Join FP2020 by Making a Commitment

• Aman Foundation, through the Sukh initiative is committed to share best practices and research to aid evidence based decision making. The intention is to share the best of time practices for family planning project scale ups and sustainability with potential users of the information. The Department of Community Health Sciences, Aga Khan University as a measurement partner for Sukh Initiative, is to provide an external and independent measurement of program impact through a cross sectional survey of a sample population within the 1 million intervention population in the form of a baseline and an endline. Program impact will be measured as per the objectives and program goals outlined and agreed upon in the Sukh program framework. The measurement partner will conduct a mid-term assessment of program progress towards identified goals and also an independent analysis of progress monitoring and PMIS data on an annual basis and participate in an annual review of program progress. A dedicated position of Manager Research and Metrics has been introduced to the Sukh initiative with sole responsibility of identifying and developing research questions and hypotheses and with program data to identify best practices and evidence based impact studies. The activity is to commence from 2015 when field level service data becomes available for a meaningful and effective sample study.   

• To increase the ambit of Sukh strategy and build on the success of different models implemented in the country, Sukh Initiative has evolved an exclusive technical body which is widely represented by the Sindh Government, development partners, technical experts both from public and private sector. This body aims to create synergy between different stakeholders including the government departments in Sindh. Sukh is also working at the community level through more than 200 community base organizations. To create an enabling environment for family planning services, Sukh is working in close collaboration with the provincial Departments of Health, Population Welfare, Education and Youth Affairs, to strengthen the existing systems in the intervention areas and play a leadership role in advocating for the sustainability of its objectives.

• [Aman Foundation's family planning] program will promote longer term, more effective contraceptive methods. Sukh through increasing MCPR will motivate new users to adopt family planning for the first time, and encourage users of traditional methods to switch to more reliable modern methods. The connection between increased MCPR and reduced maternal mortality rates is well established, as is its direct contribution to lowering the total fertility rate. To improve quality of services to increase access to family planning, Sukh strengthens the quality of services locally available and will develop capacity of maternity homes to offer quality post-partum and post abortion family planning services. Jhpiego as implementing partner will work with public sector facilities to improve access to FP services (by method) and with improved quality of service.

• One of the multiple service provision levers for the Sukh project is Family Life Education through Aahung, a local organization with previous experience in working with young girls and boys in communities on the sensitive issues related to maternal health, marriage rights and communication. Sukh will include door to door counselling and service delivery through Aman Community Health Program, to educate and inform the family planning clients on importance of family planning, choices available for family planning supplies, health hazards and other healthcare topics. In addition, Aman TeleHealth a 24-hour round the clock, 26-desks Health Helpline services over 3 shifts with medical advisors, counselors and doctors, will provide health advice and referral information over the phone. This will empower and encourage women and youth in particular, to avail the widely used mobile phone services to seek timely medical counseling that otherwise would not be accessible to them.

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.

• After the London Summit on Family Planning in 2012, Mozambique planned the purchase of contraceptives via the Central de Medicamentos e Artigos Médicos for 2013, and covered 25 percent of the budget necessary for contraceptives.

• The Government of Mozambique is striving to establish new partnerships with the private sector and donors in the SRH/FP area. [For this purpose] and in collaboration with UNFPA [Fundo das Nações Unidas para a População (United Nations Population Fund)], financing was received from the Government of the Netherlands in November 2013 to promote and offer SRH services using m-Health.

• Resources from the Government of Korea were mobilized to support the National Integrated Plan to reach the Millennium Development Goals [Objetivos de Desenvolvimento do Milênio ] 4 and 5, and the UK Department for International Development for community distribution of contraceptives.

Intrahealth shared the following update on progress in achieving its FP2020 commitments:

IntraHealth has been working towards this commitment through our projects in Mali and Senegal and our role as the host for the Ouagadougou Partnership Coordination Unit.

• In Senegal, our leadership of a combination of projects* has contributed to the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs achievement of 20% modern CPR in 2013-14. IntraHealth is supporting Senegal in implementing its national costed implementation plan with advocacy, community mobilization and outreach in collaboration with religious leaders, training of health workers, and contraceptive logistics support.
• IntraHealth International, in collaboration with Senegal's Ministry of Health, is expanding access to—and use of—family planning by reducing contraceptive stockouts. Together we’re implementing the Informed Push Model, which reinvests proceeds from clients’ contraceptive purchases back into the public contraceptive supply system to ensure the constant flow and availability of products. The model makes a wide range of family planning commodities available, allowing women to more freely choose the methods they want at affordable prices. When the Informed Push Model has been introduced into health centers, average monthly stock out rates have fallen from as high as 80% to less than 2%. The Informed Push Model is functioning nationwide to improve the family planning supply chain in Senegal’s public sector, where contraceptive shortages have long persisted.
• In Mali through our USAID-funded Capacity Building for Fistula Treatment and Prevention in Mali Project, IntraHealth is working with the Ministry of Health and local partners to ensure that women leaving fistula repair centers are offered and can voluntarily accept family planning methods if interested. The project is working with five centers and recorded and there are 1,333 new FP users since the start of the project.
• The Ouagadougou Partnership has increased the number of new users of modern contraceptives since 2011 by 1.18* million in Francophone West Africa, surpassing the Partnership’s goal of 1 million new users. [* Senegalese Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (ISSU in French) – Gates funded; Health Services Improvement (USAID funded); Informed Push Model (Gates and Merck for Mothers); ** Estimation from Track20 based on data available through June 2015]

IntraHealth is committed to expand use of mobile technologies to increase health workers’ access to accurate, up-to-date information on family planning and reproductive health services:

• In Senegal, IntraHealth continues to roll-out a data collection system on mobile devices referred to as “SEDA”. This system is now used in half of the 14 regions of the country, enabling health workers to more easily report their service statistics and health managers to understand performance at the various levels of the health system. The software for this system is also being fed directly into DHIS2 as well which facilitates health information management.
• In Mali and Senegal, IntraHealth’s suite of Human Workforce Information Software, iHRIS, is available for ministries of health and divisions of human resources to manage their health workforce. In Senegal, this software is interoperable with the SEDA system thereby allowing for eventual analysis of health workforce presences against health services and health outcomes statistics. In Mali, the analysis showed that were more health workers are present, contraceptive prevalence is higher.

IntraHealth has continued to support the integration of family planning services with routine immunization.

• In Senegal, where we have rolled out systematic screening—offering every woman who comes to a health facility an opportunity for counselling and family planning services—in 10 zones. Family planning also has been systematically integrated into post-abortion care.
• In Mali, IntraHealth is supporting the integration of family planning into national post-fistula repair protocols to ensure that every woman, post-repair, leaves with the contraceptive method of her choice.

In Mali and Senegal, IntraHealth continues to collaborate closely with national midwives associations to ensure their support of an enabling policy environment for family planning.

IntraHealth continues to work in Senegal, in particular, on increase male acceptance of and support for family planning.

• IntraHealth has addressed this social barrier through collaboration with religious leaders, particularly the Reseau Islamic et Population (RIP). We have written sermons for imans to deliver that reference where the Koran supports health families (e.g., healthy timing and spacing), we have developed briefing documents for religious leaders to use with men to indicate how Islam supports FP. In addition, we continue to work with key religious families in Senegal to have their support for healthy families including greater support for and communication with their members about ANC, skilled delivery at birth, nutrition, vaccination and FP/RH. We are working with 27 companies in Senegal to encourage greater access of health services, particularly FP/RH and for men to support FP/RH.

IntraHealth continues to support advocacy for family planning on the part of civil society in West Africa, including youth, through our initiative “Civil Society for Family Planning” or CS4FP.

• This initiative, funded by the Hewlett Foundation supports coalitions of civil society members in five countries (Benin, Burkina, Mali, Niger and Senegal). Each coalition is working to support implementation of the national costed implementation plans in alignment with the Ouagadougou Partnership and FP2020. In Mali, Benin and Senegal, the initiative has support identification and preparation of a total of 93 “Jeunes Ambassadors” who are peer educators and advocates for FP. They are active on social media, tracking events in country relating to the CIP implementation and raising awareness to encourage their governments to honor their Ouaga and FP2020 commitments.