As part of a ten-week JICA seminar Nutrition and Diet Improvement for Women Leaders II, ten female participants from nine African countries attended lectures at JOICFP on 30th November 2005.

The lectures aimed to show the need for a comprehensive, community-based approach when improving people’s lives, using JOICFP’s experience in reproductive health and family planning as an example.

The video Health by the People in Japan shows how issues such as poor health, parasitic infections, and high maternal and infant mortality were successfully tackled in post-war Japan through community-based efforts, evenunder the conditions of extreme poverty.

The trainees were asked to identify the problems highlighted in the video, and the common approaches taken to address them. These include intensive human resource development, community-driven programs, and use of local resources.

The video showed one community-operated method of contraceptive distribution in Japan, the “Love Box.” Consisting of a wooden box containing compartments for condoms and money, the box was passed from household to household enabling people to buy condoms as they needed, and preserving privacy on the number of condoms used by each household. The money collected was then used to buy more condoms, which have been the main contraceptive used in Japan even until today.

One of the participants remarked that such a system would not work in her area as the box and money were likely to be stolen. Aiko Iijima, Senior Advisor, JOICFP, explained that the idea behind showing the use of the Love Box was to share the experience on how good solutions were tailored to best suit community situations, and therefore needed to be community-driven to solve problems such as the lack of access to contraception, and keep people’s privacy on their contraception practices.

Iijima with the participants

Other participants indicated that they had become more aware of the importance of home visits as these allowed health care workers to see the real situation that community people face in their daily lives.

Some of the other important points realized by the participants included:-

• The need for communities to trust health providers
• The midwife as a key reproductive health care worker
• A coordinated approach among GO, NGO, and civil organizations as well as experts
• The need for sustainability

The trainees also came to recognize that sexual and reproductive health and rights are influenced by many different factors, including law, socio - culture, religion, education, employment situation, gender and the mass media. If the case of “one woman every minute dying” is to be properly dealt with, all these areas must be considered.

Even though the JOICFP lectures only lasted one day, participants said that they had learned many new concepts, such as BCC, and that the experience had been impressive.

They also commented that the textbook A Bird's-eye View on Population and Reproductive Health-World and Japan was very useful in understanding the Japanese RH situation compared to that in the rest of the world.

Through the JOICFP lectures, the participants were able to realize different approaches that could be applied to their own situation of nutrition care.