Funder
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Overview
2018–2022
Combining social entrepreneurship and innovative communication approaches, YUVVA improves access to contraceptive choices and positively shifts gender and social norms by delivering customized family planning messages to young couples in 10 districts of Bihar and Maharashtra. YUVAA’s mPari App is designed to support counseling and conversations about contraceptive choices by service providers, healthcare workers, and peer promoters.
Project Activities
- Ensure a gender-synchronized approach that places young people’s needs and perspectives are at the center of intervention design.
- Provide young couples with sources of information, counseling, referrals, and delivery of over-the-counter contraceptive methods through a cadre of trained young couple entrepreneurs, called the Yuvaa Corps.
- Encourage couples’ communication and joint decision-making, while increasing young couples’ agency in making independent decisions.
- Foster an environment emphasizing and supporting pregnancy only when couples are physically, mentally, and economically ready.
- Increase availability of evidence-informed resources and tools supporting contraceptive uptake among young married couples and first-time parents.
- Pilot innovative digital technologies, job aids, and communications approaches to increase young married couples’ and first-time parents’ access to contraceptive information and services.
- Partner with Camber Collective, Dalberg, Gram Vaani, Dharma Life, and Northeastern University to solve for scale and sustainability using innovative and youth-focused methods.
