After two days of technical presentations on climate change and agricultural adaptation strategies, three farmers took the stage at the International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI) and Ethiopian Development Research Institute's (EDRI) workshop "How can African farmers adapt to climate change? Results and conclusions for Ethiopia and beyond." These men had personally experienced farming challenges related to the changing environment. Unlike the previous days' sessions, these men did not talk about the statistical significance of choosing one adaptation strategy over another, or present mathematical models detailing adaptation strategy decision-making. Instead, they talked about their real experiences of hunger, disease, and crop failure.  For me, this was the most important information presented at the workshop. I find that qualitative research has the potential to capture this lived experience in ways that quantitative analysis, for all its strengths, simply cannot.

"We farmers don't have access to family planning and we are moving more and more into poverty."

As the world focuses on the outcomes of the meeting on climate change that just concluded in Poznan, Poland, I am sitting in a workshop in Nazret, Ethiopia, listening to a panel of farmers talking about the effects of climate change on their lives - less rain, lower crop yields, malaria, no milk for their children. The farmers, from Amhara Region in the Rift Valley, talked about population pressure. They are acutely aware that farm sizes shrink with each generation and speak eloquently of the need for access to family planning so they can have fewer children. Rural Ethiopians currently have an average of six children.

"Pinch the tip of the condom and gently roll it down!" exclaimed the school nurse as she demonstrated how to put on a condom with a banana to my seventh grade co-ed health class.  She spoke with so much enthusiasm that I thought perhaps she had momentarily transformed into a six-year old at her own birthday party.  The entire classroom was silent with embarrassment -- consisting of being uncomfortable with the topic at hand and the performance on display.  Watching Mrs. Robinson's demonstration was like a train wreck, something horrific that compelled you to keep watching, unable to turn away.  The vision of the Juliet Louis Dreyfus look-alike with her banana is forever imprinted in my brain, for better or worse.

On a recent visit to Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana's (PPAG) Youth Center, I couldn't help but reflect on my own experience learning about the birds and the bees.  I found myself wishing my sex education experience would have been closer to the youth friendly services offered by the Youth Center rather than the banana experience I received. 

The large banner stretched across busy Langata Road near Nyayo football stadium in Nairobi, Kenya declares, "We CAN End All Violence Against Women" as the traffic jam below grinds on. It signals the annual "16 Days of Activism" campaign - from November 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) to December 10 (International Human Rights Day) - against gender violence.  This two-week global advocacy campaign for women's rights aptly envelopes World AIDS Day, for the issues of gender violence and HIV/AIDS are inseparable.

Here in Kenya, HIV/AIDS prevalence has increased in both urban and rural areas in recent years and the alarm bells have sounded. There seems to be growing recognition among policymakers and program managers that HIV and AIDS cannot be viewed and acted upon as solely a clinical matter. Deeply entrenched social norms make women and girls highly vulnerable to HIV - the central tenet of PAI's newest documentary, The Silent Partner: HIV in Marriage, which premiered in Nairobi last week.

This World AIDS Day, Population Action International is exploring a different side of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one that many people might not even realize is an issue - the prevalence of HIV in marriage.  Our new documentary, The Silent Partner: HIV and Marriage, explores this very issue.  It tells the stories of women from different backgrounds who were infected with HIV in their own homes, in their own beds, from their own husbands. 

Most people believe that if a woman makes it to marriage without contracting HIV, she is safe.  However, the reality can be quite different. Judy Atieno, one of the women profiled in The Silent Partner, found out she was HIV-positive while she was pregnant with her fourth child.  She says, "You have to depend on this man for everything -- the husband, he pays the school fees for the kids, he buys food for the house... you don't question where he walks, how many women he has outside - for the sake of these children."