The INFO Project Blog

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).

Three New/Forthcoming Resources (stay tuned for links!)

1.  Balanced Counseling and Testing Tool from the Population Council. An attractive package with method-specific cards developed using Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers and a step-by-step job aid for client needs-oriented counseling.
2. 2. FRONTIERS Integration Assessment Methodology (FIAM) Handbook, to measure, guide, evaluate or test the integration or linkage of family planning and other reproductive health services.

3. Helping Women Achieve Healthy Birth Intervals: Working title of a forthcoming publication from authors including Nahla Tawab, Population Council Egypt.

Two News Articles on Population (making family planning relevant to decision makers)

1. U.S. HIV/AIDS policy must include family planning. Philadelphia Inquirer, Janet Fleischman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
2. Africa’s Greatest Challenge is to Reduce Fertility. Financial Times, John May, Population Council

One source for all the presenter’s slides, to be posted in the next week: the Population Council’s Web site.

**Update! All presentations have been posted here. Stay tuned for more information and summaries!