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Are your publications appropriate for both female and male audiences? How can you ensure that photographs, graphics, content, and design are gender sensitive? The INFO Project’s just published A Gender Guide to Reproductive Health Publications: Producing Gender-Sensitive Publications for Health Professionals is designed for the editors, writers, designers, and distribution specialists who help develop and disseminate reproductive health publications for professional audiences. Press releases and media kits can also benefit from this guide’s approach.

-Posted by Lisa

In conjunction with our new project on the elements of successful family planning methods, we’ve been querying experts to see which components they believe are crucial. Recently we spoke with the man who wrote the book (literally) on contraception, Dr. Robert Hatcher of Emory University (Dr. Hatcher was a also key technical advisor on the Global Handbook INFO produced earlier this year).

He emphasized the importance of providing highly-effective long-lasting methods such as the IUD and implants, but also of something more basic–the empowerment of women. He said there won’t be the financial support needed for an effective program without this essential element.

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Director Michael Tobias juxtaposes the quiet order of Holland with Mumbai’s teaming streets in a film from California-based Population Communication called No Vacancy that pleads for a reinvigoration of family planning programs worldwide.

With Robert Gillespie’s narration, Tobias’s film begins in Europe praising locals’ “wise decisions” to have small families. Gillespie interviews officials in Holland that point out that their country, with its frank discussion on sexuality and contraception, has the lowest abortion rates and teenage pregnancy in the world. An average of 1.66 children are born per woman.
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The debate on elements of successful family planning programs continues on the Implementing Best Practices Knowledge Gateway.

During a rousing debate over the weekend, a participant weighed in from India on logistical problems noting that a surplus of supplies can meet an untimely end if there is no storage space.

I have myself seen health workers dumping condoms in the village well or burning them, when they were supplied with quantities which were not required by the users.

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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.

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