Our practical purpose is to facilitate expansion of service innovations on a larger scale to improve access to, and the quality of reproductive health care. We are very grateful to have received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to continue our work.

Bureaucratic systems are not set up to be what we refer to as human service organizations. They were established to collect revenue and maintain law and order and they used a law and order approach in providing family planning services.

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.

There is strong mentoring of women in the academy. Corporations appear more willing to resist affirmative action to advance women, and boards and shareholders are more tolerant of this approach.

Our practical purpose is to facilitate expansion of service innovations on a larger scale to improve access to, and the quality of reproductive health care. We are very grateful to have received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to continue our work.

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

If instead policy makers and program managers participate in an interdisciplinary assessment team, make informal visits to local families and have in-depth conversations with local providers and health authorities, the real needs and complex challenges of organizing good reproductive health services become apparent.The first country that implemented this participatory program of assessment, research and policy development was Brazil. I was one of the outsiders who provided support to the initiative.