Intrahealth shared the following update on progress in achieving its FP2020 commitments:
IntraHealth has been working towards this commitment through our projects in Mali and Senegal and our role as the host for the Ouagadougou Partnership Coordination Unit.
- In Senegal, our leadership of a combination of projects* has contributed to the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs achievement of 20% modern CPR in 2013-14. IntraHealth is supporting Senegal in implementing its national costed implementation plan with advocacy, community mobilization and outreach in collaboration with religious leaders, training of health workers, and contraceptive logistics support.
- IntraHealth International, in collaboration with Senegal’s Ministry of Health, is expanding access to—and use of—family planning by reducing contraceptive stockouts. Together we’re implementing the Informed Push Model, which reinvests proceeds from clients’ contraceptive purchases back into the public contraceptive supply system to ensure the constant flow and availability of products. The model makes a wide range of family planning commodities available, allowing women to more freely choose the methods they want at affordable prices. When the Informed Push Model has been introduced into health centers, average monthly stock out rates have fallen from as high as 80% to less than 2%. The Informed Push Model is functioning nationwide to improve the family planning supply chain in Senegal’s public sector, where contraceptive shortages have long persisted.
- In Mali through our USAID-funded Capacity Building for Fistula Treatment and Prevention in Mali Project, IntraHealth is working with the Ministry of Health and local partners to ensure that women leaving fistula repair centers are offered and can voluntarily accept family planning methods if interested. The project is working with five centers and recorded and there are 1,333 new FP users since the start of the project.
- The Ouagadougou Partnership has increased the number of new users of modern contraceptives since 2011 by 1.18* million in Francophone West Africa, surpassing the Partnership’s goal of 1 million new users. [* Senegalese Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (ISSU in French) – Gates funded; Health Services Improvement (USAID funded); Informed Push Model (Gates and Merck for Mothers); ** Estimation from Track20 based on data available through June 2015]
IntraHealth is committed to expand use of mobile technologies to increase health workers’ access to accurate, up-to-date information on family planning and reproductive health services:
- In Senegal, IntraHealth continues to roll-out a data collection system on mobile devices referred to as “SEDA”. This system is now used in half of the 14 regions of the country, enabling health workers to more easily report their service statistics and health managers to understand performance at the various levels of the health system. The software for this system is also being fed directly into DHIS2 as well which facilitates health information management.
- In Mali and Senegal, IntraHealth’s suite of Human Workforce Information Software, iHRIS, is available for ministries of health and divisions of human resources to manage their health workforce. In Senegal, this software is interoperable with the SEDA system thereby allowing for eventual analysis of health workforce presences against health services and health outcomes statistics. In Mali, the analysis showed that were more health workers are present, contraceptive prevalence is higher.
IntraHealth has continued to support the integration of family planning services with routine immunization.
- In Senegal, where we have rolled out systematic screening—offering every woman who comes to a health facility an opportunity for counselling and family planning services—in 10 zones. Family planning also has been systematically integrated into post-abortion care.
- In Mali, IntraHealth is supporting the integration of family planning into national post-fistula repair protocols to ensure that every woman, post-repair, leaves with the contraceptive method of her choice.
In Mali and Senegal, IntraHealth continues to collaborate closely with national midwives associations to ensure their support of an enabling policy environment for family planning.
IntraHealth continues to work in Senegal, in particular, on increase male acceptance of and support for family planning.
- IntraHealth has addressed this social barrier through collaboration with religious leaders, particularly the Reseau Islamic et Population (RIP). We have written sermons for imans to deliver that reference where the Koran supports health families (e.g., healthy timing and spacing), we have developed briefing documents for religious leaders to use with men to indicate how Islam supports FP. In addition, we continue to work with key religious families in Senegal to have their support for healthy families including greater support for and communication with their members about ANC, skilled delivery at birth, nutrition, vaccination and FP/RH. We are working with 27 companies in Senegal to encourage greater access of health services, particularly FP/RH and for men to support FP/RH.
IntraHealth continues to support advocacy for family planning on the part of civil society in West Africa, including youth, through our initiative “Civil Society for Family Planning” or CS4FP.
- This initiative, funded by the Hewlett Foundation supports coalitions of civil society members in five countries (Benin, Burkina, Mali, Niger and Senegal). Each coalition is working to support implementation of the national costed implementation plans in alignment with the Ouagadougou Partnership and FP2020. In Mali, Benin and Senegal, the initiative has support identification and preparation of a total of 93 “Jeunes Ambassadors” who are peer educators and advocates for FP. They are active on social media, tracking events in country relating to the CIP implementation and raising awareness to encourage their governments to honor their Ouaga and FP2020 commitments.
- In 2014 alone, IntraHealth reached 260,280 health workers with training and support. In turn, those health workers provided care, often including family planning services, to more than 520 million individuals.
