The numeric goal announced at the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning (FP) sparked work to ensure that achieving the goal was undertaken through programming that respects, protects and fulfills human rights enshrined in human rights conventions and in the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. This paper draws on 23 interviews in 2019 with key informants working on FP and engaged with the FP2020 partnership, along with documentation of FP2020 and the FP2030 partnership.
Respondents noted progress, particularly tools and guidelines identifying and explaining rights in relation to FP, promotion of rights-based approaches to programing, strengthened accountability, and measurement of rights-focused outcomes. Moving forward, they recommended: Focusing on country-level rights literacy and implementation, with accountability and continued work on metrics and evidence generation and dissemination. Institutionalizing rights-based FP will require enhanced commitment and funding over the long term.
Review of initial planning under FP2030 related to each of the recommendations suggests that the new partnership is seeking to addressing each of them. This paper helps provide a roadmap for not only building on the gains made over the past decade and to effectively tackle the challenges remaining to ensure rights-based programming to achieve the vision of FP2030.
