USAID’s Gloria Steele offers written testimony on the FY2011 Global Health and Child Survival (GH CS) budget request before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations

Andrew Revkin gives a shout-out to family planning and notes the lack of population discussion at Copenhagen in his blog post, “From Wishful Thinking to Real-World Action on Climate“

Video of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton addressing the Commission on the Status of Women in which she discusses the Global Health Initiative, maternal mortality, family planning, and “gendercide“

Family planning-environmental connections headline PATH‘s March edition of Outlook

Youth bulges and social conflict are noted in Nicholas Kristoff’s recent article on child marriages in Yemen

Follow Geoff Dabelko on Twitter for more population, health, environment, and security updates

Adding it Up: The Costs and Benefits of Investing in Family Planning and Maternal and Newborn Health, a report by the Guttmacher Institute, asserts that “sustained and increased investment in sexual and reproductive health services in developing countries” would “contribute to economic growth, societal and gender equity, and democratic governance.” The report presents cost-benefit analyses of family planning and maternal and newborn health strategies in an effort to “guide decision makers, at the global, regional and country levels, in making investments that would reap the greatest returns for individuals and societies.”

“Training is probably one of the biggest interventions in terms of making human resources available,” says Pape Gaye, President and CEO of IntraHealth International, to ECSP’s Gib Clarke in this interview on improving maternal health services in developing countries. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems associated with training.”

Gaye says obstacles to scaling up maternal health services in rural areas include employee gender inequalities, poor coordination of supplemental training, and a tendency to only offer in-service training in urban areas. Properly emphasizing pre-service education, he underscores, could remedy some of the problems associated with service provider training.

Increasing retention of medical practitioners is also critical to improving maternal health services in developing countries, Gaye explains. In his experience, however, attempts to address perceived security and financial compensation inadequacies produced mixed results. Instead, Gaye suggests that positive recognition may be one of the best methods for retaining health care workers. “We’re seeing some very good successes in places where we have just simple ways to recognize the work… because if people feel valued in a community, then they are likely to stick it out.”

While the negotiators failed to reach a comprehensive agreement in Copenhagen, the population and reproductive health community might find a silver lining in the stormclouds that derailed COP-15.

Developing countries’ strong protests of their lack of culpability for the climate problem, on one hand, and the dramatic examples of their vulnerability on the other, have focused the world on the problems of poor people—and on potential solutions, including family planning.

Integrating maternal health and HIV/AIDS services “includes organizing and providing services that meet several needs simultaneously…focusing not only on the condition, but also the individual,” argued Dr. Claudes Kamenga, Senior Director of Technical Support and Research Utilization at Family Health International, during the first event of the Advancing Policy Dialogue on Maternal Health series co-convened by the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative, Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and technical support from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Joined by Michele Moloney-Kitts, assistant coordinator at the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, and Harriet Birungi, a program associate with the Population Council in Kenya, the panelists discussed how integration of HIV/AIDS and maternal health services not only improves health outcomes, but also increases program efficiencies, strengthens health systems, and saves money.

“Incorporating environment, population, and health is a timely issue. Unless we focus on integrated approaches, our Ethiopian Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved,” says Negash Teklu, executive director of the Consortium for Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE), in this short video.

The Center for Global Development’s latest report, Start With A Girl: A New Agenda For Global Health, sheds light on the risks of ignoring the health of adolescent girls. Like other reports in the Girls Count series, it links broad social outcomes with adolescent health. “Adolescence is a critical juncture for girls. What happens to a girl’s health during adolescence determines her future–and that of her family, community, and country,” state coauthors Miriam Temin and Ruth Levine.

Between childhood and pregnancy, adolescent girls are largely ignored by the public health sector. At the same time, programs and policies aimed at youth do not necessarily meet the specific needs of girls. Understanding the social forces that shape girls’ lives is imperative to improving their health.

Like recent books by Michelle Goldberg and Nicholas Kristof, the report argues for increased investment in girls’ education to break down the social and economic barriers that prevent adolescent girls from reaching their full potential. Improving adolescent girls’ health will require addressing gender inequality, discrimination, poverty, and gender-based violence.

“For many girls in developing countries, well-being is compromised by poor education, violence, and abuse,” say Temin and Levin. “Girls must overcome a panoply of barriers, from restrictions of their movement to taboos about discussion of sexuality to lack of autonomy.” The report points to innovative government and NGO programs that have successfully changed negative social norms, such as female genital cutting and child marriage. However, the authors urge researchers to examine the cost-effectiveness and scalability of these programs.

In the last five years, the international community has become increasingly aware of the importance of youth to social and economic development. Some new programs are focused on investing in adolescent girls, such as the World Bank’s Adolescent Girls Initiative and the White House Council on Women and Girls, but significant additional investment and support is needed.

“Big changes for girls’ health require big actions by national governments supported by bilateral and multilateral donor partners, international NGOs…civil society and committed leaders in the private sector,” maintain Temin and Levin. They offer eight recommendations:
1. Implement a comprehensive health agenda for adolescent girls in at least three countries by working with countries that demonstrate national leadership on adolescent girls.
2. Eliminate marriage for girls younger than 18.
3. Place adolescent girls at the center of international and national action and investment on maternal health.
4. Focus HIV prevention on adolescent girls.
5. Make health-systems strengthening and monitoring work for girls.
6. Make secondary school completion a priority for adolescent girls.
7. Create an innovation fund for girls’ health.
8. Increase donor support for adolescent girls’ health.

“We estimate that a complete set of interventions, including health services and community and school-based efforts, would cost about $1 per day,” say the authors of Start With a Girl. There is no doubt in my mind that this small investment would indeed have a high return for the entire global community.

“All trafficking is not sex trafficking,” argued Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow Pardis Mahdavi, at a recent Middle East Program event. Drawing on her ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates, Mahdavi analyzed the policy implications of the latest Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The TIP report offers information on modern day slavery–human trafficking–and includes comprehensive data on policies and enforcement in 155 countries and territories.

The TIP report paradoxically hurts the people it tries to protect, claimed Mahdavi, by placing too much emphasis on sex trafficking and failing to take into consideration other types of abuse, such as those against men and migrant labor workers. Mahdavi pushed for a “breakthrough of the labeling and politicizing of sex traffickers as women and children,” which depicts women as passive and helpless, while excluding male victims.

According to Mahdavi, in Dubai, 80 percent of the population are migrant laborers. Often, these foreign workers do not trust the government to protect them against trafficking abuses, particularly if they are working in the host country illegally. Thus, civil society organizations, and not the state government, serve as the major source of protection and recourse for abused migrant workers. In the Persian Gulf region, Mahdavi argued that the “TIP report needs to be rewritten…to include increased labor inspectors and police training,” and called for the increased “accountability and transparency” of civil society organizations.

Mahdavi cautioned countries against using the TIP report to enact policies that make migration illegal. Tightening borders forces workers into the informal economy, she maintained, where it becomes difficult to track and protect these individuals.

Although the TIP report has weaknesses, it does pressure countries to act, as Mahdavi has witnessed in the United Arab Emirates, where it has provided opportunities for dialogue on the various aspects of trafficking.