Responding to the Need for Family Planning through Expanded Contraceptive Choices and Program Services (RESPOND)

Overview

The RESPOND Project, a five-year cooperative agreement funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), works to increase the use of high-quality family planning (FP) services. Lead by EngenderHealth, the project addresses the unmet need for healthy timing, spacing, and limiting of childbearing by improving access to long-acting and permanent methods (LA/PMs) of contraception. RESPOND promotes renewed and sustained focus on four essential programmatic principles:

• Employing evidence-based holistic planning that brings together supply, demand, and advocacy.
• Ensuring the fundamentals of care—informed and voluntary decision making, medical safety, and ongoing quality improvement.
• Addressing gender equity in decision making, services, and programs.
• Ushering programs from pilot to scale and from advocacy to action.

As part of the implementing team, CCP will support strategic social and behavior change communication initiatives that focus on demand generation for family planning and reproductive health services.

Accomplishments

Project plans include:

• Provide technical assistance in the development, implementation and evaluation of demand generation across the project.
• Support the revitalization and evaluation of Community Postabortion Care activities in Kenya.
• Lead in the development of the Communication tab in the Implants Toolkit, an electronic toolkit modeled on the MAQ IUD toolkit.
• Support the development of a multi-country qualitative study exploring the key factors that influence the decision to use LA/PMs.
• Develop a comprehensive social and behavior change communication strategy for LA/PMs in Ghana.