On December 3, 2009 USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health’s PVO/NGO Flexible Fund held a one day partner’s meeting for Flexible Fund grantees and partners to share practices from community based family planning programs and discuss ways to scale up and support these approaches. USAID and ICF Macro also shared key accomplishments within the Community-based Family Planning initiative, known as the Flexible Fund, and contributions to the pool of knowledge on family planning.

Around 30 participants attended from 24 different organizations including EngenderHealth, PSI, World Vision, Africa 2010, CEDPA, Save the Children, ESD, Knowledge for Health Project (K4H), USAID, World Learning, CARE, Food for the Hungry, URC, George Washington University, IntraHealth, IYF, Christian Connections for International Health, MSH, JHPIEGO, Emerging Markets Group, and Project Hope.  

Victoria Graham opened the meeting and thanked all Flex Fund grantees for a successful 7 years of community based family planning programming.

Leo Ryan, from ICF Macro, presented on the success of Flex Fund grantees in increasing CYP and percent of facilities reporting no stockouts of family planning commodities. In addition, he also discussed the contributions made by ICF Macro and GSM/World Learning to the Flex Fund.

Adrienne Alison, from World Vision, provided an overview of the World Vision Birth Spacing Project including lessons learned, promising practices, results and scaling up. In summary, political will and advocacy linking healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies (HTSP) to the World Vision goal of improving child well-being plus field models that use the timed and targeted counseling strategy along with advocacy, resource and community mobilization will increase World Vision partnerships that support HTSP as a key strategy in improving child and maternal health.

Beth Outterson, from Save the Children, presented a summary of the Maya Salud project in Guatemala. Beth described how the Amigas/Amigos Positive Deviance and the Partnership Defined Quality (PDQ) Strategies improved the quality of family planning services and increased use of family planning methods in the project area. The Amigas/Amigos strategy proved to be an ideal bridge between the project and the community while the PDQ strategy increased demand and supply for sexual and reproductive health services by bringing services closer to clients and engaging community members to promote modern family planning methods.

 

Ruth Madison, from Project Hope, summarized the youth sexual and reproductive health (SRH) program in Uzbekistan. Ruth laid out the challenges that many youth face in accessing youth friendly services in the project area. The recommendations that were discussed at the end were projects should consider implementing a youth friendly SRH component that also includes vocational school students as target groups, as this is an often overlooked population. Ruth also suggested developing a perennial peer education training plan to allow for attrition and graduation of students from the SRH curriculum, allow peer educators to co-teach material with teachers in classes, and have the implementing organization work with the Ministry of Education to have SRH classes made into credit granting courses.

Winnie Mwebesa, from Save the Children, presented their community based family planning program in Guinea. Winnie highlighted the work of Village Health Committees to increase family planning uptake, program highlights and lessons learned/conclusions. Winnie’s conclusions include conducting targeted advocacy with religious leaders, discussing birth spacing/FP in the context of Islam, partnering with religious leaders to clarify misconceptions about religious text banning FP, helping to education communities about the importance of birth spacing/FP, and reaching men.

Julia Freed, from International Youth Foundation, described the model used in Project Samriddhi to integrate reproductive health into existing youth vocational training programs in Andhra Pradesh and Delhi, India. IYF gave a small grant to the local organization, Youtreach, to build the skills of youth educators to teach sexual/reproductive health (SRH) and family planning topics to students aged 15 to 24. The result was an increased knowledge about gender, SRH, and family planning among youth.

Victoria Graham closed the meeting by requesting participants provide feedback on ways that USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health can move forward with strengthening the community-based family planning initiative. The following were some suggestions:

• Request grantees to conduct a cost analysis of implementing a community based family planning program including the cost of each CYP
• Focus on strengthening community health systems and improving the linkage to the district and national level health system
• Request that grantees improve policies in country to contribute to the sustainability of their work
• Flex Fund grantees need larger amounts of funding and project need to be implemented for longer periods of time to see significant change and create sustainable projects
• Grantees should share their lessons learned with USAID mission staff in country so they are aware of what works and what doesn’t and are more invested
• Postpartum Family Planning is an easy fit in community based family planning
• Funding should be provided to more integrated projects. Financial resources from nutrition or PEPFAR to create integrated programs should be considered so comprehensive programs can be implemented. Also consider adding community based family planning programming to the Child Survival Health Grants Program (CSHGP) or the Maternal Child Health Integration Project (MCHIP)
•  Programs should not only focus on health timing and spacing of pregnancies but also focus on moving towards limiting births and implementing behavior change strategies that facilitate beneficiaries to think about ideal family size.

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Powerpoint Presentations

(1) Overview: Community Based Family Planning

(2) World Vision

(3) Save the Children Guatemala

(4)Project Hope Uzbekistan

(5)Save the Children Guinea

(6) International Youth Foundation India