Last fall, Sharon Arscott-Mills of ICF International wrote a guest blog post announcing the new Family Planning Sustainability Checklist, a tool that helps project designers, implementers, and evaluators ensure long-term sustainability for their community-based family planning programs. Now Adrienne Allison describes World Vision’s recent use of this tool in the field.

Preparing to report out

© World Vision 2013

World Vision (WV) used the excellent Family Planning Sustainability Checklist during a family planning workshop for WV staff and Ministry of Health (MOH) representatives in Hawassa, Ethiopia, in February 2013. We spent the first day of the workshop exploring beliefs, attitudes, and experiences with family planning; reviewing Ethiopia’s family planning policies and guidelines; and examining the data on healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies (HTSP). The discussion of HTSP proved to be the catalyst to winning the hearts and minds of the participants, who had heard about family planning for years but had never understood how using family planning to time and space births improves maternal and child health. The second day we assessed our expectations of the circumstances we would find on a visit to Abaya, a village 100 km south of Hawassa, by rating each statement in the Checklist as “true,” “mostly true,” or “not true.” The checklist guided us to ask questions we had not considered before.