Focus Areas
Working towards global reproductive choice; autonomy and empowerment; and gender equality.
Commitment Makers
Creating a future for women and girls with the freedom and ability to lead healthy lives.
FP2030 is based on the principle that all people, no matter how they identify, should have access to a full suite of reproductive health care. Too often in the context of family planning, the LGBTI community is overlooked — sometimes maliciously and sometimes because their needs are misunderstood or ignored. But they are a key population that is at heightened risk of pregnancy, HIV acquisition, gender-based violence, and more.
To ensure the successful delivery of FP2030 Commitments, Pathfinder International under its Advance Family Planning (AFP) has organised an AFP Smart workshop for three selected Advocacy Working Groups (AWG) each from Kaduna, Lagos, and the Gombe States to strengthen their capacity.
Much of the literature on family planning and reproductive health is women-centered. This makes sense — family planning is incredible for women. It protects their physical health by allowing them to space their children and reduce high-risk pregnancies, enables and empowers them to pursue economic and educational opportunities, and helps improve their mental health by allowing them to choose when to have children, if at all.
Earlier this month, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Health, Dr Olorunnimbe Mamora, said that more widespread use of family planning can reduce maternal deaths by 30 percent, saving the lives of about 18,000 women every year.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that everyone’s health is deeply interconnected. We recognized this in the Sustainable Development goals, in SDG3: good health and well being for all. But we will never achieve this goal by segmenting people and their health care. This applies to family planning as well. For too long, family planning has been siloed as a “women’s issue,” but if the most excluded and stigmatized people in our communities can’t use the family planning services available, we won’t succeed in meeting our family planning goals.
It is often assumed that religion has a negative influence on family planning (FP), yet virtually all faith traditions support the concept of healthy timing and spacing of pregnancy. Interfaith support for FP exists, as shown in the Interfaith Declaration to Improve Family Health and Wellbeing, which was signed by a committee of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist leaders, to promote using their networks to promote healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies.
Evidence shows that, to reach global goals related to women and girls’ access to modern family planning (FP) and gender equality, it is critical to understand and account for the role of men and boys as users of reproductive health services, as partners for millions of women & girls around the world, and as advocates in their communities.
An estimated 218 million women across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have an unmet need for contraception: that is, they want to avoid a pregnancy but are not using modern contraceptives. Mass media reaches a large share of the population in these countries, but how effective is it in changing behaviors? To answer this question, Development Media International (DMI) conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of an intensive, 30-month radio campaign in Burkina Faso that promoted family planning. The trial was funded by the Global Innovation Fund (GIF), Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and an individual philanthropist.
