The original, highly acclaimed 'Stepping Stones' training package, published in 1995 by Strategies for Hope and ActionAid, is now used in over 100 countries worldwide. The package - a 240-page manual and a 70-minute workshop video - is designed to help women and men explore their social, sexual and psychological needs; to analyse the communication blocks they face; and to practise different ways of addressing their relationships.

This new, 27-minute film takes us on a journey back to the v more...

ARTH, an NGO working in western India has achieved remarkable success in driving awareness on reproductive health among rural women. Apart from running field clinics and fully equipped health centres in the region, the organisation also trains women to deal with emergencies.

In 1968, world leaders proclaimed that individuals have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and timing of their children. Forty years later, modern contraception remains out of reach for hundreds of millions of women, men and young people.

This year’s World Population Day reaffirms the right of people to plan their families. It encourages activities, events and information that will help make this right real – especially for those who often have the hardest more...

Please join the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Population, Family Planning, and Reproductive Health and Center for Communication Programs (CCP) in a selected screening of Child Brides: Stolen Lives,produced by the weekly newsmagazine NOW on PBS.

Supporting Married Girls – Calling Attention to a Neglected Group – The Population Council (Nicole Haberland).

(Brief No. 3: Promoting Healthy, Safe and Productive Transitions to Adulthood, December 2007). In the next ten years, if current patterns continue, more than 100 million girls will marry before the age of 18, according to Population Council analyses of United Nations country data. Child marriage—any marriage that occurs before the age of 18—is considered a human rights violat more...

"Intra- and inter-generational social mobility have in the past played an important role in attempts to explain fertility behaviour, and continue to do so today. The opinions expressed by social scientists in the first part of the 20th century are renewed and confirmed. More specifically: (1) intra-generational social mobility has been reinforced by the personal well-being aspirations and job careers of women; (2) status anxiety parents feel for their children pushes fertility down in large area more...

"The Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) is one of the two pillars of the Generations and Gender Programme designed to improve understanding of demographic and social development and of the factors that influence these developments. This article describes how the theoretical perspectives applied in the survey, the survey design and the questionnaire are related to this objective. The key features of the survey include panel design, multidisciplinarity, comparability, context-sensitivity, inter-g more...

Subtitle: "Women and Children - The double dividend of gender equality". The State of the World's Children 2007 examines the discrimination and disempowerment women face throughout their lives - and outlines what must be done to eliminate gender discrimination and empower women and girls. The report argues that investment in women's rights will ultimately produce a double dividend: advancing the rights of both women and children. UNICEF, December 2006.

The Department of Child and Adolescent Health and Development (CAH) of the World Health Organization, with the assistance of Department of Population and Family Health of Johns Hopkins University, undertook to identify, describe, and analyze current projects in developing countries that assist parents of adolescents in promoting healthy adolescent development and preventing health risks. Ultimately, this effort identified 34 projects around the world, by means of searching computerized databases more...

"A variety of approaches have been employed to assess the importance of women’s education for their second- or third-birth rates. Some researchers have included the educational level measured at a relatively high age in their models, whereas others have included current education. A few have taken selection into account by modelling first-, second-, and higher-order birth rates jointly, with a common unobserved factor. The corresponding education-fertility relationships among men, however, has more...