Events Calendar

  • Next 10 events
  • Sep 2025
  • Nov 2025
  • Jan 2026

Next 10 events

Wed17

17 September 2025 at 19:30 – 21:00

Sex and the planet: Population, the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about.

Venue: Zoom

Our speaker Professor John Guillebaud is Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, University College, London. Following his early years spent in Africa, he decided to study medicine, becoming the world's first professor of clinical gynaecology.

Professor  Guillebaud's  vision is that the population factor P in the Ehrlich-Holdren equation I=PAT should be addressed in affluent as much as in low-resource settings. Here I stands for environmental impact, P for population,  A for affluence and T for technology, so the equation says that our environmental impact is the product of P, A and T.

His talk will consider the still largely overlooked yet crucial importance of the P-factor 
and overcoming the opposition, or deafening silence, among most in civil society - including most faith-based entities and many Quakers - to discussion of this taboo topic.

Our convenor Martin Schweiger's previously announced talk on 'Introduction of family planning in Bangladesh' will be postponed to a later date.

Sat8

8 November 2025 at 11:00

Memorial Meeting for Roger Plenty

Venue: Nailsworth Meeting House and by zoom

Join Online Meeting (available shortly before event)

A Memorial Funeral Meeting for our Friend and QCOP founder Roger Plenty.

Wed12

12 November 2025 at 19:30

Family Planning in Bangladesh in the 1970s

Venue: Zoom

Our convenor Martin Schweiger will talk to us about family planning in Bangladesh in the 1970s.

Wed21

21 January 2026 at 15:00

Census in Africa. Talk by Dr. Rachel Shipsey

Venue: Zoom. Note the afternoon time.

 Dr Rachel Shipsey of the Office of National Statistics ONS-UK is  Strategic Advisor to the Africa Centre for Statistics (ACS), United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. She will talk to us about her work on Census taking in Africa. Dr Shipsey is based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, hence the afternoon time of the talk.

Carrying out a national population and housing census in any country is a challenge - but doing so in Africa brings a whole new level of difficulties.  Lack of infrastructure,  climate events, political instability, civil unrest and covid all played a part in preventing many African countries from carrying out a census in the last decade. In this talk, Rachel will describe some of the ways in which ONS and ACS are trying to help conduct censuses in Africa whilst also building data science capability on the continent. Rachel will talk in general about the previous census round in Africa as well as describing work that she carried out as part of the 2022 Rwanda Census, which highlights some of the particular challenges of conducting a census in Africa.