Reproductive Health Interventions: Report of a Meeting
At the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, representatives of more than 180 countries agreed to a Programme of Action committing themselves to “. . . by the year 2015, seek to provide universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family-planning methods and to related reproductive health services which are not against the law” (ICPD, 1994). To implement this program will require decisions on which of the many possible reproductive health services should have the highest priority in different countries, which organizations should deal with which tasks, how they should be funded, and how to allocate public funds for service delivery and research.
Shortly before the ICPD, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation asked the Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council to form the Panel on Reproductive Health, composed of a balanced, international group of experts from relevant disciplines. The panel's mandate is to assess the magnitude of the major reproductive health problems in developing countries and to recommend priorities for interventions and research to deal with those problems in different settings. The panel began work in July 1994 and expects to issue its report in 1996.
As part of its research, the panel sponsored a Meeting on Reproductive Health Interventions, January 25-26, 1995, in Washington, D.C. This gave panel members and their guests a chance to listen to researchers, policy makers, and program managers with experience in selected areas of reproductive health in developing countries. There was no attempt at this meeting to cover the gamut of reproductive health problems and interventions; rather, it was designed to collect
