Training, Research, and Advocacy
Douglas Onwonga, a fieldworker at the African Population and Health Research Centre, conducts household visits in Nairobi slums to monitor demographic, health, and education trends.
To advance sound policy, the Program promotes timely, evidence-based analyses of family planning and reproductive health issues that have practical applications. Grants in 2006 emphasized:
- Exploring the impact of population dynamics on economic development. Grantees analyzed the links between population issues and poverty. The research will help policymakers understand the role of family planning and reproductive health in improving the economic well-being of people in developing countries.
- Advancing policy-relevant research. With Foundation support, major research institutions focused attention on significant population trends, such as the stall in declining fertility rates and the demographic impact of HIV.
- Training the next generation of population experts. Program funds strengthened key population science programs in African universities to enable more graduates to guide their countries’ family planning and reproductive health policies.
- Advocating for more effective international reproductive health policies and development assistance. With the support of Foundation funding, advocates from Europe to Asia to the United States worked to secure greater commitment to family planning and reproductive health in government policies and development assistance.
2006 Highlights
Because the United Nations Millennium Development Goals emphasize poverty reduction, and because family planning and reproductive health affect standards of living and economic progress, it is critical to understand how these development priorities are related. Foundation grantees have led the way. Both the African Economic Research Consortium and the Population Reference Bureau advanced policy-oriented research on these links, joining with other development economists and demographers at the end of 2006 to share results. The Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom agreed to contribute £1 million, to be matched by the Foundation, toward European and African population/poverty research.
One of the main bottlenecks to development in sub-Saharan Africa is the dearth of trained African specialists willing to work on the continent. This year, the Foundation addressed this problem by enabling five universities—the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town in South Africa; the University of Ghana at Legon and the University of Cape Coast in Ghana; and IFORD in Cameroon—to improve their master’s and doctoral programs in population science. For the first time, we also brought these universities together with the INDEPTH Network, a Ghana-based grantee conducting long-term demographic and epidemiological studies at thirty-nine sites worldwide. This connection promises to help the staffing and research efforts of both sets of African population scientists.
2007 Goals
- Invest in organizations known within the field as Centers of Research Excellence on the issue of how population and poverty are related, as well as other policy-relevant research in Africa and worldwide
- Fund and disseminate research on the economic impact of abortion-related morbidity and mortality
- Stimulate research on the interaction of population issues and poverty among promising scholars globally and in international financial institutions
- Strengthen relationships between research and advocacy organizations in family planning and reproductive health
- Make demographic and reproductive health–related data easily available to scholars, policymakers, and advocates
- Encourage scholarship, research, and training related to sub-Saharan population issues in selected universities
- Increase the effectiveness of overseas development assistance and other international policies for family planning and reproductive health
For more information, please visit the Foundation Web site.
