international women's day

Women and children in Nepal benefit from CARE's work to reduce maternal and infant mortality rates. Photo by Robert Strauss.

How CARE Promotes Access to Family Planning Services

CARE views family planning as a basic health care need and works to increase access to and utilization of these services, as well as improves the service quality. CARE, with its partners, conducts research to capture the knowledge, attitudes and practices as well as cultural factors of the current and potential client populations. These findings are then used to design appropriate interventions that reflect the priority needs of the local people. Often, many CARE projects facilitate the mobilization of community resources and volunteers to make contraceptives and information more available. Furthermore, many of CARE's projects include a component specifically designed to reach adolescents, a particularly hard-to-reach population.

Nepal's Family Planning Health Project
One example of CARE's family planning programs in action is in Nepal. Nepal has some of the highest maternal and newborn deaths in Asia. Health care services are limited, inadequately staffed and poorly equipped. Overall, women in Nepal have an estimated 4.6 children. However, in certain remote districts of the country, this figure was as high as 8.7 children before CARE began working there.

CARE began the Family Health Project in 1994 to promote access to family planning and maternal and newborn health services in some of the most remote districts of Nepal. The project used a three pronged strategy. First, it increased knowledge and awareness of mother and child health and family planning services so that families could make informed choices about health. Second, it strengthened the government health services at the community level through training and support. Third, CARE instituted community-based distribution systems to make contraceptives available at clients' doorsteps, while facilitating mobile and outreach clinics for basic health services, including family planning.

In just two years, the overall use of modern contraception jumped nearly 40 percent -- from 17 percent of the population of reproductive age to 24 percent. Additionally, 98 percent of survey respondents said they knew how to access contraceptives, compared with 75 percent before the project's start.