In this era of tight financial resources for international family planning  as evidenced by the recent budget cuts proposed by President Bush in the United States  are the world's donated contraceptives reaching the women and men who need them most? A review shows that while donors of such supplies often focus their resources on countries with high need, they could do so even more effectively.

HIV prevention has long been approached at the level of individual behaviors, operating to some extent under the assumption that behavior is determined by a person's conscious decisions. However, a paradigm shift toward considering the physical and social environments in which individual HIV risk behavior takes place is gradually gaining momentum. These structural factors-whether political, economic or cultural-may directly or indirectly affect an individual's ability to avoid exposure to HIV.1 The Dominican Republic offers an example of this progression from successful individual HIV behavioral interventions among sex workers, toward broader community approaches and policy initiatives.

Weak infrastructure and limited distribution systems in low-income countries complicate access to health services, especially in rural areas. Government health outlets may be relatively few and widely dispersed, and private-sector sources often favor wealthier urban areas, resulting in uneven service availability within a country. In the absence of a solid heath infrastructure, strengthening primary health care and innovative community-based health service delivery systems help provide more equitable access to health services.

This paper reviews 41 National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) submitted by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and identifies the range of interventions included in countries’ priority adaptation actions. The review found near-universal recognition among the NAPAs of the importance of population considerations as a central pillar in climate change adaptation.

Few outsiders are likely aware of the stagnation of Pakistan's family planning program, which provides key services and affects the country's larger demographic trajectory....Pakistan was among the vanguard countries in Asia in starting a family planning program more than five decades ago, with intermittent support from international donors including the United States. Yet fertility has declined more slowly in Pakistan than in most other Asian countries.

Population Action International’s latest working paper, Projecting Population, Projecting Climate Change: Population in IPCC Scenarios, shows that population growth is not adequately accounted for in the emissions scenarios produced by the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is the second in a three part series that explores role of population dynamics in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

An unchallenged fixture of many news stories about population aging and decline in developed countries today is the idea that replacement fertility-the number of children women must have, on average, over their childbearing years to produce a stationary population-is 2.1 children. The extra tenth of a child is needed, the explanation often goes, to make up for the children who don't themselves survive to parenting age.

Donor assistance for population, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS programs continues to increase, but the benchmarks used to assess performance have not changed since 1994. Those who monitor donor performance say that current assistance is not sufficient and that the benchmarks need to move upwards. This review of recent efforts to revise cost estimates for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS services concludes that $35 billion to $45 billion annually will be needed from all sources over the next few years. At the same time, further research is needed to improve the accuracy of such estimates.

New foreign assistance strategies that aim to encourage ownership by recipients while still effectively reducing poverty are laudable. They offer the hope of increased financial support to overall global development-a bigger pie-but they also pose significant challenges to the family planning field: Will it be able to keep a slice of that pie?

Over the last two years, the architecture of U.S. foreign assistance has undergone an unprecedented restructuring. At the same time, a congressionally-mandated commission on poverty-focused development has issued its report; a Senate staff delegation has conducted an extensive overseas fact-finding mission; and numerous nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and presidential campaigns have issued policy prescriptions on the future of U.S. foreign aid. In all of these efforts, insufficient attention has been paid to the implications of actual and proposed changes in the U.S. foreign assistance program to the future priority and funding of family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) care overseas-highly successful and cost-effective programs that have received U.S. government funding since the 1960s.