In the eight years of the FP2020 partnership, the family planning community has proven that when we work together, across borders and sectors, we can truly change the course of progress on family planning.
Family Planning 2020 was launched with a simple premise: that every woman and girl, no matter where she lives, should have the opportunity to use lifesaving, life-changing modern contraception. The leaders who gathered at the London Summit in 2012 agreed on an ambitious goal and a tight timeframe for achieving it: to reach an additional 120 million users of modern contraception in the world’s 69 lowest-income countries by 2020.
That initial eight-year period is now drawing to a close. We didn’t reach 120 million, but we did bend the curve of progress upward. The FP2020 initiative has become a movement, with more than 130 governments, foundations, multilateral organizations, civil society organizations, youth-led organizations, and private sector partners all collaborating to advance rights-based family planning. Dozens of countries have strengthened and expanded their family planning programs over the past eight years, providing millions of women and girls with access to modern contraception. Together we’ve cultivated a global community of practice that is grounded in data and evidence and guided by the principles of human rights.
That’s the story we tell in this final FP2020 Progress Report (The Arc of Progress). We also tell the story of how in the past year the family planning community faced its greatest threat yet—the COVID-19 pandemic—and how partners all over the world worked heroically to maintain health services (Family Planning in the Time of COVID). And we look ahead to what comes after FP2020: a new partnership that is smarter, stronger, more inclusive, and built to take us to 2030 (FP2030: A Stronger Partnership for a New Era).
REACHING MORE WOMEN AND GIRLS
As of July 2020, the total number of women and girls using a modern method of contraception in the 69 FP2020 focus countries stood at 320 million, up from 260 million when the partnership was launched. Since 2012, an additional 60 million women and girls have chosen to use modern contraception. While this is far short of our original goal, there has been significant progress across many countries, particularly in Africa:
- The number of modern contraceptive users in Africa has grown by 66% since 2012, from 40 million to more than 66 million women and girls.
- In Central and Western Africa, the number of modern contraceptive users has doubled.
- In Eastern and Southern Africa, the number of modern contraceptive users has grown by 70%.
- In 13 countries (eight of which are members of the Ouagadougou Partnership), the number of modern contraceptive users has doubled since 2012: Benin, Burkina Faso,Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Somalia.
Across the 69 FP2020 focus countries, modern contraceptive prevalence (MCP)1 has risen by more than 2 percentage points since 2012. The growth has been fastest in Eastern and Southern Africa, where MCP has risen by approximately 8 percentage points since 2012.
- Ten FP2020 focus countries have experienced MCP growth rates greater than 1 percentage point per year since 2012: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.
- Eleven countries have achieved or are on track to achieve the MCP goals they established in their FP2020 commitments: Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam, and Zimbabwe.
These insights are possible because of the transformation FP2020 partners have brought to the data landscape for family planning. Almost all commitment-making countries now have in place an annual process to review national and subnational data on family planning and produce estimates of key progress markers (the FP2020 Core Indicators).