Increase access to services; give people choices
The Population Council is part of an eight-partner consortium on the Pakistan Initiative for Mothers and Newborns (PAIMAN) project funded by USAID. PAIMAN assists the Government of Pakistan to ensure mother and newborn health. Photo: Pakistan Voluntary Health & Nutrition Association
The Population Council’s Reproductive Health program strives to improve sexual and reproductive health, especially for vulnerable people in developing countries. The relationships we have cultivated enable us to tackle sensitive issues and to give voice to those groups who are most in need. To do this, the Reproductive Health program conducts both social science and biomedical research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and at the Center for Biomedical Research in New York City.
Program objectives
- Increase access to family planning and other reproductive health services in countries with unmet need and where clients are unable to achieve their reproductive health goals.
- Reduce maternal mortality with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and vulnerable groups in other areas.
- Reduce inequalities in the use of critical reproductive health services by wealth, age, and gender groups.
- Develop and test the effectiveness and acceptability of new reproductive health technologies designed to benefit women and men in developing countries.
- Develop collaborative relationships with pharmaceutical companies to license, register, and/or manufacture technologies developed by the Council in support of increased access and choice in reproductive health programs in developing countries.
Impact
- Through a south-to-south collaboration among our staff and government officials in South Asia, we supported the introduction of emergency contraception into the national family planning programs in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, including its expansion nationwide in Bangladesh.
- As a result of health provider education programs focused on hypertensive disorders during pregnancy and the use of magnesium sulfate treatment, our project in Kano, Nigeria, reduced the rate of maternal death due to eclampsia by 68 percent.
- We established a mechanism to provide vouchers to poor, pregnant women in Bangladesh that enabled them to access free services to manage pregnancy and delivery-related complications. This voucher program reduced inequities in access caused by poverty and increased the rate of institutional deliveries from 3 to 20 percent, antenatal care from 50 to 89 percent, and postnatal care from 10 to 59 percent.
- At our Center for Biomedical Research, we are developing ulipristal as a long-acting contraceptive to make contraceptives safer and more effective in preventing unwanted pregnancy and to contribute to breast health by arresting the potential emergence of tumor cells.
- Council scientists developed a one-year user-controlled contraceptive vaginal ring (re-usable for 13 cycles) containing the marketed hormonal product ethinyl estradiol (EE) and new chemical entity Nestorone®. The contraceptive vaginal ring was recently licensed to Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc., for commercialization in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Resources
Selected publications
- The Balanced Counseling Strategy Plus: A Toolkit for Family Planning Service Providers Working in High HIV/STI Prevalence Settings (more)
Publication date: 2012 - Reproductive Health program: From product development to service delivery (PDF)
Fact sheet
Publication Date: 2010 - ECP handbook: Introducing and mainstreaming the provision of emergency contraceptive pills in developing countries (PDF)
Hossain, Sharif Mohammed Ismail; Khan, M.E.; Vernon, Ricardo; Keesbury, Jill; Askew, Ian; Townsend, John W.; Rumbold, Victoria
FRONTIERS Manual
Publication Date: 2009
- FRONTIERS Legacy Themes (more)
Publication Date: 2009
- Improving the quality of family planning and reproductive tract infection services for urban slum populations: Demand-based reproductive health commodity project (PDF)
Talukder, Md.Noorunnabi; Rob, Ubaidur; Rahman, Md. Mafizur
Publication Date: 2009 - Reference guides for health care organizations seeking accreditation for high-quality, gender-sensitive reproductive health services (more)
Riveros, Patricia; Palenque, Erica; Vernon, Ricardo; Carreño, Ignacio; Bratt, John
Publication date: 2009 - The Balanced Counseling Strategy: A Toolkit for Family Planning Service Providers (more)
Publication date: 2008
Selected projects
- AIDS, Population, and Health Integrated Assistance (APHIA II) Operations Research Project (more)
APHIA II is working with local partners in Kenya to test innovative interventions that can ensure high-quality reproductive health, family planning, and HIV/AIDS and related services to better address Kenya’s health needs.
(10/2008 - 10/2011)
Kenya
Behavior change; HIV care, support, and treatment; Integrating health services; PMTCT and pediatric HIV; RTIs/STIs
- ECafrique (more)
The African Forum on Emergency Contraception, or ECafrique, is a bilingual, international network of health care and business professionals that seeks to increase the availability of high-quality emergency contraception (EC) services in Africa.
(1/2002 - ongoing)
Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, DRC, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda
Access to contraceptive methods
- Encouraging the Abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) Among the Somali of Kenya (more)
The Council is conducting research in Kenya to inform the design and implementation of interventions to encourage abandonment of FGM/C.
(1/2009 - 1/2010)
Kenya
Female genital mutilation/cutting
- Experiences of Women Accessing Legal Abortion in Mexico City (more)
Council researchers conducted a qualitative study of women accessing legal abortion in Mexico City.
(9/2008 - 2/2009)
Mexico
Safe abortion
- One-year Combination Vaginal Ring, Phase 3 Study (more)
The NES/EE vaginal ring is a convenient, highly effective, easy-to-use method of pregnancy prevention for women who choose to use hormonal contraception.
(9/2005 - 6/2009)
Americas, Australia, Europe, United States
Technologies for women
What's New
- "There are as many ways to address [maternal health problems] as there are creative people," says Population Council vice president and Reproductive Health program director John Townsend in Huffington Post article. The article, "Vouchers for safe motherhood: Saving the lives of poor mothers in Kenya with creative financing," and a related microdocumentary profile a Population Council research project to evaluate the impact of reproductive health vouchers. (offsite link)
- Population Council Distinguished Scholar Anrudh Jain's "Hormonal contraception and HIV acquisition risk: implications for individual users and public policies," published online in the journal Contraception, can now be downloaded free of charge. As researchers continue to explore the relationship between hormonal contraception and HIV, Jain examines the individual and public policy implications of the potentially elevated risk of HIV acquisition among women who use depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) injectable contraception. (offsite link)
- New peer-reviewed research from the Population Council's reproductive health vouchers studies! An article based on a Council project "Community-level impact of the reproductive health vouchers programme on service utilization in Kenya," is now available online in Health Policy and Planning. This journal has also published the Council-authored "Increase in facility-based deliveries associated with a maternal health voucher programmein informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya." (offsite link) (offsite link)
- For every woman who dies of pregnancy-related causes, an estimated 20 women experience acute or chronic morbidity. In "Maternal morbidity: Neglected dimension of safe motherhood in the developing world," the Council's Ann Blanc and colleagues Karen Hardee and Jill Gay address relatively unneglected areas like maternal depression, infertility, and uterine rupture and scarring,and make recommendations to reduce maternal morbidity. (offsite link)
- Learn more about reproductive health vouchers by visiting the RH vouchers project page and blog maintained by Council program associate Ben Bellows. (more) (offsite link)
- FRONTIERS Legacy Themes: Results and lessons learned from ten years of operations research have been synthesized and grouped into eight major legacy themes. (more)
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