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Contributors
Leela StakeLeela is a director who helps businesses innovate, collaborate and communicate to be more successful. She’s based in San Francisco, has worked in six Asian countries and is interested in the relationship between long-term business success and community prosperity.
Laura PalantoneLaura is a member of our corporate communications team and is based in New York.
James RobinsonJames is a director who brings ten years of experience working on CR strategy and communications in New York, Beijing, and Jakarta. He looks at how CR is employed as part of broader business strategy and has a particular interest in the evolving role of technology and innovation in managing social and environmental issues.
Julie JackA director in APCO's New York office, Julie works on corporate responsibility with a focus on business strategy and emerging issues and trends. Her currents interests and work focus on sustainable agriculture and supply chain management, the integration of CR and financial communications, and CR in the consumer goods space.
Ellen MignoniEllen is a senior director and helped build APCO’s global corporate responsibility practice. She works primarily with APCO’s corporate clients on business alignment and corporate responsibility, stakeholder engagement and partnership development, and communication and outreach.
Let’s Talk about Sex
While investing in women and girls is a hot topic these days, there’s one issue that hasn’t been getting much attention: family planning.
When compared to other popular areas of focus (e.g., girls’ education, women’s economic opportunities, young women’s leadership development), the more politically charged issues of women’s sexuality, contraception and family planning are harder to discuss and have therefore been left out of most conversations.
In the latest issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, former Global Fund for Women president Kavita Ramdas notes, “We want to educate girls, but we don’t want to talk about sex. We want girls to read, but we don’t want to provide them information about their bodies.” She adds: “The words of Margaret Sanger are as prescient now as they were when she first uttered them: ‘No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.’”
Yet one recent development may help turn the tide. As reported by Newsweek, Melinda Gates’ “new crusade” is to make family planning her signature issue. In a recent TEDxChange talk she said, “I’d like to talk with you about something that should be a totally uncontroversial topic.” Right now, 100,000 women annually die in childbirth after unintended pregnancies. Six hundred thousand babies born to women who didn’t want to be pregnant die in the first month of life. For these reasons and others, Gates sees global family planning as a public health issue – one that warrants broad-based consensus and shouldn’t be so contentious. She believes that by focusing on the lives of women and children, and by making it clear that the agenda is neither coercive population control nor abortion, the controversy over international family-planning programs can be defused.
With global attention to investments in women and girls at an all-time high, we have an important opportunity to reopen discussions on women’s sexual health and education and create cross-sector and bipartisan solutions.
Catogories Health, What's Next for CR and tagged family planning, Kavita Ramdas, Maraget Sanger, Melinda Gates
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