I would like to make it possible for many women and men in Latin America to win the lottery and receive the type of reproductive health services they so urgently need.

Because in traditional Hindu culture menstruation is associated with a variety of social taboos, prolonged menstrual bleeding produced conflicts within families. The whole idea of fertility regulation was still extremely new in this setting and many husbands and other family members were angry when they found out that women had decided on their own to use the method and had gone to the clinic in secret.

If you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.

We wanted to see how access to care can be expanded and service quality can be improved when one uses a participatory approach to program development. We showed that major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action. In time leaders from other municipalities expressed interest in replication and the project succeeded in expanding innovations to three other areas.

Major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action.

I'm the youngest of 12 children. And although I was the youngest, I tried to organize things in my family. When there were disputes, I tried to mediate.

I have been working with the World Health Organization since 1989 in an effort to redefine approaches to contraceptive introduction. This has given me the opportunity to insist that strategies for research and policy development must simultaneously address people's needs, the capacity of programs to provide good quality of care, and the range of technological options available.