Population Council Research that makes a difference

Overview

The Population Council worked intermittently in Sudan for more than 20 years through the Middle East Research Awards (MEAwards) program. The program was established in Cairo in 1978 to enhance capacity to conduct research on population in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2004, with support from The David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Council began capacity-building activities among local institutions, including the Near East Foundation, the Sudan Family Planning Association, the Ahfad University for Women, and the Center for African Family Studies. Within this short time, the Council has developed partnerships with many other local and international institutions and opened an office in Khartoum in December 2006 that began work in January 2007.

Program focus

The goal of the Council’s program of work in Sudan has been to strengthen the capacities of Sudanese scholars and institutions working in health and population-related research. The program has a strong service-delivery component focusing mainly on vulnerable populations living in camps for internally displaced persons around Khartoum. This component is designed to provide "best-practice" models of service delivery that can be evaluated through operations research to help policymakers evaluate their potential for being scaled up.

Specific objectives include strengthening the capacity of service-delivery NGOs to enable them to be sustainable and to expand their programs, developing a network of informed reproductive health advocates to promote participatory planning in Sudan, and strengthening research capabilities of Sudanese scholars.

The program focus has recently expanded to include research on the protective role of education among displaced children and young people in Darfur. The findings will be used to elicit investment in education in emergencies.

Highlights of past and present work

• Conducted two major studies, a situation analysis of reproductive health services and an urban health and poverty survey, in Khartoum State that provided a wealth of information about the areas. The findings from these studies will be published and disseminated as widely as possible among policymakers and other stakeholders through workshops and seminars.
• Commissioned the writing of a demography textbook in Arabic by authors from Sudan and Egypt to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge about the social dimensions of reproductive health among a wider population of interested Sudanese. The book is designed to contain extensive up-to-date materials on reproductive health. It is intended for use by university professors in Sudan for teaching and research.
• Developed new institutional partnerships with the Ministry of Health, the University of Gezira, and the University of Khartoum.
• Conducted widely acknowledged research and capacity-building workshops.
• Used reproductive health service-delivery points to promote community awareness of programs devoted to such issues as reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, nutrition, and skills training.