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Abstract
The International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 set targets for donor funding to support family planning programmes, and recent initiatives such as FP2020 have renewed focus on the need for adequate funding to rights-based family planning. Disbursements supporting family planning disaggregated by donor, recipient country and year are not available for recent years. We estimate international donor funding for family planning in 2003–13, the period covering the introduction of reproductive health targets to the Millennium Development Goals and up to the beginning of FP2020, and compare funding to unmet need for family planning in recipient countries. We used the dataset of donor disbursements to support reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health developed by the Countdown to 2015 based on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Creditor Reporting System. We assessed levels and trends in disbursements supporting family planning in the period 2003–13 and compared this to unmet need for family planning. Between 2003 and 2013, disbursements supporting family planning rose from under $400 m prior to 2008 to $886 m in 2013. More than two thirds of disbursements came from the USA. There was substantial year-on-year variation in disbursement value to some recipient countries. Disbursements have become more concentrated among recipient countries with higher national levels of unmet need for family planning. Annual disbursements of donor funding supporting family planning are far short of projected and estimated levels necessary to address unmet need for family planning. The reimposition of the US Global Gag Rule will precipitate an even greater shortfall if other donors and recipient countries do not find substantial alternative sources of funding.
Highlights
The ability to control the number and spacing of one’s children is a key reproductive right, alongside the right to safe and effective care in pregnancy and childbearing (Cook and Fathalla 1996)
The overall trend between 2003 and 2012 in our data is consistent with the trend for donor funding to family planning in the Resource Flows reports published by UNFPA/Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), UNFPA/NIDI
Our results follow the same trend for family planning funding as reported in the 2016 report on Development Assistance for Health by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), the IHME figures are higher for every year, being over $1bn (2015 USD) in 2009 and 2011–13 (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation 2017)
Summary
The ability to control the number and spacing of one’s children is a key reproductive right, alongside the right to safe and effective care in pregnancy and childbearing (Cook and Fathalla 1996). Since the beginning of large-scale family planning programmes in the 1960s, bilateral donors— the USA—and multilateral agencies have provided much of the funding for programmes in low- and middle-income countries (Population Reports 1983; Sinding 2007). This is still the case—the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) (UNFPA and NIDI 2014) report that ‘most developing countries’ continue to be ‘dependent on the international donor community to finance population activities’
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