This post, by Theresa Norton, Knowledge Management Director at Jhpiego, originally appeared on the Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program (MCHIP) Blog.

Do what works. Do it well. Share your “know how” with others. Repeat.

These sentences give an over-simplified view of a complex issue: how to scale up evidence-based, high-impact maternal, newborn and child health practices in low-resource settings. MCHIP aims to do just that—and by doing so, reduce maternal and child mortality by 25% across 30 priority countries.

My field is Knowledge Management, and so one sentence in that first paragraph is especially significant to me: “share your ‘know how’ with others.”

Almost 13 years ago, we published a Population Reports issue, Ending Violence Against Women, in which we stated that around the world at least one woman in every three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

The report published by the Population Information Program, a predecessor project to the Knowledge for Health project, in collaboration with The Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), gained widespread publicity and helped focus attention on the issue of gender-based violence.

During a conference on Gender Based Violence and Health, a t-shirt display in a public area bears witness to violence against women. A clothesline is pegged with t-shirts, and each shirt has a written message to represent a particular woman's experience, by the survivor herself or by someone who cares about her.

© 2003 Henrica Jansen, Courtesy of Photoshare.

“Many cultures have beliefs, norms, and social institutions that legitimize and therefore perpetuate violence against women,” wrote the authors Lori Heise, Mary Ellsberg, and Megan Gottemoeller, adding: “The same acts that would be punished if directed at an employer, a neighbor, or an acquaintance often go unchallenged when men direct them at women, especially within the family.”

While there has been some recognition of the problem and ongoing U.S. Government efforts to combat gender-based violence in the intervening 13 years, there is no doubt that it is still a widespread practice in many countries in the form of child brides, child prostitution, female genital mutilation/cutting, honor killings, sexual abuse, and more. I was therefore excited  to learn that the U.S. Administration and USAID recently released the government’s first ever United States Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally, which cited the statistics from the 1999 Population Reports issue.

We are delighted to introduce the new website for Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers, at www.fphandbook.org. The Handbook is one of K4Health's flagship publications, and we wanted it to have a website that did it justice.

This post was written by Sharon Arscott-Mills, a Fellow in International Health at the Center for Design and Research in Sustainability in the International Health and Development Division at ICF International. Her post originally appeared on the Center for Design and Research in Sustainability (CEDARS) blog.

The Family Planning Sustainability Checklist

The Family Planning Sustainability Checklist is a tool that has evolved over several years and was field tested in multiple countries during the process.  The goal of the Checklist is to provide a tool that enables family planning project designers, implementers and evaluators to think through all of the elements that need to be in place to sustain community-based family planning services over the long term.  The Checklist can be used at multiple points during a project cycle—from the initial design phase through regular staff meetings, annual reviews, to midterm and final evaluations.