The INFO Project Blog

If there’s ever a Mount Rushmore memorial built to honor heroes of family planning, the granite rock faces should be chisled with the features of community health workers like the women in pink, at left.

This woman, who works in a remote village in Rajasthan, India, promotes the use of family planning, educates families about HIV/AIDS, and encourages girls to go to school. The Veerni Project, a women’s empowerment group, trained her and other mostly-volunteer ”promoters” in each village.

I was reminded of these brave women, whose energetic work I observed while working with the Veerni Project a few years ago, in doing research for the upcoming issue of Population Reports, Elements of Successful Family Planning Programs. One key element of many successful programs? A mix of contraceptive service delivery points, facilitated by community agents like Veerni’s promoters.

In the case of CARE’s Extra Mile Initiative (EMI), which took place in eastern Madagascar–dubbed “the eight continent” for its rich biodiversity–community health agents overcame obstacles including flooded rivers and roadless districts to teach community members about methods to space their childrens’ births and limit family size. They were also tasked with training health center staff and local politicians. According to the Case Study, “the project’s very name indicated the additional effort CARE would need to invest just to reach the six communes–by motocycle, canoe and, mostly, on foot.” Luckily, the agents were cheerfully good-humored about the challenges, recounting storise like Mr. Boutobé’s:

In roadless Ambahoabe commune… the SDC [Social Development Committee] organized residents of the commune seat to smooth out nearly five miles of trail so that field agent Sebastian Boutobé could reach them by motorcycle, rather than on foot… “[My motorcycle] made such an impression,” [Sebastian] says, “that some people named their babies Sebastian in honor of the event.”

Others crossed flooded rivers, like Mac Samuel, who remembered at one point, while he was trying to reach a remote area, ”we were up to our necks.”
Read the rest of this entry »

The Population Reports team has been busy, busy, between researching new findings on contraceptive methods, elements of successful family planning programs, and providing an updated guide to the highly effective but underutilized method of vasectomy.

Last covered by the Population Reports series in 1992, vasectomy research has now clarified many questions of eligibility criteria, optimal technique, post surgical follow-up and risk of long-term health concerns.

The topic came to light today in a blog post on the Elements of Family Planning Success Web site. Yogeeta Manglani, an INFO intern, posted on her blog about new male contraceptive options, which include hormonal therapy, testicular warming, transdermal gels and, fascinatingly, a vitamin A blocker. According to Yogeeta,

The most talked about methods are RISUG, an injectable compound that seems to prevent a man from fathering a child for up to 10 years and IVDs, which are sutured to the vas deferens.

Yogeeta, who cited a U.S. News & World Report article from April, writes that steady funding for research on male contraception is less than assured. This major roadblock means, in the words of Elaine Lissner, director of the San Francisco-based Male Contraception Information Project, no real progress can be made in the near future.

The problem, she added, is that research has been scattergun. ‘If we [continue to] do a study here, a study there, as we have for the last 20 years, it could take forever.’

In the mean time, don’t miss the Population Reports issue on vasectomy. Watch this site.

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.

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 »

Join colleagues around the world in an online discussion forum from April 23 - May 2, 2008. Health professionals will share their experiences with female condoms in diverse service delivery settings. This forum will be an opportunity to review the latest guidance on female condoms featured in Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers and exchange information and experiences with colleagues who are working to provide high-quality family planning services.

Register for free

The discussion will be guided by the interest of the participants. Topics will include integration of female condoms into family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs, opportunities for male involvement, strategies for encouraging commitment and participation of governments, donor agencies and civil society in female condom programming, as well as practical guidance related to female condom use and counseling. Read the rest of this entry »