Over the last year I worked with my USAID colleague, Shawn Malarcher, and with an outstanding intern who is currently an MSPH candidate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Selam Desta, to develop a guide to tools and resources to support family planning programming and advocacy in the field. Selam interviewed USAID health officers based in the field and Washington-based staff who regularly provide technical assistance to field programs to find out what they felt were their primary needs for information and resources related to family planning.  She also identified a number of possible resources, reviewed each of them and organized them into this guide, which we have titled USAID Resource Guide for Family Planning.  

--Peggy D'Adamo

We had heard from our staff in the field and from our partners that field-based staff has information needs that are often time-bound and urgent while, at the same time, they have little time for research or synthesis.  In addition, many of them find it hard to keep up-to-date with the tremendous amount of information, tools, and resources that are currently available.  We also learned that there is a broad spectrum of technical understanding of family planning among some of USAID field staff, and that they may not necessarily be familiar with the standard resources that those of us working in this field for years take for granted.  We also knew that field staff needs access to some specialized information and resources related to program design and to family planning compliance, which is often difficult to find on the USAID website or Intranet.  So, we developed this guide in two versions – one directly targeting our own mission-based staff and another with more general resources.  The guide posted here on the K4Health site is the more general version.  I’m delighted to share it with K4Health’s audience now.

A reproductive revolution is spreading across much of the developing world. Use of effective contraception has risen rapidly, and fertility has been falling. But there is still a long way to go. More than one woman in every five wants to avoid pregnancy but is not using contraception.

That was the lead introduction in a Population Reports issue on “The Reproductive Revolution” from December 1992—more than 20 years ago. 

Jump ahead to March 12, 2013, and a headline for a Lancet Commentary about an article appearing in the journal on contraceptive prevalence rates and unmet need for family planning  reads: “The contraceptive revolution: focused efforts are still needed.”

The Problem

The article (by Leontine Alkema, Vladimira Kantorova, Clare Menozzib, and Ann Biddlecom) and commentary (by John Cleland and Iqbal H. Shah) present detailed information about trends between 1990 and 2010 with projections to 2015 and reveal there is a long way to go to reach the Millennium Development Goal of achieving  “universal access to reproductive health” by 2015. Although worldwide contraceptive prevalence rates increased during this 20-year period from 55% to 63%, and unmet need decreased from 15% to 12%, the authors write:

A young mother awaits health care at a clinic in Jos, Nigeria, amongst a crowd that has flocked to the newly established program.

© 2000 Liz Gilbert, Courtesy of Photoshare

• The absolute number of married women who either use contraception or who have an unmet need for family planning is projected to grow from 900 million in 2010 to 962 million in 2015, and will increase in most developing countries.
• Unmet need for modern methods will jump from 221,000 in 2010 to 233,000 by 2015.
• In 2010, an estimated 146 million married women (or those in a union) (aged 15-49)  had an unmet need for family planning.
• In 2010, contraceptive prevalence was less than 20% (one woman in five) in 23 countries (all in Africa), and
• Unmet need exceeded 30% in 15 countries—12 of which are in Africa.
• Unmet need is particularly problematic in western and central Africa. For example, in Nigeria, the most populated country in sub-Saharan Africa, contraceptive prevalence has risen from 7% to only 14% in 20 years and unmet need has remained static at 21%.
• Of greatest concern are the Sahelian countries of Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, where the combined population is projected to increase threefold, from 45.6 million in 2010 to 131.9 million in 2050, which presents an impossible burden for fragile ecosystems.
  

Originally published on March 14, 2013 on the GSMA mHealth Blog, K4Health's Laura Raney discusses the upcoming online discussion forum hosted jointly by the mHealth Working Group and the mHealth Alliance.

Co-hosted by the mHealth Working Group and the mHealth Alliance, this online discussion forum aims to gather input from the global community about their opinions on and experience with scale-up and sustainability. The discussion follows the recent Skoll World Forum debate series on Moving beyond Pilotitis.

Photo courtesy of the M4RH Program.

Experts representing a variety of organizations will address the following questions:

• What does it mean to design for scale and sustainability?
• Does designing for scale and sustainability alleviate ‘pilotitis’?
• What are the drawbacks of designing for scale and sustainability from the beginning (particularly for new mHealth programs)?
  

The Global Health Knowledge Collaborative is pleased to announce the addition of a Useful Technologies for KM Practitioners tab on the Knowledge Management for Health and Development Toolkit. The new tab features sixteen categories of tools which can be used to share knowledge, collaborate virtually, and communicate with audiences.

Useful Technologies for KM Practitioners

Researched and reviewed by members of the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative, this tab highlights technology tools that would enable KM practitioners to successfully transfer and exchange knowledge within and outside their organizations.