Former USAID Directors to Launch Making the Case Report on Increasing International Family Planning Assistance

Report will launch in DC and will be webcast live at www.wilsoncenter.org on TUESDAY, March 17 at 3pm EST.

The report launch comes on the heels of President Obama’s signing of the FY09 omnibus spending bill that paves the way for restored funding to UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund and provides a total of $545 million for bilateral and multilateral family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. This is $82 million over 2008 funding levels, an 18 percent increase, and a 66 percent increase over the Bush administration’s request. The bill also included a pill pricing provision designed to make affordable birth control available to millions of women across the United States by allowing birth control to be provided at greatly reduced prices to college health clinics, all Planned Parenthood offices and other family-planning centers.

President Obama also released his FY2010 budget outline last week, which includes an increase in funding for the State Department, but details on the break down by program, including bilateral and multilateral family planning and reproductive health, have yet to be released.

The launch of Making the Case for U.S. International Family Planning Assistance will be Tuesday, March 17, 2009 from 3:00 - 5:00 p.m. at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, 6th Floor Flom Auditorium. The briefing will also be webcast live at www.wilsoncenter.org.

The launch will feature:

• Duff Gillespie, Professor at The Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health;

• Steven Sinding, Senior Scholar, Guttmacher Institute;

• Joseph Speidel, Adjunct Professor, University of California, San Francisco, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health; and

• Ruth Levine, Vice President for Programs and Operations, and Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development

The five co-authors of Making the Case for U.S. International Family Planning Assistance successively directed the USAID Population and Reproductive Health Program across Republican and Democratic administrations from 1978 through 2006. They argued that this use of scarce resources provides substantial returns in both the short and the long term, contributing to the new administration’s goal of reducing unintended pregnancies and saving millions of lives in the process.

Authors of the report, their years of service as Directors of USAID’s Office of Population, and their current work are: J. Joseph Speidel (1978-1983), now an adjunct professor at the University of California at San Francisco; Steven Sinding (1983-1986), now Senior Fellow at the Guttmacher Institute; Duff Gillespie (1986-1993), now a professor at Johns Hopkins University; Elizabeth Maguire (1993-1999), now President and CEO of Ipas; and Margaret Neuse (2000-2006), now an independent consultant.

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