As the world changes, achieving universal access to family planning takes on new urgency. With this urgency in mind, the UNFPA has framed new strategy towards meeting family planning needs. The “Expanding Choices – Ensuring Rights in a Diverse and Changing World” broadens our role to capture the full range of fertility and contraceptive policies and services needed to end unmet need for family planning by 2030.
UNFPA said that it recognised the scale of the challenge — the need, opportunity and responsibility to expand choices and ensure rights amid this evolving landscape. Through the new strategy, UNFPA is reframing its approach towards meeting family planning needs in the current decade.
THE PROGRESS TO BE ACHIEVED
Drawing on lessons learned over the past decade, the strategy will shift UNFPA’s work in key ways to drive progress towards 2030:
- Building decisive leadership for family planning as the foundation of sexual and reproductive health and rights. This vision goes beyond contraception to encompass a range of sexual and reproductive health issues — including infertility — as well as beyond a health sector response to changing social norms, laws and policies to enable all individuals to realize their reproductive intentions.
- Breaking down silos to integrate family planning across all that UNFPA does. Repositioning family planning as a foundation of health, development and economic growth, through innovation, use of evidence-based high-impact practices, and responding to emerging needs.
- Fostering a shift from the reliance of countries on external funding to sustainable financing, including supporting countries to invest domestic resources.
PRIORITIES FOR ACTION
- Expand availability and access to family planning choices, including through self-care interventions and new contraceptive method innovations
- Strengthen and disaggregate data to assess barriers, identify opportunities and improve financial tracking, using tools to generate, analyse and apply evidence in advocacy
- Increase sustainability of national family planning programmes with strengthened health systems, more domestic commitment to financing and more efficient use of resources
- Improve quality of person-centred care and services by expanding contraceptive choices, counselling, health workforce skills, competency and quality of care at the service delivery point
- Engage adolescents and youth as agents of change and provide rights-based and gender responsive services, including contraception
- Deepen integration of family planning into national health policies, strategies and plans,
including primary health care and universal health coverage
- Build resilience and improve adaptation, in settings of humanitarian crisis and environmental change, starting with the Minimum Initial Service Package and including family planning in national policies, plans and strategies
- Enhance agency and address discrimination to ensure the full range of family planning services for women and girls from marginalized groups and others at risk of being left behind
