The DHS Program

Calverton, MD – While International Women’s Day celebrates the achievements of women worldwide, it is also a time to acknowledge the challenges women confront every day. For women in developing countries, many of these challenges are health-related. Worldwide, women struggle with anemia, lack of family planning services, sexually transmitted infections, and domestic violence.

Calverton, MD. Limited progress has been made in improving the health and well-being of women worldwide over the past decade. The publication Women’s Lives and Experiences: Changes in the Past Ten Years takes a close look at how women’s lives have improved since the landmark 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. Overall, the pace of change has been slow, and in some places, women are actually facing more hardships than before.

Calverton, MD. Twenty-five years after the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), millions of people in developing countries still do not understand how the virus is transmitted or how they can protect themselves from it. For the past five years, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) project, with primary funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has been collecting nationally representative data to better understand the dynamics of the epidemic in less developed countries.

Calverton, MD. The Central Statistical Agency along with the Ministry of Health released the results of the 2005 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey in Addis Ababa on Monday, September 18th. The major results include an HIV prevalence rate of 1.9 percent ,improvements in child health, stagnation in women’s health, and a large increase in the use of family planning.

Calverton, MD. According to the newly released Uganda HIV/AIDS Sero-Behavioural Survey (UHSBS), approximately 6 percent of men and women age 15-49 in Uganda are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This rate is similar to other reported national estimates of HIV infection.