Recognizing the potential usefulness of such successful experiences to other countries in similar situations, PPD, with the financial support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Packard Foundation, an exercise to select and document case studies of innovative practices in population, reproductive health and development.
This work was undertaken in partnership with the UNDP Special Unit for South-South Cooperation as part of its Global South-South Development Academy, which defines the methodology and standards for the publication of the series, Sharing Innovative Experiences.
This publication confirms the PPD commitment to help to promote the goals of ICPD through South-South cooperation and to share, in particular, operational experiences in addressing issues in population dynamics and development, family planning and reproductive health among its member and other developing countries.
The case studies cover successful experiences with innovative approaches adopted by PPD member countries in addressing important issues in expanding access to family planning, improving the quality of care in the delivery of family planning services, having national parliamentarians advocate for a reproductive health agenda, tackling the mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, empowering women and integrating population factors into development planning.
It should be emphasized that these are experiences from the South, Southern solutions to Southern challenges arrived at through the use of Southern expertise. They were selected following a call for nominations by PPD member countries of practices in the population and reproductive health areas that the individual member countries considered to be innovative, good or successful in their national contexts. From more than 80 submissions, 10 were chosen for documentation following an in-country process to ensure that there was consensus in the country on the relevance and usefulness of the practice for wider sharing and replication. An External Review Group comprising international experts, representatives of UNFPA and the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation, and PPD staff reviewed the drafts of the case studies. The authors subsequently presented the experiences for discussion at a workshop held in Bangkok, Thailand, in August 2010, which provided an opportunity for sharing as well as for capacity-building and mutual learning before the finalization of the drafts of the case studies.
The practices included here are important in addressing more effectively the population challenge as the world moves towards the 9 billion mark by the middle of the century. To increase their impact, each case study has been edited into a non-technical version, making it accessible to a wider audience. As with other books in the series, the present volume will be distributed free of charge throughout the South. By providing such a collection of innovative practices and lessons learned, it is hoped that developing countries, with their limited human resources, will be able to select the most appropriate measures and adapt them to their own particular development needs. The present volume is also being made available online (ssc.undp.org) with the hope that the innovative practices that it contains will be able to reach an even wider audience.