Rights-Sizing Family Planning: A Toolkit for Designing Programs to Respect, Protect, and Fulfill the Rights of Girls and Women

The primary aim is to help stakeholders in FP2020 Commitment Countries develop a Costed Implementation Plan (CIP) that includes a rights frame calling for respectful and client-focused care. A rights-based approach to family planning is one in which all phases of a program are viewed through the lens of individuals' human rights and how rights are or are not upheld in communities and in FP programs. A rights-based approach to family planning is driven by the needs and rights of people the program is meant to serve, rather than the program's structure, systems, staff, or numeric goals. This approach strives to give everyone equal access to the family planning information and services they want, treating people equitably, with dignity and respect, and providing high-quality care to all. It rewards respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the rights of individuals and couples to make and act on their family planning decisions. The toolkit emphasizes the importance of rights literacy among all FP program staff, including policymakers and healthcare staff responsible for respecting, protecting, and fulfilling individuals' human rights. Rights literacy among individual clients and potential clients is also essential to ensure that they know and can demand their rights. Community participation, individual empowerment, equity, and accountability need to be valued and supported as essential program elements. A rights-based program establishes mechanisms for monitoring, investigating, managing, and redressing rights violations. It requires high-quality counseling that supports clients' voluntary, informed decision making. Routine review of service data is necessary to identify who is being served and who is not, and to track method mix for indications of free choice or provider bias. Rights-explicit elements are built into staff performance expectations and appraisals. The Costed Implementation Plan (CIP) is a multi-year actionable roadmap designed to help governments achieve their family planning goals. CIPs are a critical tool in transforming ambitious family planning commitments into concrete programs and policies. Countries must be strategic and efficient in investing limited resources to meet the growing demand for family planning. A comprehensive CIP can address and budget for all thematic areas of a family planning program, including demand creation, service delivery and access, contraceptive security, policy and enabling environment, financing, and stewardship, management, accountability, and a rights-based approach. FP2020 has found that countries that devote time and resources to developing a CIP emerge with a detailed plan for systematically implementing strategies, fulfilling commitments, and achieving family planning goals. By engaging in the CIP strategic planning process, governments can prioritize family planning interventions, detail key activities and outline a roadmap for implementation, estimate the impacts of interventions, forecast costs and make strategic allocation decisions, mobilize resources to meet gaps, monitor progress, unify stakeholders around one focused family planning strategy, and ensure that the rights-based approach to family planning informs all they do. The toolkit provides a framework for developing a rights-based approach to family planning, including a template for FP CIP themes, human rights elements, and related actions. The template covers demand creation and social and behavior change, service delivery, contraceptive security, policy and enabling environment, financing, and stewardship, management, accountability. The toolkit also includes a resource guide with 15 resources to guide programming, including the Costed Implementation Plan Resource Kit.