Reproductive Health

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Core Activities
Key Commodities
Global Goals
Strategic Partnerships
Tools & Additional Resources

USAID estimates 225 million women in developing countries want to postpone or stop childbearing, but lack access to modern methods of contraception. Under USAID’s Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project, the Reproductive Health activity strengthens supply chains to ensure that key reproductive health commodities are available for safe and reliable family planning.

Contraceptive Implants
Contraceptive Implants
Photo Credit: Tobin Jones/JHPIEGO
Core Activities

Our project teams work in 15 priority countries committed to addressing policy, financing, delivery, and socio-economic barriers to accessing contraceptive commodities and information. Activities focus on the following three strategies to ensure equitable access to reproductive health commodities and advance contraceptive security:

 

  1. Leverage global commodity procurement and logistics to increase availability of health commodities
  2. Offer technical leadership to strengthen global demand and financing, and help ensure availability of existing and promising new reproductive health commodities
  3. Foster more stable, healthier markets by identifying areas in which USAID can improve supply security, affordability, and product appropriateness as well as influence global capacity investments

 

Current country presence includes: Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Zambia.

Key Commodities

Key commodities include:
 

  • Injectable contraceptives
  • Implantable contraceptives
  • Combined oral contraceptives
  • Copper-bearing intrauterine devices
  • Emergency oral contraceptives
  • Progestin only pills
  • Male condoms
  • Female condoms
  • Fertility-based awareness methods
  • Hormone-releasing intrauterine
  • Other related commodities
Global Goals

With the launch of Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) at the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning, the global community set a goal of enabling 120 million additional women and girls in the world’s 69 poorest countries to access and use contraception by 2020. Since then, nearly half of these target countries have made commitments to address the policy, financing, delivery, and sociocultural barriers to women accessing contraceptive information. The GHSC-PSM project is committed to supporting USAID’s goal of accelerating progress toward reaching 120 million new users through the project’s focus on commodity procurement and system strengthening.

Strategic Partnerships

GHSC-PSM works to build and maintain strategic partnerships and to support USAID’s leadership among key stakeholders in the global community. Most notable in the reproductive health arena is the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, where GHSC-PSM was elected to chair the Systems Strengthening Working Group and is committed to supporting the Coalition’s campaign to end contraceptive stockouts, Take Stock.

Regionally, GHSC-PSM anticipates supporting partnerships in West Africa, where contraceptive prevalence rates are the lowest in the world. The Ouagadougou Partnership, formed in 2011, is working to revitalize efforts toward its goal of reaching at least 2.2 million additional family planning methods users by 2020 in the nine Francophone Africa countries, while the West Africa Health Organization is likewise rising to prominence in the area. GHSC-PSM strives to leverage these collaborations to develop and implement innovations in commodity procurement and distribution.

Tools & Additional Resources

News & Highlights

News Article
6 Key Insights on How National Policies Shape Contraceptive Use and Choices
GovernanceSupply PlanningMaternal and Child HealthReproductive Health
Family planning (FP) policies play a crucial role in improving contraceptive use, especially in low- and middle-income countries. However, many policies intended to encourage the availability, uptake, and use of contraceptives by women and their partners lack clear evidence of their effectiveness.…
News Article
Market Day is Family Planning Day for the Women of Enukweni Village
LogisticsProcurementSupply PlanningMaternal and Child HealthReproductive HealthMalawi
Mary Hlema, a 43-year-old mother from Enukweni village in Malawi, highlights the impact of family planning on her life. “It gives you enough space to allow kids to grow properly. When kids have followed each other very closely, it is difficult to manage them. But when they are spaced out, even when…
News Article
One Finger Cannot Lift a Pebble
LogisticsProcurementSupply Chain HeroMaternal and Child HealthReproductive HealthMali
Mali has one of the world's highest fertility rates, where the average woman will give birth six times in her lifetime, and approximately 24 percent of women in Mali report that they wish to avoid pregnancy but are not using a modern method of contraception. Access to family planning helps women…
All News and Highlights

Resources

Success Stories

Promoting Equity While Availing FP Commodities
Supply Chain HeroMaternal and Child HealthReproductive HealthMalawi
Flora Kalimba is the only female among the three task order coordinators at Global Health Supply Chain Program- Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project in Malawi. She is the power behind supply chain management for family planning and maternal, neonatal and child health. Her work…
Dialing in a Human Connection to Improve Availability of Medicines and Contraceptives
LogisticsProcurementSupply PlanningReproductive HealthSouth SudanNiger
Poor infrastructure can complicate gathering data in real-time or near real-time to accurately forecast health facility needs for contraceptives and life-saving medicines. In supply chain management, the human element can be just as important when it comes to getting accurate data for decision-…
Partnership Helps Ensure Reliability of Contraceptive Supplies at Health Centers in South Sudan
LogisticsSupply PlanningReproductive HealthSouth Sudan
Since 2017, the USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project has provided technical assistance to South Sudan to improve the availability and quality of data for family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) commodities to help ensure contraceptive…