Family Planning and Reproductive Health
A woman attending a postpartum family planning counseling inside refurbished bus during an Lakbay Buhay Kalusugan (Journey to a Healthy Lifestyle) event in Albay Province, Philippines. Photo credit: Igor Dashevskiy
Family Planning and Reproductive Health
Family planning (FP) services that include sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH) are crucial not only to improve the health of women, children, and families and safe lives, but also to empower women to participate fully in society and fulfill human rights.
Today, more than 218 million women globally want to avoid or postpone their pregnancy but are not using an effective FP method. Adolescents and older women face higher risks of severe complications and death during pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum period. When women give birth too often and too soon after a previous delivery, the children are at greater risk of poor health.
Many countries recognize the need for FP and made a commitment as part of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to ensure universal access to SRH services, information and education, and the integration of into national strategies and programs by 2030. URC supports countries improve access and quality of FP services by working at the household, community, facility, sub-national, and national levels with the following overarching strategies:
- URC applies an integrated reproductive health life cycle approach to increase demand, access, and quality of care for clients through integration of FP information and services with immunization, well-child visits, nutrition, HIV/AIDS, maternal and postpartum, and COVID-19 health care services.
- URC prioritizes the needs of adolescents to access SRH information and services.
- URC’s people-centered quality FP services are built around fundamental client rights to safety, privacy, confidentiality, informed choice, dignity, and provision of evidence-based care, as well as positive experience of care.
- To achieve equity, URC partners with and prioritizes disadvantaged and underserved groups, including refugees, people with disabilities, and others to design, implement, and monitor services.
- To increase demand for and achieve changes in SRH requires the deployment of tailored social and behavior change interventions that alter individual behaviors and gender norms, positively engage men, and sustain these changes over time.
- As sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) remains common and undermines health outcomes and bodily autonomy, including for boys and men, URC supports screening for SGBV and access to services as an indispensable part of comprehensive SRH care.
Family Planning and Reproductive Health Progress
Since 1980, URC has supported more than 60 countries around the world to develop and implement successful FP programs at all levels of the health care system. URC projects are making strides in FP across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Keneya Nieta
USAID Keneya Nieta (also known as the USAID Household and Community Health Activity) in Mali is building resilient community health systems by strengthening human and social capacity and empowering communities to use local resources to manage their own health and hold health systems accountable. Keneya Nieta is helping communities:
- Independently plan and implement key health promotion and outreach activities and adopt and sustain healthy behaviors;
- Improve individual household and community financial management, planning, and savings; and
- Increase community engagement, ownership, and oversight of local health services.
Uganda Health Activity
Among the USAID Uganda Health Activity’s (UHA) wider goals, the activity is working to accelerate inclusive access to respectful, people-centered care for Ugandan families. This includes making certain that family health outcomes are anchored in strong, data-driven local health systems.
UHA is implementing governance and health systems strengthening interventions across 72 health districts in seven sub-regions to improve health service delivery networks’ performance and management systems to deliver cost-effective, high-quality health services. Amid other positive signs, the activity is seeing a steady increase in the total number of family planning users.
Health Services Quality Accelerator Activity in Jordan
Led by URC, the USAID Health Services Quality Accelerator Activity in Jordan supports the Jordanian Ministry of Health (MOH) to accelerate and sustain improvements in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) outcomes through the public and private health sectors.
The Activity is improving the quality of equitable RMNCH services through:
- Strengthening delivery of integrated health care services;
- Strengthening MOH capacity to lead for quality care; and
- Improving patient-centered RMNCH core competencies.
The activity strengthens MOH leadership and governance capacity to lead for improving quality of care through enhancing their capacity in data management and utilization, improving health care provider’ accountability, and enhancing the health care policy environment.
Regional Health Integration to Enhance Services – North, Acholi Activity
In Uganda, the USAID Regional Health Integration to Enhance Services-North, Acholi (RHITES-N, Acholi) Activity implemented an integrated health system strengthening approach for primary health care. The activity’s FP objectives were accomplished by increasing the uptake of long-acting contraceptive methods and more than doubling the number of IUD users across the eight districts of the Acholi subregion.
