Family Care International (Part 1)

I recently had a conversation with Jill Sheffield, the President of Family Care International (FCI), a non-profit that is committed to improving maternal health, including adolescent sexual and reproductive health, safe motherhood, and HIV/AIDS. Within these focus groups, they also confront unsafe abortion, gender-based violence, and unmet needs for family planning. Most of their work is in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This is Part 1 of a two-part interview with Jill Sheffield of Family Care International.

Tell me about your work at FCI.

Part of our work is global. We do a lot of advocacy work. We really care that policies that govern women in general, and their sexual and reproductive health and rights in particular are, I want to say, progressive... We spend a lot of time at events at the UN because 192 governments look at that… if there is a global institution that helps them get their bearings on issues, it’s the UN… Right now is the Commission on the Status of Women…

Tell me about the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).

We started getting really active in about 1991-92 when there were preparatory meetings for the Cairo Conference [ICPD]… In fact, FCI organized 117 countries to work together. Some were government representatives and most were civil society—organizations who cared about the language of the document. They were working toward an outcome document that would set the parameters, the framework, for work on sexual and reproductive health and population issues in general. And those were the days of fax machines! We did not yet have the miracle of e-mail. I can’t begin to imagine what our telephone bill was. We would send paragraphs and suggest changed language… and then from eighty-two countries would come comments—all by fax—and then we’d put them together and negotiate a peaceful outcome.

It really worked. Cairo [ICPD] was a two-week meeting. By the time it was over, virtually 80 percent of the language the coalition wanted in the document was there. It was a real lesson that people everywhere really want to make contributions… and they care a lot.