The INFO Project Blog

The INFO Project is headquartered in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (CCP). Along with a mouthful of a name, our location within CCP makes us privvy to the latest news about highly effective health communication activities around the world. Recently, we learned about some comprehensive health analysis being dispatched in Pakistan’s English-language International News.

Working as Deputy Team Leader with the CCP Pakistan team, Dr. Zaeem ul Haq’s current professional focus is maternal and newborn health. He also advises the National Programme of Family Planning and Primary Health Care in 132 districts around the country, and is designing a mass media campaign with this program.

In his spare time–one wonders how there is any–Dr. ul Haq has been writing a series of editorials that connect behavior change communication (BCC) theory and maternal and child health with issues like global warming, famine and HIV. In a March appeal for  improving the country’s health facilities and training of birth attendants (Lights, camera, action: for a cause), he writes,

Today, Pakistani mothers and infants are facing a situation worse than the Ethiopian famine [of the mid 1980s]. A mother dies every 20 minutes while in pregnancy or while giving birth to her child in Pakistan. Similarly, a child less than a year dies every two or three minutes in the country. This is a ’story’ much bigger than the African famine, because it has been happening for decades as opposed to the famine that spanned a few years only.

In an April editorial, Dr. ul Haq highlights Pakistan’s acute vulnerability to environmental problems, writing that that “infective diarrhea and dysentary [will] likely increase further as a result of… climate change.” Already one of the three most common diseases among children aged less than five, diarrhea’s impact on children in this region could worsen with growing temperatures, water stagnation, especially in light of poor existing santitation and waste disposal. But instead of pointing fingers, the health communication specialist has a simple, relatable suggestion for policymarkers: he writes that the “small step of promoting exclusive breast-feeding can go a long way.” Read the rest of this entry »

Child Lives: Stolen Lives, the NOW on PBS program that screened at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in January, has received the Edward R. Murrow Award for best TV interpretation or documentary on international affairs from the Overseas Press Club (OPC). 

At the panel discussion following the Hopkins screening, journalist Maria Hinojosa discussed the media’s role in exposing under-reported stories affecting women and girls around the world, like child marriage. She said,

The issue of child marriage gets glossed over… But this practice sets [girls] off for life impoverished, disempowered, and at risk for all these health issues.

Read more about the panel, organized with ICRW and featuring additional child marriage experts from Hopkins, the Population Council, and TOSTAN, at INFO’s press archive.

All the winners of the OPC’s Edward Murrow awards are listed on their site.

Listen to Maria Hinojosa speak with broadcast news reporter Marc Steiner about the serious health consequences of child marriage.

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Jane Bertrand about building monitoring and evaluation into family planning programs. Dr. Bertrand, who is the director of the Center for Communication Programs, home of the INFO Project, pointed to Colombia’s pioneering PROFAMILIA family planning program, an IPPF affiliate that is the largest not-for-profit FP provider in the country.

In terms of organizations that have done M&E well, let me go back to a pioneer in this area, PROFAMILIA in Colombia in the 60s and 70s. They were way ahead of the competition, and their executive director, Miguel Trias, said at one point, “A day without data is like a minute without oxygen.”

Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent interview about the Elements of Family Planning Success, Dr. Alan Bornbusch gives examples of national contraceptive success stories in countries including Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. Dr. Bornbusch, a Public Health Adviser in USAID/Washington’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, explains the role of the supply chains and gives strategies for averting bottlenecks (supply choke points) in national contraceptive provision programs.

Zimbabwe has an innovative system that Dr. Bornbusch describes in this video. Trucks come to clinics each month with laptops to work with contraceptive supply managers to determine what supply should be for that month. Then, the supply is “topped up” to carry them through the next month.

Read the transcript of his entire interview, then tell us what you think.

Several INFO staffers journeyed to Washington to attend the two-day FP forum, Strengthening Family Planning Services through Operations Research: Lessons Learned and Future Directions, in the Reagan Rotunda building. The sessions, sponsored by FRONTIERS and ACCESS-FP, were chock full of new ideas. What to do, what to do? For starters, we thought we’d rattle off a a few choice tidbits.

Five Pithy Quotes

1. “The theme of this meeting might be the blurring of family planning” –Ian Askew, on the growing emphasis on integrating services with HIV/AIDS voluntary counseling and testing as well as maternal and child health services.
2. “If you know a woman who got pregnant when she was not meaning to, raise your hand [most hands up]. That’s why we are here today” –Catharine McKaig, ACCESS-FP/JHPIEGO, about why postpartum family planning is so important.
3. “And we are all family planning wallahs here,” –M.E. Khan, Population Council, India, saying that even he is skeptical that family planning should always have a role in antenatal care services.
4. “It’s the year of living dangerously” — Holly Blanchard, ACCESS-FP/JHPIEGO, about the first postpartum year, when providers may not prescribe a hormonal method because bleeding has not resumed. During this year, the risk of pregnancy is very high.
5. “They say LAM is an old wives tale”–Marcos Arevalo, Population Council, Mexico, about policymakers’ reluctance to endorse and support breastfeeding as a modern family planning method.

Four Surprising Statistics (or, why operations research matters!)

1. 61% of HIV-positive adolescents used no contraceptive method during first sex (Harriet Birungi, Population Council, Kenya, during a presentation on the family planning needs of HIV-positive youth).
2. Every year in Africa, 250,000 women die every year in childbirth (Annie Mwangi, Population Council, Kenya, explaining midwives’ crucial role in expanding service delivery).
3. Cost of IUD insertion right after delivery is as low as $2.14 (John Pile, ACQUIRE/EngenderHealth, on long-acting and permanent contraceptive methods during postpartum period).
4. Women using LAM were 20 times less likely to be pregnant 1 year after another pregnancy than women who had not been using the lactational amenorrhea method, or exclusive breastfeeding to prevent pregnancy after birth to baby’s six month birthday (Marcos Arevalo, Institute for Reproductive Health, Georgetown University). Read the rest of this entry »