Meeting National Goals and People's Needs with LA/PMs in Malawi

This goal is crucial for slowing the nation's population growth, meeting national development objectives, and helping citizens achieve their reproductive health intentions. However, Malawi faces a significant FP challenge, with the unmet need for FP currently standing at 28% among married women. The use of modern FP methods more than tripled between 1992 and 2000, but the momentum has slowed over the past decade. The population continues to grow, with an estimated 723,000 more women of reproductive age in Malawi by 2015 than there are today. To meet the government's contraceptive goal, 1.8 million women would need to be served. If the most recent trend were to continue, Malawi would be expected to reach a CPR of 38% by 2015, which is 61% of what it would take to fulfill the fifth Millennium Development Goal (MDG). Long-acting and permanent contraceptive methods (LA/PMs) play a vital role in addressing the dissonance between women's expressed reproductive intentions and their method use. LA/PMs have multiple benefits for programs, women, and couples, including increasing awareness, correcting misinformation, and expanding method choice. In Malawi, LA/PMs constitute a very small share of the method mix for both spacers and limiters, indicating potential for more robust programming focused on these methods. The RESPOND Project can help the Ministry of Health and the USAID Mission's implementing partners achieve their FP and reproductive health goals by taking a holistic programmatic approach that addresses the essential components of supply, demand, and advocacy. Possible interventions include using Reality √, a cutting-edge forecasting and planning tool, to generate data for realistic, evidence-based service, training, and commodity projections. Additionally, state-of-the-art technical assistance can be provided to strengthen service delivery support systems and communications campaigns to address LA/PMs. Malawi's demand for contraception is met and unmet, with 43% of all pregnancies being unintended and only 10% of the total demand for FP being met by the use of the most effective methods. Addressing unmet need for FP can avert nearly 11,000 maternal deaths and more than 210,000 child deaths by the MDG target date of 2015. The Government of Malawi's national FP program offers LA/PMs in support of its CPR goal, but the use of these highly effective methods has declined slightly, with fewer than 20% of FP users currently relying on LA/PMs.