Rights-based Approaches to Family Planning

With its goal of reaching 120 million new women with family planning services and information by 2020, the FP2020 movement spurred by the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning has refocused global attention on the need to expand access to voluntary family planning that adheres to human rights principles.

As a start to this work, the Evidence Project will conduct a literature review of successful family planning programs that employ human rights–based approaches in the provision of contraceptive services and information. The review will build on previous work in this area by describing the human rights–based approaches utilized, the outcomes achieved, the challenges faced, and how those challenges were overcome.

It will also seek to provide evidence on how rights-based approaches to family planning service delivery are successfully operationalized in diverse settings, and the lessons learned for expanding rights-based programming moving forward. In addition, the synthesis will attempt to address the question of what difference it makes to outcomes to take a voluntary, human rights–based approach to family planning. Based on this review, the project will collaborate to implement and conduct implementation science rights–based family planning interventions.