It’s all about women: creating healthy, functional markets to address the unmet global need for contraception

Abstract

In 2012, dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals met in London for a groundbreaking Summit on Family Planning to increase global access to family planning services. This visionary group of governments, civil-society members, multilateral organizations, donors and private sector groups agreed to support the research and development community to enable 120 million more women and girls in 69 developing countries to use contraceptives by the year 2020 [1]. The work of this Summit has been organized under the banner of Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) and is facilitated through the FP2020 Secretariat, headquartered at the United Nations Foundation offices in Washington, DC. This initiative represents an unprecedented step forward in improving the quality of life of women and girls worldwide [2]. As the global family planning community ratchets up efforts to empower these 120 million women and girls, FP2020 collaborators have put into motion a set of diverse approaches to create societal change. For developing and developed countries, we strongly advocate for infusing a robust, business-oriented approach into FP2020 strategies that explicitly incorporates women’s voices. We are proposing a fresh “total market” perspective that incorporates lessons learned from past efforts that focused on using market forces but did not include more business-oriented approaches. A large number of women in developing countries obtain their family planning from the private sector, and we propose that more intentional integration of private sector strategies will increase overall sustainability of these services in the developing world [3,4]. It is essential to listen carefully and to thoroughly integrate their varied contraceptive needs and support requirements into our plans. Otherwise, FP2020’s goal will be difficult to meet.