Overview

Between 2016 and 2021, through the Integrated Family Planning Program (IFPP), Pathfinder reached women with a particularly high unmet need for FP services. Pathfinder’s Improved Family Planning Initiative (IFPI) will scale up key interventions from the IFPP Activity to address maternal and newborn health challenges, with a focus on rural and vulnerable populations in the Nampula, Sofala and Zambezia provinces. IFPI will address barriers to reproductive health through individual and community connections, family planning service points, and removing policy and institutional barriers to care.

Project Activities

• Engages a variety of stakeholders (women, adolescents/youth, men, couples, parents/care givers, community/religious leaders, etc.) to identify key drivers and barriers to behavioral change.
• Creates safe spaces for reflection to critically assess and question social and gender norms and address power imbalances.
• Holds gender-transformative community dialogues, parent-child communication activities, and household visits.
• Deploys of a network of trained community health workers who conduct household visits and provide family planning (FP) counseling, FP commodities (e.g., pills, injectables, condoms), and referrals.
• Conducts neighborhood meetings with men and women to build critical consciousness and knowledge about reproductive health and make recommendations on how to improve contraceptive uptake and safety.
• Through mobile platforms, engages youth (15-24) in a role-model story and informational message system to increase knowledge about contraceptive methods, dispel common myths around contraception, address common barriers youth face surrounding the use of contraception, and refer clients to the nearest family planning service points.