Nov 22, 2016

CPC Fellow Ilene Speizer was recently awarded a new project that will assess longer-term implications of family planning funding in urban Nigeria. Speizer will collaborate with CPC Fellow David Guilkey.

Ilene Speizer, PhD, research professor in the Maternal and Child Health Department at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health will lead a two-year, $1.7 million projected funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Speizer will collaborate with David Guilkey, PhD, a Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Economics and others on the Measurement, Learning & Evaluation (MLE) team to examine the long-term sustainability of family planning program activities in urban Nigeria.  The project will involve collecting data from women and facilities in 2017 that were originally surveyed in 2010 and 2014 as part of an earlier grant funded by the Gates Foundation.  UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center will administer the grant.

“This is an exciting opportunity to examine the longer-term implications of family planning funding. In particular, this project will collect data from a city where the program continued and compare it to another city where the program worked but activities ceased two-years earlier. This project will answer an important question that is often overlooked by funders so we are excited that Gates Foundation colleagues are interested in learning what they can do to ensure long-term impacts,” said Dr. Speizer.