Tag Archives: PSI

June 18, 2013

Multiplying Health Impact in Benin: A Peace Corps and PSI Collaboration

Categories: Global Health Beat
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By PSI and the Peace Corps

UntitledThe small West African country of Benin hosts over a hundred Peace Corps Volunteers serving in local communities as teachers, health and enterprise advisers and environmental educators. Volunteers work at a local level to support underserved people and communities in each of these sectors. From their local vantage point, Peace Corps Volunteers know that the delivery of primary health care in resource-constrained countries like Benin faces many challenges that negatively impact both the quality of care and the achievement of sustainable clinical and public health outcomes.

To address these challenges, Population Services International (PSI) and its affiliate Association Beninoise pour le Marketing Social (ABMS) have undertaken programs to improve the provision of quality of services and products in Benin’s health sector.

Peace Corps Benin and PSI have had a long partnership, which has evolved and matured over the past eight years. Initially Peace Corps assigned one or two Volunteers to work directly with PSI. While this partnership was fruitful, it had a limited impact, and did not involve the many other Peace Corps Volunteers in Benin, serving both in the Rural Community Health and other programs.

Recently, PSI has been able to broaden its relationship with Peace Corps Benin and extend to include other Volunteers and to increase the impact of their joint activities. This collaboration complements Peace Corps’ recent emphasis on partnerships, increased emphasis on technical training, and a more focused programmatic approach. Peace Corps Benin sees in PSI a partner who can help improve pre-service and in-service technical training modules, assist in the development of job aids and tools for Volunteers after training, provide continued technical support over a number of years, and offer a structure and/or framework for Volunteers to better deliver their messages or assistance.

June 11, 2013

What’s the Big Idea? Investing in a Comprehensive Approach to Women’s Health

Categories: Global Health Beat
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By Amy Lieberman

There are still two years left before the United Nations’ eight poverty, health and gender Millennium Development Goals expire and lapse into a new international development agenda. Yet MDG 5 remains one of the most off-track targets, potentially too derailed to meet the benchmarks on time.

Every year, more than 1 million children are left motherless as a result of complications during pregnancy and childbirth. In sub-Saharan Africa, a woman’s maternal mortality risk is 1 in 30, compared to 1 in 5,600 in developed regions. And more than 200 million women lack access to critical family planning services.

The situation is dire, but signs of progress are emerging. Increased advocacy in recent years has spurred a wide array of new commitments from donors, government leaders and corporations. Many advocates, health experts and supporters are looking at new models for improving the health of women and girls in the world’s poorest countries.

But what strategies will ensure that those regional and global commitments – in policies, partnerships and dollars – will be maintained during this decade and beyond? And what models for health service delivery can successfully reverse the abysmal health outcomes facing millions of girls and women?

June 10, 2013

One Woman’s Battle with Cervical Cancer May Help Save a Neighborhood

Categories: Daily Impact
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Gabrielle Fitzgerald if the Director of Program Advocacy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  She travelled to Myanmar last week with Population Services International, an NGO that has worked in Myanmar for nearly 20 years.  Dr. Aye Aye Mu is a health provider in the SUN Quality Health Network, a health franchise run by PSI. This originally appeared in the Impatient Optimists blog.

Dr. Aye Aye Mu runs a thriving medical practice in the North Okkalapa Township in Myanmar’s capital of Yangon.  Her office can be found after winding through labyrinthine, rutted roads, filled with puddles from the morning’s torrential rain.  She gave up her middle-class existence to move with her family to this neighborhood, so she could be closer to the people that needed her most.

One of those people is Ma Ni, who is dying of cervical cancer on the floor of her two-room home near Dr. Aye Aye Mu’s office. Dying of any kind of cancer anywhere in the world is sad, but this case is particularly heart-rending because cervical cancer is so easily preventable.

June 5, 2013

PSI Honors Champions in Women’s Health at the 2013 Impact Awards

Categories: In The Field
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PSI President and CEO Karl Hofmann and Women Deliver President Jill Sheffield were joined by guests of honor Global Health Corps CEO and co-founder Barbara P. Bush, and singer-songwriter, actress and PSI Ambassador Mandy Moore on Wednesday to present awards to four visionaries in girls’ and women’s health at the Impact Awards ceremony in Kuala Lumpur.

The second annual Impact Awards, hosted by leading international NGOs Population Services International (PSI) and Women Deliver, recognized the exceptional leadership and determination of these four recipients in the field of girls and women’s health. Recipients of the Impact Award were chosen by the editors of PSI’s flagship publication, Impact Magazine, and Women Deliver. The ceremony coincided with the Women Deliver 2013 Conference, which has brought thousands of experts and advocates to Malaysia. The conference was the largest of the decade focused on girls’ and women’s health and rights, bringing together more than 4,500 leaders and advocates representing over 2,200 organizations and 149 countries.

 

Why “Partnerships” Were All the Buzz at Women Deliver

Categories: Commentary
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This is a special guest post from Jill Filipovic

Does the private sector have a role improving health systems? According to some participants at this year’s Women Deliver conference on maternal health, absolutely.

The conference, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, brought together thousands of health care providers, advocates, politicians, journalists, activists and human rights workers to discuss the challenges, victories and potential solutions in the maternal health field. One of those solutions: Private sector involvement.

Most people who work in the maternal health field are there for one reason, said Jennifer Pope, Director of Support for International Family Planning Organisation at PSI, in a Women Deliver panel on the private sector and health care. They’re working for “Sara.”

May 30, 2013

Cowal and Seffrin: No Woman Should Die from Cervical Cancer

Categories: Global Health Beat
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This special edition of Impact, the global health magazine of PSI, was produced in partnership with Women Deliver and the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. This issue, launched in conjunction with the Women Deliver 2013 Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, brings insightful dialogue on the value of investing in girls and women’s health. Our hope is that this issue will call attention to the urgent need for increased investment in girls and women in the developing world. 

cervicalcancer-biophotoGirls and women in the developing world are losing the fight against cervical cancer because we have failed to close deadly gaps in prevention, screening and treatment that could spare their lives and end this disease.

More than 85 percent of the estimated 275,000 women who die from cervical cancer globally every year live in low- and middle income countries.

As global leaders convene in Kuala Lumpur for the third Women Deliver conference, the American Cancer Societyand PSI are proud to join forces with other critical members of civil society to raise our collective voices and amplify the message that no woman should die from cervical cancer. We know what it takes to save lives from this disease – and we have a moral obligation to ensure that all girls and women, regardless of their location, benefit from this knowledge.

Sarah Brown: Grassroots Mobilization Saves Mothers’ Lives

Categories: Commentary
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This special edition of Impact, the global health magazine of PSI, was produced in partnership with Women Deliver and the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. This issue, launched in conjunction with the Women Deliver 2013 Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, brings insightful dialogue on the value of investing in girls and women’s health. Our hope is that this issue will call attention to the urgent need for increased investment in girls and women in the developing world. 

No need to explain here the recent progress in reducing needless maternal deaths around the world and the challenges ahead. At Women Deliver, most participants have devoted their working lives and a lifelong passion to feminism, equality, access to rights and fair treatment. We are looking at the final run toward the 2015 Millennium Development Goal deadline and must never give up working for further progress.

It is not good enough that pregnancy and childbirth remain the biggest killers of girls and women in many countries. It is not acceptable that there are still barriers in terms of access to quality health care, choices regarding reproductive health and age of marriage, and opportunities for education, employment and personal safety.

May 29, 2013

Seven Questions with Melinda Gates

Categories: Global Health Beat
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This special edition of Impact, the global health magazine of PSI, was produced in partnership with Women Deliver and the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. This issue, launched in conjunction with the Women Deliver 2013 Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, brings insightful dialogue on the value of investing in girls and women’s health. Our hope is that this issue will call attention to the urgent need for increased investment in girls and women in the developing world. 

Melinda Gates is co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Along with Bill Gates, she shapes and approves the foundation’s strategies, reviews results, and sets the overall direction of the organization. Together they meet with grantees and partners to further the foundation’s goal of improving equity in the U.S. and around the world. They use many public appearances to advocate for the foundation’s issues. In July of 2012, Gates made headlines by spearheading the London Summit on Family Planning, with the goal of delivering contraceptives to an additional 120 million women in developing countries by 2020. While involved in all of the organization’s endeavors, Gates believes that empowering women in developing countries to decide whether and when to have a child is a critical driver of her work at the foundation, since this decision can be the source of transformational improvements in the health and prosperity of whole societies. Bill and Melinda Gates live in Medina, Washington, near Seattle. They have three children.

IMPACT: In your travels, you’ve met many women who have shared their personal stories with you. Is there one story that stands out?

MELINDA GATES: I am inspired by the women I meet everywhere I go. They have to work so hard just to make sure their families survive, but somehow they stay optimistic and do everything in their power to make the future better than the past. I try to talk and write about all of them when I come back from trips, because I believe their stories will inspire others as they’ve inspired me. On my most husband’s family and insist on spacing her pregnancies. I’ve been telling her story a lot lately.

In terms of one woman who stands out, I always come back to Marianne, who I met in a slum outside Nairobi, Kenya. I was talking with a group of mothers at a community center about why they use contraceptives, and Marianne said, “I want to bring every good thing to one child before I have another.” That is now a mantra for me. It expresses why I am motivated to do the work of the foundation.

We all want to bring every good thing to our children. I have three kids, and I can relate to that. Sharmila risked everything to give her children every good thing. The work we do with our partners is all about helping brave women like Marianne and Sharmila achieve that goal.

May 23, 2013

Princeton Philosopher Challenges People to Stop Being Bystanders to Poverty

Categories: Global Health Beat
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Princeton philosopher Peter Singer wants people to give to charity. He may be best known for his drowning child story and uses his TED talk to make a similar point. He opens with a video of a child who was run over by a car in China. Multiple people pass by the injured child as she lie bleeding on the ground. Singer asks the audience if they would have passed the girl by. The majority raise their hands to say they would help.

“But before you give yourself too much credit, look at this. UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases. UNICEF thinks that that’s good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good. But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day. Does it really matter that we’re not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they’re far away?” challenges Singer.