The Population Council celebrates the life of Elizabeth J. McCormack, one of the nation’s most influential philanthropic counselors, and long-term Trustee of the Population Council Board, who died December 4, 2020 at the age of 98.
In the Gender & COVID-19 blog, Senior Associate Chi-Chi Undie, Senior Associate Nicole Haberland, Associate II Sanyukta Mathur, Mexico Country Director Isabel Vieitez and Program Director (HIV/AIDS) Julie Pulerwitz examine how the COVID-19 pandemic unearths several important gender dimensions and implications before, during, and after data collection.
An article from SciDev.Net’s Sub-Saharan Africa English desk highlights findings from a study published in PLOS One by Council researcher Jessie Pinchoff and colleagues Deborah Balk and Carrie Mills of CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. The study used nationally representative datasets and analyses of satellite imagery to examine the relationship between women's chronic disease risk factors and increasing urbanization in Tanzania, finding that more urban environments had populations with higher body mass index and c-reactive protein, potential indicators of chronic disease and worse health outcomes.
In a recent Knowledge Success post, Council researchers and research utilization specialists highlight a set of validated tools, developed by the Evidence Project, to support governments and partners to measure quality of voluntary family planning services from clients’ perspectives.
In a piece for Think Global Health, program director, Thoai Ngo and research associate Jessie Pinchoff underscore the need for and outline strategies to enable the global health community to embrace an inclusive urbanization strategy to accelerate progress on basic health outcomes.
The Indigenous Adolescent Girls’ Empowerment Network (IMAGEN), which seeks to empower adolescent Native American girls through girl-centered programming, was featured for Indigenous Peoples Day 2020 in a segment for Voice of America (VOA) News.
As the United States hit the gruesome milestone of 200,000 deaths from COVID-19, program director Thoai Ngo and colleagues Charlotte Brasseux and Mingqi Song share in Think Global Health how “woefully inadequate and inconsistent data collection and reporting efforts” have hindered the country’s ability to successfully employ targeted efforts to control the spread of COVID-19.
Meaningful engagement of key stakeholders throughout the research process is critical to promoting research use in response to the global HIV pandemic. But what does this look like in practice, and what is the added value for those involved? Building on the systematic research utilization process developed by Project SOAR (Supporting Operational AIDS Research), the Population Council hosted an AIDS 2020 Virtual workshop featuring three case studies of collaboration between implementation science (IS) researchers, communities, program managers, and policymakers leading to evidence use across diverse contexts.
Between February and July 2020, more than 90 percent of school-going children around the world were affected by school closures. Across settings, the crisis is intersecting with entrenched inequities, and COVID-19 related closures and economic instability pose a threat to areas where there has been important, but uneven progress, such as improvements in primary school enrollment and attainment for girls and the narrowing of gender disparities.
In an op-ed for Think Global Health, Thoai Ngo, Program Director for the Council’s Poverty, Gender & Youth Program, and graduate intern Charlotte Brasseux, MPH candidate at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, call for a more structured, uniform, and comprehensive approach to collect, report, and analyze COVID-19 data in the U.S.
