Advance Family Planning (AFP) received a $750,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to sustain its advocacy initiative. The grant will strengthen AFP's advocacy efforts to make quality, voluntary family planning easier to access for women and girls around the world.

The AFP initiative comprises more than 20 organizations in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. It is led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The Hewlett Foundation’s contribution is very important, coming from one of the earliest and most significant private donors in population and reproductive health,” said Duff Gillespie, AFP's Principal Investigator. “They have been a longtime supporter, and we’re glad to continue our strong partnership.”

AFP recently received an $18 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to supplement advocacy in the nine focus countries and support expansion into one additional country, Bangladesh. With the additional grant from Hewlett, the total funding for the initiative comes to approximately $47 million and extends it through 2018.

An estimated 225 million women—mostly from the world's poorest countries—want to avoid pregnancy but are not using an effective contraceptive method. In 2012, the global community committed to expanding family planning access to an additional 120 million women and girls by 2020, launching the Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) partnership.