Kelly McCarty is PAI's summer 2008 International Advocacy Intern.

After a month working at the office, three of PAI’s summer interns were happy to take a break from their computers to visit the Corcoran Gallery of Art.  Off we went to view its newest exhibit, Access to Life, which captured the struggles of people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS and demonstrated the life-giving power of anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs).  The exhibit is on display until July 20, 2008, and is a joint effort between Magnum Photos and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

In all honesty, I went to the exhibit mainly for personal reasons.  I jumped at the chance to intern at PAI because I believe deeply in the issues for which they advocate, but I’m passionate about my thesis on the ability art has to influence politics.  I’ve spent the past year and a half poring over examples of art that sends powerful political messages.  You would think I’d be used to the power of art by now.

Allison Palser is PAI's 2008 summer communications/website intern.

This afternoon, I stopped by the Wilson Center to attend the launch of UNEP's Africa: Atlas of a Changing Environment. Due to a lengthy wait for the metro train, I arrived a few minutes late, and was immediately disappointed that I had missed lunch and had to sit in the overflow room. Crud. I knew I would have a lot of important questions, and I just love the humiliation of standing up in a crowded, climate-controlled room with a microphone. Consider it my fifteen seconds of fame. Little did I know that my spot in overflow would provide me with an interesting opportunity later on.

UNEP's Atlas is the first in an expanding project that measures visual changes in the environment as related to climate change, land degradation, deforestation, and water scarcity. The atlas used satellite imagery from the USGS LandSAT as well as from the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) group to place before and after shots of environmental changes in the hands of policymakers. For the first time, agents of government in Africa and around the world can see the process of environmental change, and, with that information, do something about it.

You may have heard that the Bush administration is once again withholding funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).  Because UNFPA provides funding for health services -- including voluntary family planning -- in China, where the government maintains a “one-child policy,” the Bush administration decided Thursday to unjustly withhold U.S. funding to UNFPA, as it has for the last seven years. That’s no surprise (and it’s barely even news-worthy), though it is disappointing.  Contrary to the administration’s assertions, UNFPA provides alternative and voluntary approaches to China’s compulsory family planning program.
 
But you may have missed the potentially even bigger news.  Now the Bush administration has threatened to dramatically expand the interpretation of the Kemp-Kasten amendment, which until now has been limited only to UNFPA, to also cut off funding to other organizations solely because they operate health programs in China. Buried in the statement released by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte is the following ominous warning:

This Los Angeles dinner started in a limo. This is not my usual transport when dining with my Ethiopian colleague Boge Gebre. But tonight I was introducing friends from different worlds. Our Los Angeles hosts generously provided the transportation. The car's black velvet interior with blinking lights on the ceiling gave a surreal setting to our conversation about stopping the unbearable practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).

Boge is a modern hero. As a successful catalyst for change she (through her NGO, the Kembatta Women's Self Help Center) has virtually wiped out the practice of FGM in several districts in Southern Ethiopia. A decade ago she returned to her country with one burning goal, "to stop even one girl from being cut!" I asked her how many girls have been spared and she grabbed my hands beaming, paused, and said with great satisfaction, "I don't know the exact number but in 7 of the 8 districts where we work, there is no mutilation of any girl!" Many thousands I told our hosts! In 2006 I was at one of her rallies where some 15,000 people -- from several villages -- came together to celebrate the end of the practice. I've never seen anything like it!

Continue reading Amy's blog entry on The Huffington Post!

Ellen Knickmeyer’s article “Egypt’s President Urges Family Planning” (June 11) effectively highlights the challenges that continued population growth can pose for countries’ development by increasing demands for jobs, food and education. 

It has been shown the world over that investing in women is essential to the well-being of families, communities and nations.  As Egypt’s president has recognized, voluntary family planning results in smaller families and is a cost-effective means to ease demographic pressures.

Last week I had the good fortune of being in Mexico for a PAI study tour of the country's family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) programs. Thanks in part to twenty years of U.S. FP/RH assistance (from the mid-1970s to the late-1990s), Mexico has made major improvements in the health of women and children and its demographic situation.  Although challenges on these issues certainly remain, particularly in terms of the needs of its adolescent and indigenous populations, Mexico is a clear success story when it comes to the effectiveness of investments in voluntary family planning programs.  

Consider a few statistics that underscore the progress Mexico has made.  In 1970, a few years before Mexico initiated its national family planning program -- with significant assistance from the United States and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) -- less than a quarter of women used contraceptives, average fertility rates were about seven children per woman, infant mortality rates were 69.0 per 1,000 live births, and average life expectancy was 62 years of age. 

Christine Bixiones is a Development Associate at PAI.

Mexico City, with its bustling streets, vibrant public art, and mixture of progress and need turned out to be an excellent location for an educational “tour” of a society’s public health challenges and success stories. Population Action International’s Friends’ Study Tour to Mexico gave its participants the opportunity to speak with passionate Mexican women leaders about their work to advance women’s status and health in a conservative “machista” culture and to see first-hand what these amazing leaders have accomplished and what challenges lie ahead.

Our group was particularly impressed with a dynamic group of youth leaders who work as community health promoters with the organization Mexfam (the Mexican Foundation for Family Planning).  At Mexfam clinics, sexual and reproductive health services are offered at a subsidized cost and are targeted to youth; outreach activities also reach youth in their schools and neighborhoods.

I've been in Mexico for almost a week. There's a growing behavior change challenge here: persuading Mexicans to change the way they eat and the way they have sex.

Why change the way they eat? Diabetes is on the rise in Mexico. Currently 9% of the population has type 2 diabetes and 18% are intolerant to carbohydrates. This is quite a challenge when the dietary staples are beans, rice and tortillas and more Coca-Cola is consumed here than anywhere on earth. It's VERY cheap.

Continue reading Amy's blog entry on The Huffington Post.

Wendy Turnbull is PAI's Sr. Policy Research Analyst. She is in Kenya with other colleagues working on PAI's latest documentary.

The small, one-room primary school building in Kibera has broken windows in a few spots, but is otherwise in good shape.  Located in the heart of Nairobi, Kibera competes with Soweto, South Africa to lay claim to being Africa’s second largest slum: it is home to more than one million people.

Colleagues from PAI and Pathfinder International and I are in Kibera to film and participate in a Muslim bridal shower.  We’re here in Kenya for the week producing a short documentary about the vulnerability of married women to HIV/AIDS.  Because the bridal shower is a women-only event, our male filmmaker, Nathan, is unable to attend, so we’ve lined up a local female camera-person. We women have been advised to “bling up” and wear as much gold, sequins, and makeup as possible.  We do our best to comply but we’re utterly out of our league in this crowd.  Jeans are a no-no.

Craig Lasher is PAI's Senior Policy Analyst.

The lead from Michael Gerson's column in today's Washington Post on Tony Blair's newfound faith references the Global Gag Rule:

The American kickoff of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation last week unintentionally revealed the mountain of misunderstanding the former British prime minister has undertaken to scale. At an event designed to further mutual religious sympathy, two of the panelists -- including the president of Yale University, Richard Levin -- casually asserted that religious Americans who support pro-life restrictions on international family planning aid are as doctrinaire and exclusionary as Saudi extremists. Pro-life Catholics and evangelicals? Wahhabi extremists? What's the difference?

Tamar Abrams is PAI's Vice President of Communications.  She is in Kenya with other colleagues working on PAI's latest documentary.

On a cool Saturday afternoon, the day before Kenya celebrates Madaraka Day (June 1, 1963 -- the date the country attained internal self-rule), I and several colleagues from PAI are having lunch at the home of Rosemarie Muganda-Onyando in Nairobi. Rosemarie, the director of the Centre for the Study of Adolescence and a dear friend of PAI's, has been instrumental in arranging logistics and interviews as we film our latest documentary. She has gathered over a dozen people in her lovely living room for a traditional Kenyan meal, many of whom work in reproductive health. Our conversations span topics from our children to USAID to Nairobi's biblical traffic jams.

It is only after many of the guests have left and there are just six women remaining that the conversation turns to the presidential elections in the U.S. There is such passion as the Kenyan women talk about Barack Obama. "He is our son," one states emphatically. They speak with awe of his father's birthplace in Nyanza Province, more than five hours away from where we are sitting in Nairobi. Barack's father was "brilliant," a woman says. "Everyone talked about how smart he was. It is the fish they eat there. You eat the head of the fish and all the wisdom goes straight to your own head." The women nod in agreement, assuming the senior Obama ate a lot of fish heads.

Numbers: Billions, trillions, ga-zillions. When's a number too big, too little, appropriate, effective? I mean, who gets numbers?

It's like gaggles of 3rd graders accelerating every conversation with their own numerical system:
"My dad has a million!"
"My mom saw a ka-zillion in New Jersey!"
"Well, I'm gonna have a ka billion ga zillion when I grow up!"

What would the grown up version be?
"Before you know it, she'll want a googol (10 followed by 100 zeros) of 'em!"

Even smart adults struggle with really big numbers. Particularly as they relate to money, people and sex. Trillions of dollars, billions of people, oh yeah, and sex - the multiplier.

Read more of Amy's third blog entry for The Huffington Post!

Elizabeth Leahy is a Research Associate with PAI.

CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden’s recent identification of population growth as one of three top destabilizing trends currently facing the world has received extensive media coverage. The director’s comments seem to have taken many by surprise by singling out demographic trends, rather than religious extremism or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as meriting a top spot on the intelligence community’s radar screen.

Speaking in the Landon Lecture Series at Kansas State University, the same forum where Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last fall advocated for increasing the use of “soft power,” Gen. Hayden highlighted the challenges that will be faced by some of the poorest and weakest states in the world—among them Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Yemen—in providing for the needs of their citizens, particularly young people, in the coming years. The populations of these countries are projected to double and in some cases triple by mid-century, magnifying already heavy demands on health care, education facilities and the job market.

Carolyn Vogel, Vice President of Programs, and Karen Hardee, Vice President for Research, report on the Strategic Workshop "SRHR-Population-Environmental Degradation-Climate Change" in Istanbul, Turkey.

We met in Istanbul for two more or less unstructured days of discussion around the emerging issue of population, environmental degradation and climate change. Coming together as like-minded organizations in support of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), including voluntary family planning, we struggled to get our heads around the complicated linkage between these pressing and timely issues. That we all felt compelled to talk and needed to voice our ideas, confusions, and brainstorms was evident when at the end of each and every session, facilitators struggled to close and wrap-up (we wouldn’t stop talking). Those discussions then dominated our “out of meeting time” in local restaurants and cobbled streets of the Sultanahmet. In Istanbul, every conversation and presentation was completely new territory for many of the participants.

There are always complicated issues around mothers. Being one, having one, not having one, wanting one, losing one, not being one.

Personally, we love our mothers even when we don't. Culturally, we revere them. Globally, we say how important mothers are, but still a woman dies every minute of every day from a pregnancy-related cause. Each of those deaths is preventable and at very little expense. There's been little help for those young women -- dying to be mothers -- over the past two decades. It's not just bad, it's sinful!

Read more of Amy's second blog entry for The Huffington Post!

Last week's Earth Day celebration reminded me of the first one. As a college kid responding to the passionate calls to action punctuated by pounding music, I came away thinking that if I hadn't already decided to work for women's rights, I would choose to work on environmental causes as a career.

This came to mind recently as I bumped along a dusty road in Northern Ethiopia. I was distressed by the lack of trees and by the many young women trudging along the road bent under the weight of huge piles of branches tied to their backs. Many of them never attended school or had dropped out because of the time required to travel long distances in search of wood that their families need for cooking and heat in the winter.

Read more of Amy Coen's blog at The Huffington Post.

“Birthrates Help Keep Filipinos in Poverty” – that’s the headline of an April 21, 2008 Washington Post article highlighting the plight of a growing number of poor women in the Philippines who lack access to one of the most basic forms of health care: family planning (FP) and reproductive health services. The article, which mentions that the U.S. is scaling down its FP program in the Philippines, should be a wake-up call for policymakers about the global impact of declining FP assistance on the lives of hundreds of millions of men and women in the Philippines and other developing nations.

U.S. investments in international family planning have been one of the most successful and cost-effective ways to improve maternal and child health, ease population pressures on the environment, and help countries fight poverty. But despite the achievements of recent decades -- including an increase in use of contraceptives among married women in the developing world from 10 percent to 60 percent since 1960 and a decline in average fertility rates from about six children per woman to three children per woman -- significant needs remain. For example, only one-third of married Filipino women use modern contraceptives.

Jeffrey Locke recently joined PAI as a Legislative Policy Associate, where he will help educate policymakers and their staff about the importance of international family planning and reproductive health programs.  In this blog, he talks about why, after two years in Togo, he decided to come to Washington to work on family planning issues.  

After over two years as a community health volunteer for the Peace Corps in Togo, I don’t have a canned, thirty-second response answer to why I wanted to work on issues of international family planning.  I do, however, have a story.

As a librarian for over 30 years, I’ve seen my share of April Fools jokes. But this year’s seemed more outrageous -– and less funny -- than in previous years. A librarian at the University of California/San Francisco Medical Center sent an inquiry to staff at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health when she found discrepancies in POPLINE searches that included the term “abortion.” On April 1, she received the following response from Debbie Dickson at POPLINE:

Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop terms. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception.’ This is the broader term to our ‘abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields…

In effect, the word “abortion” was downgraded from a medical search term to the status of words such as “a” and “the.”

Our car has absolutely no business driving this rocky (small boulders, really) dirt/mud road—loaded down with four passengers, no less. A sagging bridge up ahead taunts us to attempt the crossing. But we make it across in order to reach the Palabana district rural health center, surrounded by fields of corn and pumpkins, with a few tethered goats thrown in for good measure. A mere 45 kilometers from downtown Lusaka, we could be in far off Western Province in this beautiful rural landscape.

We arrive at the center and are led to a circle of benches under the generous shade of the large acacia tree. We’re meeting with assembled village leaders and health workers to discuss the loss of the five-year sexual and reproductive health (SRH) project that ended in 2006.

“Unplanned pregnancy is feared more than HIV/AIDS among young people,” comments Nthazie Nalungwe, a striking young woman leader within Youth Vision Zambia, a sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) advocacy group here in Lusaka. This comment is reflected among many young Zambian advocates, peer educators and health workers we’ve talked with, including those with organizations promoting abstinence-only. Perhaps it’s a good thing that condoms seem far more plentiful than other contraceptives in Zambia: dual protection by default.

The rainy season is coming to an end here in Zambia and the early morning sun floods the car as we pull through the front gate of Professor Nkandu Luo’s house in Lusaka to join her for breakfast. Luo is the former (and outspoken) Minister of Health who now leads two Zambian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) tackling HIV/AIDS and women – the Society of Woman Against AIDS in Zambia (SWAAZ) and Tasintha, the only local organization focused on helping women leave commercial sex work. It is a survival strategy for many women in countries like Zambia with weak economies and high unemployment.

"Reproductive health has been left behind. We can’t fight HIV/AIDS unless we center it within sexual and reproductive health. The majority of those affected by and living with HIV/AIDS are women, especially young women in Zambia,” she thunders. Zambia’s draft reproductive health policy—first proposed ten years ago by Luo during her tenure leading the Ministry—remains untouched. It was never finalized nor implemented by her successors.

Yesterday the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a bill to reauthorize the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Now the bill will move to the House floor -- as soon as next week. In the meantime, check out these news clips with more information and various perspectives on the bill.

PEPFAR Wins Money, Compromises Principle
RH Reality Check - Washington, DC, USA
The moment to improve PEPFAR based on reality and public health passed before the House Foreign Affairs Committee was ever convened. Americans frustrated with political game playing over dedicated problem solving will see this as one more reason Washington must change...

House Foreign Affairs Committee Approves PEPFAR Reauthorization Bill
Kaiser network.org - Washington, DC, USA
President Bush had called on Congress to authorize a $30 billion, five-year extension of PEPFAR. The bill also would remove a requirement that at least ...

The House Committee of Foreign Affairs is poised to mark-up a bill that will reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and correct the critical flaws in the existing program, which hinder its effectiveness. The new bill will provide greater access to contraceptives for HIV-positive women who desire to space and plan their births, as well as increase effectiveness and flexibility in the fight against HIV/AIDS by striking PEPFAR's restriction that mandates at least one-third of U.S. HIV/AIDS prevention funding be limited to abstinence-only programs

President Bush's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2009, released today, would dramatically cut funding for international family planning and sexual and reproductive health programs. The proposed funding level of $327 million represents a $134 million (or 29%) cut from current levels.

This budget proposal continues a disturbing downward trend in funding for these vital health programs for women and families. Since 1995, U.S. funding for family planning programs has fallen nearly $100 million -- a 39 percent reduction when adjusted for inflation and the FY 2009 budget request would equal a nearly 60% reduction below the amount provided for these programs in FY 1995 (adjusted for inflation). These cuts have occurred despite a growing need and demand for reproductive health care in the developing world. For example, the number of women of reproductive age in the developing world alone has increased by approximately 275 million women since 1995.