International Women’s Day - March 8, 2007

Family Planning and Reproductive Health

USAID’s family planning and reproductive health programs enable couples to determine the timing and spacing of their children, which is vital to safe motherhood and healthy families. Voluntary family planning has profound health, economic, and social benefits for women including:

• Reducing high-risk pregnancies
• Fighting HIV/AIDS through providing information, counseling, and access to male and female condoms
• Reducing abortion
• Supporting women's rights and opportunities for education, employment, and full participation in society

Success Stories

• "Among Us Women" - Family Planning Initiative Gives Romanian Factory Workers the Facts [PDF, 293KB]
  Population Services International’s “Among Us Women” (AUW) initiative is helping the Romanian government to educate women of reproductive age by providing them with voluntary family planning and reproductive health information. The program targets factory workers in an effort to improve awareness, allowing them to make informed decisions about their choices for contraception.
  
  
  
• Increasing Use of Family Planning Methods in Jordan
  USAID’s Private Sector Partnerships Project in Jordan is helping to improve the health of women by targeting female physicians as preferred providers of women’s health services.
  


• Success in the Poorest of Settings
  Ghana’s Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative has simultaneously increased contraceptive use, reduced fertility, decreased maternal mortality, and addressed female genital mutilation/cutting. It has been so successful that the Ghanaian government is scaling it up across the country, and health teams from Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia have come to Ghana to determine if the program may work in their own countries.