The INFO Project Blog

Egypt’s Health Minister Hatem el-Gabali announced an $80 million USD family planning campaign last week with the slogan “two children per family - a chance for a better life.” Since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has come to power he has urged Egyptian families to plan their families and have fewer children.

Mubarak has stated that at current growth rates the population of Egypt will double by the year 2050 in the absence of increased uptake of family planning. Egypt is the 16th most populous country in the world, according to the CIA.

An article in Ghana’s Public Agenda drew our attention today to a report from Population Reference Bureau (PRB) showing that demand for family planning services is growing around the world.

According to Toshiko Kaneda, co-author of the new data sheet Family Planning Worldwide, the increase is due to two key trends: the huge numbers of young people entering childbearing age in the developing world, and the increasing adoption of contraceptive use. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

I never knew that  so many useful surveys on contraceptive prevalence are out there.  While researching vasectomy prevalence for an upcoming issue of Population Reports I learned that the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are not the only source for data on population, health and nutrition.   A vital source of family planning data can also be drawn from UNICEF’s Multiple Inidcator Cluster Survey (MICS).   The third round of MICS surveys has been completed and UNICEF provides data for certain countries where DHS data is not available. 

Read the rest of this entry »