Updates
Reaching more with less
23 Dec 2021
Access to contraceptives is key for women and adolescent girls making choices about planning their families. For countries like Uganda, whose contraceptive commodity budgets are highly donor-funded, investing in high-quality generic contraceptives is a sustainable strategy.
Increasing use of contraceptives
The Ugandan experience brings some evidence. The country has made progress: an increase in the modern contraceptive prevalence rate for married women from 27.1% in 2012 to 38.7% in 2020 and 21.3% to 30.4% for all women. Efforts towards strengthening the contraceptive commodity security in the country contributed to this achievement, especially through pooling funding from development partners to the procurement of contraceptives.
Uganda participates in the UNFPA Supplies Partnership Programme. Each year UNFPA contributes over 40% of the overall national family planning commodity budget (USD 4-8 million). These supplies are managed by the Ugandan Ministry of Health, which provides oversight to their warehousing, distribution, and utilization by the population.
Contraceptives reach the hands of adolescents and women at the over 3,084 public health facilities and 944 private not-for-profit health facilities that deliver them across the country.
Expanding investments, expanding choices
Over the past three and a half years, UNFPA supplied family planning commodities worth USD 17.6 million to the Ministry of Health through the public health supply chain. These supplies had the potential to provide 7.5 million couples with one full year of protection of contraceptive method mix (implants, injectables, IUD, oral contraceptives and condoms).
“In a resource-constrained setting like Uganda, access pricing offered by quality generic contraceptive options is a worthwhile, cost-efficient investment to ensure that women and girls without exception have uninterrupted availability of family planning methods as and when they need them.” ▬ Dr. Mary Otieno, UNFPA Uganda Representative.
Through UNFPA’s value-driven procurement system and in a bid to ensure value for each dollar spent, some of the contraceptives procured were generic family planning products of commendable international quality standards (WHO). By procuring generic contraceptives, Uganda was able to achieve over USD 780,000 in savings with the potential to provide an additional 250,000 women with one full year of combined oral contraceptives and injectables.
More than half of the hormonal contraceptives in the UNFPA catalogue are generics. Learn how generic medicines work in 2 minutes:
