提高女性教育水平可控制人口增長
Former Irish President Mary Robinson was just making polite conversation when she asked an Ethiopian teenager about her wedding day.
The 16-year-old had already been married a year.
"She looked at me with the saddest eyes and said, 'I had to drop out of school,'" Robinson said in a telephone interview.
"That conveyed to me the reality," said Robinson, the first woman to serve as Ireland's president and former U.N. high commissioner for human rights. "Her life, as far as she is concerned, had more or less ended."
Robinson said keeping girls in school was one of the most important things policymakers could do to address the coming challenges of an ever-increasing population, predicted by the United Nations to reach 7 billion at the end of the month.
"European countries are concerned about aging populations as is Japan, but this is much less of an issue than the huge bulge of people which we are going to see over the next 40 years when the population goes from 7 billion to 9 billion people," she said.
"Almost all of that increase will be in poor developing countries, so that we have a very big demographic challenge."
Family planning experts worry in particular about the looming population boom in sub-Saharan Africa.
In May, the United Nations projected the world population would reach 9.3 billion in 2050 and 10.1 billion by 2100. Much of that growth will come from Africa, where the population is growing at 2.3 percent a year -- more than double Asia's 1 percent growth rate. If that rate stays consistent, which is not certain, Africa's population will more than triple to 3.6 billion by 2100 from the current 1 billion.
Joel Cohen, a professor of population studies at Rockefeller University and Columbia University in New York, said universal secondary education offered a way to reduce population in high-fertility regions.
In addition to providing information about contraception, a secondary education motivates women to reduce their own fertility, improve the health of their children and allows them to move from a mind-set of having many children in the hopes that some will survive to improving the quality of each child's life, Cohen wrote in the journal Nature.愛爾蘭前總統瑪麗•羅賓森最近與一名埃塞俄比亞少女進行了友好交談，詢問了她有關結婚典禮的情況。
這位16歲的少女已經結婚一年了。
羅賓森在電話採訪中說：“她用無比悲傷的眼神看着我，說，‘我被迫輟學了。’”
羅賓森說：“這讓我看到了現實真相。她期盼的生活幾乎終結了。” 羅賓森是愛爾蘭首位女總統，還曾擔任聯合國前人權事務高級專員。
羅賓森表示，爲應對人口增長帶來的挑戰，政府能做的最重要的事情就是讓女孩多讀書。據聯合國預測，全球人口將在本月末達到70億。
她說：“歐洲國家很擔心出現日本那樣的人口老齡化問題，但和人口快速增長相比，這都是小菜一碟。在未來40年裏，全球人口將從70億飆升至90億。”
“幾乎所有的新增人口都將出生在貧困的發展中國家，因此我們將面臨嚴峻的人口挑戰。”
計劃生育專家尤其擔心撒哈拉以南非洲地區的人口激增問題。
今年五月，聯合國預計全球人口將在2050年達到93億，在2100年達到101億。大多數新增人口將來自非洲，非洲人口年增長率爲2.3%，是亞洲人口增長率1%的兩倍多。如果該比率保持穩定（但還不確定），非洲人口將在2100年漲至36億，是目前人口（10億）的三倍多。
紐約市洛克菲勒大學和哥倫比亞大學的人口研究教授喬爾•科恩稱，在人口高增長地區，普及中等教育是控制人口的好辦法。
科恩在《自然》雜誌中說，除了傳授避孕知識，中等教育還鼓勵女性降低生育率，提高孩子的健康水平，另外還會讓她們改變多生育，希望其中一些孩子可以存活的心態，引導她們提高每個孩子的生活質量。
