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Although access to primary education in Guatemala has increased in recent years, particularly in rural areas, levels of educational attainment and literacy remain among the lowest in Latin America. Problems include late entry, grade repetition, and early dropout. Inequalities in school access and grade attainment linked to ethnicity, gender, poverty, and residence remain. Age trends show that Mayan females are the least likely to ever enroll, and, if they do enroll, to start school the latest and drop out earliest. Mayan females are not a homogeneous group, however. Summary statistics indicate that the one-fourth of Mayan girls who are non-poor have primary school entry rates, school entry age, and grade-for-age levels equal to those of Ladina females, and, conditional upon primary school completion, have secondary school enrollment levels about 80 percent of those of Ladina females. The one-quarter of Mayan girls who are extremely poor, on the other hand, have the worst educational outcomes of all. Multivariate results indicate that being Mayan and female is a barrier to enrollment, particularly among those who are poor. Enrollment rates drop sharply at age 12, and the dropout curve is steepest for Mayan females. While age 12 would be a time of transition from primary to secondary school for children who entered school on time and made regular progress, most nonenrolled children aged 12 and older, especially those who are Mayan, have very low grade attainment and few have completed primary school. The main constraint to Mayan educational achievement therefore appears to be primary school completion. Among nonenrolled young people aged 13-24, household duties and lack of money were the constraints most frequently mentioned by females. Early marriage did not appear to directly affect female enrollment, but related qualitative findings indicate that Mayan parents’ expectations of daughters’ future roles may reduce parental incentives to invest in education beyond the age of puberty. For adolescent males, regardless of ethnicity, market work was by far the most frequently cited cause for nonenrollment, followed by lack of money. Lack of physical access to school was not a frequently cited constraint for children in any age group. In addition to poverty-reduction programs, mechanisms to encourage poor families to start their children’s schooling at age 7 may lead to fewer competing interests with regard to time allocation as children approach puberty and are compelled to assume adult work roles

Tap and Reposition Youth (TRY) was a multiphase initiative undertaken by the Population Council and K-Rep Development Agency (KDA), the oldest and largest microfinance institution in Kenya. The overall aim of the project was to reduce adolescents' vulnerabilities to adverse social and reproductive health outcomes, including HIV infection, by improving their livelihoods options. The project was launched in low-income and slum areas of Nairobi, Kenya, where rates of HIV infection are alarming and where young women are disproportionately affected

The usual lessons drawn from East Asia's striking experience of health and fertility transition concern the efficacy of well-designed government programmes catering to an existing or ideationally stimulated demand. An alternative interpretation sees the demographic change and the uptake of services as a byproduct of social and economic development together with, in some cases, strong government pressures. This paper probes more deeply into this experience, seeking to identify common features of development design and administration that underlay it and to derive lessons for policies elsewhere. The broad sequence entailed, initially, establishment of an effective, typically authoritarian, system of local administration, providing (sometimes incidentally) a framework for promotion and service delivery in health, education, and family planning. Subsequent economic liberalization offered new opportunities for upward mobility and greater risks of backsliding but along with erosion of social capital and the breakdown or privatization of service programmes. The study is mainly focused on seven countries: Taiwan and South Korea ("tiger" economies), Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia ("second wave" countries), and China and Vietnam ("market-Leninist" economies). The period is roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s

During the past 20 years, substantial reductions have occurred in the proportion of young women who report marrying as teenagers in sub-Saharan Africa. An oft-stated consequence of a delay in age at marriage is a rise in the proportion of young women who engage in premarital sex. This paper investigates the links between changing age at marriage and premarital sexual behavior in 27 sub-Saharan African countries in which Demographic and Health Surveys were conducted between 1994 and 2003. Using multiple-decrement life tables to examine the competing risks of premarital sex and marriage without prior sexual experience, we answer the largely unaddressed question of how reductions in the prevalence of early marriage have affected the likelihood of initiating premarital sex. Our analysis reveals that although the age of first sexual activity has either remained the same or increased, a shift in the context of sexual debut from marriage to before marriage has taken place in many countries. We assess whether the increase in the proportion of young women who report premarital sex is influenced by an increase in exposure resulting from delayed marriage or by an increase in the rate of premarital sex. The evidence on this point is mixed; in some settings greater exposure explains more of the increase, whereas in others an increased rate of premarital sex dominates

'This study's aims are to: (1) determine the prevalence of functional limitations among older adults in Cambodia using activities of daily living (ADLs); (2) compare limitation prevalence with other countries in the region; (3) estimate active life expectancy; (4) examine standard correlates of functional status and assess whether they are associated with limitation in expected ways. ADLs included here are bathing, dressing, eating, and getting up from lying down. Degree of difficulty is used to determine whether limitations are moderate or severe. Results are generally consistent with expectations. For example, women live longer than men but spend a greater proportion of life with limitations, and older age is related to higher rates of limitation and less active life. Elderly Cambodians appear more likely to report limitations than their counterparts in neighboring countries. A contribution of the analysis is the examination of a basic measure of health among a population that until recently has been isolated from the rest of the world.'

This is the report on an intervention study that evaluated the effectiveness of a succession planning programme in Uganda. The programme works with children and their families while their HIV-positive parents are still living and in a position to plan for their children’s long-term well-being. The focus of this report is on the impact of the succession planning intervention on HIV-positive parents’ and standby guardians’ efforts to prepare for the future of children who will experience parental loss. The report also presents findings on the impact of the programme on children and discusses the programme and policy implications of the research