Ann Starrs: enabling women to fulfil their potential

Abstract

Ann Starrs is proving hard to pin down. When I do make contact, she apologises profusely and explains that she's currently doing a job and a half: finishing off as the President of Family Care International (FCI) and getting to grips with the new role she assumes on Aug 4 as President and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute. Fortunately, she's able to make time to talk about her aims and motives—these being most succinctly captured in a sentence she uses half way through our conversation. “If women aren't in good health, and they aren't in control of their reproductive lives, there's no way they're going to be able to fulfil their potential.” FCI and the Guttmacher have different roles; but in going from the one to the other Starrs is hardly moving into alien territory. FCI was the first international organisation set up to promote maternal health and make pregnancy and childbirth safer. It now has field offices in five countries in Africa and Latin America, and aims for a world in which sexual and reproductive health and rights are available to all. The Guttmacher Institute too seeks to improve sexual and reproductive health. But it does so principally through programmes of research, policy analysis, and public education designed to generate new ideas, encourage debate, and promote sound policy. Starrs' involvement in this field is long-standing, as is her international outlook. The daughter of a US Foreign Service officer, Starrs grew up in Washington DC, and in Spanish speaking countries overseas, including Guatemala, at a time when life for US Government employees could be hazardous. As a student she began studying English at the University of California in Santa Cruz but grew more interested in liberal politics, became a feminist, and switched to politics. She knew she wanted to do something international when she graduated. Her father advised against the Foreign Service; so, instead, in 1984, she joined the Carnegie Corporation of New York for 18 months, working mostly on education programmes for women and girls. It was during a brief subsequent period as a consultant to the International Planned Parenthood Federation that Starrs first became directly involved in family planning and women's reproductive needs. And it was also during this time that she helped to start FCI, initially a very small organisation with just three staffers. “My interest in these issues emerged from my focus on feminism and my commitment to enabling women and girls to achieve their potential”, she says. After a masters in public affairs at Princeton she joined FCI full time—and there, until now, she remained. Her first FCI task, which was working on maternal health and mortality, took her abroad. “I went to Uganda and worked for 9 months with a coalition of women's groups to develop a project supported by the World Bank and the UN Population Fund. When the project was running, I lived there for 2 more years, spending half my time in Uganda and the other half travelling around eastern and southern Africa working with NGOs and health ministries.” In 1992, she returned to New York as the director of FCI's Africa programme. 3 years later she became Executive Vice-President of FCI, and a decade after that its President. Margaret Hempel, Director of the Ford Foundation's programme on gender, sexuality, and reproductive justice, has known Starrs since they were graduate students. She says her friend has an unusual combination of talents. “She's very visionary, but she's also practical and smart and level-headed. And she doesn't shy away from being in difficult spaces or difficult conversations.” She adds that Starrs is “naturally collaborative, especially when it makes strategic sense to be so”. Willard Cates, President Emeritus of Family Health International, has known Starrs for a decade. He identifies a further set of traits behind her success: her social skills, her managerial ability, and her appreciation of the importance of making decisions based on evidence. “In the reproductive health field you sometimes get ideology trumping evidence”, he explains. “Ann values the basic tenets of reproductive health and justice and rights, but combines them with wanting to examine the evidence base for any new policy.” So why the switch from FCI to Guttmacher? Starrs says she never envisaged staying indefinitely where she was, and the thought of moving to Guttmacher, which she'd worked with for years, was attractive. The more closely she studied its approach, the more attractive it became. Guttmacher's principal focus is on many of what she calls “the hot button issues” in sexual health, including contraception, abortion, and STIs. In the new job she will, in effect, be concentrating on one particular section of her current agenda. She hopes that her experience and her networks in the global health community will strengthen Guttmacher's impact. Cates thinks it's a good move because she'll be in an organisation where her insistence on evidence will be even more highly prized. Hempel agrees. “What's made her effective at FCI is that she starts with the facts. What do we know? What don't we know? How do we use what we know?” This mindset lies at the core of Guttmacher thinking. “All of us in the global health game need stamina”, says Cates. “Ann seems to have boundless energy. I'm amazed at the travel schedule she maintains.” She doesn't seek controversy, says Hempel, but she's not afraid of it. “She's a hard worker, but someone who makes time for her kids and for her diverse set of friends. She's interested in ideas. It's never a dull conversation if you're sitting at a table with Ann.”