Sexual and reproductive health programs are an essential component of development.

High quality programs are cost-effective and offer a broad range of benefits impacting development, such as reducing sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, unintended pregnancy, and maternal and child death.

The global reluctance to invest fully in this area reflects discriminatory attitudes toward women, who bear the greatest burden of poor sexual and reproductive health.

Selected collaborations and resources

• We make a million choices that are affecting the environment every day, and yet people don’t have the skills and understanding to do something about that.  Meg Greene shares her thoughts with  FP Voices, stories from people passionate about family planning, from K4Health + FP2020
   
• Margaret Greene and her colleagues analyzed strategies that address gender inequality and gender-based violence as part of HIV prevention efforts in Mozambique. They also documented  the institutional support needed to implement these strategies. The results of their efforts was published as Building capacity to address gender and gender-based violence in HIV prevention in Mozambique. [Click here for a limited number of free e-prints.]
   
• What do we know about the impact of adolescent sexual activity, pregnancy, and childbearing on girls’ life prospects? Margaret Greene and Thomas W. Merrick’s Poverty Reduction: Does Reproductive Health Matter? for the World Bank builds on their earlier MacArthur Foundation-funded research exploring the links between poor reproductive health and poverty.
  • Poor Health, Poor Women: How Reproductive Health Affects Poverty a summary of the Greene-Merrick report was published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
• The United Nations Population Fund issues an annual review of the state of the world’s population, The State of World Population. Greene contributed significantly to several of these reports:
  • The Promise of Equality: Gender Equity, Reproductive Health and the MDGs - section on men & gender inequality (2005)
  • The Cairo Consensus at Ten: Population, Reproductive Health and the Global Effort to End Poverty - section on men (2004)
  • Making 1 Billion Count: Investing in Adolescents’ Health and Rights - 2003 (2 chapters)
• Greene also worked with Rebecca I. Lundgren, James N. Gribble, Gail E. Emrick, and Margarita de Monroy on Cultivating Men’s Interest In Family Planning In Rural El Salvador, a 2005 article in Studies in Family Planning 36(3): 173-188.