By Suzanne York, HowMany.org As much of the women’s rights and international development communities focused well-deserved attention on the London Summit on Family Planning in early July, South Sudan celebrated its first anniversary as a nation. Which made me wonder, what is the state of women in this newest of countries? South Sudan is a
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org This was my first time attending the annual Aspen Ideas Festival (AIF), and what a week it was! Suffice it to say, my head still hurts from all the information I took in from some of the country’s top thinkers and doers. From the polarization of U.S. politics to the Supreme
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Population Reference Bureau (PRB) just released its 2012 World Population Data Sheet, showing that the world’s poorest countries will have the greatest population growth, due to high birth rates and a large youth population. Just one week after the London Summit on Family Planning, which raised $2.6 billion from donors for
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At last week’s London Summit on Family Planning, a high-level gathering hosted by the Gates Foundation and the UK Department for International Development, donors pledged to provide $2.6 billion over the next eight years to help the world’s poorest women gain access to contraceptives.  It has been called a “breakthrough for the world’s poorest women
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By Suzanne York, HowMany.org July 11, 2012 is World Population Day, and there are reasons to be hopeful that the subject of population, along with empowering women, will be attracting more positive attention and obtaining more positive results. We are very excited about the London Summit on Family Planning, sponsored by the Gates Foundation and
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by Suzanne York, HowMany.org – In the aftermath of the UN Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, which deliberately left reproductive rights out of the official outcome text, there is little time to feel discouraged.  There are education and awareness campaigns to undertake, and alliances to build and strengthen – especially between the environmental and women’s
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by Suzanne York, HowMany.org – An experienced and learned colleague of mine asked me one evening at the start of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) if it really mattered what issues made it or didn’t make it into the official Rio+20 text known as “The Future We Want”. Symbolically, it seemed important to
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By Suzanne York, HowMany.org Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in rain-soaked Rio on the third day of the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit and announced to conference delegates  that “women must be empowered to make decisions on whether and when to have children” if the world is to attain agreed-upon
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By Suzanne York, HowMany.org Rio de Janeiro — Word was out that reproductive rights was left out of the Rio+20 Earth Summit finalized text, much to the dismay of many conference attendees.  The exclusion of these rights is supposedly on the grounds that reproductive rights have nothing to do with sustainable development. However, the text does
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By Suzanne York, HowMany.org Rio de Janeiro — Nearly half of the world´s population is under the age of 25, or more than 3 billion people.  In some areas of the world, young women (ages 15-19)  are twice as likely to lack access to contraceptives they desire as women over the age of twenty.  As policy-makers
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