Showing posts from category maternal health.
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Hans Rosling Double Feature: ‘The Joy of Stats’ on BBC and Population Growth at TED
›Hans Rosling, creator of Gapminder and professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, hosts a new documentary on the BBC called The Joy of Stats that takes a look at the breadth and depth of data available today to analysts and private citizens alike.
In the clip above, Rosling demonstrates his primary interest in world health, tracking life expectancy and income over the last 200 years to show both the remarkable progress that has been made but also the tremendous gap that remains between those at the top (the very rich and healthy) and those at the bottom (the very poor and sick).
Rosling has been a vocal (and visual) advocate for expanding people’s knowledge of the world by presenting statistics in innovative ways. “Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them,” he said at a discussion at the Wilson Center in May 2009.
In particular, Rosling’s focus has been on health, poverty, and the developing world, where he’s advocated for increased focus on child and maternal health and education. “The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world – nothing more, nothing less,” he said during a TED talk on population growth (see below) where he broke from his more flashy visuals and went analog – using IKEA boxes to illustrate population and consumption growth. “But it’s a very important role. Do it well and get used to it.”
Rosling’s Gapminder software has been incorporated into Google’s Public Data Explorer, where many development indicators from the World Bank, World Health Organization, and others can now be easily tracked by anyone. For more on Google Data and to see an example set of indicators (agriculture as a percentage of GDP vs. fertility rates over the last 50 years), check out this previous Eye On, on The New Security Beat.
Video Credit: “Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC Four,” courtesy of BBC, via YouTube, and “Hans Rosling on global population growth,” courtesy of TED. -
World AIDS Day 2010: Not Yet in a Position to Say “Mission Accomplished”
›December 1, 2010 // By Schuyler NullToday is World AIDS day. More than 33 million people are currently living with HIV around the world, according to the UN, and the vast majority of them (22 million) are located in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We have halted and begun to reverse the epidemic. Fewer people are becoming infected with HIV and fewer people are dying from AIDS,” said Executive Director Michel Sidibé in the 2010 edition of UNAIDS’ annual report.“However we are not yet in a position to say ‘mission accomplished.’ Growth in investment for the AIDS response has flattened for the first time in 2009. Demand is outstripping supply. Stigma, discrimination, and bad laws continue to place roadblocks for people living with HIV and people on the margins.”
Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, “people on the margins” often means women and children. As a result, there has been more and more integration of HIV/AIDS programs with gender and maternal health. The environmental community has also worked closely with HIV/AIDS interventions in places where the destruction of natural resources makes certain populations more vulnerable than others and valuable conservation efforts are threatened.
As development efforts become more cross-sectoral, it’s important to keep in mind and maximize these connections between community, economic, and environmental health.
Check out The New Security Beat’s coverage of HIV/AIDS integration with other health and environment programs including coverage from the Global Health Initiative’s “Integrating HIV/AIDS and Maternal Health Services” event last year, a sit-down interview on the challenges facing HIV-positive adolescents with Harriet Birungi of the Population Council in Kenya, and an examination of how gender-based violence contributes to women’s vulnerability to HIV.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UN, World Wildlife Federation.
Map Credit: World AIDS Campaign. -
Watch: Blue Ventures PHE Program in Madagascar
›“All conservation efforts will be in vain if family planning issues aren’t addressed,” says Rebecca Hill, project manager for the Sexual and Reproductive Health Programme at Blue Ventures in a video highlighting their population, health, and environment (PHE) programming in Madagascar.
While primarily a marine conservation group, Blue Ventures also recognizes the need for integrating population into their efforts. They began a family planning program in southwestern Madagascar in 2008 as part of a “holistic approach to conservation.” The project aims to address the high unmet need for family planning, high fertility and maternal and infant mortality, and conserve the coastal environment. “We are directly saving lives,” Hill says.
Rapid population growth is creating an unsustainable strain on natural resources, as Matthew Erdman of Blue Ventures wrote in a previous post on The New Security Beat:The average total fertility rate in Velondriake is 6.7 children per woman, according to our data. On average women are only 15 years old when they first conceive. To compound this problem, a majority of the population is under the age of 15 – at or approaching reproductive age. At the current growth rate, the local population will double in only 10 to 15 years. The local food sources, already heavily depleted, barely feed the current population, let alone twice that amount. Without enabling these coastal communities to stabilize their population growth, efforts to improve the state of marine resources and the community’s food security are considerably hindered.
Hill describes the situation in the village when she joined the Blue Ventures in 2008 as “alarming,” with women “having up to 17 children despite not wanting children.” Many people in the town had never heard of condoms and had no idea how to use them, she said, and “they are desperate to have access to contraception.”
Today, the initial family planning program has been scaled up to the surrounding region and generated significant community involvement by peer educators teaching community members about sexual and reproductive health. It’s also become the first PHE project to receive support from the UNFPA within Madagascar.
There are currently 18 community-based distributors who give out two types of contraception in their villages. The fact that the community has so fully embraced the project shows that it can be replicated elsewhere, says Hill in the video. “Communities themselves have harnessed the ideas and consider that what we’re doing is vitally important.”
“Addressing family planning needs and issues is inextricably linked with conservation issues,” says Hill. “All conservation efforts will be in vain, if family planning issues are not addressed.”
Video Credit: Blue Ventures Family Planning Project from Alexander Goodman on Vimeo. -
Robert Walker on Family Planning Promotion and Global Population Growth
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“Expanding voluntary family planning access and ensuring that all women have access to reproductive health services is, to me at least, a no brainer,” said the Population Institute’s Robert Walker in this interview with ECSP. “I think it’s a win for women, for their health, for their welfare, the welfare of their families, for their communities, for the environment, and for the planet at large.”
While China and India dominate much of the global headlines about population growth, other parts of South Asia – namely Afghanistan and Pakistan – and sub-Saharan Africa receive comparatively little attention. For Walker, a renewed global effort to boost the quality and quantity of reproductive healthcare tools and services in these areas of the developing world is essential.
“This is very, very doable. We face a lot of really incredible challenges in the world today, particularly with respect to food, energy, water, and poverty. But if we can increase what we spend on international family planning assistance by three or four billion dollars a year, we can literally change the world,” Walker said. “And I think we desperately need to.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
What’s Good for Women Is Good for the Planet
›Ammi, my mother-in-law, was 16 years old when her marriage was arranged. Before she was 18, she had borne her first child, who died within the year, and by 30, she had given birth to six more. She had a fourth-grade education, and like other women in the new state of Pakistan, she knew little about contraceptive choices.
More than 50 years later, contraception still remains inaccessible for millions of women in Pakistan, such as Rani, the young woman who cleans Ammi’s Karachi home. Illiterate and married off to a cousin at age 15, Rani already has three children, and, like the majority of married Pakistani women who have never used modern contraception, will most likely have at least one more.Giving women the ability to determine whether and when to become pregnant is fundamental to the realization of their basic human rights. It is also a proven health and development strategy, substantially reducing maternal and infant mortality by allowing women to space their pregnancies. And now, for the first time, two studies offer compelling evidence that it has another benefit: What is good for women is also good for our planet.
These groundbreaking studies have rigorously quantified the effect on the environment of helping women and girls control their reproductive destinies. The studies – “The World Population Prospects and Unmet Need for Family Planning,” by the Futures Group, and, “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions,” by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis – demonstrate that giving women and girls access to contraception offers a precious co-benefit: a substantial reduction in carbon emissions.
The logic is simple: When women have the power to plan their families, populations grow more slowly, as do greenhouse gas emissions. The cost of providing these needed family planning services worldwide is minimal compared with other development and emissions reductions strategies – roughly $3.7 billion per year.
More than 200 million women in the United States and developing countries are sexually active and do not want to become pregnant, yet are not using modern contraception. The results are staggering: One in four births worldwide is unplanned, leading to 42 million abortions each year (half of them clandestine) and 68,000 women’s deaths.
Moreover, the large number of women who become pregnant when they do not want to is a significant source of population growth. Read in tandem, the studies show that a reduction of 8-15 percent of essential carbon emissions can be obtained simply by providing modern contraception to all women who want it. This reduction would be equivalent to stopping all deforestation or increasing the world’s use of wind power 40-fold. Although this is just one piece of the emissions reduction puzzle, it is a substantial piece.
The world is now facing multi-layered challenges of economic distress, rising inequality, and environmental devastation caused by climate change. International climate negotiations have repeatedly stalled as powerful nations play the blame game and block progress. Meanwhile, a series of severe weather events has buffeted the earth from Moscow to Iowa to Pakistan, each one hitting women and children hardest. This is the reality that rich nations must reckon with – and commit to changing – today.
In my 14 years at the Global Fund for Women, I have observed the wave of change that comes from empowering women – what some call the “girl effect.” Making information, education, and contraception easily available offers us an affordable, no-regrets strategy that can be implemented now.
Meeting the need for family planning services is not a complex challenge. We know how to provide the commodities, services, and education that women and their families want. There are thousands of programs around the world with successful track records in every conceivable religious, cultural, and political setting.
Investing in family planning has already been proven as an essential strategy to ensure the health, safety, and development of societies. Now we know that it is also an effective way to safely steward Mother Earth through one of her most challenging crises.
Kavita N. Ramdas is chair of the Expert Working Group of the Aspen Institute’s Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health and senior adviser and former president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women.
Sources: Futures Group, National Center for Atmospheric Research and the International Institute for Applied Systems, Science, UNFPA, WHO.
Photo Credit: “Chaco: Madre pilagá,” courtesy of flickr user Ostrosky Photos, and Kavita Ramdas, courtesy of Global Fund for Women. -
John Bongaarts on the Impacts of Demographic Change in the Developing World
›“The UN projects about 9.1 billion people by 2050, and then population growth will likely level off around 9.5 billion later in the century. Can the planet handle 9 billion? The answer is probably yes. Is it a desirable trajectory? The answer is no,” said John Bongaarts, vice president of the Policy Research Division at the Population Council, in this interview with ECSP.
Although family planning was largely brushed aside by international policymakers following the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Bongaarts said he is hopeful because it is now enjoying a higher profile globally – and receiving greater funding.
“I am optimistic about the understanding now, both in developing and developed world, and in the donor community, that [family planning] is an important issue that should be getting more attention,” Bongaarts said. “And therefore I think the chances of ending up with a positive demographic outlook are now larger than they were a few years ago.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Tamara Kreinin on Women’s Empowerment, Population Growth, and Sustainability
›“We know that when that when we empower women – whether it’s giving them control over their bodies and access to family planning or whether it’s by including them in planning around climate change – their agency can make huge leaps for us,” said Tamara Kreinin, executive director of women and population at the UN Foundation, in this interview with ECSP.
Seventy percent of the world’s poor are women and they’re also the members of the household most likely to be responsible for food, water, and firewood collection.
“At the same time, we know that women are often not at the table,” she said. “They’re not at the table in country when countries are creating aid to adaptation strategies around the environment and climate change, and they’re not at the table at places like Copenhagen and some of the big climate change meetings.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Mobile Phones for Maternal Health in the Developing World
›With rising use in the developing world, cell phones and mobile technologies can create “connected and coordinated health systems that save more lives,” said Josh Nesbit at the GHI event “New Applications for Existing Technologies to Improve Maternal Health,” on October 27. Capitalizing on these new technologies could increase efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and efficacy of public health programs. Nesbit, executive director of FrontlineSMS: Medic, was joined by Alain Labrique, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and David Aylward, executive director of the mHealth Alliance at the United Nations Foundation, to discuss the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the prevention of maternal mortality.
Collaborations for mHealthWhile “cell phones can’t save lives, the lack of information does kill,” said Aylward. Using technology that many people already own and use, mobile technology is an appropriate tool for disseminating health data and information. Existing technologies such as mobile phones and SMS text messaging can revolutionize healthcare by improving data collection and disease tracking, expanding patient diagnostics, and advancing education and awareness among health workers and patients.
With 64 percent of all mobile phone users located in the developing world, the use of mobile devices to improve health services in low-income countries is especially promising.
Aylward hopes that mobile health technology (mHealth) will help combat maternal mortality in the developing world. With approximately 350,000 women dying in childbirth each year, and only marginal progresses towards achieving Millennium Development Goal 5, finding such innovative solutions to improve maternal health is crucial.
Public-private partnerships are particularly important when considering the long-term sustainability of mHealth programs. “This didn’t happen because of the World Bank, it happened because people who are very poor voted with their very limited funds to have access to information,” said Aylward.
Aylward is hopeful that government and donor support will continue to become more supportive of mobile technology and coordinated in their implementation of mHealth programs globally.
Mobile Health Solutions in the Developing World
“Through mobile tools, we can act as quickly as possible to improve access to skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetric care, and access to reproductive health commodities,” said Nesbit.Nesbit’s organization, FrontlineSMS: Medic, is working to eliminate barriers created by the lack of resources and infrastructure in the developing world using mobile health technology. Now working in 20 countries, the organization uses free software “that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem, and inexpensive cell phones,” explained Nesbit.
“One of the best measures is whether people continue to use your tools, and they will if it impacts their lives positively and they won’t if it doesn’t—sometimes it’s as simple as that,” said Nesbit on why communities in the developing world are eagerly embracing mobile technology.
Moving forward, Nesbit hopes to “scale and replicate, both vertically and horizontally, models that we’ve shown can work, but also to build new tools” and work with the health community “to help identify the needs and the gaps in these systems.”
However, Nesbit stresses that “these are very much tools and not solutions; they become solutions when they are paired with people on the ground who use them.”
Compressing the Time Between Crisis and Care
“The opportunities for mobile phones to act synergistically with existing health systems in low- to middle-income countries are many,” said Labrique. The current challenge is to harness this technology to improve health outcomes in the developing world, where disease burden is disproportionately high.
In the developing world, “decisions influenced by the lack of resources, such as poverty, or lack of information have led to highly convoluted patterns of care-seeking,” said Labrique.“Delayed decision-making compounded by delayed transport can have tragic consequences for maternal mortality,” said Labrique, and the most immediate use of mobile technology is “getting the necessary care, on time, to where these deaths are taking place.” Cell phones can help women, their families, and local health workers to seek timely, appropriate medical help for an obstetric emergency.
“Addressing equity and access to phones when evaluating the impact or success of mHealth interventions is critical,” Labrique said. Although cell phone use is high and steadily increasing, social and cultural norms in some countries might prevent women from using them. Further, Labrique notes, in Bangladesh, cell phone use among the poorest families is noticeably less than those with higher socioeconomic status.
“ICT and mHealth solutions have tremendous promise to improve maternal health in resource limited settings; however, it’s important not to let the technology guide the public health agenda,” said Labrique. More data is needed to determine how these tools might strengthen and enhance health systems and a clearer research agenda can help ensure evidence-based solutions guide programming.
For more from David Aylward and mHealth, be sure to see “Watch: David Aylward on How Wireless Technology is Changing Global Health and Empowering Women.”
Sources: Lancet, United Nations Foundation.
Photo Credit: “‘SMS till you drop’ — mobile phone ad on van in Kampala, Uganda,” courtesy of flickr user futureatlas.com.
