PRB

PRB is implementing a project, Bridging High Impact Family Planning Communications and Advocacy, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The goals of this project, which began in May 2016, are to facilitate investment in effective policy and program interventions for youth family planning (FP) and to improve the use of data and evidence for FP advocacy.

The project has two components:

1.  Develop an index assessing countries’ commitments to policy and program interventions that increase youth access to and use of contraception.
2. Establish a Resource Hub to provide advocacy partners with analyses, communication materials, data, and advocacy capacity to achieve their objectives.

Youth FP Policy Scorecard

PRB’s Youth Family Planning Policy, released in April 2017, measures the favorability of national policy and program environments for youth uptake of contraception. It reviews countries’ commitments across six indicators that have been proven to affect access to and use of contraception among youth ages 15 to 24. The current version of the scorecard includes data for sixteen countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sindh (Pakistan), Tanzania, Togo, and Uganda.

The goal of the scorecard is to increase understanding about what makes a policy environment favorable to youth and adolescent uptake of contraception and what barriers young people face to accessing services, thus providing governments, donors, and civil society with greater knowledge of where to invest their resources.

PRB’s “Youth Contraceptive Use: Effective Interventions, Reference Guide” compiles existing evidence of policy and program interventions that have proven to be effective in increasing access to and use of contraception among youth, as well as those that are promising but have inconclusive evidence and those shown to be ineffective.