Opposition to contraception is hurting the Philippines. Each year, more than half of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the country are unplanned, resulting in high costs to women, their families and the national health care system. In addition, this very high rate of unintended pregnancy is impeding the Philippine’s development goals.

Yet this is not an epidemic for which there is no known solution. Unintended pregnancies are highly preventable if women have access to voluntary family planning information and services, particularly modern methods of contraception.

For full article, visit:
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/views-and-analysis

Ask 46-year-old Erlinda Cristobal (real name concealed by request) how many children she has.
“Ten,” she said.

“But I was supposed to have only six,” she snapped in a breath.

After the sixth pregnancy, Cristobal decided that she and her husband, a casual laborer who earns an average of four dollars a day, should not have any more children.

“My husband doesn’t have a stable job. There are days when we don’t eat so that our children can,” she told Xinhua in an interview near her residence in Manila.

For full article, visit:
http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=461829&publicationSubCategoryId=200

PMC was recently featured in Earth Island Journal
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/sex_sells/

Sex Sells: A Tiny Nonprofit Uses Mass Media to Encourage Family Planning

Fikrite is a girl in trouble. Her grandfather has just died and now a neighbor, a man named Damte, has taken over the house and is trying to turn the place into a bar and brothel. Fikrite says she won’t allow it, so Damte starts spreading rumors about the girl and soon everyone, including her boyfriend, thinks that she is hiding a child born out of wedlock. Damte then seduces Fikrite’s stepsister, Lamrot, gets her hooked on booze and drugs, and knocks her up. When Lamrot tries to abort the pregnancy, she almost bleeds to death and lands in the hospital, where she finds out that she is HIV-positive.

If this sounds like overcooked melodrama – well, that’s the point. The story comes from “Yeken Kignit” (“Looking Over One’s Life”), a radio soap opera that gripped much of Ethiopia for 257 episodes beginning in 2002. The show had all of the elements that make serial dramas popular: sex, romance, mischief, betrayal, suspense. But the wildly successful program – which reached more than one half of Ethiopian adults during its two-year run and sparked a craze for naming baby girls Fikrite – wasn’t designed just for entertainment. Produced by a small US organization called the Population Media Center (PMC), the show was written with the express purpose of encouraging family planning, women’s empowerment, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Not all the listeners knew this, however, and that was also the point.
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Since 1994, Rwanda’s population has increased by three times the number lost during the genocide. Yet curbing population growth remains a sensitive issue. Nevertheless, the government – and Population Media Center’s radio soap opera – are working to change long-held behavior patterns. Our most recent monitoring data from family planning clinics shows that, when new clients are asked what motivated them to seek family planning, 57% name Population Media Center’s program by name.

Many thanks to Marianne Ward for the article below.
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Convincing women in the deeply impoverished Rwandan countryside that they should have fewer children is a daunting task. “They say we’re not Christian,” said Jeannette Mukabalisa, a local health advocate, of the predominantly Catholic population. “They say, ‘You’re town people, we’re traditional.’ Children bring these families prestige. For them, children come from God. So it’s difficult, very difficult.”

After the 1994 genocide, in which more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered, it seemed difficult to believe that overpopulation would ever be a problem. Yet Rwanda has long had more people than its meager resources and small area can support.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/weekinreview/11kinzer.html

Emergent Media Center at Vermont-based Champlain College is currently developing an educational video game designed for young boys in developing nations and targeted at preventing violence against women.

The title will be a global initiative, with an initial focus in South Africa.

The Center was recently awarded a $600,000 grant from the United Nations Population Fund — an international development agency promoting the right of every woman, man, and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity — to develop the title.

For full article, visit:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21226

While this comic book series is about business life in Japan, it is easy to imagine a similar strategy with regard to condom use, reproductive health, and elevation of the status of women.
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Japanese bosses are mostly an elderly lot. So it seemed that a new generation had taken the reins of corporate Japan when Kosaku Shima was appointed president of Hatsushiba Goyo, a conglomerate, in June. At just 60, Mr Shima is the best known and most beloved businessman in Japan. His ascent from lowly salaryman to lofty shacho (president) traces corporate Japan’s rise in the 1980s, its descent into the “lost decade” of the 1990s and its subsequent tentative recovery. News of Mr Shima’s appointment was broadcast on television and splashed across the country’s newspapers, and the bosses of Japan’s biggest firms lined up to lavish praise on him. “He is a man of principle,” said Tsunehisa Katsumata, president of Tokyo Electric Power.

For full article, visit:
http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory

Creating a fun game may seem an unlikely way to tackle the serious problem of domestic violence. But that’s the task facing a team of college students in quaint Vermont. An added challenge: The digital game has to be appealing and accessible to young people half a world away, in the townships of Cape Town, South Africa.

As part of a broader campaign against gender violence, the United Nations wants to reach children, particularly boys, before stereotypes sink in. Seeing the global popularity of gaming, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) decided to partner with two media centers in Vermont. They hope to make a game available by the end of next year that can be adapted for various cultures.

For full article, visit:
http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=767950

The literature generally points to a negative relationship between female education and fertility. Citing this pattern, policymakers have advocated educating girls and young women as a means to reduce population growth and foster sustained economic and social welfare in developing countries. This paper tests whether the relationship between fertility and education is indeed causal by investigating the introduction of universal primary education in Nigeria. Exploiting differences in program exposure by region and age, the paper presents reduced form and instrumental variables estimates of the impact of female education on fertility. The analysis suggests that increasing female education by one year reduces early fertility by 0.26 births.

For full article, visit:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science

Participatory Assessment of Gugar Goge, an Entertainment-Education Radio Soap Opera in Nigeria - A Qualitative Assessment Report

by Arvind Singhal, Sarah Hurlburt and Radha Vij

This report documents the results of a participatory assessment exercise conducted in Nigeria to gauge audience reception of Gugar Goge (“Tell It To Me Straight”), an entertainment-education radio soap opera produced by Population Media Center that sought to promote education for girls, the delay of marriage and pregnancies, and the adoption of family planning and maternal health services to both prevent and treat obstetric fistula. The assessment exercise, which used participatory sketching and participatory photography, aimed to assess how frequent listeners engaged with the radio programme, and how they derived personal meanings from its plot, characters, and educational messages.

For full article, visit:http://www.comminit.com/en/node/269041/38

Manila housewife Jasmin is well aware the bigger the family the bigger the potential poverty trap.

“I feel it most when we eat together because the food on the table is not enough,” said the 33-year-old mother of six who had her fallopian tubes tied to avoid getting pregnant. “So, I decided to have ligation because life is hard.”

Artificial birth control is often taboo in this staunchly Roman Catholic country. Yet with a birth rate that is one of the highest in the world, sustainable population growth is becoming a burning issue, especially as millions of poor people struggle to feed themselves at a time of high food prices.

For full article, visit:
http://www.reuters.com