Faith-based organizations believe in family planning

British Prime Minister David Cameron speaking at the London Summit.

This article was originally published on Impatient Optimists on July 19, 2012.
 
Faith-based organizations (FBOs) were well represented at last week’s London Summit on Family Planning thanks to the summit organizers, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the British government. Ten faith leaders participated and, like most of the delegates, they thought the summit was a smashing success by securing financial commitments to reach an additional 120 million women and girls with voluntary family planning services.

Gary Darmstadt, head of the foundation’s Family Health Division, made clear his belief that FBOs are “critical to family planning” in a post-summit blog, pointing out that FBOs “provide up to 40 percent of the total healthcare in many countries in Africa.” It may be even higher than that in some countries.

“The only way the ambitious goals in child health and family planning can be reached is to mobilize the faith community along with other stakeholders, an ‘all hands-on-deck’ approach,” said Ray Martin, executive director of Christian Connections for International Health (CCIH) . “Often the hardest-to-reach populations in rural areas and the urban poor are the ones most likely to be reachable by FBOs.”

Faith-based organizations hope to have a positive impact at London Family Planning Summit

Three African presidents and Melinda Gates at Family Planning Summit.

This article was originally published in the "On Faith" section of the Washington Post on July 10, 2012. 

When the British government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation bring together governments, donors, civil society, the private sector and the research and development community in London on July 11 for a major summit that hopes to rekindle the neglected embers of family planning, there will be one constituency there that might surprise some people — people of faith, including Christians (Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals), Muslims and other faiths.

These religious leaders are working to mobilize the faith community to work with governments, donors and other secular partners to bring family planning back as a major force in maternal, child and community health, something that has been downplayed the past two decades, in part because AIDS and other health issues took precedence, and in part because of the religious and political sensitivities to sexuality and family planning.

This faith support for family planning ranges from progressive Christians to Catholics and evangelicals.

In management of G8 and G20 summits, Mexican performance was vastly superior to U.S.

NGOs meeting at Los Cabos to prepare for their first press conference.

NOTE: This was originally published on the Huffington Post on July 2, 2012.
 
This year's G8 Summit took place at the secluded Camp David presidential retreat in the mountains of northern Maryland. The G20 Summit took place in Los Cabos, Mexico, the beach resort area at the southern tip of Baja California, where American tourists partied in clubs and frolicked on the beaches while 26 heads of state grappled with the world's most pressing problems.

Apart from the striking difference in venues, there was another huge contrast in the American and Mexican summits -- the level of transparency and the manner in which the two governments managed the process of consulting outside groups, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), otherwise known as civil society. Guess which country had a very transparent and inclusive process, with multiple opportunities for civil society engagement, and which made used a dedicated website and a suite of social media tools, including Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and others, to share information.

If you guessed the United States, you'd be wrong. As a member of the G8/G20 Global Task Force, a group of international NGOs advocating for their issues in the two summits, I saw firsthand that the Obama Administration's management of the G8 process was none of that:

In advancing food security at G20, civil society can learn from business

NOTE: This was originally published on the Impatient Optimists of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on June 20, 2012.
 
LOS CABOS, Mexico — One of the remarkable developments of this G20 Summit is the meteoric rise of the B20 (Business-20) and its championing of an issue that is also a priority for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — food security and nutrition.

The B20 describes itself as “an international forum aimed at fostering dialogue between G20 governments and the global business community,” with a main objective of providing heads of state with meaningful recommendations from business.

Food security and nutrition might not have achieved the prominence they have at this summit if not for the B20. And they have achieved prominence—if not many concrete results — as evidenced by Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s op-ed in the Financial Times Monday entitled “Why food security comes first:”

We will have failed if we manage to get the richest nations back on track while the poorest still experience famine. That is why my country insisted on placing food security at the top of the G20 agenda, alongside the restoration of economic growth and global financial reform.

What NGOs want from the Mexico G20 on food security and nutrition

NGOs holding one of our two press conferences at the G20 at Los Cabos.

NOTE: This was originally published on the Huffington Post on June 18, 2012.
 
LOS CABOS, Mexico -- On the eve of the G20 Summit, which opens here on June 18, I've been looking into what nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) want to get out of the G20 Mexico on an issue that is a priority to NGOs as well as the Mexican presidency of the G20 -- "enhancing food security and addressing commodity price volatility," in the words of the Mexican government.

And I discovered that the biggest NGOs and NGO coalitions here in Los Cabos are advocating for many of the same food security and nutrition issues, but also have some differences.

In its paper titled Food Security: A G20 Priority, the Mexican government defines food security "not only as an increase in production, but also the availability of, and access to, food by the population."

In a sense, that is one of the highest priorities of NGOs advocating on this issue at Los Cabos -- to ensure that the G20 not only takes steps to increase food production but also to make sure that the most vulnerable, especially women and children, have access to it.

"Wise-Up" helps Ethiopian sex workers find new vocations

Munayie

NOTE: This was originally published on the Huffington Post on June 18, 2012.
 
SHASHEMENE, Ethiopia -- Three years ago, Munayie, 25, made her living as a commercial sex worker here in Shashemene, a city of over 100,000 in the lake resort area of southern Ethiopia, about 240 kilometers south of Addis Ababa. She wanted to do something else but sex work was the only thing she knew that brought in the money she needed to provide for herself and her 8-year-old son.

Eventually, she and other sex workers found their calling as café owners with support from "Wise-Up," a condom promotion program of the non-profit organization DKT Ethiopia that targets sex workers, their clients and gatekeepers, and other "most at-risk populations." Wise-Up is grounded in the belief that promoting condoms to these groups will reduce prevalence of HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) because 1) prevalence is generally higher among these groups and 2) they act as "bridging" populations that spread HIV and STIs to the general population.

In 2009, Wise-Up created a cooperative of 15 sex workers and Munayie became its leader. In 2011, the cooperative opened a café and condom shop in Shashemene.

WHO finds social media indispensable in managing global health crises

Inside SHOC, the "situation room" of the World Health Organization.

NOTE: This article was first published on the Huffington Post on May 21, 2012.

GENEVA, Switzerland -- This month I was visiting the Strategic Health Operations Centre (SHOC), deep inside the World Health Organization. SHOC is WHO's equivalent of the White House Situation Room, where a multi-disciplinary team of experts gather to access and share information that enable rapid situation assessment and decision-making during global pandemics and other health crises.

Along with an impressive array of state-of-the-art communications, collaboration and coordination tools were four large screens for monitoring crises. I was fascinated to see that one of them displayed TweetDeck, the application that facilitates Twitter searches by selected key words or phrases.

WHO uses social media to manage global health crises, I asked Christine Feig, WHO's head of communications? Yes, they are, and she recounted a tale of how social media have fundamentally changed WHO health surveillance in the age of Twitter and Facebook. WHO's seminal social media event occurred the last time the SHOC was staffed 24/7 -- the Japanese tsunami and Fukushima radiation crisis of 2011. Here's how it played out:

On March 14, three days after the tsunami hit Japan, WHO observed via social media that some people were drinking wound cleaner, which contains iodine, because it was thought to protect them from radiation. Via Twitter and Facebook, the WHO social media team warned people not to drink it -- that it would not help and could be harmful.