly on the Mahgreb. Following are some of the interesting issues that arose:
Food security
A paper in the opening plenary session defined it in terms of the ability to be well nourished, which is not identified with the national supply of food nor with the individual access to food. The paper proposes to operationalise food security in development terms with a relevant measure of poverty. It argues that a country suffers from food insecurity if its poverty level is increasing over time irrespective of the behaviour of its per capita food production. Increased food insecurity would ensue when the rate of growth of the poor is greater than that of the overall population.
Gender
Although there were a number of different sessions on gender and gender relationships, it was interesting to see that none of the papers addressed these issues from the point of view of the people themselves. This aspect being absent from the research designs, the results of the papers were uncannily similar to reports from other parts of the world, bearing no Arab specificity. For example, a paper on gender stereotypes in educational materials reported the kind of stereotype that can be found in other third world text books. Had the study looked into the way in which these stereotypes are perceived, viewed, replicated or reacted to from the point of view of the students, male and female, more regional-specific results could have been found.
Socio-cultural issues
Conclusions from selected research papers:
- Women's reproductive health is affected by the cultural theories that women have developed on reproductive health and illness. In the studied community (Morocco), women establish a shared realm of knowledge of which men are excluded and thus constitute a mechanism of womenÕs resistance. It functions as a means to face their inferior status in a power relationship.
- Women were likelier to use indigenous methods for perceived infertility than for other health problems.
- A factor related to low use of health care services was that women would endure and tolerate pain more easily if the pain was related to reproductive functions than otherwise.
- The woman's position in the hierarchy of the household also affects her health related behaviours.
- In Egypt infant mortality can be severely under-enumerated because many families refuse to register the child until after the fortieth day, after a large part of mortality has taken place. Due to the costs associated to getting the registration and its certificate, if a registered child dies, it is not reported so that a subsequent sibling may use the certificate.
- Children are often registered together in order to save travel costs, even if they have three or four years of difference. Officially, they are registered as twins. This leads to errors in the age structure and in the estimation of age at marriage.
