Introduction

At the London Summit in 2012, the family planning community committed to enabling 120 million additional women and girls to use contraceptives by 2020, creating the FP2020 global partnership.

The ‘additional users’ indicator is the first in a suite of 18 FP2020 Core Indicators. It serves as one of FP2030‘s foundational measures of progress and is reported annually for FP2030’s 69 focus countries. Since 2012, the 120x2020 goal has helped galvanize efforts to expand contraceptive access, expand method choice, improve quality of care, and overcome barriers to use, but the ‘additional users’ metric is often confused with other related family planning metrics.

This confusion was referenced by the FP2030 Performance Monitoring & Evidence Working Group (PME WG) in a statement, and is discussed in a March 2017 Global Health: Science and Practice paper. Confusion around the ‘additional users’ metric hinders efforts to align measurement and improve understanding of collective progress towards FP2020’s global goal.

In order to address this confusion, FP2030 hosted a webinar and created an infographic to illustrate the meaning of ‘additional users’, explain the underlying dynamics of contraceptive use and demonstrate how these concepts relate.

Webinars

 

Quiz

How well do you understand the 'additional users' metric? Test your understanding by taking this quiz.

PME WG Statement

At its semi-annual meeting in Nairobi, Kenya in March 2017, the FP2030 Performance Monitoring & Evidence Working Group (PME WG) acknowledged the confusion around the term “additional users,” – FP2030 Core Indicator 1 – and sought to clarify the terminology with the following statement:  

The term "additional users" does not apply to individuals, but refers to the net number of current modern contraceptive users above a specified baseline. In the case of FP2030, the baseline is the number of current modern contraceptive users there were in 2012.

The Family Planning 2030 Performance Monitoring and Evidence Working Group recognizes the confusion in terminology commonly used among family planning programs and initiatives around the world. For example, the term "new user”, usually used to refer to an individual, is often and incorrectly used interchangeably with the term “additional users", which is measured at a population level.

We support efforts to clarify and distinguish between overlapping terminology in common usage.