Impactful collaborations today for innovative solutions tomorrow
Published: May 28, 2019
This International Women’s Health Day, we at the IMPT remain committed to making impactful contributions in improving women’s health, rights, and lives.
While much improvement has been realized in women’s lives since the first International Women’s Health Day was celebrated in 1987, there is still much more to be done. One powerful way to improve women’s lives and protect their health is making MPTs available to women across the world. The MPT field is working to ensure that these products have the capability to address a host of complex health issues around HIV, other STIs, and unintended pregnancy. The potential of MPTs to be a safe and effective tool allowing women to take ownership of their sexual and reproductive health is one thing; developing MPTs themselves and ensuring they are accessible is another. As with any new technology, the MPT field encounters various challenges as it grows.
Because we at the IMPT believe that we are all stronger together than apart, we use the learning network model to bring together people and organizations across the globe who are united behind the common goal of improving the lives of women and girls worldwide. This approach allows us to tackle complex and multifaceted global health challenges facing women today, with the support and expertise of a wide range of stakeholders.
The role of the IMPT learning network is to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, resources, and support among stakeholders, and to provide well-researched, actionable tools and guidelines to support the MPT field as it grows. We do this by facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations, managing MPT-related knowledge, and developing field-wide recommendations. Much like a conductor, the Secretariat unites the symphony orchestra that is the IMPT learning network. Similar to the instrumental sections of a symphony, the IMPT is a dynamic arrangement of funding agencies, advocates, researchers, product developers, and providers. All IMPT members are working toward the end goal of making MPTs readily available to the women who need and want them–the final concert performance. In meeting this end-goal, there is much work to be done. This process includes the development and use of tools and guidelines to provide a data-driven approach to our work (the sheet music), actively curating a bank of resources (the instruments) to assist in the development of MPTs, as well as collaboration with other stakeholders in the field (the ensemble). While all players in our MPT orchestra are contributing to the same piece of music, each section offers its own unique melody, critical to building the tone of the performance. The IMPT Secretariat, as the conductor, unites the different instrumental sections in harmony to play a concert that is ultimately in service of the audience.
Utilizing the learning network model, some ways our work as IMPT Secretariat has improved the health of women and girls include:
- Advocating to fund the MPT field and additional research in order to provide the women we serve and experts in the field with the means to advocate for themselves. For instance, our MPT target population mapping tool now provides data on contraceptive users and their preferred prevention methods. Stay tuned for a blog post specifically about this innovative tool!
- Guiding technical priorities and facilitating the strategic growth of the field by, in one example, developing a strategic action framework to inform the decisions and investments of field leaders.
- Facilitating dialogue and information sharing among people invested in improving women’s health by advancing product research and development, as we do through our IMPT network
For us at the IMPT, every day is women’s health day. Applying the learning network approach in our daily work helps us impactfully contribute to changing women’s health, rights, and lives for the better by providing women with effective, modernized prevention methods.
Get involved in the movement to make MPTs a reality for women across the globe. Join our international network of connections with the shared goal of prioritizing women’s health, rights, and lives, now and in the future!