Family Planning & Reproductive Health Resources

Research Briefs

Quality of Family Planning Programs in HIV/AIDS Care and Treatment Clinics

Research from Tanzania evaluates the quality of family planning (FP) services provided in the two models of FP/HIV integrated service delivery and assesses the extent to which provision of FP services in care and treatment centers meets established national standards for FP service delivery.

Factors Influencing the Adoption of Postpartum Family Planning

This study questioned women attending antenatal care in Ghana to explore factors that influence their willingness to adopt postpartum family planning.

Involving Men in Family Planning Programs and Services

Research was conducted in Rwanda to investigate the barriers to integrating men into family planning programs.

The Evolution of Community-Based Distribution of Family Planning in Kenya

Kenya's community-based health program was investigated to evaluate policy and programmatic changes and determine how they have impacted access to and use of family planning methods in Kenya.

Improving Access to Family Planning Can Promote Food Security in a Changing Climate

New research in Ethiopia demonstrates that slower population growth can also play a significant role in promoting future food security in a climate-altered world.

Fact Sheets

These BEST Country Fact Sheets summarize a few findings from secondary analyses of select Demographic Health Surveys. Separate wealth classifications for urban and rural women were constructed to examine inequalities in key population and reproductive health indicators, including family planning and antenatal care. The analyses demonstrate that disaggregating relative wealth by place of residence may reveal patterns obscured by national trends and the importance of examining multiple indicators.

Tools and Guides

Guide for Monitoring Scale-up of Health Practices and Interventions

This guide was developed as a "how-to" resource to provide program implementers with a low-cost and replicable approach to monitoring the process of scaling up and institutionalizing innovations in health, particularly family planning. The goal is to assist country stakeholders with identifying if scale-up is happening as intended, assess if the scale-up is adhering to the model or pilot, and determine if the scale-up efforts can be sustained to achieve the desired impact.

GIS Data Linking to Enhance Multi-sectoral Decision Making for Family Planning and Reproductive Health

The MEASURE Evaluation PRH project conducted an activity to investigate and document the process of using a geographic information system (GIS) to link family planning/reproductive health data with data from multiple sectors. With Rwanda as a case study, this tool shows how GIS can help overcome the stovepiping of data and enhance the visualization and analysis of family planning/reproductive health data.

Framework for Monitoring and Evaluating Efforts to Reposition Family Planning

With illustrative indicators and a detailed framework for monitoring and evaluating repositioning family planning (FP) services, this tool can be used by international donors, governments, and programs to assess their repositioning efforts, identify gaps in strategies to reposition FP in countries, and to inform funding, program design, policy and advocacy, and program planning and improvement. To accompany the framework and indicators, the Repositioning Family Planning: Decision Support Tool Manual was designed to provide a way for stakeholders to gather information about the indicators and receive feedback to help with decision makingThe manual provides background about the framework, as well as guidance about applying the framework and the decision support tool.

Performance Management Plans: A Checklist for Quality Assessment

A performance management plan (PMP) establishes guidelines for the collection of specific information that will be used to assess program or project progress and guide decision making. A 14-item checklist provided in this guide is designed to help managers decide whether or not a document has the basic characteristics of a good PMP.

Addressing Poverty: A Guide for Considering Poverty-Related and Other Inequalities in Health

Taken as a whole, this guide covers the spectrum from priority-setting to monitoring and evaluation. Each chapter can also be used as a self-contained module, depending where a particular Mission is in its planning cycle.

Modeling Climate Change, Food Security, and Population

A computer simulation model was developed to help clarify the dynamic relationships between climate change, food security, and population growth. The aim was to develop a model that would be simple enough to adapt to a country and that could be used at the policy level to introduce population issues into the dialogue on adaptation to climate change in the context of food security.

A Guide for Monitoring and Evaluation Population-Health-Environment Programs

Combines efforts to help communities manage and conserve their natural resource base with efforts to improve their health and access to family planning information and services.

An Overview of Spatial Data Protocols Guide for Family Planning Activities: Why and How to Include the "Where" in Your Data

Data with a geographic component are particularly well-suited to support monitoring and evaluation efforts and evidence-based decision making within family planning activities. This guide presents key concepts involved in the collection and use of spatially referenced family planning data.

International Planned Parenthood Federation Routine Data Quality Assessment Tool: User's Guide

This user’s guide is a reference document designed to complement the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) Routine Data Quality Assessment (RDQA) tool. The RDQA approach to evaluating data quality was selected and adapted for use by IPPF’s member associations due to its flexible nature and its usefulness in identifying weaknesses in data quality flow. This user’s guide includes an overview of the IPPF RDQA tool and detailed guidance on the implementation and use of the tool. Instructions on using the tool can also be found within the tool itself.

Population, Health and Environment M&E Training Tool Kit

This training tool kit aims to increase the M&E capacity, skills and knowledge of those who plan, implement, and evaluate innovative, integrated health and community development programs in low-resource settings. The tool kit provides managers, technical specialists, and M&E staff with user-friendly, modifiable training components to adapt for a specific developing-country and programmatic context.

Reports

Methods for Estimating the Costs of Family Planning: Report of the Expert Group Meeting on Family Planning Costing

This report is a summary of an expert meeting held in June 2011 to discuss issues related to methods of estimating family planning program costs. Such estimates have been used by government officials to plan national and subnational budgets, by nongovernmental organizations and donors to determine levels of donor support at all levels, and for advocacy purposes at all levels to highlight shortfalls in funding or to put family planning program costs into perspective for various audiences.