I came to understand the value of education, not just to enable me to make a good living, but to enable me to make a worthwhile life.
Fear of failure is the fuel of achievement. If you weren't afraid to fail, you probably wouldn't be highly motivated to work at the level that most of us have to work at to do well.
There's nothing worse than a leader who lacks ambition.
the most important thing one can do for children is not accept the limitations they are so willing to impose on themselves.
If you are the kind of person who listens to conservative advice, you may do okay in life, but you probably won't ever be a fantastic leader. You have to take risks, and you also have to go against conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom doesn't make for startling advances in society.
Major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action.
The humanities don't belong to some elitist group... knowledge as a whole should be embraced.
It's very important in a leadership role not to place your ego at the foreground and not to judge everything in relationship to how your ego is fed.
If instead policy makers and program managers participate in an interdisciplinary assessment team, make informal visits to local families and have in-depth conversations with local providers and health authorities, the real needs and complex challenges of organizing good reproductive health services become apparent.The first country that implemented this participatory program of assessment, research and policy development was Brazil. I was one of the outsiders who provided support to the initiative.
Strategies for research and policy development must simultaneously address people's needs, the capacity of programs to provide good quality of care, and the range of technological options available.
I was intent on doing something productive and on being everything my parents taught me to be. Their values were clear: do good work; don't ever get too big for your breeches; always be an authentic person; don't worry too much about being famous and rich because that doesn't amount to too much.
If you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.
We have emphasized the importance of applied action research because it allows evidence-based policy and program development and a focus on learning. We are also committed to using a participatory approach in which local people, local program managers and providers, local researchers, women's health activists, and national decision-makers play the leading role. International "experts" from technical assistance agencies or universities can make important contributions, but they certainly don't have all the answers.
There is strong mentoring of women in the academy. Corporations appear more willing to resist affirmative action to advance women, and boards and shareholders are more tolerant of this approach.
One of the things we have learned in the first year is that if you want to scale-up, the first thing you have to do is to expand your own team.
There are hundreds, even thousands of remarkable pilot or experimental projects in all fields - in agriculture, health, education. But where do these pilots take us? Do they lead to change on a broader scale? If not, how can we ensure that they have broader impact?
We wanted to see how access to care can be expanded and service quality can be improved when one uses a participatory approach to program development. We showed that major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action. In time leaders from other municipalities expressed interest in replication and the project succeeded in expanding innovations to three other areas.
A longer time perspective is needed because we face a daunting task both in an intellectual and practical sense.
If I can give a very substantial injection of humanistic thinking into corporations, boy, that would change things a lot.
A focus on people's health and well-being must be the core of family planning research and policy. This may seem self-evident, but the realities of program implementation in third world countries has often shown that the health and well-being of individuals is not a priority.
Nobody had counseled women to expect the changes in bleeding patterns which are typically associated with IUD use, and they received no support from the health clinics with their problems. Because in traditional Hindu culture menstruation is associated with a variety of social taboos, prolonged menstrual bleeding produced conflicts within families.
Governments have a legitimate concern with slowing population growth. But often this has been attempted with little concern for the individuals most affected.
It all started in India in the late 60s when I began helping my husband George, who was in the population field, evaluate the introduction of the intrauterine contraceptive device. At that time the IUD was considered to be the panacea for India's population problem. George's dissertation was focused on population and he became interested in the question of this new technology and how people were responding to it.
When ownership is local and national, and various stakeholders work together, program innovations have a greater chance to take root and survive.
When we conducted focus group interviews in the first municipality in Brazil before initiating the pilot project, a woman commented: Getting an appointment in the public sector municipal health services is like "winning the lottery." I would like to make it possible for many women and men in Latin America to win the lottery and receive the type of reproductive health services they so urgently need.
