Family Planning High Impact Practices List

This High Impact Practices (HIP) list highlights practices in family planning (FP) from interventions that show strategies aimed to maximise investments through effective service delivery or systems interventions. 

Practices were identified by a Technical Advisory Group (TAG) formed to review evidence and make recommendations on updating and implementing HIP.

The list of programme elements that create an enabling environment for FP, such as fostering norms that support sexual and reproductive health (SRH), include:

• Policy advocacy on commitment to FP.
• Policy development at the government level for supportive FP policies.
• Support for financing of FP commodities and services.
• Effective supply chain management for contraceptive commodities.
• Capacity development and support for leading and managing FP programmes.
• Implementation of a systematic, evidence-based health communication strategy that includes communication through multiple channels to enable people to make voluntary and informed health care decisions. (See related summary below.)
• Keeping girls in school to improve health and development. This linked HIP brief describes the effect of girls’ education on FP and reproductive health and behaviours; highlights evidence-based practices that increase girls’ enrollment, retention, and participation in school; and provides recommendations for how the health sector can help support keeping girls in school. It gives evidence of why and how keeping girls in school is a route to future FP. It then lists what works to keep girls in school including: engaging communities to change social norms, improving the school environment, and providing economic incentives. 

Further, the document recommends service delivery interventions that include: training of community health workers (CHWs), post-abortion family planning counseling services, promotion and distribution of a wide range of FP methods and of contraceptive behaviours through social marketing, and mobile outreach for FP. "Promising practices" include: the training and support of drug shop and pharmacy staff to provide a wider variety of FP methods and educational information and integrating FP and immunisations services to extend FP in the postpartum period when women seek routine immunisation for children.