The Overview

Today over 200 million girls and women in the world’s poorest countries want to use contraception but lack access. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 40% of pregnancies are unplanned, three quarters of abortions are unsafe and new HIV infections remain stubbornly high, especially amongst young women. Many of the world’s poorest countries have young and fast-growing populations where the need for Sexual & Reproductive Health & Rights (SRHR) is set to grow dramatically. At the same time, SRHR is frequently underfunded, deprioritized or held back by policy.

While barriers to progress exist, there have also been significant achievements over the last decade, with millions more users of SRHR services and commitments to equity and individual empowerment. We also have opportunities to accelerate progress towards 2030, with new ways to deliver sexual health services, more service choices, and innovative financing solutions that could increase access for a growing number of people.

Approach / Solution

PICSA Uganda aims deliver to high quality, equitable and gender transformative SRH programming at scale. We aim to make bold investments across three priority areas:

Increase SRH Choices

We will support individuals to access affordable choices, measured by changes in modern contraceptive use, desired fertility, and use of HIV prevention tools.

By 2030, we aim to deliver:

Faster growth of low-cost, highly effective SRH service options that reach the most marginalized and vulnerable. We will focus on contexts where there is high unmet demand, low actual use and high total fertility or HIV incidence rates. Key interventions include scaling community outreach of comprehensive contraceptive choices – including long-acting methods; and increasing access to HIV prevention tools.
We aim to increase financing for SRH choices by growing domestic and private sector contributions and making donor financing more predictable.
More options that meet the preferences of girls and women, by bringing to market at least five SRH product innovations that attract users and/or reduce unit costs.

De-medicalize SRHR and support self-managed care

Task-sharing, community-based delivery, telehealth and ‘SRH self-care’ are opportunities that can fast-track the empowerment of those who are marginalized or discriminated against, and address health system inefficiencies to meet contraceptive and HIV prevention needs.

Our goal is to make self-care a ‘new normal’, supporting governments to institutionalize task sharing with users themselves, which could lead to 50 million unique users of self-care options by 2030.

Our impact will be concentrated in a community that have decided to champion self-care, where:

Health policy and systems prioritize self-care interventions for access, equity, and cost effectiveness.
Digital healthcare is increasingly used to support user knowledge and options for delivery through direct-to-consumer pathways.
A self-care ‘tipping point’ is achieved by 2030 with goals for access to self-managed contraception (notably DMPA-SC) and HIV prevention (notably HIV self-tests).

Champion Reproductive Rights

No one should suffer or die because of unsafe abortion.

We aim to prevent unsafe abortion by making comprehensive reproductive healthcare equitable and integrated within health systems. At the same time, we will champion reproductive justice and support policies that promote gender equality.

By 2030 we will:

Make quality-assured products and services universally accessible.
Reduce out-of-pocket expenditure for hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty through targeted subsidy, public-private partnerships, and health financing interventions.
Prevent disinformation, reduce stigma and uphold the rights of marginalized groups and those who face discrimination to integrated SRH care, which includes HIV prevention and contraception.

Improving Sexual Reproductive Health Rights and Reducing Sexual Violence for Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW)

In collaboration with the district health and education services, over 1,000 adolescent girls in five schools received training on menstrual hygiene management and local sanitary pad making. PICSA Uganda  trained Community Adolescent Reproductive Health Mobilizers (CACAS) to facilitate community mobilization and awareness creation as part of improving adolescent and young women’s health in rural communities, thus ensuring a high level of sustainability. Our school intervention program established a low-cost adolescent girls and boys club in 10 schools to support menstrual hygiene education and support.

We also integrated our AGYW into community health-seeking behaviours: awareness was conducted on SHSR, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, malaria prevention and control, TB prevention, and early health-seeking behaviours. We also engaged in a community dialogue on various health problems affecting the community. The project has built the health facility and community health workers’ capacity in the planning and implementation of community health services for adolescent girls and young women.

OUR PARTNERS

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