The INFO Project Blog

Here at INFO, we love to report about how others are using Web 2.0 to advance the cause of improved global health, especially in the area of reproductive health, family planning and maternal and child health.

Recently I received a wonderful e-mail from the folks at Engenderhealth (see past post on the ACQUIRE End of Project Meeting). EngenderHealth has been using YouTube in order to raise awareness for infant and maternal mortality and the Millennium Development Goals.

The Millennium Development Goals are eight international development goals that the 189 United Nations member states (plus a broad range of international organizations) agreed in 2001 to achieve by the year 2015. They include cutting levels of extreme poverty in half, substantially reducing child mortality rates, fighting epidemic diseases, and promoting global socioeconomic development.

YouTube has organized a global campaign called “In My Name” to raise public awareness of the Millennium Development Goals, in the belief that governments would be willing to do more if they saw how strongly so many of their citizens believe in this kind of effort. The overall campaign features Black Eyed Peas front man Will.I.Am, and his call-out video asks people from around the world to create and upload their own video stating their name, their home country, and a specific request that their own government do more to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Read the rest of this entry »

From guest blogger Vanessa Mitchell, a Program Specialist with the INFO Project, and a Program Officer with CCP/Côte d’Ivoire:

On July 17, 2008 in Abidjan, a mini-film called Porteuses de Vie, premiered in front of groups in the fight against HIV/AIDS, as well as the media. The 26 minute film on the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) was created by Alexis Don Zigre with support  from the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP).

Through this communication tool, JHU/CCP explores the issue of HIV positive women seeking to have children. The film is targeted primarily towards health centers and NGOs in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and is complemented by a user guide. The user guide covers five main areas that are targeted toward women, their partners, and their families: communication in a relationship, stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), the role of service providers, the role of PLWHA support groups, and PMTCT. Read the rest of this entry »

When the leaders of the G8, a group of 8 industrailzed nations (the G8 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) meet July 7-9 in Hokkaido for their annual summit  global health will be on the agenda!  Leaders discuss setting targets to tackle the world’s growing shortage of health workers. 

Japan, as host of the July 7-9 summit, is particularly pushing for G-8 cooperation to promote universal access to reproductive health services and increased birth attendance by skilled attendants in Africa to 75 percent in five years to drive forward the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, the sources said. - Associated Press

Leaders of the G8 said that they will discuss ways to increase global cooperation to achieve the MDGs and to discuss ways to increase effectiveness of aid delivery.

Recently, generous funding slotted towards the prevention and treatment of HIV have stolen some of the thunder once belonging to global family planning programs. The budget and quantity of often vertically-organized programs (for example, a program offering HIV voluntary counseling and testing with no information on family planning), have left many reproductive health advocates scrambling to demonstrate to decision makers how essential, not to mention cost effective, family planning is.

In the words of Dr. Robert Blum, who teaches in the Population, Family and Reproductive Health department of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

HIV has sucked not only all of the air out of the conversation, but also all the money…

Luckily, reproductive health advocates are mobilizing. The Global Exchange Network for Reproductive Health (GEN) is organizing a virtual discussion forum, “Using Leadership to Reposition Reproductive Health on the Public Health Agenda.” Funded by USAID, the forum will take place June 9-13 on the GEN Web site, in three languages (English, Spanish and French). Read the rest of this entry »

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 »