Community Health Workers: Meeting the Unmet Need for Family Planning in West and Central Africa

A recent New York Times article featured an updated United Nations forecast that projects the world’s population will reach 10.1 billion by the end of the century, rather than stabilizing at nine billion midcentury as previously predicted.

The Promise of Better Health Worker Education with Launch of New Kenya Center

The Kitui Centre of Excellence for Family Planning and Reproductive Health will support local faculty to develop & apply innovative teaching methods.

An Imperative to Act: Family Planning in West Africa

Earlier this month, I was in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso with delegates from eight French-speaking West African countries* for the conference, “Family Planning in the context of Population and Development: the Urgency to Act.”

How Health Workers Influence Attitudes and Decisions about Family Planning

Last month, a new World Health Organization publication compared current data to data from the early 1990s on the readiness, willingness, and ability of women to use modern contraceptives in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Boubous and Contraceptives: Choice is the Name of the Game

I woke up at 5am for the kick-off event of the third annual National Campaign to Reposition Family Planning in Senegal.

News from Indonesia: A Bold Vision for Driving the Reproductive Health Global Agenda

Recently, I was in Indonesia for the International Conference on Promoting Family Planning and Maternal Health for Poverty Alleviation.I know that most of us working in reproductive health, especially family planning, fervently agree that ensuring universal access to care and services needs additional resources and attention.

Week Two in Ethiopia, Another Woman Saved

Things might have turned out differently had Shashitu delivered a month earlier. Things might have turned out much worse.

Family Planning: An Essential Health Service Here and Everywhere

Wonderful to see Anu Kumar, vice president of Ipas, critiquing the bordering-on absurd contradictions between the United States government’s domestic and global policy on family planning in her recent Huffington Post article, “Does the U.S. Care about Women? That Depends on Where They Live.”

Going Digital: Taking the Maternal Health Community Online

The “Maternal health: digital” panel closed the conference with exciting, new, and innovative ways for using technology for global health and maternal health issues.

“What about men?”

On a recent trip to Malawi, I visited the rural community of Matapila outside of the capital, Lilongwe, where a theater group was performing a series of short plays on how couples negotiate sex and make decisions about if and when to have children.