Health Education of Women - The InterAcademy Panel on International Issues

Lead academy: French Academy of Sciences

Following the former Mother and Child Health Programme, Women Health Education Programme (WHEP) was launched by IAP in 2004 to address the dramatic issue of maternal, infantile and juvenile mortality and morbidity in developing countries. It is now demonstrated that women education and awareness are key tools to improve the situation and WHEP is in this context an educational IAP programme run in collaboration with the InterAcademy Medical Panel (IAMP) and with the support of UNESCO.

Contact: jacques.frochen@academie-sciences.fr

Latest Activities: New website of the IAP Women's health education programme (WHEP):
The programme on women's health education has recently launched a website which is available both in English and French.
For more information and to access the site, see: www.whep.info

Previous Activities:

SEPTEMBER 2006

-The programme is now running a project in the Senegal River Basin (The Senegal River Basin Espoir pour la Santé (EPLS) pilot project) supported by the World Bank through the OMVS (Senegal River Basin Development Project), which includes the creation of a website: http://www.iap-whep.org with the motto: “Empower Women with Health Education”.
For more information, contact: jacques.frochen@academie-sciences.fr

DECEMBER 2005

The French Academy of Science is collecting input from IAP members on the state of health education among children age 6 to 15. For information, contact: jacques.frochen@academie.sciences.fr.

JUNE 2005

A planning workshop for IAP's Women's Health Education Programme, led by the French Academy of Sciences, took place on 10-11 March in Paris (Sevres). More than 50 participants were in attendance. Workshop conclusions focused on the need to review existing basic health education systems, especially in Africa, and to establish a group of academies that would examine how best to achieve the UN's Millennium Development Goals related to women and children's health issues. For additional information, contact: france.agid@academie-sciences.fr

Activities in 2004:

Although numerous initiatives aiming at improving literacy and health education have been developed during the last 15 years by non-governmental organisations or under the auspices of international institutions, very few have been rigorously evaluated.
There is a particular need for renewed and culturally adapted methods of education to fulfil the goal of sustainable education, and for building models of universal relevance which are adaptable regionally.
This programme is therefore not in this context an additional initiative to already existing programmes but rather aims at developing innovative, well structured and properly evaluated strategies.

Background Information

Recommendations of Scientific Committee

Link to activities under this programme which were run from 2001-2003.