London Summit on Family Planning poised to provide 'staggering' results

The "groundbreaking" London Summit on Family Planning, scheduled for July 11, "aims to provide an additional 120 million women ... lifesaving contraceptives, information, and services by 2020," Gary Darmstadt, who heads the Family Health Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, writes in the foundation's "Impatient Optimists" blog. If that goal is reached, the health and economic benefits would be "staggering," he says, laying out the five guiding principles to the world's "collective efforts to revitalize family planning." Those principles include improving "political commitment, funding, and collaboration"; promoting equal rights among women and girls; strengthening voluntary family planning programs under existing infrastructure; and holding stakeholders accountable, he writes, and concludes, "The time to come together is now. The global community has the chance to achieve transformational results that will save millions of lives" (6/28).