The INFO Project Blog

Reproductive health and family planning take on even keener importance in conflict zones, where the unique circumstances can intensify the problems facing populations just as they hamper systematic responses of assistance. A fellow at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, Elizabeth Crowley, gave an interesting presentation to my class last week about the current work in conflict and post-conflict situations.  In addition to detailing the content of the Minimum Initial Service Package (MISP) for reproductive health in conflict situations, she spoke about the role that conflict is seen to play in the spread of HIV/AIDS and other STIs. The patterns are not identical across contexts, but current research suggests that conflict and displacement may actually slow the spread of HIV.

She also directed her audience to two short UNFPA films: Women, War and Health, and Reproductive Health Services for Displaced Persons: A Decade of Progress. They are as pertinent now as ever.

-Posted by Ted Alcorn

Reporter Collins Vumiria wrote a great editorial for Panos’s AfricaVox blog, in reprinted in Uganda’s Monitor, about the urgent need for the government to involve traditional birth attendants in preventing HIV.

She writes,

rural village women still struggle to get the money for transport to hospitals, even when they are only a few kilometres away. If birth attendants were fully trained and integrated into the healthcare system, they could be equipped with better knowledge of HIV prevention and to advise women about the drugs that can help prevent their children contracting HIV. 

Vumiria spoke with a 52 year-old birth attendant with two years of schooling who last attended a workshop on HIV counselling in 1992. The woman, who Vumiria writes was “confused about how the virus could be diagnosed,” sought further training yet was brushed aside by local medical workers.

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Hakia is a new social searching tool that, in the eyes of some trend watchers, is making Google look “old school.”

After listening to the BBC World Service Health Check’s broadcast from Bangladesh, focusing on maternal health and doctor scarcity in this flood-prone nation, I was curious to see what its maternal mortality rate was. So I googled–oops, searched–for “bangladesh maternal mortality rate.” This is what it told me:

The following should help: Bangladesh’s maternal mortality rate - at 440 deaths per 100,000 live births - is a leading cause of death. See this page. …See the hakia gallery for Bangladesh

It then listed 10 resources with an answer to this query, highlighting the relevant passage.

Clicking through to the Hakia gallery for Bangladesh took me to a list of resources divided into tabs like Country Profile, Culture, and Cities.

A parallel search on Google did not answer the question, but the first hit, a UNICEF country profile, told me that Hakia’s statistics might be outdated. The adjusted rate (1995-2005) of MM is 380 per 100,000 births.

The “social” part of Hakia isn’t actually the conversational responses, which come from Ask.com, or the handy-highlighting (called Hakia ScoopBar), it’s checking to see who else searches like you.

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The new site, called MDG Monitor, was just developed by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), Relief Web  and UNICEF to be a one-stop-shop for information on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), globally and at the country level. It is designed for policymakers, journalists, students and people like us who are working in development. 

	Those of us working in reproductive health are most interested in goal #5 - Improve Maternal Health
	and goal #6 - Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other Diseases.

You can browse by goal or by location and view maps of the entire world or individual countries.  If you have a high bandwidth connection to the Web, you can also download Google Earth (about 13 MB) and view the entire site through Google Earth.

Speaking of maternal health, if you’d like to track new research coming out about maternal health, search INFO’s One Source database on this topic.   

The World Bank’s Private Sector Development Blog posted a new interactive map showing data on the Millennium Development Goals today–halfway to 2015. According to the monitor’s site,

The MDG Monitor is designed as a one-stop-shop for information on progress towards the [goals], globally and at the country level. It is intended as a tool for policymakers, development practitioners, journalists, students and others interested in learning about the Goals and tracking progress toward them.

On the pink-hued Maternal mortality map,clusters of fuchsia and burgundy across Africa and South Asia reinforce the importance of focusing on safe motherhood, and family planning, to meet the goals for 2015.

Even Brazil, with its growing economic strength, is dusty rose (260 per 100,000 live births), behind China’s pale pink (56 per 100,000 live births).

Also helpful to visualize development challenges lying ahead is this Progress Chart compiled from June 2007 statistics on progress towards meeting the goals.