Donor assistance for population, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS programs continues to increase, but the benchmarks used to assess performance have not changed since 1994. Those who monitor donor performance say that current assistance is not sufficient and that the benchmarks need to move upwards. This review of recent efforts to revise cost estimates for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS services concludes that $35 billion to $45 billion annually will be needed from all sources over the next few years. At the same time, further research is needed to improve the accuracy of such estimates.

Special report on Community-Based Population and Environment Programs including a list of publications and other materials.

Revised Data for the Population Action International Report, Sustaining Water: Population and the Future of Renewable Water Supplies

New foreign assistance strategies that aim to encourage ownership by recipients while still effectively reducing poverty are laudable. They offer the hope of increased financial support to overall global development-a bigger pie-but they also pose significant challenges to the family planning field: Will it be able to keep a slice of that pie?

Over the last two years, the architecture of U.S. foreign assistance has undergone an unprecedented restructuring. At the same time, a congressionally-mandated commission on poverty-focused development has issued its report; a Senate staff delegation has conducted an extensive overseas fact-finding mission; and numerous nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and presidential campaigns have issued policy prescriptions on the future of U.S. foreign aid. In all of these efforts, insufficient attention has been paid to the implications of actual and proposed changes in the U.S. foreign assistance program to the future priority and funding of family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) care overseas-highly successful and cost-effective programs that have received U.S. government funding since the 1960s.

Report detailing how the risks of civil conflict between either governments or state factions are in fact closely tied to demographic factors and the dynamics of human population.

The Shape of Things to Come provides valuable new insights into the programs and investments that can make countries "healthier"-more stable and peaceful, more democratic, and better able to provide for the needs of their citizens. It places all countries into one of four major age structures with attendant characteristics, benefits and risks associated with governance, security and economic development.

The world's population more than doubled in the last half-century and still is increasing. Absent an unexpected dramatic shift in family size or catastrophic increases in death rates, it could add 2.5 billion people before peaking. Worldwide, the largest group of young people ever is entering their reproductive years, requiring an expansion of family planning services to enable more couples to have the smaller families and later pregnancies they desire. In the long term, this will contribute to individual and family well-being, a slowdown in population growth and sustainable economic development.