Population Services International

This grant to Population Services International will support the Self-Care Trailblazer Group to expand its field-building activities to promote user-controlled sexual and reproductive health. Co-funded with the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, this project aims to bringtogether self-care stakeholders and advocates in a community of practice to consolidate concepts and communicate around key events in 2020, build the evidence on self-care, and advocate for the adoption of recent World Health Organization guidelines on user-controlled health care. This second grant will focus on deeper country-level engagement in promising countries as well as an intention to shift the leadership of the secretariat to a focus country by the end of this grant cycle.

This project seeks to reduce maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion in Francophone West Africa. Population Services International will use insights about women’s preferences to increase reproductive health options and use commercial marketing techniques to promote new products in several countries in West Africa. It will also test innovative models that require less infrastructure to distribute reproductive health products and look for opportunities to provide alternatives for women who otherwise would seek a clandestine abortion.