Jhpiego is the Initiative’s implementing partner for the East Africa Accelerator Hub. Since 2010, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Jhpiego-led Tupange Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (URHI) Project has been addressing urban family planning supply and demand side interventions as well as advocacy in five urban cities of Kenya, including Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, Machakos and Kakamega. These efforts have contributed to unprecedented improvements in the contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) of these cities from 45% to 58% over the project implementation period (MLE, Tupange, 2014).

The Initiative will assist Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and potentially more countries in East Africa, to scale up family planning in order to reach additional women and girls with voluntary FP services over the next three to five years. The East Africa (EA) Hub’s strategy is to amplify the momentum achieved by Tupange’s success by translating URHI best practices in family planning programming to provide geographies throughout East Africa with the necessary tools, knowledge, skills and financial commitment necessary to achieve scale in coverage of high-quality, sustainable family planning services.

The Initiative is envisioned as a ground-breaking new demand-driven model of ensuring that quality reproductive health services will be expanded to more women and girls by scaling up successfully tested URHI innovations and related best practices.