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MEDIA CENTER Peter J. Donaldson, President of the Population Council, ACCRA, GHANA (23 June 2005) — The newly elected president of the Population Council, Dr. Peter J. Donaldson, will visit Ghana from 27 June to 1 July 2005 as part of a six-nation African tour. He will be accompanied by Dr. Anrudh Jain, acting vice president and director of the Population Council’s International Programs Division. The purpose of the visit, Donaldson’s first to Africa since assuming office in January this year, is for the president to acquaint himself with the organization’s on-the-ground operations in Africa. The tour will take him to Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. The Population Council’s sub-Saharan African operations headquarters is in Accra, Ghana. While in Ghana the Population Council leaders will hold discussions with scientists from the Navrongo Health Research Centre, as well as with community members in the Kassena-Nankana District. They will also meet with officials of one of the main funding agencies of the Council’s research work, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission in Ghana, and with the Ministry of Health, the Ghana Health Service, and other collaborators. Donaldson was first employed by the Population Council in 1973–75 as a staff associate in Thailand and then as a representative of the Council in South Korea (1975–77). From 1985 to 1989, he was director of the Committee on Population of the National Research Council. In 1989 he returned to the Population Council to become a senior associate and regional director for South and East Asia and later served for nine years as the chief executive officer of the Washington, DC–based Population Reference Bureau. He rejoined the Population Council in 2003 as vice president and director of the Council's largest division, the International Programs Division, and later accepted the position of acting president in 2004. Population Council in Ghana Since 1994 the Population Council has provided technical assistance to the Navrongo Health Research Centre fielding support of the Community Health and Family Planning project. Initially launched as two-village pilot study, the project was scaled up into a district-wide experiment across the Kassena-Nankana District with the aim of testing various strategies for improving access to health services to underserved populations. Donaldson’s visit coincides with the completion of the ten-year experiment, the results of which have been used to develop a national policy known as the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) Initiative. As the health sector’s response to the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy, CHPS now functions at various stages in more than 90 percent of Ghana’s 110 districts. In 2004 the Population Council was awarded a five-year intervention project from the USAID Mission to provide technical assistance to support the Ghana Health Service and the Ministry of Health in scaling up the implementation of CHPS in the seven southern regions of the country. The Population Council is an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental research organization that seeks to improve the well-being and reproductive health of current and future generations around the world and to help achieve a humane, equitable, and sustainable balance between people and resources. The Council conducts biomedical, social science, and public health research and helps build research capacities in developing countries. Established in 1952, the Council is governed by an international board of trustees. Its New York headquarters supports a global network of regional and country offices. ### Media contacts Melissa May, APR: mmay@popcouncil.org +1 212 339 0525
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