On July 11, 2012 from 9am to 12pm EST, the Universal Access Project will be hosting a tweetchat about the London Summit on Family Planning.

The hashtag for this tweetchat is: #FPChat. To follow other summit related tweets use the hashtag: #FPSummit.

The schedule for the chat is:

• 8:45 EST (13:45 BST): Introduction by the UN Foundation's Universal Access Project
• 9:00 EST (14:00 BST): The Gates Foundation and DFID will discuss the keynote speeches and action from Summit
• 9:30 EST (14:30 BST): An MSI Outreach Worker from Kampala, Uganda will share experiences about delivering services on the ground
• 10:00 EST (15:00 BST): Nike's Girl Effect Project will talk about the importance of empowering adolescent girls 
• 10:30 EST (15:30 BST): USAID will discuss the U.S. Government's role in international reproductive health and family planning
• 11:00 EST (16:00 BST): The White Ribbon Alliance will talk about the implementation of commitments
• 11:30 EST (16:30 BST): The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child health and Every Woman Every Child will share insights on private-sector commitments 
• 12:00 EST (16:30 BST): Wrap up by  the UN Foundation's Universal Access Project

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.

Family planning is one of the most cost-effective ways to prevent maternal, infant, and child mortality. Yet today more than 200 million women and girls in developing countries who wish to prevent, limit, or space pregnancies are not using a modern contraceptive method. In fact, in the world’s 69 poorest countries, the number of women with unmet need for contraception has increased in recent years, resulting in 80 million unintended pregnancies each year.

A family in Dioro, Mali

© Michelle Bashin, Courtesy of Photoshare

This Wednesday, July 11, family planning stakeholders from around the world will unite for the London Summit on Family Planning. The UK Government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are partnering with UNFPA to host this gathering of leaders from national government, donors, civil society, the private sector, the research and development community, and others to renew and revitalize global commitment to ensuring the world’s women and girls, particularly those living in low-resource settings, have access to contraceptive information, services, and supplies.  

Organizers hope the summit will “mobilize global policy, financing, commodity and service delivery commitments to support the rights of an additional 120 million women and girls in the world’s 69 poorest countries to use contraceptive information, services and supplies, without coercion or discrimination, by 2020.” Doing so will prevent a staggering 100 million unintended pregnancies, 50 million abortions, 200,000 pregnancy- and childbirth-related maternal deaths, and 3 million infant deaths.