Reproductive health matters
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Reprod Health Matters · May 2015
New actors, financial mechanisms and reformed aid reporting: What role for SRHR in post-2015 financing for development?
As governments around the world prepare to adopt a new development framework and supportive financial flows, the OECD Development Assistance Committee is exploring new ways of measuring and reporting on resource flows enabling development, including population assistance. These changes will affect the evidence base, discourse about and donor incentives related to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). ⋯ With all that is at stake, although the OECD debate on the future of the development finance measurement system may seem highly abstract, this is a high-stakes game that SRHR advocates need to have a hand in. Those who seek to improve SRHR are well served to engage in these discussions as early and often as possible before the momentous decisions over the coming months.
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Reprod Health Matters · May 2015
Historical note: How bringing women's health advocacy groups to WHO helped change the research agenda.
The politics of population control and its sometimes coercive methods in developing countries documented during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, gave rise to strong opposition by women's groups, and put into question the safety of contraceptive methods that were being developed and introduced into countries. In 1991, the Special Programme on Human Reproduction at the World Health Organization, a research programme focused on development of new methods and safety assessments of existing fertility regulation methods, started a process of "dialogue" meetings between scientists and women's health advocacy groups which lasted for nearly a decade. This paper describes the process of these meetings and what they achieved in terms of bringing new or different research topics into the agenda, and some of the actions taken as a result.