Women of the World

  • Blog post
    March 14, 2013

    Innovations for Women and Girls: The World’s Mothers, Daughters, and Future

    Last week, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs hosted an International Women’s Day Global Health Symposium. Panelists highlighted state-of-the-art knowledge-sharing innovations being implemented in the U.S. and around the world to improve women’s health and the many interconnected facets of women’s wellbeing, such as agriculture, food security, the economy, education, and gender equity.

    A woman in Ndola, Zambia

    A woman in Ndola, Zambia 

    © 2009 Arturo Sanabria, Courtesy of Photoshare

    Access to family planning is critical to women and children’s health. It is also essential to the economic, social, and environmental wellbeing of families and communities. Here in the U.S. and around the world, family planning programs are implementing cutting-edge communication programs to improve reproductive health outcomes among women and youth, many of which train and deploy community members to reach their peers with essential information and services.

    • Pathfinder International is developing mobile apps to help community health workers (CHWs) determine their clients’ contraceptive eligibility. Pathfinder hopes to eventually develop speaking apps to address the literacy needs of CHWs in particular countries. Apps are also being used to map family planning need and program reach and to connect specific audiences, such as youth, with targeted contraceptive information and advice, particularly for managing side effects. (Also check out K4Health’s Application for Contraceptive Eligibility (ACE), which gives family planning providers an easy way to check whether clients are medically eligible to start using contraceptive methods, based the popular and trusted Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Family Planning Providers.)
    • The PRACHAR project in Bihar, India, successfully trained adolescents as family planning champions in their schools and communities. Five years after the pilot program began, the age of marriage among the study population had risen 2.5 years, the age at first pregnancy had risen 1.5 years, and young married couples who participated in the program were more likely to use contraception before having their first child.
    • The Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago is encouraging high school students to use digital storytelling to share their personal stories of how structural factors such as poverty and violence influence sexual and reproductive health.
    • The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab facilitates collaboration among youth and university faculty and students to create digital stories and games around health-related issues. A new game called Lucidity requires players to use different media to solve a mystery and piece together sexual and reproductive health information.
    International Women's Day
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  • Blog post
    October 11, 2012

    Understanding Global Health by Celebrating Girls

    As a newcomer to K4Health with a lot to learn about global health and the challenges of girls and women worldwide, I spent the first two weeks in my new position reading all I could about reproductive health and family planning. In the process, stories about the creativity, leadership, and bravery of girls keep rising to the top. The first observance of International Day of the Girl Child brings global focus to girls by making their stories, their obstacles, and their promise more visible. Here are just a few to get started:

    Pooja, a 13-year-old from India, found support from her family to continue her education and delay marriage. Watch her story in a video from the Half the Sky Movement.

    Catherine Wong, a 17-year-old from New Jersey, invented a portable, inexpensive electrocardiogram that connects to a mobile phone via Bluetooth. Find out more about her big idea.

    Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old from Pakistan, advocated for girls’ education under the Taliban. She is recovering from surgery after being shot by Taliban gunmen.

    Youth
    Interagency Youth Working Group (IYWG)
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  • Blog post
    September 26, 2012

    World Contraception Day: Unmet Need and the Numbers

    Worldwide 222 million women have an unmet need for modern contraceptives. That means of those women wanting to delay or prevent pregnancy, 222 million are not using contraceptives.

    This number is burned into my brain, 222 million. Let’s put this in perspective. Currently in the US, there are roughly 156 million women, so the number of women worldwide without access to contraceptives is greater than the entire population of women in the US.

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  • Blog post
    August 31, 2012

    National Geographic’s Stephanie Sinclair Documents the True Price of Child Marriage

    The world is a scary place, especially for women. Many live their lives in fear and are constantly treated like second-class citizens. Photographer Stephanie Sinclair of National Geographic took a close look at child marriage and created a 10-minute film Too Young to Wed: The Secret World of Child Brides. She captured the true consequences of the practice of child marriage. This practice, though illegal nearly everywhere worldwide, is still practiced by many cultures, in many countries. This video focuses on India, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ethiopia and the acts of child marriage. Throughout the video, several girls are interviewed about the lives they live as young brides. It is very dramatic and at times hard to watch, but it gives a glimpse into the pain and fear that runs these young girls lives.

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  • Blog post
    July 10, 2012

    Melinda Gates: Eliminating the Controversy of Contraceptives

    This morning on the Marketplace Morning Report, interviewer Jeremy Hobson spoke with Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, about the controversy around contraception and the upcoming London Summit on Family Planning. Gates’s first statement pointed out that there are a staggering 200 million women who would like to have access to contraceptives but don’t. She added that these contraceptives have the ability to be “life-transforming” for these women. One main problem is the continued cuts to family planning budgets worldwide. Though contraceptives have been shown to be an important tool to improving health and development, they have been deemed a controversy and continued to have their funding cut. Hobson brought up the recent turmoil around contraceptives in the U.S., and Gates responded with an astonishing statistic, “99 percent of women -- say they use, in the U.S., contraceptives” and she added that women all over the world don’t have the same access as we do here.

    London Summit on Family Planning
    World Population Day
    DFID
    UNFPA
    Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
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  • Blog post
    April 20, 2012

    Women’s Empowerment: The Happiest News I’ve Seen All Day

    Throughout my day, because of the work I do in social media, I read a lot. I follow multiple news affiliates, journals, list serves, newsletters, and other readily available news sources. I read about revolutions, wars, poverty, starvation, natural disasters and other devastating things.  Finding happiness in the news can sometimes be a tall feat. Drama and devastation sell newspapers and intrigue audiences.

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  • Blog post
    March 07, 2012

    What Does it Mean to be a Woman in 2012?

    In this blog series, I try to shine light on positive experiences and progress towards equality for women. But these “bright spots” don’t change the overall picture—that empowering women is still an uphill struggle. As International Women’s Day approaches again this year on March 8th, I am constantly reminded of the painful, oppressive, and unjust practices that continue to afflict women and girls worldwide..

    International Women's Day

    If it were somehow possible to average out the experiences of all women into a “typical woman,” the picture would be bleak. Compared to men, women are devalued in the workplace, the home, and the community.

    Women are disproportionately affected by poverty and homelessness, and are more likely to be targets of violence—particularly intimate partner violence.

    In many countries in the Global South, girls are likely to be married before they turn 18, often against their free will.  

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  • Blog post
    January 09, 2012

    USAID Reminds Us Why We Should Invest In Women

    In writing the blog series “Women of the World,” I have covered many different aspects of women’s equality. This is a topic I feel strongly about, not just because I’m a woman, but because I know how important women’s rights and equality are to social change for everyone. In the developing world, a focus on improving the status and equality of women leads to stronger societies and increased development across many sectors, including  agriculture, banking, health, politics, and education.

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  • Blog post
    November 09, 2011

    An Integrated Approach to Addressing Millennium Development Goals

    October 30, 2011: The 139th Annual Meeting and Exposition of the American Public Health Association (APHA) commenced with powerful speeches from prominent and provocative democratic intellectual Dr. Cornel West and APHA president Linda Rae Murray. With both of their speeches focusing on domestic healthcare and political issues, a universal theme stood out about empowerment and addressing social inequalities to improve health. In the many sessions and presentations between Sunday and Tuesday at APHA, I noticed this same theme of giving power to the powerless--not just domestically, but throughout the world. Overall, APHA left me with a strong sense of the importance of global development, health, and innovation, and the impact that an integrated approach focused on empowering women has on making substantial improvements to health globally.

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  • Blog post
    October 13, 2011

    Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Three Women: Moving Democracy and Gender Equity Forward

    Last Friday, October 7, marked a significant advance in women’s rights with the announcement of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winners—all three of whom are women. The laureates are Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf; Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee; and Tawakkol Karman, a catalyzing figure in the ongoing revolt in Yemen. These three inspiring women are all leaders in the fight against oppression, and for democracy, women’s rights, and basic human rights.

    Historically, Nobel Peace Prize winners have been overwhelmingly male and Western. The Prize was first awarded in 1901. Before last week’s awards, only 12 of 96 individual laureates had been women, and only 13 had been from countries in Africa or the Middle East. The Nobel Committee’s decision to acknowledge the social and political activism of three women from Africa and the Middle East is truly groundbreaking.

     

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