population_and_development

Acknowledging the compelling need and the significant inter-relatedness between population and environmental issues, SDPI had established a Population and Environment Communication Center (PECC) with the support of The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The PECC program was officially launched on 1 August 2001 with the purpose to achieve sustained capacity building, create awareness among the masses, and train relevant personnel in the fields of communication and advocacy. PECC’s goal is to promote a higher level of commitment to a better and increased understanding of reproductive health (RH), gender equity and youth (unmarried youth and adolescents’ RH needs including HIV/AIDS), population, health and the environment.

Media practitioners, journalists, and academia including community leaders, government personnel and other civil society representatives were the main targets for PECC activities. The PECC, housed at SDPI, worked at the national level by involving several stakeholders, both in the public and private sectors, in all the four provinces of the country. It build capacity to advocate population-related issues.

Objectives

PECC had the following objectives:

Improving the quality and quantity of information on the multiple dimensions of population available for the media and other interested stakeholders.
Strengthening understanding of the linkages between population and the environment and enhancing professional capacity to advocate for population and environment-related issues.
Establishing a mutually reinforcing arrangement that will generate the missing synergy in development communications at present, and focusing on building partnerships and linkages between the media, social issues organizations/NGOs and academic institutions.

These objectives were achieved by adopting a multi-pronged strategy comprising inputs from these four units at SDPI: Training; Resource Center; MIS for information dissemination through establishment of a website; and Advocacy for networking and advocacy in various fields of population and the environment.

To ensure the attainment of these objectives, training courses in various disciplines were designed to cater to the needs of the stakeholders and to emphasize the correlation between population and the environment. In all, nine training courses were offered on topics like population and development; national population policies; linkages between population and the environment, and the role of men, women and the youth in reproductive health, inter alia.

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