Browsing by Subject "Middle East and North Africa"

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    Essays on the Microeconomics of Development in the Middle East and North Africa
    (2015-08) Krafft, Caroline
    This dissertation explores a variety of issues in the microeconomics of development, specifically in terms of labor and human development in the Middle East and North Africa. The three essays in this dissertation address a diverse array of development challenges through microeconomic and microeconometric analysis. The first essay investigates the returns to vocational secondary schooling as compared to other routes to vocational skills, such as apprenticeships, in Egypt. A longitudinal dataset allows for causal inference about returns by comparing siblings. The essay shows that, for recent cohorts, the estimated returns to vocational secondary education are the same as attaining no formal education, while the returns to skills obtained outside of formal education are substantial. The second essay first demonstrates that fertility has recently risen in Egypt and then investigates whether declining employment opportunities for women, and therefore lower opportunity costs for childrearing, may have contributed to the increase in fertility. Discrete-time hazard models are used to estimate the relationship between employment and childbearing, variously incorporating instrumental variables and fixed effects to address the endogeneity of employment. Results suggest that declining public sector employment, which is particularly appealing to women, contributed to the rise in fertility. The third essay identifies large socio-economic disparities in child health and nutrition in Jordan and investigates the factors contributing to inequality in children's height and weight, including parental health knowledge, food quantity and quality, health conditions, the health environment, and prenatal development. This essay demonstrates that the health environment and feeding contribute to inequality in child health but that these effects mediate only a small part of socio-economic disparities. Much of the inequality in children's health is determined prenatally, for instance through disparities in fetal growth. Overall, the findings of these three essays indicate important directions for future policies and programs to promote human and economic development.
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    Putting culture to work in counseling practice: Intersections of mental health and representations of Arab and Muslim women in Egypt
    (2017-05) Jaafar, Amina
    Recent sociopolitical events in Egypt have alarmed the global mental health community and led to warnings about the lasting psychological effects of political turmoil for Egyptian women, who are often characterized by Western-trained psychologists as likely to suffer from mental illness due to ‘Arab culture’ (Al-Krenawi, 2005; Charara et al., 2017). This dissertation examines the assumptions underlying this explanation of mental illness through a qualitative study of how representations of ‘culture’ shape the work of counseling psychologists in Egypt providing psychosocial support to women (and men). Drawing on poststructural thought, and through in-depth interviewing and participant observation, this dissertation explores the process by which ‘culture’ becomes understood as heavily influencing the cause, course, and treatment of women’s social and emotional issues. Although Arab and/or Muslim ‘culture’ is often understood as a broad category and is mostly defined in counseling psychology theory and practice as negatively affecting women, through this work an argument is put forth that there are multiple and often competing ways that ‘culture’ is taken up and put to work in the provision of psychosocial support to women in Egypt and the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The findings suggest that notions of culture are taken up and utilized in different ways at the macro, meso, and micro-level. In this study the macro-level represented how ‘culture’ was used simultaneously to explain and deny the existence of sociopolitical events and their effects on women. At the meso-level, notions of culture provided the foundation for the construction of an East versus West divide that privileged Western psychological knowledge and practitioners as having the utmost authority in the field of counseling psychology. Lastly, at the micro-level, practitioners’ understandings of ‘culture’ affected how they described interactions with their clients, and the ways in which they defined themselves as either similar or different from their client populations. Building on the deep exploration and analysis of ‘culture,’ this work concludes with a call for further and more critical psychological research in Egypt and the MENA region that analyzes the problematic centralizing of ‘culture’ in Arab and Muslim women’s mental health.
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    Women’s Economic Empowerment in Jordan, Oman and Tunisia
    (2020-05-06) Deeb, Rayan; Tvedt, Jonathan; Yelgezekova, Zhamin
    To develop greater insight into future programming in Jordan, Oman, and Tunisia, the International Republican Institute (IRI) posed the following question: What legal, cultural, and existing economic barriers are preventing women from contributing to their respective national economies? This question was submitted as a research proposal to the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs as a potential capstone project for Master’s degree-seeking students. The proposal by IRI was selected as the capstone project of three graduate students who were then commissioned to examine the existing literature, identify key themes, and develop policy and programming recommendations to better assist IRI in understanding the context of women engaging in their respect economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The result is a comprehensive analysis of the local and national barriers in Jordan, Oman, and Tunisia that prevent women from engaging in their national economies, and developing a stronger sense of economic empowerment.