Stasia Obremskey
Stasia has more than twenty-five years of experience providing financial and strategic planning consulting to organizations in the U.S. and Asia. She joins management teams as an interim Chief Financial Officer to provide finance, accounting and strategic planning expertise to startups, fast growing companies and nonprofit organizations. As a philanthropist, she holds leadership positions with Upstream USA, the Gladstone Institute, Room to Read, and the Chinese American International School.
The Issue
Residing in one of the world’s poorest countries, few Mozambican women have access to contraception.
They face considerable challenges utilizing the public health sector’s resources due to poor infrastructure, large distances to clinics, and overburdened staff, which lead to long wait times and unreliable supplies. There are limited options for women wishing to use contraception, especially for those living in rural areas. Even for those who do access contraception, stigma, misinformation, and side effects can lead women to stop using them.
Pilot And Learn
This project tests the feasibility of a sustainable model for improving access to reproductive health products and services, including a new contraceptive injection system that could lead to self injection.
Through nurses and community health promoters linked to a network of clinics, PSI is building a financially sustainable model for distributing contraceptives directly to women in clinics and at home. These promoters will provide counselling on contraceptive options and use a mobile-phone based system to track these interactions, providing text message reminders to women and promoters about follow-up visits, doses, and other essential information. Most importantly, the program will test delivery of a new injectable contraceptive system at the community level, bringing greater contraceptive choice to women in rural areas.
Leverage And Scale
Evidence on providing new contraceptive methods at the community level is needed to develop standards that will allow for these methods to reach more women worldwide.
Thanks in part to the Family Planning 2020 initiative, the global agenda to expand access to reproductive health products has gained momentum and governments across the developing world have shown great interest in innovative ways of distributing contraceptives at the community level. Proving this model will also pave the way towards the eventual regulatory approval of self-injection, which would give millions of women who live far from a health provider this game-changing option to help them control when and whether to have children.
News
Convenient Contraception
PSI has made a commitment to put care and control in consumer’s hands by bringing technology to the front door whenever possible. The health center was three hours away. Marta explains to her health worker, Ilda, that it was expensive to travel to the health center in Maputo, Mozambique. But Marta recognized her need for […]
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME (FOR RECEIVING HEALTHCARE)
IMPATIENT OPTIMISTS BY STASIA OBREMSKEY, MAVERICK COLLECTIVE MEMBER Stasia Obremskey shares her experience, on the Impatient Optimist blog, in Mozambique where women can receive Sayana Press right in their living room, powered by community health workers and an SMS network. If women around the world were able to decide for themselves when and whether they would […]