Elements of Family Planning Success

This compendium was developed with the help of many individuals. At the request of the USAID East Africa Regional Mission with the Inter-agency Gender Working Group (USAID), MEASURE Evaluation developed this compendium in collaboration with a technical advisory group (TAG) of experts. The goal was to develop a set of monitoring and evaluation indicators for program managers, organizations, and policy makers who are working to address violence against women and girls (VAW/G) at the individual, community, district/provincial and national levels in developing countries.

This manual is intended to promote positive health outcomes for mothers, newborns, and infants by improving health workers' skills in fostering healthy timing and spacing of pregnancy (HTSP). It provides practical information and guidance on how to conduct a two-day training for primary health facility-based health workers in providing postpartum family planning information, education, and counselling, and in increasing postpartum women's access to all family planning (FP) methods and services.

This archive constitutes legacy of The ACQUIRE Project and has been designed as a searchable knowledge resource for the reproductive health and family planning (RH/FP) community. It contains a wide range of resources that were developed over the life of the project, at both the global and the country (field) levels. This content reflects the experience of programs from all regions and the outcomes of an extended global-field partnership dedicated to delivering more services to more people in more places.

This Population Reports issue is the flagship publication of the "Elements of Family Planning Success" initiative that identified the top 10 elements most important to the success of family planning programs in coordination with health care professionals from around the world. The report synthesizes online discussions about these elements and highlights program experiences, best practices, and evidence-based guidance derived from nearly six decades in international family planning.

This case profile highlights a suite of supply-chain projects in reproductive health that serve as examples of PATH's efforts in strengthening health systems. Key issues related to the availability, affordability, and quality of reproductive health supplies are summarized along with PATH’s efforts to improve manufacturing, purchasing, and distribution of reproductive health supplies globally.

This short publication offers clear suggestions for programme managers to address unmet need for family planning in the face of current political, financial, and health-systems challenges. It also comprises the 25th anniversary issue of Outlook, which since 1983, has synthesized the latest scientific research and evidence on effective reproductive health programming and made it available to programme managers, policymakers, health care providers, researchers, and educators around the world.

You are cordially invited to explore and utilize the new Resource Package for Family Planning and Beyond: The ACQUIRE Project Digital Archive at http://www.acquireproject.org/archive

This article presents the personal story of a manager in the Ministry of Health who benefited from the Project’s leadership development training and went in to train key managers in the health sector.

Imagine you’re a health-sector manager faced with competing priorities for your country’s valuable human resources for health (HRH). You need data to help you make the most effective decisions, yet the information you seek is not easy to find—and not always easy to understand. “Often looking at the data, I was not quite sure what to do exactly,” admits one health manager in Swaziland. Another manager laments that trying to gather information “was a nightmare because the data was not readily available, not well analyzed and often wrong.”

This brief discusses concepts of data quality and provide examples of the importance of data management specific to the field of HRH, illustrated by the Capacity Project’s experience with HRIS strengthening in developing countries.