Expanding Contraceptive Choice

Ensuring easy access to a wide range of contraceptive options is at the heart of delivering high-quality family planning services. To meet the needs of adolescents, women, and men, and to reduce unmet need, there must be a constellation of service-delivery outlets (clinics, community-based, and retail outlets) with providers and counselors who have the necessary skills to offer an array of methods that meet client needs and allow for informed choice.

Inherent to E2A’s mandate as USAID’s flagship project for strengthening the delivery of family planning and reproductive health services is expanding method choice and access to increase family planning use and reduce unmet need for contraception. To expand method choice and access, E2A focuses on two areas:

• Integration of family planning and reproductive health services into health and non-health programs. E2A’s activities, to date, include the integration family planning into nutrition programming, strengthening the integration of family planning within postabortion care services, strengthening the delivery of family planning services within prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV services, and providing integrated community-based services that include family planning and maternal, child and newborn health interventions.
• Community-based distribution of family planning services. This is an important and tested strategy for improving access and continuity of services to men, women, and young people especially those residing in rural areas where facility-based services are absent, or at best limited. In its activities, E2A focuses on improving access to injectable contraceptives and long-acting reversible contraception at the community level through community health workers and other community cadres; and enhancing community health worker performance, with a special focus on the use of data for service delivery strengthening.