HP+ at RHSC: Sharing Best Practices in Costed Implementation Plan Execution
October 20, 2016
Attending the 17th General Membership Meeting of the Reproductive Health Supply Coalition (RHSC)—held October 10–14 in Seattle, Washington—technical leadership from the USAID-funded Health Policy Plus (HP+) project shared their work on Costed Implementation Plans (CIPs) with hundreds of family planning and reproductive health stakeholders from around the world.
On the final day of the conference, Suneeta Sharma, HP+ project director, and Sara Stratton, senior technical advisor for family planning, presented a session titled “Avoiding Pitfalls of Other Health Strategies: Lessons from CIP Development and Execution.” This session was moderated by Linda Cahaelen, USAID health development officer and agreement officer’s representative for HP+. The session focused on strategies and lessons learned from prior CIP experience gleaned through HP+ and previous USAID-funded projects. Several global leaders in population and development attended the session, including Jotham Musinguzi, Director General, Population Secretariat, Uganda and John Townsend of Population Council, the RHSC chair.
CIPs are intended to help advance ambitious commitments—made by signatories to international agreements like Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) and the Ouagadougou Partnership—to empower women and families by improving access to and quality of family planning (FP) services and supplies. CIPs serve as concrete, actionable blueprints to guide a country toward achievement of FP goals. Specifically, they detail the nature and scope of all relevant FP program activities and lay out costs and resources needed to achieve national and subnational targets.
Although CIPs have been developed in more than 30 countries, they continue to evolve as countries, donors, and development partners gain experience putting the plans in action. Stratton noted that HP+ aids this evolution through continued refinement of new tools to facilitate CIP execution, and that the project welcomes ongoing dialogue on CIPs, via both conferences and events and in-country settings.
Sharma and Stratton shared resources for CIP development and implementation and generated enthusiasm for an approach that can facilitate and motivate stronger implementation of FP programs. Indeed, Sharma noted after the conference that the HP+ presentation had generated a positive response from a number of country representatives in attendance, indicating further interest in the CIP process. Specific inquiries touched on the alignment of CIPs with other plans, the timing and availability of execution tools, and implementation costs.
Sharma noted considerable promise in this level of interest in CIPs, stating, “CIPs are of great interest to family planning stakeholders as innovative roadmaps for countries to identify how to translate their family planning goals into reality.”
In addition to the discussion on CIPs, Sharma joined Jay Gribble, HP+ deputy director for family planning, in leading a roundtable on total market approach (TMA) work in Kenya. TMA encourages cooperation among government, private sector, and civil society entities to deliver health services.
Kenya’s national TMA plan intends to create more space for the commercial sector in the FP supplies market—anticipating 15 percent of total market share by late 2017. For example, private sector cooperation has already made a number of new drugs and services available to the Kenyan market. Existing policies will require modification to facilitate this degree of market share, but commercial spending should result in considerable savings to the country’s Ministry of Health and foreign donors.
For more information about the HP+ work discussed at the RHSC conference, please visit the project’s Costed Implementation Plans page, its Health Financing page, and its Kenya & East Africa page.
The RHSC is a global partnership of public, private, and nongovernmental entities dedicated to ensuring that all people in low- and middle-income countries can access and use affordable, high-quality supplies for better reproductive health. The General Membership Meeting in Seattle focused on the most pressing issues preventing the reproductive health community from attaining the FP2020 goal of reaching an additional 120 million women with reproductive health and family planning supplies.
