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"You don't have to go to the drawing board and start fresh" 

Population Reports Brings Actionable Knowledge to Reproductive Health Programs

Population Reports is a resource to serve people like me who work in the design and implementation of programs. I have been reading Population Reports for 15 years, since working for the Population Council in Bangladesh. I am from Dhaka originally and after being trained in medicine and surgery at the Sir Salimullah Medical College in Dhaka, I moved on to public health.

 

I look to Population Reports not just for data, but also for best practices and examples of how other programs are addressing similar issues that I deal with in my work. It's very targeted and it gives us perspective and context--you don't have to go back to the drawing board and start fresh.

 

Working with the Urban Family Health Partnership (UFHP)/John Snow Inc. in Bangladesh, I was in charge of developing an adolescent reproductive health strategy. I used Population Reports bibliographies--particularly the “Meeting Needs of Young Adults” issue--to find the latest, most relevant research that impacted our target population. It helped me conceptualize how we should design our adolescent strategy.

 

Later, I used the journal while leading the Bangladesh team of University Research Corporation's NGO Service Delivery Program (NSDP) from 2002-2007. We focused on the delivery of essential public health services, training, quality assurance, and on the institutional development of NGOs. In Bangladesh, we partnered with more than 30 local NGOs, over 300 local clinics, and 8000 mobile satellite teams to reach about 20 million people in both disadvantaged rural areas and urban slums.

 

Population Reports' program examples were extremely helpful because they allowed me to compare NDSP's programming in Bangladesh to other programs around the world, in order to fine-tune NSDP's quality assurance and quality of care strategies. The Web site pointed me to training curricula available online that would help us improve interpersonal communication and also prevention of infection, including HIV and Hepatitis B. The print edition is very important to service providers in the field because they don't always have access to the Internet.

 

In my current position, I support the integration of reproductive health into the Christian Children's Fund's (CCF) health and development programs. In Zambia and Angola, where CCF focuses on community-based family planning service delivery, I've used program examples in Population Reports to improve our programs.

 

I have long referred colleagues and associates to Population Reports. Most recently, I referred CCF's regional health advisor in Senegal, our regional family planning advisor in Angola, and our Zambian family planning staff to use the journal as a resource in their work.

 

I read issues of Population Reports in their entirety. It's valuable because it's one of those resources that can be used at the national level, for program development and advocacy as well as at the community level by program mangers and service providers.

 

 

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