National Population and Family Planning Commission of China

A decade ago, the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (NPFPC) faced a number of challenges to the way it operated, including a mandate for decentralization, the influence of the booming market economy, a shift from meeting demographic targets to a more holistic approach, and a new focus on the needs and right of individual patients, all these compounded by the country’s emerging HIV/AIDS epidemic.

NPFPC leaders recognized the need to build staff capacity to develop and manage innovative and cost-effective programs, and they turned to Global Health Action to develop and provide custom-designed public health leadership and management courses for Commission officials. Since 2002, GHA has presented 22 courses and trained nearly 700 NPFPC officials from the national, provincial, and municipal levels, both in China (in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shenyang) and at GHA’s Headquarters & Training Center in metro-Atlanta.

Early on, many of those courses focused on how to integrate STI and HIV/AIDS prevention into the Commission's existing family planning and reproductive health services, but more recent courses have tackled such topics as Communications & Media Relations and Quality Assurance Management. Read about a series of courses presented in June 2009.

Moving beyond its name and origins, the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China is today a forward-looking organization that is concerned with issues as diverse as reproductive health, gender equality & women's empowerment, the aging population, and adolescent sexual education. The senior and mid-level policy makers and program developers trained by GHA are applying what they learned to shape healthcare education and services at thousands of clinics and community health centers throughout China

In 2009, Global Health Action was certified as an official training resource for the Chinese government. Training continues in both China and the U.S.; and the two organizations are exploring the possibility of expanding GHA's role to help directly integrate training into program implementation, doing pilot projects at first, then larger programs and training models that can be replicated throughout China.