Child Rights to Space: The perceptions of Planners and Families in Low-Income Neighbourhoods of Amman

À la suite d’actions de réhabilitation entreprises dans des quartiers pauvres de Amman, on attendait de mesurer les progrès réalisés dans leur situation sanitaire et particulièrement pour la protection de l’enfance. Les leçons de cette expérience montrent d’abord l’inadaptation des plans et méthodes d’intervention dans les zones en question. La qualité de vie pour les enfants, et en particulier leur droit au jeu, ont été constamment sous-estimés ou ignorés par les planificateurs, les donateurs, les banques, les chercheurs et la communauté locale elle-même. L’étude suit les étapes des décisions qui ont conduit à renforcer les restrictions préalables au mouvement des enfants et à l’expression d’eux-mêmes. Elle montre les efforts déployés pour inverser cette tendance et les résistances rencontrées auprès des institutions et des familles. Elle soulève finalement la question générale des politiques urbaines à Amman en rappelant la priorité à donner aux enfants dans les choix futurs.With the upgrading of squatter areas in Amman slated in the 1980’s, health improvements were expected, especially in child survival. The lessons learned from this experience show the inadequacy of planning and methodological approaches in the project areas. The quality of children’s lives, especially their right to play, was consistently overlooked or denied by planners, donors, banks, social scientists and even the community itself. The paper traces the course of these decisions that led to reinforcing already existing restrictions on children’s right to move, to have privacy and to express themselves. It documents efforts to reverse these restrictions and the resistances encountered from institutions and families. Finally, it raises this as a broader issue of policy choice in Amman. Decisions for the future should put children first

Female autonomy and child nutritional status: The extended-family residential unit in Amman, Jordan

This study explores the hypothesis that the mother's position within household power relations--her autonomy with respect to other household members--influences her ability to provide for the health of her children. We argue that in the context of the Arab Middle East, a woman's structural position within the household is a good indicator of her relative autonomy: if she if the daughter-in-law in a vertically extended residential unit, she has less autonomy than if she is head or co-head of household. Our analysis is based on data collected from 1341 households in 1985 as a part of the Follow-up Health and Population Assessment of four urban settlements in Amman, Jordan. They include measures of the child's weight and age, plus a variety of socioeconomic factors. We analyze the effect of the mother's autonomy on child nutritional status within a multiple regression framework that controls for rival hypotheses. In particular, we investigate whether it is the availability of other potential child-care substitutes, particularly the grandmother, that influences child nutrition rather than household structure. We also look at household income, mother's education, the area of residence, and the child's sex. Our results show a strong negative influence associated with having a mother whose autonomy in the household is low. This effect does not disappear when mother's age and education, and household size and composition are taken into consideration. Nor is it a proxy for the higher household incomes characteristics of extended-family residential units with their multiple earners.female autonomy preschool nutrition extended family Jordan

Using routine surveys to measure mortality: A tool for programme managers

Aid donors and recipients have begun to demand timely, population-based information for programme planning and for measuring health programme performance. Results from trials in Jordan, Syria, Djibouti and People's Democratic Republic of Yemen show that widely-used routine surveys for estimating vaccination coverage can be adapted to collect data on health indicators such as child and maternal mortality. Estimation methods must be robust and fieldwork well-supervised. adding questions about total children ever born and surviving, the survival of the preceding birth, and the survival of sisters to such surveys, population-based estimates of the trend and recent level of childhood mortality and of the lifetime risk of maternal death can be obtained. These trials indicate that the need to monitor selected health indicators could be met through inexpensive, low-technology surveys.childhood mortality maternal mortality EPI surveys Jordan Syria Yemen Djibouti