Category Archives: Contraception and family planning

The contraceptive helping refugee women plan their families

Posted on by

Instead of becoming ‘factories for babies’, women who’ve fled South Sudan to Uganda are trying new options for managing their reproductive health

Christine Lamwaka and her husband gathered their six children and fled. It was April 2017 and their town in South Sudan had just been attacked. They walked for two days from Eastern Equatoria before crossing the border into Uganda.

“It was hard to flee with the young children. We struggled to run. I thought we couldn’t make it alive,” says Lamwaka, who was 22 at the time of the attack.

Continue reading...

Uganda recalls a million faulty condoms

Posted on by

Charity takes action after holes are discovered in two batches of Life Guard condoms

The charity Marie Stopes International is recalling more than a million condoms in Uganda, after officials raised concerns that they were prone to breaking.

The charity began the recall of packets of Life Guard condoms after the National Drug Authority found they contained holes and did not meet quality standards. More than half of the affected products have since been recovered.

Continue reading...

Cost of ending maternal deaths laid bare as $115bn funding shortfall revealed

Posted on by

UN urges major push to meet targets as researchers at Nairobi summit also sound alarm over family planning and violence

The global push to stop mothers dying unnecessarily in childbirth, meet family planning needs and end violence against women could be undermined by a massive funding shortfall, researchers have found.

World leaders have pledged to redouble efforts to end preventable maternal death, satisfy family planning demand and stop violence and harmful practices against women and girls by 2030.

Continue reading...

Access to contraception falling far short of global targets – report

Posted on by

Family planning services are reaching more women, but population growth is hampering efforts to reach 2020 goal

More women and girls in low income countries are using family planning than ever before, but global efforts to widen access to contraception are still falling well behind targets, according to a report.

One year away from a global deadline to widen access to modern forms of family planning, such services are accessible to less than half of the women that policy makers hoped to reach.

Continue reading...

Soap opera could be unlikely form of birth control in Uganda

Posted on by

An NGO has recut and overdubbed a Venezuelan telenovela to raise awareness of sexual health

Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It also has some of the most dedicated soap opera watchers anywhere in Africa.

Now a group of enterprising Ugandans is aiming to tackle the former through the medium of the latter. Soap operas are expensive to make, however, so they plan instead to “hack” a Venezuelan import, recutting the existing series and overdubbing it with Ugandan actors.

Continue reading...

Dr Fred Sai obituary

Posted on by
Campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world

The harrowing experiences that Fred Sai faced as a young medical officer in Ghana in the 1960s fuelled his concern about the link between frequent childbearing and preventable death and sickness in mothers and children, and turned him into a passionate campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world.

In his early clinical work, Sai, who has died aged 95, came across many children with protein-energy malnutrition, or kwashiorkor, which in the language of the Ga ethnic group to which he belonged means “the disease of the displaced child”. “I realised that fully a third of my child patients had mothers who were pregnant or had a young sibling born very soon after them,” he told the Lancet in 2012. “The abrupt stopping of breastfeeding was making them sick. I thought that one way to help these women was to teach them family planning and the importance of spacing children properly.”

Continue reading...

UK promises extra £600m for family planning in poorest countries

Posted on by

Majority of funding will go to UN population fund, which works across countries with highest maternal death rates

The UK government has pledged to spend an extra £600m to support family planning programmes in some of the world’s poorest countries.

Most of the money, which will be rolled out between 2020 and 2025, will be given to the UN population fund (UNFPA), which works in 150 countries, including the 46 with the highest rates of maternal deaths and lowest rates of modern contraceptive use.

Continue reading...

Global population of eight billion and growing: we can’t go on like this | Robin McKie

Posted on by

World Population Day will mark a global crisis – one that is best tackled by more access to birth control, particularly in Africa

President Magufuli pulled off an intriguing feat last year when, in a single speech, he managed to affront just about every liberal cause on the planet. The Tanzanian leader told a public rally not to listen to advice from foreigners on contraception because it had “sinister motives”. For good measure, he accused women who use birth control of being “lazy” – it was their duty to have large numbers of children.

By any standards, these were outrageous remarks – and worrying ones, for they indicate there has been a deep and potentially catastrophic failure by the west in promoting a measure on which the future health of our planet depends: limiting numbers of our species. Until this basic task is achieved, virtually every measure we take to tackle global heating will be negated by the energy demands of the extra billions we have added to global populations, say campaigners.

Continue reading...

Contraceptive injections do not increase risk of contracting HIV, study finds

Posted on by

Research also finds scale of crisis among African women higher than expected

A landmark study has ended 30 years of anxiety that hormonal contraceptive injections may increase women’s chances of infection from HIV.

But the study found a dramatically higher rate of HIV infection among women in southern Africa than was expected, which one leading campaigning organisation said signified a public health crisis”.

Continue reading...

Can China recover from its disastrous one-child policy?

Posted on by
Families are now being urged to have at least two children, but it may be too late to convince parents to embrace the change

For Xu Meiru, 38, the thought of having a second child is exhausting. Her days typically begin at 5am, don’t end until 11pm, and are filled with shuttling her nine-year-old son to school, helping him with his homework, preparing meals and running an online clothing business.

“It’s hard to find time even to sleep for a few minutes in a chair,” she says, sitting in a McDonald’s while her son plays a game on a phone, the detritus of a Happy Meal in front of him.

Continue reading...

Experts urge Egypt to rethink two-child population strategy

Posted on by

Medics say limiting families s not the answer for a country where a baby is born every 15 seconds

In the cramped office of New Cairo hospital’s family planning clinic, Safah Hosny sets a box overflowing with contraceptives next to the visitors’ ledger on a small desk.

There are eight condoms for one Egyptian pound, about 4p, or ampoules of injectable birth control, for just under 9p. A contraceptive implant lasting three years costs 22p, while copper IEDs – the most popular form of birth control on offer according to Dr Hosny – cost 17p.

Continue reading...