In his speech at the UN General Assembly this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to scale the blustery heights achieved in previous years–with predictable swipes at the European Union, Israel and the United States. Instead, he came across as a has-been bloviator, unable to escape his lame duck status and myriad problems at home, where he has his hands full with a deteriorating economy (hurt in no small part by tightened international sanctions), persistent internal political divisions, and continuing public disaffection, particularly among women. Read more »

• Education and Health in Pakistan: While better educated parents are known to raise healthier children, the role of each parent and the exact reasons for the correlation remain unclear. A study in World Development seeks to clarify the issue. Using a survey of almost 1,200 households in two provinces of Pakistan, the authors find that a mother’s level of schooling significantly affects children’s height and weight. However, only a father’s education impacts immunization. The authors speculate that fathers may guide certain health behaviors, “particularly if they require travel to a health clinic,” while mothers govern “day-to-day decisions” that affect “longer-term measures of health such as height and weight.” But it is not parents’ “education per se” that drives better child health. Instead, the authors find that immunization responds to fathers’ health knowledge (rather than overall schooling). Mothers’ impact on height and weight, meanwhile, seems driven by their health knowledge and “empowerment within the home.” Based on these findings, the authors write that “policies aimed at achieving better health awareness and knowledge” might give Pakistan the biggest development boost. Read more »

Saudi Arabia is the starkest mix of medieval and modern of any country in the world. It is ranked seventeenth in global competitiveness by the World Economic Forum and boasts world-class skyscrapers and infrastructure; but it is ruled by an aging and sclerotic absolute monarchy that kowtows to its deeply conservative religious establishment. Just last week, Saudi Arabia beheaded a man found guilty of “witchcraft and sorcery.” At least two people met a similarly grizzly end last year for sorcery. With one foot in the seventh century and one in the twenty-first, Saudi Arabia’s balancing act seems more improbable every year. Read more »

It’s good to have heroes. One of mine is Sakena Yacoobi, the founder of a terrific organization called the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) that provides education and health services to women across Afghanistan. I first met Sakena nearly a decade ago, and have followed her work closely since then. I’ve visited several of AIL’s programs in Afghanistan and wrote about her and her work in my book Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East. Read more »

This past weekend, I had the honor of being the commencement speaker at Effat University, a private university for women in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was hardly the staid affair I expected. Colorful klieg lights lit the way of arriving parents and dignitaries; forget “Pomp and Circumstance”—the more than two hundred graduates and faculty paraded in to a pulsating techno beat, while stage fog swirled to dramatic effect. The array of high-heeled shoes under the graduates’ sky-blue abayas was breathtaking—everything from six inch high, hot-pink platform wedges, to cowboy boots, to the latest snakeskin and metallic Manolo Blahniks. Read more »

• Global Growth Prospects: The IMF released a sanguine but sober World Economic Outlook last week. “Weak recovery” should take hold in advanced economies while developing ones “remain relatively solid,” the Fund says. But “recent improvements are very fragile.” The U.S. economy is projected to grow at 2.1 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2013; the Eurozone is forecast to contract 0.3 percent before resuming growth of 0.9 percent. These figures are all up slightly from the IMF’s previous forecast in January. Asia is set to remain the fastest-growing developing region, with China projected to expand by 8.2 and 8.8 percent this year and next. India should grow by 6.9 and 7.3 percent, lagging the region as a whole. Sub-Saharan Africa is forecast to keep growing at just over 5 percent per year. Read more »

In this edition of Missing Pieces, Charles Landow covers stories from the World Bank to Kenya, with stops in Turkey and the BRICS. Enjoy and have a good weekend.

• World Bank Campaigns: Jim Yong Kim, José Antonio Ocampo, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala outlined their visions for the World Bank in recent Financial Times op-eds. (Reports today indicate that Ocampo is withdrawing his candidacy in favor of Okonjo-Iweala.) Kim promised to open the Bank to the views of developing countries and pursue “an evidence-based approach” to development. Ocampo emphasized the fight against poverty and inequality, as well as the need to “mitigate and adapt to climate change.” Okonjo-Iweala outlined “three key challenges” that the Bank must address: job creation, “investments in human capital,” and institutions for governance. Ocampo and Okonjo-Iweala also appeared at events sponsored by the Center for Global Development and the Washington Post. The U.S. Treasury Department released Kim’s statement to the Bank’s board. Read more »

Charles Landow highlights a wide range of stories in this edition of Missing Pieces. Enjoy the selection.

• Pakistan’s Problems: An Economist special report last week examines Pakistan. It is young, populous, strategically located, and full of economic potential. It is also poor, dominated by its army, and beset by domestic and regional conflict. “Piety and anti-Westernism,” the report says, “have become inseparably fused,” while unreliable electricity and insufficient credit hobble the economy. Education, especially for girls, is an Achilles heel. Violence is rampant and water dangerously scarce. For matters to improve, the report concludes, the military must change its outlook, ceasing its “flirtation with terrorist groups,” making peace with India, and interfering less in politics. The list is daunting. Read more »

I recently finished reading Joseph Ellis’ excellent biography of George Washington, and was struck by a particularly poignant passage. As Washington’s best efforts to strike an honorable deal with the Native Americans fail, he worries that the Indian side of the story would never make it into the history books, “They, poor wretches, have no press thro’ which their grievances are related; and it is well known, that when one side only of a story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.” (p. 371) As the saying goes, winners write the history books – which is why the Afghan government’s recent decision to eliminate any post-1973 events from its school texts is so worrisome. Since none of the major groups can agree on a basic set of facts, the country’s new school books simply leave out the last four decades of events: no Soviet involvement, no brutal years of civil war, no rise of the Taliban, and no U.S. involvement. The intention – the hope – is that this know-nothing “de-politicized” approach will lessen tensions by avoiding controversy and division in schools, which since the 1970s have been ideological battlefields. It will “encourage brotherhood and unity,” says Education Minister Farooq Wardak, optimistically. But the absence of modern history in the school books is more likely an indication of irreconcilable divisions in society rather than a portent of national reconciliation. Read more »