Programmatic Explanations for the Remarkable Increases in the Adoption of Modern Contraceptive Methods in Malawi

Jacob Adetunji , U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Although the term “family planning” could not be used in official government documents in Malawi until early 1990s, within 22 years, Malawi’s contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) had become one of the fastest growing in Africa, and had overtaken CPR in early “champion countries” such as Kenya and Botswana to become one the highest in Africa. More spectacularly, Malawi’s CPR is fairly equitable between rural and urban areas and among women in the lowest and the highest wealth quintiles. Therefore, family planning program managers are keenly interested in understanding the factors that explain Malawi’s unprecedented CPR progress. In this paper, we trace the CPR trends, reviewed accessible family planning program documents and studies in order to understand the secret of Malawi’s FP success. The current review focuses largely on USAID, which is by far the largest source of bilateral funding for family planning in the country.

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 Presented in Session 192. Evaluation of Family Planning and Other Reproductive Health Services Using a Logic Model