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Harnessing service statistics to monitor trends in contraceptive uptake: Methodology and application to a large-scale family planning program

J.M. Ian Salas, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Jessica Mirano, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

The Challenge Initiative (TCI) is a scale-up platform that aims to improve access to and uptake of reproductive health solutions in urban poor populations, currently covering almost 100 cities in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. TCI developed a methodology to regularly track progress toward outcomes, refocusing attention to derived changes in contraceptive use rather than absolute levels. The three new indicators that TCI devised (client volume, derived number of additional users, and derived change in mCPR or DCM) harness ubiquitous, high-frequency yet underutilized service statistics data. They take into account specific characteristics of each data element and contraceptive method, including appropriate adjustments using CYP factors for short-acting methods and discontinuation rates for long-acting reversible methods. Further application of the approach includes the aggregation of data, allowing for comparisons with national trends using a before-and-since analysis. The results in this paper illustrate that sound monitoring of family planning programs can be accomplished using this new methodology and can aid timely evidence-based programmatic decision-making. TCI believes these indicators and analytic approaches can be useful to and easily used by any family planning program.

Keywords: Family planning and contraception, Cross-country comparative analyses, Harmonized data sets, Methodology

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P23.