“We knew that we had a lot of reports, we knew that we had a lot of policy papers, but what we wanted to tell was a good story,” said ECSP’s Sean Peoples speaking recently at Duke University about the short documentary, Healthy People, Healthy Environment: Integrated Development in Tanzania.

The first time Almaz, a teenager living in rural southern Ethiopia, went to the crowded health care clinic in her village to get contraception, she was told they only helped older women with children. The second time, she waited hours only to find out that her preferred method of contraception was out of stock and she would have to return another day. [Video Below]

Since 2009, the “Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health” series, co-produced by the Wilson Center, Harvard’s Maternal Health Task Force, and the United Nations Population Fund, has been one of the few public policy forums dedicated to maternal health. [Video Below]

It’s not often that we are presented with the perfect opportunity to affect a broad set of development policies as we are currently with the UN’s post-2015 agenda.

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.