|
Family Planing Stories From the Field As advocates for international family planning assistance, the Global Population and Environment Program is working to bring family planning stories from abroad home to our activists. Understanding the intricate connections between women’s health, the health of the environment and the need for the United States government to provide foreign aid assistance for organizations implementing international family planning and reproductive health programs is imperative. In the Family Planning Spotlight: 
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has supported international programs in family planning and reproductive health for nearly 40 years. This support is crucial to saving the lives and health of women and children, stabilizing world population, protecting the environment, and promoting U.S. political and economic interests throughout the developing world. USAID is the world’s largest donor to international family planning programs and the Agency’s technical expertise is crucial to helping developing countries achieve a sustainable future.
USAID is headquartered in Washington, DC, where highly skilled technical staff work in bureaus organized by region and program areas. As well, staff also work and live in the countries where USAID works, providing more direct technical assistance and technical oversight. USAID is justly acclaimed for the technical expertise it provides. But a less heralded, but as important, aspect of its work lies in the integration of program functions that facilitates tailoring programs to meet a community’s specific needs. An example of such linkages can be found in the West African country of Guinea USAID in Guinea By Sandra Jordan, Director of Communications, USAID office of Population and Reproductive Health
Guinea has many pressing and urgent needs yet few other donors are present in the country. As a result, USAID/Guinea works to maximize all assistance efforts so many links exist between the various operational areas including Democracy and Governance, Land Resource Management, and Health. In Bas (lower) Guinea, just outside the remote town of Dinguiraye, a project supporting the education of a traditional birth attendant (TBA) to reduce maternal mortality has grown to incorporate programs in family planning, child survival, health and nutrition, microenterprise, and agricultural assistance. It began a couple of years ago when Africare, a USAID-funded non-governmental organization in Guinea, educated rural TBAs on the danger signs for an unsafe birth. The goal was to get these more isolated women to a hospital before their lives were endangered by complications from delivery. The program was so well received, Africare encouraged the TBA to broaden her efforts, educating the women not only about safe birthing practices, but about family planning and infant and child care. Here, too, the results have been impressive. She has convinced the women, and their husbands, of the need for spacing families. She successfully advocated for inoculations to prevent diseases, such as measles, which once took many infant lives. Currently she is helping women improve their children’s nutrition, both by teaching exclusive breast feeding for the first six months which also reduces fertility, and then by teaching nutrition, helping the women make healthy gruels of maize, cassava, and some fish or chicken
This scenario is repeated every week. The women work well with the TBA and listen to what she has to say. They have become a community dedicated to improving their health and that of their children. Such successful health outcomes have led to creation of a women’s cooperative. We meet with the co-op’s head, an older woman whose broad smile reveals her two remaining front teeth. She shows us the new women’s center built for them by the men. It resembles a bus stop more than a meeting hall, but it is heavily used and the women are very proud to have their own space for meetings. This is where they decided to start a microenterprise project – they learned to make soap and now create large batches of it to sell in the market. They also hold talks on agriculture and have persuaded their husbands to grow such basic food crops as rice, manioc, corn, and peanuts, which not only improve nutrition but provide items that can be sold in the market. With the increased income from the sales of soap and crops, they are expanding their livestock holdings. This adds to their income and, because they can broaden their diet, it further improves their nutrition. Everything is interrelated. The visibly healthy children coupled with the increased freedom and productivity of the women has made this a model program, one that is now being adopted by several surrounding villages. This shows that integrated projects can become community-level agents of change, promoting the idea that sustainable practices can improve health, use natural resources in a beneficial way, and deliver tangible economic benefits. Guinea’s Environmental Story 
Guinea is the water tower for West Africa with water sources that serve Niger, Guinea, and Gambia. Protecting the water sources, both for health and agricultural reasons, is essential. Water shed management not only assures that there will be enough water, including potable drinking water, for these countries. So USAID works in communities to dig wells, ensure clean streams, and ensuring there’s no negative environmental impact while assuring minimization of water borne diseases.
The project also must work to resolve conflicts. During the dry season, when water becomes scarce for humans and wildlife alike, people and chimps compete for natural water sources. Although chimpanzees generally do not harm humans, last year the competition for scarce water increased their aggressiveness and they were assaulting the children and women collecting water. Had that continued, chimps would have been killed, despite their protected status. To prevent this scenario, a project to dig two wells and improve a water source for several villages in the area was launched. Working with the local population, the wells have been conveniently located, saving villagers the five kilometer trek to the natural water source, and the chimps have free access to the natural water source. The wells also ensure the people have a safer, healthier water supply. For more information on USAID’s work with Chimpanzees in Guinea go to: http://www.usaid.gov/gn/nrm/news/020520_chimp photos courtesy of USAID Back to Summer 2002 Population Report Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use | © 2008 Sierra Club |
Guinea is a francophone country about the size of Oregon that sits on the Atlantic coast. It is one of the world’s poorest nations, struggling to overcome the consequences of political and economic isolation to which the former leader, Sekou Toure, subjected the country between 1958 and 1986. The population of nearly eight million is largely young and illiterate. The primary health situation in general, and the maternal and child health situation in particular, are precarious. Everywhere in the country, signs of a deficient health system are visible: poor quality of care, inadequate referral and supervisory systems, limited drug supplies, difficult access to services, and lack of community involvement in health center management and operations. Life expectancy in Guinea is only 46 years and infant mortality is high - more than 130 children out of every 1,000 do not live past their first birthday. Guinea has high rates of fertility – in 1999, contraceptive prevalence was 4.9% and the total fertility rate was 5.5 births per woman (DHS and Macro, 2000). Today the nation is confronting a growing incidence of HIV/AIDS.
I visited the village on weigh-in day with USAID/Guinea colleagues and the Africare director. We bounce along dirt roads rutted from the rains, then turn down what looks like an impassable path (and discover why SUVs actually were made). We arrived at the village – a large circle of about 10 grass huts with a commons in the center. Cows ambled through on their way from one pasture to the next. A teenage boy crashed through, wrestling a recalcitrant calf. Small children run by, spinning a bent old bicycle wheel with a stick. We are greeted by the TBA as women with infants or toddlers emerge from the huts, dragging chairs and short wooden stools with them. Everyone sits. A rope is swung over a tree branch – a weight on one end, a cloth swing on the other. Babies, some willing, some wiggling or crying in protest – are slipped into the swing, their weight recorded, and his or her diet for the last week reviewed. If necessary, further nutritional guidance is given and this week’s information is added to the chart kept on each child. Following the weigh-in, the women visit with the TBA and ask questions. This week the conversation swung around to condom use and birth spacing.
In one region of Guinea, this work has involved protection of an endangered species. Of the three endangered species of chimpanzees, two out of the four subspecies live in Guinea, including the Pan troglodytes verus, one of the most endangered species in the world. USAID supports protection of chimpanzees through the Expanded Natural Resource Management project, implemented by Winrock International. These activities have been fully integrated as the biodiversity component of the forest co-management activities under the ENRM project. This means that rather than set aside special lands for chimps, the project works by educating villagers about the importance of biodiversity including learning about the survival and well being of chimpanzees.