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Faith and Family Planning: New Publication from FP2020
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Faith & Family Planning
Part of sustaining a rights-based family planning movement is designing programs that focus on women as their whole selves, incorporating their whole community, including faith leaders, partners, family members, and more. A family planning program isn’t considered a success just by the numbers, but by the experience of the women who use it.
A new brief from Family Planning 2020 examines the role of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in the family planning community. Religion plays an important role in many FP2020 priority countries, where faith leaders influence not only family planning decisions but health care decisions more broadly. FBOs are seen as credible and trustworthy through their continuous presence at the grassroots level, notably in conflict-affected or hard-to-reach communities where other actors appear only intermittently. FBOs help contextualize family planning concepts and interventions by using language and approaches that resonate with the cultures and beliefs of the communities they serve. When FBOs provide leadership in supporting family planning, they may contribute powerful support in favor of it.
The new Faith and Family Planning brief, now available online, outlines successful examples of FBO engagement, and highlights lessons learned, including:
The brief highlights several lessons, and also asks questions of the community in order to address further challenges:
Support for family planning in faith communities is growing - evidenced by many success stories - but continued success will take collaboration, new funding streams, and building trust between the two communities. Download the Faith and Family Planning brief now to read more.