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Community Action
Health and Family Planning in Conservation
WWF combines family planning and health outreach with conservation awareness to benefit women and their communities.
© WWF-Canon / Martin Harvey
In the wild, remote places where WWF works in the developing world, local communities are the stewards of nature. But many suffer from poor health because access to modern health services is difficult, children are often under-nourished, and communities do not have improved water supplies or sanitation. Disease and inadequate nutrition take a huge toll on human lives and wellbeing. Women have many children, and struggle to raise and educate them while their own bodily reserves are exhausted from frequent child birth. Traveling to distant health centers for child and maternal healthcare is often impossible because of expense, security or time for women, who have many responsibilities in the home.
Couples in many of these remote places often want to have several children to ensure that some survive until adulthood to provide family labor and support for their parents in their old age. It is also common for girls to marry and give birth at a young age. However, many couples realize the advantages of spacing children in order to improve the health of both women and children. Often they also understand the benefits of educating their daughters rather than facilitating early marriage, but family finances are limited. WWF helps provide access to healthcare, family planning, girls education, and health information. As a result, couples who desire increased birth spacing readily adopt family planning, girls marry and give birth later, child survival increases, maternal health improves, and more couples choose to have smaller families.
Woman growing medicinal plants, Terai Arc Landscape Project, Nepal.
© WWF-Canon / Helena Telkänranta
Conservation efforts are only sustainable if the health of people, natural habitats and biodiversity are thriving. WWF recognizes that community involvement is essential for successful long-term conservation results - and that is why partnering with local communities to help them meet their health needs is a critical part of our approach to large-scale conservation. Often WWF is the only organization working with these communities – so we bring in health partners to help.
With support first from Summit Foundation and more recently from USAID and Johnson & Johnson, WWF has been piloting the integration of health in community conservation projects. We have worked with health partners to bring health and voluntary family planning services to local communities, reduce malaria and infectious diseases, and improve water supplies, sanitation and hygiene. Since health capacity is a huge challenge in remote areas, our projects have helped to build capacity in our health partners, and trained community members as health workers, peer educators, and community distributors of family planning commodities. Already health has improved in several remote communities, and use of family planning has increased. All our projects report that relationships with communities are stronger, and they are much more willing to partner with WWF. While we continue to monitor and improve our existing health projects, we also plan to expand efforts by promoting integrated health and family planning approaches in conservation on a bigger scale.
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