Join FP2020 by Making a Commitment

August 2015, the United Nations Foundation shared an update on progress in achieving its commitments to FP2020.

• In partnership with the UN Adolescent Girl Task Force and through the launch of the UN Foundation’s Girl Up campaign, the foundation has catalyzed the development of comprehensive programs for girls in four countries – Malawi, Liberia, Guatemala, and Ethiopia. Our collective goal was to seed comprehensive programs for girls – focused on education, health, safety, and opportunities – and show that the programs could work, and were viable funding prospects for donors. These programs were designed as three-year pilot programs; the Malawi program has received generous support from other donors for ongoing implementation, and we have continued to contribute to the other programs through fundraising and partnerships. Ethiopia will finish the pilot in the summer of 2015, and the third year of the Guatemala and Liberia programs began in 2015. This year, Girl Up provided a new grant to UNFPA's Action for Adolescent Girls initiative in India and Guatemala, to provide health information and social and economic assets for girls, and to prevent child marriage. 

To complement our program efforts, Girl Up continues to support Let Girls Lead, an initiative that builds the capacity of individuals and organizations to advocate for laws, policies and budgets that are favorable for adolescent girls. Through a range of advocacy activities, Let Girls Lead Fellows have contributed to securing specific resources in youth budgets for girls at the local level, establishing a new protocol in Guatemala for protecting adolescent girls who experience sexual violence, and achieving a policy change in Malawi raising the age of marriage from 15 to 18 years old – among other outcomes.

Finally, following the launch of the Girl Declaration* in 2013, the United Nations Foundation joined the Nike Foundation and Plan International to convene the Girl Declaration Joint Advocacy Working Group (JAG), aligning 17 adolescent girl-focused organizations in collaboration to influence the post-2015 process and outcomes for girls – ensuring adolescent girls are prioritized in the next framework and meaningfully included in the design, monitoring and evaluation of the Sustainable Development Goals. In the last year, the JAG has:

• Hosted a roundtable discussion on measuring progress for girls and women at the 59th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), as well as Girl Declaration advocacy training session and a breakfast for girls and young women advocates to build their capacity to use their voices with the governments;
• Compiled and issued a JAG core indicator recommendations and began preparing comprehensive indicator recommendations for distribution in September 2015; and
• Conducted bilateral meetings with girl advocates at CSW and the Financing for Development Conference in Addis to ensure global leaders heard the importance of comprehensive, rights-based services for girls.

* The Girl Declaration is a call to action to prioritize the education, safety, citizenship, economic and health needs of adolescent girls, including their universal access to youth-friendly health information and services.

The UN Foundation is committed to championing the use of mobile technologies to improve health throughout the world:

• The UN Foundation – through MAMA (the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action), which provides essential health information to women through SMS messages – continues to disseminate post-partum family planning messages to women around the world. Consisting of over 300 unique messages, the post-partum family planning content addresses topics including birth spacing, LAM, and specific contraceptive methods.  The messages are adaptable and can be incorporated into any direct to mother mobile messaging program; to date, they have been downloaded by over 350 organizations around the world. 
• Additionally, in an effort to more comprehensively align with family planning and reproductive health objectives, MAMA has created a seat on its Advisory Board to represent these interests. The seat is currently held by Dr. Kechi Ogbuagu, former Global Coordinator of the Global Program to Enhance Reproductive Health Commodity Security at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Finally, MAMA is working to integrate family planning messaging at the outset of its newest country program in Nigeria; a representative from the UNFPA country office in Nigeria sits on the Messaging and Content Expert Review Committee in order to ensure that appropriate protocols, commodities and standards are included throughout the messaging continuum of this program. 
• In addition, through the Every Woman, Every Child Innovative Working Group Catalytic mHealth Grants Mechanism, the UN Foundation supports 26 organizations in 15 countries through grant funding, capacity building, networking and knowledge exchange. This year in Tanzania and Kenya, we supported FHI360 to implement the Mobile for Reproductive Health (m4RH) service, which is an automated, interactive and on-demand SMS system that provides essential information about the full range of short and long-acting contraceptive methods.

This year UN Foundation entered a new partnership with UNFPA, Merck for Mothers, and Accenture Development Partnerships to expand the private sector’s participation in improving access to family planning. Our goal is to work with the business sector to position family planning as a key strategy to empower girls and women, support women’s, children’s and families’ health, create more vibrant economic markets, and support sustainable and peaceful societies.  We are working to cultivate new, actionable commitments to family planning by companies that will accelerate impact and help draw both constructive attention and further investment. This phase of the project has resulted in the cultivation of four commitments from businesses in the Philippines to provide access to family planning information and services to women in their workforce and communities.

In August 2015, the United Nations Foundation shared an update on progress in achieving its commitments to FP2020.

• Since 2010, the United Nations Foundation has mobilized more than $25 million specifically for programming and advocacy to empower women and girls, including through to comprehensive access to SRHR.
• To further advance our work on issues related to girls and women, in 2015 we hired a Vice President for Girls and Women Strategy to integrate and elevate our work in this area, including family planning and reproductive health.

• This year, our U.S. advocacy efforts through the Universal Access Project helped contribute to sustained U.S. government funding for IRH/FP bilateral programs at $575 million as well as support for UNFPA at $35 million. We continue to cultivate strong, direct relationships with the U.S. government as part of UNF’s overall effort to hold the government accountable to implementing promised policy reforms and increasing integration of family planning into other health programming. More broadly, through UNF’s role as the lead advocacy and communications partner for Every Woman, Every Child, we have played a coordinating role to partners around the world who are advocating to their governments for increased commitments to women’s and children’s health, including family planning.

• In 2012, we released the Why We Care project, which showcases personal stories from U.S. and global leaders who are committed to advancing reproductive health and rights. Since then, we have expanded the platform and added more than two dozen new Champions including Laura Turner Seydel, Governor Bill Richardson, Her Excellency Toyin Saraki, Babatunde Osotimehin, journalist Nicholas Kristof, and others. In 2014, we held two WWC launch events in New York and Washington, D.C., with high-profile champions, including the head of UN Women.

We have continued to use key media moments to promote reproductive health messaging, including placing op-eds in key international and DC-based outlets that highlight the centrality of sexual and reproductive health and rights to women’s empowerment, showcase champions for reproductive health, and focus on the need to invest in youth-friendly reproductive health services.

Finally, we have used innovative communications platforms to disseminate to stakeholders around the world those conversations taking place at major global family planning events. In May 2013, UNF and our partners hosted the first-ever +SocialGood event, which live-streamed a program focused on reproductive health and women’s empowerment to a wide global digital audience. For the International Conference on Family Planning in November 2013, we hosted a week-long press fellowship for seven top journalists from major international outlets to attend the conference and visit clinics in Ethiopia. Following the trip, stories about family planning were published in outlets including Time, CNN, and The New York Times. We also hosted (with our partners) Family Planning +SocialGood, which broadcast conversations on contraceptive security and the power of mobile technology to a digital audience.

In August 2015, the United Nations Foundation shared an update on progress in achieving its commitments to FP2020.

• The United Nations Foundation, through its Universal Access Project (UAP) and in collaboration with partners has worked to advocate for continued United States’ support for international reproductive health and family planning (IRH/FP), including $35 million to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). UAP also supported the U.S. and global advocacy to build support for sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights during the post-2015 negotiations; this contributed to strong references to family planning in the SDG outcome document, a key ingredient to mobilize additional bilateral and multilateral funding over the next 15 years. Finally, through our role as advocacy and communications focal point for the Every Woman, Every Child movement, the UN Foundation has coordinated the advocacy efforts of a network of more than 300 organizations and led communications and digital engagement for the movement.
• The United Nations Foundation, through Universal Access Project, has spearheaded a number of innovative initiatives to promote influential voices aimed at bolstering support for reproductive health. This includes Why We Care, a project launched in 2012 to showcase personal stories from global leaders who are committed to advancing reproductive health and rights. This year, we added more than a dozen new, high-profile Why We Care essayists and launched a new Why We Care Youth Why We Care Youth is aimed at collecting first-person stories from young people across the U.S. highlighting why reproductive health matters in their lives and why U.S. policymakers should support reproductive health for girls and women everywhere. 
• We also partnered with Heidi Murkoff, author of What to Expect When You’re Expecting who has a social media following of 14 million women, International Medical Corps and 1,000 Days to host the social media campaign #BumpDay on July 22.  #BumpDay asked mothers and expectant mothers around the world to use social media to raise awareness of reproductive, maternal and newborn health. The campaign led to more than 40 million media impressions.
• Finally, the UN Foundation continued to build out our press fellowship program with the goal of engaging U.S.-based journalists on sexual and reproductive health issues, with a focus on family planning. In July 2015, we took seven top-tier journalists to Haiti to visit UNFPA and USAID-supported sites and meet with Haitian family planning experts, resulting in several media articles on family planning.