PAI released the first issue of its new legislative update newsletter, the Washington Memo. The update highlights the ways in which the Obama administration is using the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to underscore that effective HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment requires coordination with other health, education and gender initiatives, including family planning.
PAI is releasing a new working paper, Making Aid Effectiveness Work for Family Planning and Reproductive Health, which explores aid effectiveness and the resulting changes in the global aid architecture. The paper highlights opportunities and challenges for champions working to increase access to quality family planning and reproductive health services and supplies within the changing funding landscape.
Read the full report here.
Integrating reproductive health and HIV/AIDS can greatly contribute to mitigating the AIDS pandemic by reducing unintended pregnancy, preventing perinatal transmission and providing those living with HIV and other vulnerable groups with the knowledge and services they need.This report by PAI will help CCMs, civil society organizations and others developing proposals for the Global Fund.
Before adjourning for August recess, Congress reaffirmed their support for international family planning/reproductive health (FP/RH) by taking major steps to scale up funding for these life-saving programs even during this difficult economic climate.
Building upon its global report, A Measure of Survival - Calculating Women's Sexual and Reproductive Risk, PAI supported a team of Kenyan advocates and researchers to take a regional lens to the risk index. Led by the Centre for the Study of Adolescence (CSA), the team recently released its report – A Measure of Commitment: Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Risk Index for Sub Saharan Africa – at a packed press conference in Nairobi in July 2009. The report looks at the performance of 47 African countries in meeting reproductive health targets, ranking countries in order of the highest to lowest risk based on a set of ten indicators.
In this article, CSA’s executive director Rosemarie Muganda Onyando, urges African governments to increase the level of investment in reproductive health, strengthen the overall health system, step up policy reform and implementation, and expand access to reproductive and sexual health services.
Two years ago during a policy research trip, PAI learned about the Medical Women’s Association of Tanzania (MEWATA), a prominent NGO that had mobilized its members to screen and treat Tanzanian women for breast cancer. Six months later PAI began collaborating with MEWATA and other local NGOs to promote RH-HIV integration within Tanzania’s proposal to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Bali, Indonesia - On August 12th, 2009, PAI facilitated a session on the importance of linkages between sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and HIV during the 9th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP). The session was moderated by Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, PAI’s Project Manager for the Mobilizing for RH-HIV Integration Initiative and co-hosted by the Asia Pacific Alliance (APA) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The session was a conversation amongst donors and nearly 120 civil society representatives working in the Asia-Pacific region.