Municipalities' Role in Funding Family Planning in Francophone West Africa
This news story originally appeared in West Africa's ParlerHealth.
Under the leadership of the Ministry of Health and Hygiene (MSHP), through the Coordination Directorate of the National Program for Maternal and Child Health (DC-PNSME), a regional workshop brought together eighteen mayors from seven francophone West African countries in Cote d'Ivoire in late 2018. This regional meeting was organized by USAID/West Africa's Health Policy Plus (HP+) activity. The aim of this two-day deliberation was to mobilize extra resources for family planning (FP) through advocacy with mayors from francophone West African countries.
About twenty Mayors and Municipal Heads from Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Togo attended the workshop. Representatives of the Coordination Unit of the Ouagadougou Partnership UCPO, The Challenge Initiative (TCI) and the Network of Champions in Advocacy for the Adequate Financing of Health in Côte d’Ivoire also participated.
As a result, a joint commitment was signed by the municipalities to create conducive conditions for increased access to and use of FP services and 16 individual commitments were made by the Mayors to fulfill their financial contributions of about FCFA 90 million in total for executing FP activities in their respective townships. These contributions help implement national costed implementation plans (CIPs) for family planning. Read more on Health Policy Plus' work in West Africa here.
