ANNUAL REPORT 2015 Sustainable Development For the Next Generation Annual Report 2015 President’s Letter 1 Highlights 4 Ideas with Impact Awards 8 About the Population Council 10 Financial Report 12 Sources of Support 15 Leadership 20 Cover: In Malawi, the Population Council has charted the progress of more than 2,500 rural adolescents since 2007, collecting data on their school experiences, learning, and health outcomes to guide policies that will boost their achievements and reduce HIV risk. President’s Letter “ Protecting, advancing, and enhancing young people’s welfare is one of the single biggest issues the global development community will need to address over the next 15 years. And the Population Council is at the forefront Julia Bunting, OBE of this issue.” My daughter recently turned 12 years old, and as we celebrated I was overwhelmed by thoughts of what the future might hold for her. Every parent knows the feeling: how can I protect and prepare this bundle of pre-teen potential for the world out there? How can I give her access to everything wonderful that’s waiting out there too? How can I give her the best possible launch into adulthood? This is not just my concern. This is not just the concern of every parent. Protecting, advancing, and enhancing young people’s welfare is one of the single biggest issues the global development community will need to address over the next 15 years. And the Population Council is at the forefront of this issue. In September 2015, at the United Nations General Assembly, heads of state and government launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a bold agenda for development by 2030. For the first time, integrating the needs and rights of girls and women is woven into every aspect of the drive to ensure a safe, just, and equitable world and to end poverty worldwide. Young people are half the world’s population, and protecting their human rights, preparing them for adulthood, and creating gender equality must be at the center of every effort. For 65 years, the Population Council has conducted research and delivered solutions that improve young people’s lives around the world. Experts here were among the first to argue that adolescent girls are central to the world’s social and economic development. Over the years, our research has revealed the potential of girl-centered policies to reach hundreds of millions of girls at risk for bad outcomes like early and forced marriage, unintended pregnancy, or HIV infection. The new SDGs provide the roadmap for our work ahead. To achieve progress in reaching the 17 goals and their 169 “targets” requires careful research and evidence to ensure that investments are aligned behind policies and programs that have been proven to work. 1 In Malawi, we have charted the progress over time of more than 2,500 rural adolescents since 2007, collecting data on their school experiences, learning, and health outcomes to guide policies that will boost their achievements and reduce HIV risk. Results so far provide evidence to confirm the intuitive understanding that attending school can have far-reaching benefits, especially for girls. But thanks to the long-term nature of our study, we also know that when girls leave school, their world often shrinks, their achievements vanish, and they drop behind boys. Real and sustainable change will require us to continue to ensure and expand girls’ opportunities beyond school as well as in it. Research matters. By rigorously testing interventions, we find out what works—and importantly what doesn’t—to advance ambitious global goals. Without research, we wouldn’t know the best way to give adolescent girls access to quality sexual and reproductive health care and services that help support a healthy transition to adulthood as their bodies and minds mature. And we might not know that of the 11 most common interventions used to keep adolescent girls in school, only two have actually been proven to work: having female teachers and providing financial help. Traditional skills and study subjects are not necessarily the tools that young people will need to succeed tomorrow. Gender roles are evolving and so are job opportunities—and the places we can intervene to help are evolving too. In South Asia, we work with girls migrating for factory jobs and have found that garment factories are ideal places to deliver the messages and services that will empower young women and improve their 2 lives. And Council research has shown that in schools, comprehensive sex education programs that focus on gender and power dynamics are 5 times more likely to reduce unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections than those that don’t. Achieving the SDGs depends upon our ability to help all of today’s 12-year-old girls make a safe transition through adolescence to a healthy, thriving adulthood. Too much is at stake—and we owe too much to the next generation—to spend money on things that sound good but have not been rigorously evaluated and shown to work. Our generous donors and partners, governments and institutions alike, know that we must rely on evidence and not intuition in deciding where to invest precious resources. This 2015 annual report offers a look at the Council’s contributions of evidence toward understanding the way the world is changing. Our findings may be new, but the process is established routine at the Population Council: generate innovative ideas, rigorously test them, and ensure the results have real-world impact. Because the future of my daughter (and my two younger sons) and millions like them depends upon it, we are helping to create cultures that value adolescents as assets and recognize their potential. We hope this report will engage you in that work as well. Julia Bunting, OBE President 3 2015 Highlights In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 10 percent of girls are married before age 15 and 40 percent before age 18. In child marriage “hotspots” in Ethiopia and Tanzania, the Council tested four strategies to delay child marriage. We found that when families and communities recognized the harms of child marriage and were offered economic incentives like school supplies, chickens, and goats, they delayed the age at which their daughters got married. The results from this research are being used to expand successful approaches to delay child marriage. Research by the Population Council found that comprehensive sexuality and HIV education programs that address gender and power are five times more likely to be effective at reducing STIs and/or unintended pregnancy than those that do not. This work reinforces recommendations in the Council’s It’s All One Curriculum: Guidelines and Activities for a Unified Approach The Council conducted to Sexuality, Gender, HIV, and Human Rights Education, which is the largest-ever survey of reshaping sexuality and HIV education around the world. young people in Egypt to document the economic, Sexuality and HIV Sexuality and HIV programs social, political, and health programs that emphasize that do not emphasize circumstances of young gender or power gender or power people during this critical time in Egypt’s history. The 80% survey also provides details of programs about young people’s search are effective at for employment, their concerns reducing STIs and about the economy, and unintended pregnancies 17% their level of optimism for the of programs are future. This study surveyed effective the same group of young people studied by the Council in 2009, providing unique In Nigeria, where nearly 3 percent of 15–19-year- insight into how conditions olds are infected with HIV, Council experts and experiences of young collaborated with the government to develop people have changed since the first-ever national HIV strategy for young the revolution. This evidence people and guidelines on young people’s access is informing the Egyptian to sexual and reproductive health services and government’s response to the participation in research. needs of youth. 4 The Council conducted groundbreaking research to identify the HIV vulnerabilities More than half of girls in of women and young people Burkina Faso will marry in Egypt. While overall before age 18. The HIV prevalence is low, key government adopted populations are at extremely its first national high risk for infection. Council strategy for the experts found that women prevention and ending are frequently put at risk of child marriage because their husbands are and acknowledged HIV infected and don’t know the assistance of the or tell their wives. Egyptian Population Council policymakers committed to and partners. reexamining policies, including the national AIDS strategy, to expand women’s access to HIV information and services, including the feasibility of HIV testing as part of services such as antenatal care. Scientists at the Council’s Center for Biomedical Research completed the first clinical study of a new microbicide, PC-1005, which is designed to protect women and men against HIV, herpes simplex virus 2, and human papilloma virus during vaginal and anal intercourse. If proven effective, PC-1005 has the potential to help protect many of the 1 million women and men who contract a sexually transmitted infection daily. More than 225 million women in developing countries want to prevent Among women reporting a current or delay pregnancy but are not using unmet need for modern contraception: a modern method of contraception. A HAD USED A MODERN report by the Population Council and 1 STOPPED 1 METHOD IN THE PAST USE WITHIN Family Planning 2020, “Contraceptive 3 BUT DISCONTINUED 2 2 YEARS Discontinuation: Reasons, Challenges, USE WITHIN 1 YEAR and Solutions,” found that among women reporting unmet need for contraception, 1 in 3 had used a modern method in the past but discontinued use within one year.