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Delivering Family Planning to Rural Customers: Are Mobile Pharmacies ‘Just What the Doctor Ordered’?
Pharmacies serve as key access points for family planning products in many emerging markets. In countries like Malawi, the number of pharmacies has ballooned by nearly 100% in the past 10 years. Yet it can be difficult to run a sustainable pharmacy business, especially in rural areas. Andrea Bare and Erika Beidelman at the William Davidson Institute discuss potential solutions – including an innovative mobile pharmacy – based on conversations with Malawian entrepreneurs.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Health Care
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Still Waiting for a Seat at the Table: When Will Global Family Planning Focus on Smaller Private Providers?
The family planning community is not on track to reach its goal of 120 million new contraception users by 2020. And though millions of women in the world’s poorest countries rely on private providers for contraception, Andrea Bare at the William Davidson Institute notes that the private sector lacks a major presence in global family planning discussions. She says this needs to change, arguing that small, for-profit providers in particular can help close the gap.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Health Care
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The Donor-Funded Dilemma: What’s Stopping Emerging Countries from Developing Private Markets for Contraceptives?
In sub-Saharan Africa, the private sector provides family planning solutions to almost 40 percent of women. But that isn’t the case in Malawi, a country that’s long been dominated by donor-funded commodities. Erika Beidelman and Andrea Bare at the William Davidson Institute explore Malawi's family planning landscape, highlighting five factors that may be limiting the private sector’s involvement – issues that may apply to other countries with histories of donor-funded healthcare.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Africa’s secret weapon for economic growth and global development
Evidence shows that family planning is essential to lower maternal and infant mortality. Although both have decreased in the past decades, still today over 300,000 women and girls die in childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications, including unsafe abortions.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Global warming policy: Is population left out in the cold?
Many nongovernmental organizations undertake climate- and population-related activities, and national adaptation plans for most of the least-developed countries recognize population growth as an important component of vulnerability to climate impacts. But despite this evidence, much of the climate community, notably the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the primary source of scientific information for the international climate change policy process, is largely silent about the potential for population policy to reduce risks from global warming.
- Categories
- Environment
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Plugging the Gap: What Are Funders Doing to Respond to the Global Gag Rule?
In March 2017, nearly 60 nations along with private funders and philanthropists from around the world attended what is being widely described as a “hastily convened” one-day She Decides family planning conference in Brussels, Belgium. She Decides is a global family planning initiative launched by Dutch minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, Lilianne Ploumen, in response to the GGR reinstatement. The goal of the campaign is to fill the nearly $600 million funding gap that will likely be caused by the GGR.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Doctors on the cusp of launching the first male contraceptive
Despite a survey from 2000 that found 83 percent of men from various countries would take a contraceptive, pharmaceutical companies seem reluctant to pursue a male contraceptive beyond what is already on the market. Without backing from big pharma, some small companies are receiving grants from large public health organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in 2016 donated $600,000 for the development of male contraceptives.
- Categories
- Health Care
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‘Uncomfortable and disgusting’: Uganda’s 1.2m unwanted condoms
The government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on female prophylactics, but poor take-up is sparking concerns of a rise in HIV infections.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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