Women's Reproductive Health

Caribbean, Latin America, North America, South Asia, South East and East Asia, Western Europe

Paula Hollerbach is an independent consultant in international health based in Fairfax, Virginia, USA.  Her field of expertise is women's reproductive health, especially the acceptability of contraceptives and fertility decision making, as well as STI/HIV prevention programs designed with and for vulnerable populations, including adolescents, males who have sex with males, and female partners of men with multiple concurrent relationships.  She has approximately ten years experience working specifically with youth and adolescents both in the US and Asia on issues pertaining to the determinants of adolescent fertility and contraceptive use, including youth development; gender socialization of males and females; and STI/HIV prevention in various settings.

Dr. Hollerbach is trained in demography, epidemiology, formative, process, and impact evaluation, and qualitative and quantitative methodology.  She has provided technical assistance to numerous researchers worldwide.  She has also served as the cross-site process evaluator assisting program staff and evaluators in 13 US communities with high adolescent pregnancy rates and multi-ethnic populations.

She has been funded as a researcher by USAID, NICHD, the World Bank, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.  She has also served as a regional monitor, evaluator, program manager, or project director on five USAID-funded and two CDC-funded projects, which were conducted by the research center staff at the Academy for Educational Development, Family Health International, and the Population Council.  She has written full-length monographs and reports analyzing demographic and health data and cross-site indicators for donors and communities; edited monographs and policy briefs for overseas distribution to academicians, policy makers, and population libraries; and developed the learning objectives, content and downloadable resources for two online training modules.

Professional Experience

Egypt:  Served as the family planning/reproductive health specialist for the mid-term evaluation of the integrated reproductive health services project (“Takamol”). The team analyzed and evaluated the effectiveness of the project in achieving its objectives and M&E indicators, and contributing to USAID/Egypt’s efforts to increase the use of family planning and maternal child health services. The evaluation summarized major challenges, documented best practices, and suggested recommendations regarding modifications in approach, results, or activities to ensure that the last 2-½ years of the project will achieve the intended goals.  (Funded by USAID through the GH Tech Project/The QED Group LLC, Washington, DC from February 7 to April 30, 2009.)

US:  Reviewed and supplemented an annotated bibliography that identified the most salient research publications, reports, and documents on the topic of birth spacing that address the impact of communication on behavior change and will inform the development of proposed Communication for Change (C-CHANGE) activities on factors related to spacing.  Also reviewed a manuscript on choosing and using contraceptive methods.  (Funded by the Academy for Educational Development, Center for Global Health Communication and Marketing, Washington, DC, June 2008.)

US:  Provided evaluation technical assistance (ETA) to CDC-funded partners, specifically HIV/AIDS advisors in local and state education agencies and staff in nongovernmental organizations, specifically, the development of goals and SMART objectives, logic models, and the selection of appropriate indicators for school health programs, which enable the partners to record and track their program progress.

Wrote a series of 33 ETA Evaluation Briefs on methodological and substantive topics, many of which have been distributed to CDC project officers and funded partners and posted on the CDC web site at http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/evaluation/resources.htm.  (Funded by CDC/Division of Adolescent and School Health, 2005-2006).

Bangladesh:  Served as a co-investigator on a qualitative study  entitled In Their Own Words:  The Formulation of Sexual and Health-related Behaviour Among Young Men in Bangladesh.  Assisted in thematic data analysis and writing of the Summary Report and Full Report, describing the methodology, study findings, and recommendations from the study.  She also prepared the CD-ROM entitled A Guide for Conducting Research on the Formulation of Sexual and Health-related Behaviour Among Young Men, which provides all of the resources and information necessary to replicate the study, including the Summary Report, training guidelines, a lengthy list of resources pertaining to men at risk, the IGWG Men and Reproductive Health Task Force Resource Guide on Reaching Men to Improve Reproductive Health for All, study guides for participatory research discussion groups, interviews, and focus group discussions, and informed consent forms for all study groups.  The Full Report, Summary Report, and the CD-ROM can be downloaded from one of two websites, either http://www.synergyaids.com/resources.asp?searchtxt=Young%20men or http://www.nfi.net. (The Asia/Near East [ANE] Bureau funded the study. The ANE Bureau and the Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, funded CATALYST staff time and publication costs, under the terms of a cooperative agreement awarded to the CATALYST Consortium, 2003-2005).

US:  Managed a multi-year systematic literature review and meta-analysis, conducted by three teams of researchers from the US and abroad, which investigated the relationship between interpregnancy/interbirth intervals and 30 adverse health and nutritional outcomes for pregnancies, infants, mothers, and children. She supervised the search process and acquisition of 450 documents,  facilitated discussion of the methodological approach, prepared agendas and summaries of conference calls, reviewed drafts of the reports, and organized a meeting of the USAID Expert Panel meeting in Washington, DC, where external consultants provided suggestions to the investigators on their draft reports. The reports were subsequently revised and submitted to the World Health Organization for final review.  See http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2007/WHO_RHR_07.1_eng.pdf. (The Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, funded CATALYST staff time and publication costs, under the terms of a cooperative agreement awarded to the CATALYST Consortium, 2003-2005).

US:  Wrote a review for USAID on serosurveillance and behavioral research and recent programmatic interventions designed to reduce the spread of STIs/HIV in Asia among adolescents, adult men, and their female and male partners.  She also compiled an annotated guide to resources on sexual and health-related behavior of vulnerable populations in Asia.  (The Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, funded CATALYST staff time and publication costs, under the terms of a cooperative agreement awarded to the CATALYST Consortium, 2003-2005).

Contact Information

Paula E. Hollerbach
4150 Vernoy Hills Road
Fairfax, Virginia 22033 USA

Phone:  +1 703.385.2077
Email:  phollerb@verizon.net