U-M students help build sustainable community in rural Africa

A merry-go-round that generates electricity to light a rural African schoolhouse is among the sustainability projects tackled this summer by a team of U-M graduate students working with villagers in Liberia.

With colleagues from Clemson University and the University of Liberia, the U-M student group also designed and installed a toilet system that creates biogas to fuel the school’s kitchen stove and a solar-powered produce dehydrator that allows the villagers to keep dried mangoes, tomatoes and eggplant for up to a year without refrigeration.

“The developing countries are a key to global sustainability,” says Jose Alfaro, a doctoral student at the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) and co-founder of the U-M student group, Sustainability Without Borders.

“Eighty percent of the world’s population lives in developing countries, but most sustainability projects are being done in the developed world,” Alfaro says. “If we focus solely on that top 20 percent, we’ll never achieve a truly sustainable planet. The developing world really deserves our attention.”

Ten U-M graduate students from SNRE and the College of Engineering participated in the project. Five of them made a 10-day May trip to Konia, a village about eight hours drive from the Liberian capital of Monrovia. Two members of the group returned in August to put the finishing touches on the projects.

“Their level of dedication is amazing to me,” says Shelie Miller, an assistant professor at SNRE who advises the student group. “They are trying to find solutions that are both practical and creative, and I have no doubt that their efforts are making a difference in the community of Konia.”

— Jim Erickson, News Service

Federal program reduced births to poor women by nearly 30 percent

Federal family planning programs reduced childbearing among poor women by as much as 29 percent, according to a new U-M study.

The work by economist Martha Bailey is the first known study to assess the short- and long-term effects on U.S. fertility rates of early federal family planning programs that started in 1964 as part of the War on Poverty. The programs continue today under Title X of the Public Health Service Act.

“For almost 50 years, the federal government has invested in domestic family planning programs with mixed evidence of their short-run effectiveness and no credible evidence that these programs reduced U.S. childbearing in the longer term,” says Bailey, who is affiliated with the Department of Economics, the National Poverty Center and the Institute for Social Research (ISR).

The study was published online in August as a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper.

The impact of these programs was contentious in the 1960s, and it remains contentious today, with Title X federal family planning funding for Planned Parenthood and similar groups challenged earlier this year in debates about spending cuts needed to balance the federal budget.

Analyzing newly collected data on the expansion of federal family planning funding from 1964 to 1973, Bailey found that access to these programs was associated with a significant and sustained reduction in childbearing.

“This reduction was partially driven by a decline in births to teens and women in their early 20s, and partly by a reduction in second births,” Bailey says.  

“In the future, my work will consider how family planning programs affected a host of longer-term outcomes, including the age-structure of poverty and children’s resources and life chances.”

— Diane Swanbrow, News Service

Study: Lead exposure decreases Indian children’s hand-eye coordination

Young Indian children exposed to lead poisoning scored low on tests that measured hand-eye coordination, a new study finds.

Researchers conducted the study on children living in Chennai, India, and examined how lead exposure influenced scores on three motor skill tests — copying figures, matching designs and using pegboards.

Despite the 2001 phase-out of lead in gasoline in India, the study found that blood lead levels in children remain relatively high, with half (52.5 percent) of the children having a level greater than 10 milligrams. An increase of 10 milligrams decreased the children’s visual score by 2.6 points and 2.9 points for the drawing subtest.

“The implications are that in addition to the well-known effects of losing points of IQ, kids with modest levels of elevated lead exposure can also be expected to perform less well on the kinds of functions requiring hand-eye coordination, like writing, drawing or riding a bicycle,” says Dr. Howard Hu, professor of environmental health sciences, epidemiology and internal medicine, and the study’s principal investigator.

The study, conducted from 2003 to 2006, involved 814 children between ages 3 to 7. The children’s blood sample was measured with a lead analyzer.

Data collected from each child’s parent or primary caregiver involved a questionnaire that covered topics related to the child’s birth history, gender, school, parents’ education and occupation, socio-economic background. Other factors included living conditions, nutritional and dietary habits of the child, and environmental surroundings, such as industrial exposure, traffic exposure, hobbies and residential exposure from paints and toys.

Hu and Bhramar Mukherjee, an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics, co-authored the study.

The findings appear in the current online issue of NeuroToxicology.

— Jared Wadley, News Service

Poll: Majority of Michigan’s local leaders say employee unions hurt fiscal health of their localities

More than half of the local government leaders surveyed in Michigan jurisdictions that have public employee unions say those unions have had a negative impact on their jurisdictions’ fiscal health, a U-M survey reports.

Despite the negative view, 60 percent of the local officials say the relationship between their localities and employee unions has been either good or excellent over the past 12 months, according to the statewide poll. Only 5 percent say the relationship was poor.

Public employee unions have been a hot topic of debate this year nationwide, and the U-M survey provides a better understanding of the presence and impact of the unions across Michigan.

Bitter political feuds have erupted in other states over moves to curb employee benefits and, in some cases, union bargaining rights. Although Gov. Rick Snyder has taken a far less confrontational approach in Michigan, his efforts to reform public sector employment have helped focus debate on union-related issues.

Surprisingly, only 27 percent of Michigan’s local governments statewide have unions, according to the poll, part of the ongoing Michigan Public Policy Survey by U-M’s Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

However, most Michigan residents live within localities that have unions because the vast majority (98 percent) of the largest jurisdictions — which have the bulk of the state’s residents — have unions. Southeast Michigan stands out, with 56 percent of the region’s localities reporting one or more unions — twice as high a percentage as in any other region.

— William Foreman, News Service

The waning of American apartheid? Residential segregation declines in U.S. metros

The ideal of equal housing opportunities is closer to becoming a reality in most major U.S. metro areas, according to a U-M researcher.

“While black-white segregation remains high in many places, there are reasons to be optimistic that ‘apartheid’ no longer aptly describes much of urban America,” says Reynolds Farley, an investigator at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) who studies racial segregation in the United States.

Farley says residential segregation is a lens to assess whether the U.S. has achieved the equality symbolized by the 2008 Presidential election, when the Obama family moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Where you live determines much about what happens to your family, including where your children go to school, how easily you can access healthcare — and the quality of that care, your exposure to crime, the quality of your municipal services, your local tax rates, your access to fresh, healthy food, and whether your home appreciates or declines in value,” says Farley, who has a special interest in the City of Detroit and maintains a website about the history and future of the Motor City.

Based on a wide range of evidence, including studies of his own and work by Brown University researchers, Farley says that black-white segregation is decreasing in the country’s largest cities. “Even Chicago and Detroit, which were bastions of racial segregation, have become more integrated,” Farley says. “And in all 394 U.S. metro areas studied, black-white segregation has declined steadily from 1980 to 2010.”

Farley’s article on racial segregation trends appears in the current issue of Contexts, a publication of the American Sociological Association.

— Diane Swanbrow, News Service