USAID and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) “announced [Thursday] new efforts to strengthen their collaboration to advance reproductive health, including voluntary family planning, worldwide,” a UNFPA press release reports. “[T]he two agencies will build on their work and expertise, accumulated over 40 years, to ensure women who want contraceptives can access them through … [c]oordinating supply planning to prevent organizations distributing contraceptives on the ground from running out of these life-saving commodities”; “[a]ddressing funding and technical assistance gaps to allow the two agencies’ country teams to help smoothly implement voluntary national family planning and reproductive health plans”; and “[j]oint analyses of progress and evidence-based recommendations for future direction, leading to improved collaboration between the two agencies’ country teams as they strive to achieve the [Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)], particularly MDG 5 (Improve maternal health), and to input into the post-2015 development agenda,” the press release states (8/22).