IntraHealth International has received a five-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase access to modern family planning methods among Senegal’s urban poor. 

One third of Senegal’s low-income urban women lack access to modern family planning, contributing to the country’s high maternal and newborn mortality rate; 690 out of every 100,000 pregnancies in Senegal end in the mother’s death, and 11% of Senegalese children die before the age of five. The project aims to double access to and use of modern family planning in six Senegalese cities.

“The laughter and cries of those little angels keep going through my mind. I will carry those memories with me wherever I go,” says Grace Kariuki-Mogaka, senior programs officer, referring to IntraHealth’s Kenya staff team’s visit to Kenyatta National Hospital to celebrate an early Christmas with children in the pediatric ward on November 20, 2009. The staff used the funds allocated to them for an end-of-year holiday event to buy the children gifts such as clothes, shoes, toys, and a Christmas cake. 

IntraHealth is working to improve access to HIV/AIDS community services in the Eastern Caribbean island nations of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines through the Eastern Caribbean Community Action Project (EC-CAP). The International HIV/AIDS Alliance leads EC-CAP, a USAID-funded, three-year project that began in 2007. The University of California at San Francisco also supports the project.

“I am slowly settling back, but it’s hard!” says Isabelle Bertrand, who recently completed her six-month fellowship with IntraHealth. “I’m missing Senegal very much.”