The INFO Project Blog

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 »

The INFO Project is headquartered in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (CCP). Along with a mouthful of a name, our location within CCP makes us privvy to the latest news about highly effective health communication activities around the world. Recently, we learned about some comprehensive health analysis being dispatched in Pakistan’s English-language International News.

Working as Deputy Team Leader with the CCP Pakistan team, Dr. Zaeem ul Haq’s current professional focus is maternal and newborn health. He also advises the National Programme of Family Planning and Primary Health Care in 132 districts around the country, and is designing a mass media campaign with this program.

In his spare time–one wonders how there is any–Dr. ul Haq has been writing a series of editorials that connect behavior change communication (BCC) theory and maternal and child health with issues like global warming, famine and HIV. In a March appeal for  improving the country’s health facilities and training of birth attendants (Lights, camera, action: for a cause), he writes,

Today, Pakistani mothers and infants are facing a situation worse than the Ethiopian famine [of the mid 1980s]. A mother dies every 20 minutes while in pregnancy or while giving birth to her child in Pakistan. Similarly, a child less than a year dies every two or three minutes in the country. This is a ’story’ much bigger than the African famine, because it has been happening for decades as opposed to the famine that spanned a few years only.

In an April editorial, Dr. ul Haq highlights Pakistan’s acute vulnerability to environmental problems, writing that that “infective diarrhea and dysentary [will] likely increase further as a result of… climate change.” Already one of the three most common diseases among children aged less than five, diarrhea’s impact on children in this region could worsen with growing temperatures, water stagnation, especially in light of poor existing santitation and waste disposal. But instead of pointing fingers, the health communication specialist has a simple, relatable suggestion for policymarkers: he writes that the “small step of promoting exclusive breast-feeding can go a long way.” Read the rest of this entry »

Umniah, one of Jordan’s largest mobile phone companies, has signed a Letter of Agreement with the Jordan Health Communication Partnership (JHCP) to support and spread the messages national family planning campaign (Hayati Ahla”- My Life is More Beautiful). Umniah will send health awareness SMS messages to all Umniah subscribers (addressing a number of health issues, includin reproductive and sexual health), free of cost, which will reach a total of 300,000 people. Umniah will also be distributing JHCP health education materials at point of sales and include birth spacing and small family size related messages on their pre-paid cards, reaching over 1.3 million subscribers.

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 »

“Can the cellphone end global poverty?” Sara Corbett’s article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine points to new ways Nokia and other mobile phone manufacturers are getting their product to remote rural areas, way off the land line grid.

At the moment, Africa makes up just 7.2% of the 2.7 billion mobile phone users worldwide. But the numbers are growing fast:  in 2006, 55.3 million more mobile phone subscribers were added, and already, 45% of African villages are covered.

To expand access, Corbett writes that Nokia asks its developers to think about how the other half lives:

How do you make a phone that can be repaired by a streetside repairman who may not have access to new parts? How do you build a phone that won’t die a quick death in a monsoon or by falling off the back of a motorbike on a dusty road?

Other manufacturers are, so to speak, dreaming of Africa (or at least, Africans’ growing buying power). Corbett writes that, since access to reliable electricity is a major barrier, Motorola now provides free solar-powered charging kiosks to female entrepreneurs in Uganda. Read the rest of this entry »