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Best Practices for Sustaining Youth Contraceptive Use

As countries work to ensure women and couples are able to choose whether, when, and how often to have children, it is critical to examine the drivers of contraceptive discontinuation that may inhibit young people from achieving their reproductive intentions.

Family planning programs are high-impact, cost-effective interventions that improve maternal, neonatal, and child health outcomes. Family planning offers additional benefits to young women, including protecting access to education and employment and reducing the health risks of early childbearing. Despite recent advances in expanding access to voluntary family planning, 218 million women of reproductive age in low- and middle-income countries, including 14 million adolescent girls (ages 15 to 19), would like to prevent, delay, or avoid pregnancy but are not using modern contraception. Among these women with an unmet need, an estimated 38 percent are former family planning users who have discontinued use of a modern contraceptive method.

To align with health sector and development goals, family planning programs are often structured in ways that intrinsically emphasize initiation of new users. Elevating program goals and monitoring systems that also focus on current users will enhance the quality and reach of family planning programs. Contraceptive discontinuation among women who wish to prevent, delay, or space pregnancies inhibits individuals’ reproductive intentions and contributes to unintended pregnancies and abortions. Irregular, episodic family planning use across a large segment of the population has implications for population dynamics and age structure as contraceptive discontinuation accounts for 35 percent of unintended pregnancies.

Youth ages 15 to 24 have higher rates of contraceptive discontinuation than older women. As countries work to ensure women and couples are able to choose whether, when, and how often to have children, it is critical to examine the drivers of contraceptive discontinuation that may inhibit young people from achieving their reproductive intentions. This policy brief describes patterns of contraceptive discontinuation among youth and summarizes the evidence on the drivers of discontinuation, namely method-related concerns and poor quality of care. It presents new analysis of the primary elements of dissatisfaction with family planning care among youth that may contribute to contraceptive discontinuation and outlines the policy and program strategies that may enhance continuation among young women who wish to prevent, delay, or space pregnancies.

Best Practices for Sustaining Youth Contraceptive Use

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Meilleures pratiques pour l'utilisation durable des contraceptifs chez les jeunes

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A companion PowerPoint presentation that summarizes the main findings and recommendations of the brief is freely available as an advocacy tool for youth leaders. The PowerPoint presentation is available in English and French. We welcome you to use this tool.

Presentation. Best Practices for Sustaining Youth Contraceptive Use

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Présentation. Bonnes pratiques pour maintenir l'utilisation des contraceptifs chez les jeunes

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In collaboration with researchers at the Institut Supérieur des Sciences de la Population (ISSP) in Burkina Faso, PACE developed a policy landscape analysis of the national policy and program environments for sustaining youth contraceptive use in the nine Ouagadougou Partnership countries, based on the policy brief’s recommendations. This analysis allows users to quickly assess the extent to which a country’s policy environment enables and supports sustained youth contraceptive use. Civil society organizations can directly use this information in their dialogue with policymakers around how to enhance policies that support sustained contraceptive use by young people who wish to prevent, avoid, or delay pregnancy.

Rapid Analysis: Policy Landscape for Sustaining Youth Contraceptive Use in the Nine Ouagadougou Partnership Countries

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Rapide analyse de l’environment politique de l’utilisation durable de la contraception chez les jeunes

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PACE supported three youth-led organizations—SERAC in Bangladesh, Visible Impact in Nepal, and Youth Alliance for Reproductive Health (YARH) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—as they undertook policy advocacy initiatives related to enhancing youth contraceptive continuation in their respective countries.