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Investing in Family Planning: Key to Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Sunday, 3rd of July 2016

 

1. 1.   First published online June 9, 2016, doi: 10.9745/GHSP-D-15-00374 Glob Health Sci Pract June 20, 2016 vol. 4 no. 2 p. 191-210

 

Investing in Family Planning: Key to Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

1. 1.   Ellen Starbirda,
2. 2.   Maureen Nortona,
3. 3.   Rachel Marcusa

+ Author Affiliations

1. 1.    ^a U.S. Agency for International Development, Washington, DC, USA
2. Correspondence to Rachel Marcus (rmarcus@usaid.gov).

Voluntary family planning brings transformational benefits to women, families, communities, and countries. Investing in family planning is a development “best buy” that can accelerate achievement across the 5 Sustainable Development Goal themes of People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership.

 Excerpts below; full text is at ghspjournal.org/content/4/2/191.full

 

INTRODUCTION

Family planning encompasses the services, policies, information, attitudes, practices, and commodities, including contraceptives, that give women, men, couples, and adolescents the ability to avoid unintended pregnancy and choose whether and/or when to have a child. In this commentary, we outline family plannings links to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and highlight the transformational benefits that voluntary family planning brings to women, families, communities, and countries. We present family planning as a cross-sectoral intervention that can hasten progress across the 5 SDG themes of People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership (Figure). We particularly stress family plannings:

           Link to human rights, gender equality, and empowerment

           Impact on maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health

           Role in shaping economic development and environmental and political futures

Accelerating progress in these areas is critical for SDG achievement.

We set forth evidence on ways that family planning can influence SDG achievement. At times, the evidence is strong; at other times, less so. Our hope is that the evidence gaps will motivate researchers to address unanswered questions. Most importantly, we hope that the evidence presented here leads to action at the international and country level—to fully support organized, voluntary family planning in the public and private commercial sectors, as well as through civil society.

This paper outlines the multiple reasons why investing in family planning is a good decision at every level. It is aligned with recent studies that find that investing in family planning is a development “best buy.”¹ Accordingly, we hope that the information presented here will help governments and planners—including Ministries of Finance, district health teams, and civil society organizations—to consider family planning as a fundamental element of any long-term, socioeconomic development strategy, and key to SDG achievement.

Investing in family planning is a development “best buy.”

In 2000, representatives from 189 United Nations Member States endorsed 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to be achieved by 2015, and affirmed their collective commitment to poverty reduction and improved quality of life. However, during the next decade, progress toward MDG 4 (reduce child mortality), 5 (improve maternal health), and 6 (combat HIV/AIDs, malaria, and other diseases) was relatively slow. In fact, MDG 5.B, universal access to reproductive health, including access to voluntary family planning (not added until 2007), witnessed the least progress over the entire 15-year MDG time frame. By 2010, experts concluded that “the poorest, least educated women in sub-Saharan Africa have lost ground, with adolescents lagging farthest behind.”²

The international community, however, has made important strides in recent years. The 2010 “Global Strategy for Womens and Childrens Health” has mobilized new resource commitments, and Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities, the MDG Health Alliance, and other groups have revitalized family planning globally. Civil society organizations are highly engaged at local levels to ensure the positive momentum continues. Despite this renewed momentum, family planning investments and service access fall short of need in virtually all low-resource settings.

Despite renewed momentum, family planning investments and service access fall short of need in virtually all low-resource settings.

Below, we present the SDGs using the organizing principles set forth in the preamble of the Sustainable Development Goals—People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership. (Thus, the SDGs are not always presented in numerical order in this article.) We then synthesize the most recent analyses that document family plannings importance for the achievement of the SDGs.