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.

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

When we conducted focus group interviews in the first municipality in Brazil before initiating the pilot project, a woman commented: Getting an appointment in the public sector municipal health services is like "winning the lottery." 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.

I often say that shareholders should feel very responsible for how responsive corporations are to the public trust.

There are hundreds, even thousands of remarkable pilot or experimental projects in all fields - in agriculture, health, education. But where do these pilots take us? Do they lead to change on a broader scale? If not, how can we ensure that they have broader impact?

My colleagues from the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education are working on participatory public health initiatives in Michigan, and there is much that we can learn from each other. In fact it is essential that we strengthen efforts to learn from each other, and stop considering public health in the third world and in the U.S. as separate intellectual and practical endeavors.

High level policy makers and program managers do not normally listen to the voices of local people, local providers and local program managers when they make decisions about contraceptive introduction or other aspects of program development in reproductive health.