Allan Hill is a medical demographer with regional interests in West Africa and the Middle East. He teaches three courses:

• PIH220: The analysis of mortality and its proximate determinants;
  
• PIH 251: Assessing the demographic impact of health interventions; and 
• PIH222: Population and Development (with David Bloom).

The latter course is meant for doctoral students preparing for their Written Qualifying Examination and second-year Masters students.

He is Head of the Education Office in the Department and chairs the Masters degree committee. For details on the two-years' Master program or the doctoral program, please click here. For admissions information, please click here.

Since coming to Harvard in 1991, most of Allan Hill's research has focused on two main questions:

1. How can we explain the rapid improvement in survival of children and adults in populations that are relatively poor and have low levels of education?
2. Why are some populations lowering their fertility very quickly without strong, state-subsidized family planning programs?

In The Gambia, much of the work has been centered in the villages around Farafenni where the UK Medical Research Council has maintained a field station since 1981. There, good measures of child survival are available as well as continuous reports of births. The villages have been used (amongst other projects) to assess the mortality and morbidity impact of impregnated bed-nets to prevent malaria¹ and other public health interventions such as fly control and the use of village-level health services. Bill MacLeod wrote his doctoral thesis on this topic in 1999.²

Recognizing that certain fertility patterns threaten the reproductive health of women, several interventions to reduce fertility have been tried in the area. Margaret Luck for her doctoral thesis³ assessed the impact of a family planning household distribution scheme in ways on fertility and birth spacing. With an anthropologist, Dr. Caroline Bledsoe, a three-year study was conducted on local concepts of reproductive health and their bearing on women's strategies for family building the cessation or control of fertility.⁴ More recently, Amy Ratcliffe has worked on the fertility of men and their overall contribution to the prevailing high fertility of about 7 births per woman.⁵ A reproductive morbidity survey was conducted in selected villages by Dr. Gijs Walraven and these results will be linked to the fertility histories for women collected in 1992, 1994 and 1998.

Through the Health Office of the Harvard Institute for International Development, Allan Hill manages the Polio project within the Applied Research on Child Health (ARCH) project direct by Dr. Jonathan Simon. This main thrust of this work is to discover reasons for the non-participation of young children in routine immunization programs or in national immunization days. These efforts are focused particularly on ways to achieve very high immunization rates in poor urban communities in West Africa with a view to eliminating polio from the region in the near future. See the HIID web page for full details.

Other work in Egypt with Drs. John Weeks and Saad Gadalla from University College of San Diego is combining census and survey data with images from high-resolution satellite photography to map the spatial dimensions of the health and fertility transitions in Cairo and governorate of Menoufia.⁶ This work is being expanded to Tunisia and Jordan where both good demographic data and a series of satellite images are available for both countries.

Allan Hill also manages two institutional links overseas -- one with Dr. Hoda Rashad and the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo and the other with Dr. Ofusu-Ammah at the School of Public Health, University of Ghana in Accra. The link with Cairo allows faculty from Harvard to contribute to the annual course "From science to action: reproductive health in the Arab world" as well as the comparative analysis of the survey data on the health and fertility transitions in Arab countries.

In 1998, Allan Hill took over the editorship of The Health Transition Review from Professor Jack Caldwell in Australia. Details on this journal can be accessed through the Health Transition Review web site and by sending e-mail correspondence to htr@hsph.harvard.edu.

 

---

1)  Alonso, P.L., J.R.M. Armstrong-Schellenberg, P. Gomez, A.G. Hill, et. al., "A malaria control trial using insecticide-treated bed nets and targeted prophylaxis in a rural area of The Gambia, West Africa. 6. The impact of the interventions on mortality and morbidity from malaria," Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 87(S2):37-44, 1993.
2)  Macleod, W.B., Unpublished DS thesis, Harvard School of Public Health, 1999.
3)  Luck, M., Unpublished DS thesis, Harvard School of Public Health, 1997.
4)  Bledsoe, C.H., F. Banja, and A.G. Hill, "Reproductive mishaps and western contraception:  an African challenge to fertility theory," Population and Development Review 23(3), 1998.  Bledsoe, C.H., A.G. Hill, P. Langerock, and U. D'Alessandro. "Constructing natural fertility:  the use of western contraceptive technologies in rural Gambia," Population and Development Review 20(1):81-113, 1994.
5)  Hill, A.G. and A.A. Ratcliffe. Male fertility.
6)  Weeks, J., M. Saad Gadalla, T. Rashed, J. Stanforth and A.G. Hill, Spatial variability in fertility in Menoufia, Egypt assessed through the application of remote sensing and GIS technologies. Population Association of America, New York, March 1999.