Archive for: Reproductive Health Matters

Resilience, Integrated Development and Family Planning: Building Long-Term Solutions

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For the many individuals and communities experiencing natural disasters and environmental degradation, building resilience means becoming more proficient at anticipating, preventing, recovering, and rebuilding following negative shocks and stresses. Development practitioners have been working to build this proficiency in vulnerable communities around the world for several decades. This article first examines the meaning of resilience as a component of responding to disasters and some of the key components of building resilience. It then summarises approaches to resilience developed by the Rockefeller and Packard Foundations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, USAID and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), which show how family planning services can contribute to resilience. Next, it gives some examples of how family planning has been integrated into some current environment and development programmes. Finally, it describes how these integrated programmes have succeeded in helping communities to diversify livelihoods, bolster community engagement and resilience, build new governance structures, and position women as agents of change.

Year: 2014

Source: Reproductive Health Matters

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    Environment

    Family Planning

    Integration

    Resilience

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    Providing Family Planning Services to Remote Communities in Areas of High Biodiversity Through a Population-Health-Environment Programme in Madagascar

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    Population-Health-Environment (PHE) is an interdisciplinary model of programme design which recognises the complex interconnections between people, their health and their environment. PHE responds holistically to the challenges faced by ecosystems and the communities dependent on them, with thematically distinct but interconnected work strands sharing the same infrastructure, resources and goals. This has been shown to achieve better outcomes than tackling health and environmental issues in isolation. This paper shows how PHE programme design has been used by Blue Ventures for providing family planning services in a remote, biodiverse coastal region in southwest Madagascar. The PHE programme has integrated family planning services into a pre-existing, community-based conservation programme, aided by the established infrastructure and good community relations developed by the conservation workers. Implementation of the programme has led to a strong uptake of family planning services, and couples in the region are now able to make their own family planning choices. Successes and challenges of the programme are discussed.

    Year: 2014

    Source: Reproductive Health Matters

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      Community Outreach

      Conservation

      Family Planning

      Integration

      Project Design

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      Population, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights and Sustainable Development: Forging a Common Agenda

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      This article suggests that sexual and reproductive health and rights activists seeking to influence the post-2015 international development paradigm must work with sustainable development advocates concerned with a range of issues, including climate change, environmental issues, and food and water security, and that a way of building bridges with these communities is to demonstrate how sexual and reproductive health and rights are relevant for these issues. An understanding of population dynamics, including urbanization and migration, as well as population growth, can help to clarify these links. This article therefore suggests that whether or not sexual and reproductive health and rights activists can overcome resistance to discussing “population”, become more knowledgeable about other sustainable development issues, and work with others in those fields to advance the global sustainable development agenda are crucial questions for the coming months. The article also contends that it is possible to care about population dynamics (including ageing and problems faced by countries with a high proportion of young people) and care about human rights at the same time. It expresses concern that, if sexual and reproductive health and rights advocates do not participate in the population dynamics discourse, the field will be left free for those for whom respecting and protecting rights may be less of a priority.

      Year: 2014

      Source: Reproductive Health Matters

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        Climate Change

        Conservation

        Environment

        Integration

        Population

        Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

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        Beginning With Sustainable Scale Up in Mind: Initial Results From an Integrated Population, Health and Environment Project in East Africa

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        Small-scale pilot projects have demonstrated that integrated population, health and environment approaches can address the needs and rights of vulnerable communities. However, these and other types of health and development projects rarely influence larger policies and programmes. ExpandNet, a network of health professionals working on scaling up, argues this is because projects are often not designed with sustainability and scaling up in mind. This paper shows how this new approach is being applied and the initial lessons from its use in the Health of People and Environment in the Lake Victoria Basin Project (HoPE-LVB) currently underway (2011-2017) in Uganda and Kenya. Specific emerging lessons are: 1) ongoing, meaningful stakeholder engagement has significantly shaped the design and implementation, 2) multi-sectoral projects are complex and striving for simplicity in the interventions is challenging, and 3) projects that address a sharply felt need experience substantial pressure for scale up, even before their effectiveness is established. This paper recommends that other projects would also benefit from applying a scale-up perspective from the outset.

        Year: 2014

        Source: Reproductive Health Matters

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          Integration

          Project Design

          Scale-up

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