Priorities for Family Planning Post-2020: What’s at the Top of the List?
By Jay Gribble and Barbara Seligman
The short answer is political support. At the end of the day, whether 300 million women and girls have access to modern contraception depends on 69 countries. Many of those countries have mobilized political and financial resources to achieve or exceed the family planning access goals they set for 2020. Others have not.
Our guest bloggers in this series provided specific examples and recommendations for: creating regional advocacy platforms; reframing family planning priorities so men and youth see it as their issue, too; tapping into social movements for change; and creating and seizing opportunities to secure new revenue streams to ensure sustainable domestic funding. Development partners can provide resources and technical assistance, engage heads of state, and help keep the family planning goals on the agenda. But the goals won’t be met without real commitment from the countries themselves, starting with dedicated and competent technical and political leadership.
Committed leadership drives change. Decisionmakers need to be open to new evidence and see issues from new perspectives. As Dr. Azra Fazal Pechuho and colleagues from Pakistan point out, the confluence of capable leaders, institutions, and social norms can make a tremendous difference in translating family planning ideals into reality. The story of how Pakistan’s Sindh Province developed its Costed Implementation Plan reflects an important reality — even when things appear to be working out, the work is never done: Funding is never enough funding, social and cultural barriers always exist, governance structures are not perfect in a decentralized setting. But having the right kind of leadership is vital to advancing a post-2020 family planning agenda.
Securing political support means building coalitions, sharing power, and having the flexibility to define an issue so more constituencies own it. Thought leader Meg Greene argues this means creating space for men to be at the forefront in promoting reproductive health and family planning, and gender equality. Creating this space will require reframing family planning and reproductive health advocacy to include priorities that resonate with men and letting go of the naïve hope that men will put their political capital forward for an issue where they are but add-on partners; to engage men, we need to continue to redefine family planning as more than a women’s issue.
“Looking toward a bold future is important, but we must learn from our successes and continue to make them relevant as we move forward.”
Harnessing youth power, a potentially formidable political force, means broadening the framework for discussing family planning so what youth care most about — meaningful youth engagement in designing programs and direct funding to youth organizations — feature prominently on the agenda. Founding member of the global International Youth Alliance for Family Planning and youth advocate, Burcu Bozkurt, cautions advocates not to assume youth will “buy-in” to a status quo family planning agenda. Youth demand what any other constituency wants — respect, autonomy, and direct access to resources and funders.
Looking toward a bold future is important, but we must learn from our successes and continue to make them relevant as we move forward. How have diverse constituencies joined forces to advance a family planning agenda — without diluting the role of family planning? Herminia Reyes and colleagues of USAID’s flagship Health Policy Plus project in Guatemala describe how human rights, public health, safe motherhood, and family planning advocates successfully secured revenue from a new alcohol tax to fund family planning programs and contraceptive commodities. Knowing how to take advantage of a political moment to advance the family planning cause and staying on top of those commitments — keeping opponents away from those scarce resources — requires a broad, concerted effort in which all actors understand the benefits and continue to fight for them.
Fatimata Sy, the visionary former leader of the Ouagadougou Partnership, led a regional movement to coordinate family planning goals and funds, share knowledge, and engage in healthy competition across nine francophone West African countries, including some of the poorest on the continent. The Partnership encouraged government family planning advocates to build alliances with other movements — such as climate change, women’s rights, and human rights — that have shared goals. Using new financing mechanisms, such as equitable matching funds, governments in the region mobilized critical domestic resources for family planning. The response was overwhelming. More women and girls voluntarily began using modern contraceptive methods since 2011 when the Partnership mobilized than had over the past 30 years.
Taking a bold stance in support of family planning is not only critical to the post-2020 agenda; it is also our mandate. The issues raised in this series of blogs on the post-2020 agenda represent the beginning of a conversation. Other issues, such as inclusion of family planning in Universal Health Care initiatives, innovative efforts to finance family planning, and the need for an accountability framework related to family planning commitments are certain to be prominent in discussions about future directions for global family planning. Barack Obama summed up this moment well — “We don’t fear the future, we shape it.” To shape the future we want for all women and men, girls and boys, funders and advocates alike need to adapt their approaches, their strategies, and especially their tactics, broaden the tent, and adjust to shifting political realities so that political leaders in the Family Planning 2020 countries — and beyond — respect family planning as a national priority upheld by a powerful coalition of national interests.
