State of World Population 2012 - Country Page List - UNFPA

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Dr. Babatunde
Osotimehin, Executive
Director of UNFPA,
speaking at the
London Summit on
Family Planning.
©Russell Watkins/
UK Department for
International Development
Activities that support the right to family
planning may include:
• Changing norms to generate long-term
change in demand, for example, working
with men and boys to delay marriage and
support female partners;
• Mobilizing people to demand their rights
and to hold providers accountable for the
quality of services;
• Overcoming obstacles to access; for example,
helping develop community transportation
systems.
Some activities aimed at increasing demand
for family planning, such as encouraging males
to be more supportive of their female partners’
family planning use and raising awareness of
the health and economic benefits of being able
to space and time pregnancies are sometimes
included in cost estimates because they are
directly related to use of family planning.
Efforts to change gender and other norms
ultimately related to sexual and reproductive
health outcomes can be costed, but the “credit”
they can take for increasing contraceptive use is
difficult to measure. This makes it hard to assess
their cost in relation to family planning, even
though they may ultimately have effects not only
on family planning and other aspects of sexual
and reproductive health but on other areas of
health and development. One example of a
norm change intervention with concrete effects
on clinical outcomes is the “Stepping Stones”
curriculum, developed in sub-Saharan Africa
and now adapted for use in dozens of countries
around the world (Welbourn, 2003). The curriculum
works to alter the balance of power as
it plays out in relationships between and among
men and women in the community in ways
that impact health. Stepping Stones affected
gender-related attitudes in ways that reduced
HIV incidence and increased condom use,
among other outcomes, even measured a year
after the intervention.
There has so far been little rights discourse in
discussions about how much it costs to provide
family planning to all who want it. There have,
however, been some instances in other fields
where the costs of ensuring human rights are
factored in to overall costs. A recent study of
costs associated with treating HIV, for example,
included estimates for supporting activities that
would ensure the effectiveness of investment in
providing antiretroviral therapies. These activities
included actions to protect the human rights of
people receiving treatment (Jones et al., 2011).
A recent study attempts to calculate the
human rights costs of offering antiretroviral
94 CHAPTER 5: THE COSTS AND SAVINGS OF UPHOLDING THE RIGHT TO FAMILY PLANNING: