Gates Foundation Familly Planning

Voluntary family planning is one of the great public health advances of the past
century. Enabling women to make informed decisions about whether and when to
have children reduces unintended pregnancies as well as maternal and newborn
deaths. It also increases educational and economic opportunities for women and
leads to healthier families and communities. Family planning is a smart, sensible,
and vital component of global health and development.

However, more than 220 million women in developing countries who dont want
to get pregnant lack access to contraceptives and voluntary family planning
information and services. Less than 20 percent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa
and barely one-third of women in South Asia use modern contraceptives. In
2012, an estimated 80 million women in developing countries had an unintended
pregnancy; of those women, at least one in four resorted to an unsafe abortion.

Significant challenges stand in the way of making contraceptives more widely

available and accessible, including insufficient donor and developing country
funding, lack of appropriate products that meet users needs, weak distribution
systems, lack of reliable monitoring and data collection mechanisms, and cultural
and knowledge barriers.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations Family Planning program is working to
bring access to high-quality contraceptive information, services, and supplies to
an additional 120 million women and girls in the poorest countries by 2020
without coercion or discrimination, with the longer-term goal of universal access
to voluntary family planning.
With our partners, we support national governments that have committed to the
goals of FP2020 and are leading the development and implementation of their
own country-specific plans.

Foundation support includes assessing family planning needs, particularly among

the poorest and most vulnerable populations; identifying access barriers and
funding gaps; developing and testing interventions; sharing evidence-based
practices; promoting accountability through real-time performance monitoring
and data collection; and fostering coordination among governments, partners,
and donors.

We also work to increase funding and improve policies for family planning, create
public-private partnerships to expand contraceptive access and options, develop
innovative and affordable contraceptive technologies, and support further
research to close knowledge gaps.

We are particularly committed to exploring how our family planning efforts can
meet the needs of young women and girls.