PAI Participates in the International Conference on Family Planning in Kampala, Uganda

PAI Participates in the International Conference on Family Planning in Kampala, Uganda
The International Conference on Family Planning brought together over 1,200 participants to learn findings of state of the art research on family planning and their policy implications.  PAI was heavily involved in the conference with Vice President for Research, Karen Hardee serving as PAI’s representative on the conference steering committee.  During the conference, PAI staff engaged in an exciting week of events:

• Project Resource Mobilization and Awareness (PRMA):  PAI, International Planned Parenthood Federation and the German Foundation for World Population (DSW) held a full day meeting on engaging in policy-informed research and evidence-based advocacy, in support of reproductive health supplies.  The meeting, chaired by PAI consultants Rosemarie Muganda and Mercedes Mas de Xaxás, brought together over 45 researchers, advocates and communications experts.  Participants formulated several new strategies for improving future research-advocacy collaborations, and have requested to continue dialogue beyond Kampala.  In addition to the PRMA meeting, PAI’s film consultant, Nathan Golon and PAI Vice President of Communications Michael Khoo spent the week conducting interviews with members of parliament, clinicians, and families to capture their stories for PAI’s Reproductive Health Supplies film to be released in summer 2010. PRMA also hosted a luncheon roundtable on strengthening the linkages between maternal health and family planning. 

• Financing International Family Planning: PAI’s Suzanna Dennis brought together leading experts in a preformed panel on costing and tracking resource flows. Suzanna presented a draft of forthcoming work co-authored with Clive Mutunga, which finds that $6.7 billion is needed to meet family planning needs in developing countries each year.  This work was cited by Jagdish Upadhyay from UNFPA in his remarks at the packed closing plenary of the conference.  The panel, chaired by Mercedes Mas de Xaxás,  featured presentations from John Stover of the Futures Institute, Karen Hoehn of the German Foundation for World Population, An Huybrechts of Countdown 2015 Europe-IPPF EN and a commentary from Stan Bernstein of UNFPA’s Technical Support Division. 

• Population & Climate Change: PAI’s work on population and climate change provided content for a pre-conference workshop, “Building African Leadership on Population and Climate Change” organized by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB).  Karen Hardee and Clive Mutunga made presentations and participated in plenary discussion on critical population, climate change and development linkages to a packed room of African professionals, researchers and policymakers.  PAI and PRB participated in a subsequent press conference which attracted around 30 media outlets, including Uganda's Nation TV news network. In a separate panel, Clive presented a paper co-authored with Karen Hardee on population and reproductive health in NAPAs, research that was cited in the closing plenary by Anthony Daly of the United Kingdom’s DFID as acknowledgement of the need to leverage new sources of funding for family planning including through climate funds.  PAI also showcased the results of an Ethiopia case study linking population and family planning and adaptation to climate change in a poster presentation by Karen Hardee.

• Integration of SRH and HIV/AIDS: PAI’s new publication, “A Practical Guide to Integrating Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS into Grant Proposals to the Global Fund” authored by Karen Hardee and Elisha Dunn-Georgiou with consultant Jill Gay, was presented as a poster in Kampala.   The guide has been well received as an extremely useful resource on integration.