Probably the first time I was a boss was when I was associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. I was in my early 30s.

There's nothing worse than a leader who lacks ambition.

A focus on people's health and well-being must be the core of family planning research and policy. This may seem self-evident, but the realities of program implementation in third world countries has often shown that the health and well-being of individuals is not a priority.

Governments have a legitimate concern with slowing population growth. But often this has been attempted with little concern for the individuals most affected.

In the late 60s, 70s and possibly early 80s, social scientists were interested in researching the diffusion of innovation and studying the link between applied research and policy and program development. Recently there has been less interest in these issues and we feel that this interest must be rekindled.

It is not enough to give money for demonstration projects. From the very beginning plans should be made for the scaling-up of successful innovations.

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.