The right to enjoy full, free and informed access to contraceptive information, services and supplies is central to sexual and reproductive health and rights, as well as to the right to the highest attainable standard of health. These rights are universal, inalienable and indivisible, and States have a duty to respect, protect and fulfil these rights to the maximum of their available resources. There are a range of barriers and opportunities that either prevent or enable access to FP. Power, governance and accountability and women’s participation and leadership all influence the outcomes and capacity of key actors to deliver for FP.
The Ethiopian Government made commitments to increase access to Family Planning (FP) as part of FP2020 and to take the measures within their remit to address some of these barriers. Implementation of FP2020 commitments has the potential to transform family planning provision, extending high quality services at scale and reaching the most marginalised. But ambitious commitments and limited political incentives mean that implementation is currently lagging in Ethiopia. Accountability interventions can alter this trend by working with a range of actors so that governments and service providers are better able to meet the commitments they have made, leveraging a scale of impact which would be unachievable by alternative interventions. To achieve this, social accountability programmes must be ‘strategic’: pursuing multiple pathways to change, creating an enabling environment for collective action and linking citizen mobilisation to agents within governments with similar incentives.