Assessing performance of family planning financing

Family planning is an extremely cost-effective intervention. Yet family-planning programmes tend to remain underfunded.

A widely held hypothesis is that family-planning funding challenges are in part the result of fragmentation across policy, planning, budgeting, financing, service delivery and output monitoring. This fragmentation also extends to national and sub-national levels.

The fragmentation tends to go hand in hand with weak governance, lack of coordination and understanding of service needs, resulting in funding gaps. The combination of these often results in sub-optimal outcomes for end users.

Genesis conducted family-planning performance assessment for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to identify key improvement areas in family-planning financing for three countries and created a tool that supports alignment between the foundation’s health and family-planning financing strategies.

Our analytical work provided deep dives at the country level of the family-planning financing landscape to identify potential levers of improved system performance by illustrating the nature and flow of funding for family-planning programmes in-country, the contribution by donors and spending at national and sub-national levels.

Our work has been positioned to assist policy makers and development partners improve coordination of family-planning financing, and is likely to be rolled out to a wider set of countries than those initially identified.