The INFO Project Blog

In light of INFO Project’s online discussion forum on female condom programming in low-resource settings, we thought it appropriate to highlight a recent Lancet Global Health Network’s article featuring a report on U.S. foreign policy’s role on the acquisition and promotion of female condoms in the prevention of HIV/AIDS. The Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) recently released this report presenting an overview of the female condom, its role in the prevention of HIV, the challenges faced in making the contraceptive accessible, and a thorough explanation of U.S. and global policies that affect the use and promotion of the female condom.

The report summarizes a number of peer-reviewed articles and also features opinions from female condom experts and organizations. The article concludes with a number of evidence-based recommendations for U.S. and U.S. agencies’ support in the procurement, distribution and advocacy of female condoms and removal of existing barriers hindering women’s access to these potentially life-saving contraceptives.

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 »

INFO is gearing up to launch a new kind of social networking site. The Elements of Successful Family Planning Programs is more than your new bicycle. It’s your fast-tracked guide to meeting colleagues around the world, finding new evidence-based resources, and gaining insight from FP program authorities around the world who have built successful programs. Join today, and stay tuned for the site to launch next week!

Family Health Internation (FHI) research chief Ward Cates is quoted in a Washington Post article by Craig Timberg saying that birth control is Africa’s “best-kept secret” for preventing the transmission of HIV.

173,000 HIV-infected births each year are averted with contraception, and tens of thousands of more infections could be reliably and less expensively prevented by improving access to birth control in Africa.

Timberg interviews a 27 year-old widow who, after being diagnosed with HIV in 2004, said she “wanted to be done” with childbearing.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »