The INFO Project Blog

On my recent trip to Beijing, I was able to sit down with the director of Marie Stopes International China, Lily Liu Liqing, and American expatriate Alice Zheng, who is working there as a project assistant. Both had a lot to say about the work of MSIC in the domain of family planning and reproductive health in China, which is interesting in its own right but also has implications for work in other contexts. As they discuss in the following clip, China’s unique history and rapid socio-economic transformation have implications both for the needs of the population, and the methods by which organizations can go about fulfilling them.

-Ted Alcorn, The INFO Project

Experimenting with the Clusty.com search features (it searches blogs, wikipedia, and images as well as the Web) I stumbled upon an NPR broadcast on pending PEPFAR legislation in Congress.

A global health aid package worth tens of billions of dollars is being debated in the House of Representatives this week. Among the items under consideration is whether to integrate money for family planning into AIDS prevention efforts.

NPR’s Brenda Wilson reports that the proposal to integrate reproductive health services such as family planning into HIV prevention efforts is sometimes controversial with faith-based aid organizations such as the Catholic Relief Services.

Studies have shown that integrating these kind of services with HIV prevention and treatment takes careful strategy and execution. Intregration can save money and it can save lives, for example, by averting missed opportunities to counsel women about family planning.

The INFO Project culls the latest resources on integrating sexual and reproductive health services with HIV and puts everything online here. Stay tuned for the quarterly newsletter, with the latest on male circumcision, female-controlled FP methods such as microbicides, and other hot topics.

A poster of “Tatiana y Johnny,” in vintage-1986 glory (faux pearls, perms, and nylon cinch belts) hangs in our office. Recently, while working on the forthcoming issue of INFO Reports, Entertainment-Education for Better Health, I learned who they are. Read the rest of this entry »

For those who follow the HIFA2015 (Health Information for All by 2015) Listserv, there has been an interesting thread on the future of information dissemination to and from health workers in developing countries.

Much of the discourse has been about the cost and effectiveness of print materials on one hand, and the difficulties of accessing the Internet and other electronic resources such as CD-ROMs on the other. Some of the posts have been about the way health workers absorb and communicate information with proponents and opponents of print and electronic formats airing their views.

Of course, as with most of these types of debates, the future path lies somewhere in the middle–printed reference materials, the Internet, e-forums, blogs, e-learning, e-books, etc., all have their place. The challenge will be to teach future generations of information seekers and information communicators to use all these vehicles to achieve their goals. Read the rest of this entry »

While many at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland were wringing their hands over the US housing slump, Jordan’s stunning Queen Rania was ringing in an exciting new campaign with the UN Foundation and Nike-convened Coalition for Adolescent Girls. Read on for Davos diaries from Bangladesh to Guatemala… Read the rest of this entry »