As world leaders gathered at the UN for a special event on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) last month, there was much to celebrate. Some of the MDG targets – on poverty reduction and safe drinking water, for example – have been reached ahead of the 2015 deadline. But on MDG 5, which addresses maternal mortality and reproductive health, progress lags shamefully behind.

As their five-year funding cycle for supporting integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) programs around the world came to a close this fall, leaders from BALANCED Project – Building Actors and Leaders for Advancing Community Excellence in Development – came together at the Wilson Center to discuss lessons learned, best practices, and new ideas for the future.

More than 20 percent of the world’s population live in ecological hotspots, places rich in biodiversity but often lacking basic government services. Population, health, and environment – or PHE – programs address compounding stresses in these areas by helping to meet people’s needs for basic health services, including reproductive health care; promoting food security and poverty reduction; and teaching sustainable natural resource management. [Video Below]

More than 84 percent of the 2010 world population – 5.8 billion people – consider themselves religiously affiliated, according to a recent study. Religious leaders can therefore have significant influence across a broad range of social, economic, and political issues. Perhaps nowhere is that influence felt more strongly than in debates about reproductive health and rights, and perhaps nowhere are the consequences so large than in poor and marginalized communities.

The Population Council’s annual report highlights new work from one of the largest organizations doing research on the lives of adolescent girls in the developing world. Of particular note is the Council’s Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program, a four-year study launched in May which will involve 42,000 girls in seven countries – Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Tanzania, and Zambia. The aim is to evaluate successful strategies for helping girls avoid child marriage, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancies at a critical juncture in their lives. Council President Peter Donaldson writes that young girls are “one of the potentially most influential figures in the developing world.” A typical 12-year-old girl “in the next few years…will either abandon or continue her schooling, be pushed into marriage and childbearing, or develop a sense of proud ownership of her physical self… As her future is reconfigured, so is ours.”

Ensuring access to family planning is not only a matter of human rights, but can also play a key role in protecting the health of mothers and children. Maternal health experts and program directors met at the Wilson Center on July 31 to discuss the role family planning takes in women’s health in developing countries, what successes family planning programs worldwide have had so far, and what can be done to expand services. Sarah Craven, chief of the UN Population Fund’s Washington office, moderated the event.

The demographic dividend – the idea that a decline from high to low rates of population growth can lead to dramatic economic gains – has become something of a buzzword in development circles. Sub-Saharan Africa holds the single largest block of remaining high fertility countries and while headlines tend towards the dramatic about demographic shifts there, less column space has been devoted to examining the underlying issues causing these shifts or the other changes that will be necessary for countries to benefit from them.