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.