As the UN High-Level Forum on Sustainable Development continues this week, member states and civil society are taking a hard look at countries’ progress toward securing safe drinking water, sanitation, and adequate housing. Achieving these and the other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires recognizing the synergies among them—including the role that reproductive health and family planning can play. You may ask, “Why does family planning matter for the SDGs not related to health?” The answer is that it is one of the most cost-effective investments for achieving the SDGs. Increasing access to family planning provides sweeping social, economic, and environmental benefits for every dollar spent.

“Community mobilization, local capacity-building, and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development. And that for us includes resilience,” said Franklin Moore, Africare’s Chief of Programs, at a Wilson Center event on family planning and sustainable development. As rapid population growth intersects with challenges like food insecurity and water scarcity, communities in developing countries need not only the capacity to absorb short-term shocks, they also need transformative capacity to address long-term challenges.

Conservationists and development practitioners may not have always seen eye to eye, but a new partnership between a cheetah conservation charity and a network of reproductive health NGOs is making the case for why these groups need to work more closely together.

“Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy are responsible for over 76,000 maternal deaths globally, killing a woman every 11 minutes,” said Charlotte Warren, Senior Associate at the Population Council, at a recent Wilson Center event about non-communicable diseases in pregnancy, held on World Preeclampsia Day.  These disorders complicate 8 to 10 percent of pregnancies worldwide and are trending upward due to increased maternal weight and sedentary lifestyles. “In low-income countries, a woman has approximately 300 times higher risk of dying of preeclampsia and eclampsia than a woman in a high-income country,” she said.

“We are seeing increasingly self-reliant countries develop national health sector plans solidly grounded on technical evidence,” said Dr. Jim Ricca of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) at a recent Wilson Center event. Expanding successful reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent healthcare (known as RMNCAH) interventions to the national level could make a significant contribution to meeting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals for mortality reduction, he said.