Accelerating Access to Postpartum and Postabortion Family Planning: Workshop Report

Family Planning 2030 (FP2030) hosted the Accelerating Access to Postpartum and Postabortion Family Planning Workshop, an innovative working meeting, in Kathmandu, Nepal, from Oct. 31 to Nov. 3, 2023. Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the workshop was designed to bring together country delegates, key international stakeholders, and technical partners (see Appendix A for a complete participant list and Appendix B for technical partners) to learn, discuss, and work together to scale up postpartum family planning (PPFP) and postabortion family planning (PAFP) using High-Impact Practices (HIPs). More than 150 participants from 15 countries — Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Zambia — met and worked together to fast-track their country’s action plans to accelerate progress toward their FP2030 family planning (FP) commitments with a focus on reaching postpartum and postabortion women, particularly pregnant adolescents whose family planning needs are frequently overlooked.

The workshop’s primary objectives were to:

  1. Convene 15 country delegations from Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa and Asia to review the status of their PPFP and PAFP programs.
  2. Review country data, barrier analysis, and HIPs to identify critical gaps and possible solutions to address barriers to scale up.
  3. Conduct south-to-south country exchange, learn from exemplars and innovators, and share challenges.
  4. Support each country in identifying three strategic priorities and corresponding action steps to accelerate the uptake of rights-based PPFP and PAFP.
  5. Advance PPFP and PAFP data and measurement goals to support evidence-informed policy and program decision-making.