• Feminism

    The Family Planning Summit London 2012 – More Than Statistics and Soundbites

    The Family Planning Summit of 2012 took place in London today. A stones throw from the UK Houses of Parliament, world leaders, activists and health care workers and providers gather together to put Family Planning back on table in developing countries around the globe.     Melinda Gates began by calling it ‘an important milestone in the history of Family Planning’. In Ban Ki-Moon’s pre-recorded video address he expressed the wish that ‘no child should be born unwanted, and no woman should die needlessly in childbirth’. There followed a lot of speeches by ministers of various countries, expressing their commitment to the cause.  Speeches filled with statistics and soundbites. ‘One in three…

  • Feminism

    Family Planning in Kenya – A Tale of Two Women

    This week I will be blogging from the London Summit on Family Planning, organised by the UK government and the Gates Foundation. The ambitious aim is to provide family planning methods to an additional 120 million women worldwide by 2020. I have already blogged at length about this, so will simply give you all an impression of what this means for two  of the women I met on my recent trip to Kenya. Miriam is 32 years old and was at the Marura Village Dispensary in Laikipia District with her 3 month old son, Peter. She already has five girls at home and is struggling to keep them in school.…