Youth

For E2A, young people were much more than a key population in need of information and health care. They were our valued partners and, increasingly, our priority in nearly every country where we worked. Our support for young people (ages 15–24) was cross-cutting and driven by four basic principles: (1) recognizing the diversity of youth and their corresponding needs, (2) cultivating youth participation and leadership, (3) utilizing socio-ecological model to guide our overall strategy for the improvement of adolescent and youth reproductive health, and (4) employing a gender-transformative approach.

We intentionally focused on uniquely vulnerable youth populations, like first-time mothers and fathers, who are often starting their reproductive lives without critical information and health services. By promoting a carefully sequenced package of information and services, our programs addressed the immediate reproductive health needs of young first-time parents and facilitated their action to improve their families’ wellbeing and future.

Credit: Sandra Samuel, Wisdom Bassey and their daughter. Photo: Seun Asala

Broadening Family Planning Impact

The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda recognizes the transformative benefits of voluntary family planning—for people, the planet, and prosperity. When women and couples can exercise their right to freely decide whether, when, and how many children they want to have, the whole world benefits. Universal access to family planning contributes to broader development goals, including women’s and girls’ empowerment, gender equality, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability. And, as demonstrated by E2A’s work across Africa to define, refine, apply, and scale up family planning best practices, we have learned how to focus family planning resources to have the greatest impact.

E2A seized opportunities to broaden the impact of family planning by creating synergistic and mutually beneficial partnerships across sectors, closing evidence gaps, addressing emerging health threats, and engaging stakeholders who are often left behind. Explore our publications below to see what happens when a global family planning program says, “No more missed opportunities.”

Credit: Fausta Najjuuko, Bussi Island, Uganda. Photo: Maren Vespia

Scale

Since E2A’s inception, we made it our mission to help introduce or scale up best practices in family planning and reproductive health service delivery for women and girls. This meant taking deliberate steps to increase the impact of innovations successfully tested in pilot projects, so they could benefit more people and foster lasting improvements in health policies and programs.

Scale-up should not be left to chance. It requires a systematic process that begins at the design stage and continues throughout the life of a project. E2A and our partners—led by scale-up leader ExpandNet—gained significant experience applying this systematic scale-up approach across multiple countries. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, and Uganda, our scale-up approaches were adopted by governments, institutions, and implementing organizations. Together with partners across Africa, we successfully scaled up numerous best practices, including community-based family planning; innovative peer education approaches for youth, integrated population, health, and environment activities; and task-shifting and task-sharing to expand method choice.

We believe systematic scale-up is one of the keys to achieving global family planning goals. Explore our publications below to see why.

Credit: In Côte d’Ivoire, Pathfinder and its partners support the Ministry of Health to increase access to quality reproductive health services. Photo: Courtney Boudreau

Method Choice

Family planning is one of the best and most cost-effective investments in international development. Supporting women and couples to freely decide whether and when to have children provides more than just immediate health and family life benefits. It also helps countries achieve stability, increase economic and social opportunity, expand the civic space to include more women, and promote social accountability between governments and civil societies.

As USAID’s global flagship for strengthening family planning and reproductive health service delivery, we were fiercely committed to expanding access to a full range of contraceptive options with special attention to the promotion of client-centered, voluntary, and informed choice. Across 17 countries, through our family planning programs, scale-up initiatives, and strategic partnerships across the globe, we infused method choice in everything we did. We believe method choice is a reproductive right: everyone should have access to contraceptives that will help them achieve their reproductive intentions.

Credit: A health worker explains oral contraceptive pills to a client in Muyinga province, Burundi. Credit: Sala Lewis