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Ethiopia

HP+ More recent Ethiopia publications are available.

  • The Health Policy Project (HPP) helped countries achieve their health goals by building capacity for policy, advocacy, governance, and finance at multiple levels. The project developed global tools and best practices for policy work, promoted South-South sharing and collaboration, and carried out regional and country-specific policy initiatives. The files included in this zip document provide brief program overviews for each country highlighting key accomplishments. Individual briefs are available from the country pages.

  • Family planning (FP) advocacy plays a key role in policy development. Despite a significant body of evidence-based advocacy promoting family planning, there are few systematic studies on decisionmakers’ opinions of such advocacy; how advocacy and evidence are used by decisionmakers; what types of evidence and advocacy are persuasive from the perspective of decisionmakers themselves; and how and why decisionmakers support FP policies. This USAID-funded Health Policy Project study was designed to address these issues. The findings draw from structured interviews in three countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, and Malawi.

  • The Partners in Population and Development global alliance, through its Africa Regional Office (PPD ARO), uses South-to-South dialogue as an effective mechanism to hold leaders and countries accountable for stated international and regional commitments related to health. Through the Health Policy Project, PPD ARO is sharing expertise, best practices, effective models, and high-level policy dialogue surrounding population and health issues with African policymakers and partners at the national and regional levels. Specifically, to raise awareness among parliamentary health committees on the linkages between improving family planning/reproductive health and achieving national development goals, PPD ARO is developing and disseminating policy briefs on family planning in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda.

    At the request of and in partnership with Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), PPD ARO developed a policy brief for initial dissemination at the Women Parliamentarians Meeting: Enhancing Leadership for Family Planning and Reproductive Health in Kampala, Uganda, August 27–28, 2012. The brief highlights the important role of family planning in achieving maternal health and other development goals, as well as presents policy recommendations for increasing family planning use. FMOH stakeholders contributed to the recommendations, which focus on increasing financing for family planning commodities, especially long-acting methods (permanent and non-permanent). Expanded dissemination to policymakers across Ethiopia will help foster more champions of family planning as the country builds momentum for further progress.

  • The USAID-funded Health Policy Project supported partners at Gondar University to use the FamPlan model to analyze the demographic and family planning program implications of meeting Ethiopia’s Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) targets. The projections show that, if Ethiopia achieves a contraceptive prevalence rate of 73.3 percent by 2020 (the target set by the Federal Ministry of Health), the total fertility rate would fall to less than two children per woman in 2020 and the annual population growth rate would slow to less than 1 percent by 2020. In addition, under-five and infant mortality rates would drop significantly due to increased use of family planning. The model projection also estimated the number of contraceptive commodities required to achieve the target, which can be used to ensure contraceptive security.  

  • A lack of comprehensive knowledge about HIV/AIDS and sexual reproductive health (SRH), financial insecurity, gender-based violence, and other risk factors can leave students of higher education institutions (HEIs), especially women, more vulnerable to HIV infection. It is therefore important to consider the specific needs of this population group when designing and implementing HIV interventions. In Ethiopia, the Health Policy Project (HPP) is supporting the Federal HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office and HEIs to prioritize and target HIV interventions in HEI settings. As part of this effort, HPP assisted the government's HEI Partnership sub-Forum against HIV/AIDS with developing a Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation Framework for HIV/AIDS and SRH interventions in HEIs. Establishing a standardized system for planning, monitoring, and evaluating interventions will facilitate the generation and use of high-quality program-related data to inform decision making, thus helping to boost program effectiveness. Training and implementation of the framework has begun, and the next step will be to evaluate its effectiveness and standardization across HEIs in Ethiopia.

  • One major issue involved with expanding FP services is identifying direct and indirect costs of service delivery. Accordingly, the Gather, Analyze, and Plan (GAP) tool is being applied in the Amhara region of Ethiopia to understand what is needed to achieve the regional FP target set for the year 2020. GAP is a simple Excel-based tool developed by the USAID-funded Health Policy Project (HPP) to help policymakers, ministry officials, and health officials understand the costs associated with expanding family planning to achieve national or regional contraceptive prevalence or fertility goals. Information is urgently needed to ensure that FP programs are fully funded as the shift in agenda and ownership takes place. The GAP tool allows countries to project funding gaps in contraceptives, service provision, and program support. In collaboration with the Amhara Regional Health Bureau and other partners, HPP organized a regional GAP workshop in June 2014.

  • ImpactNOW, a new family planning advocacy model, generates evidence to make the case for immediate FP investments by modeling gains in maternal and child deaths averted, unintended pregnancies, and financial savings to the healthcare system as a result of FP uptake. ImpactNOW is currently being pilot-tested in Ethiopia's Amhara Region. On August 27, 2013, the Health Policy Project held a one-day stakeholders meeting to introduce ImpactNOW, provide a live demonstration of the model, and obtain feedback and impressions of it from family planning stakeholders, advocates, and policymakers. Stakeholders included representatives from the Amhara Regional Health Bureau (ARHB), the Regional Finance and Economic Development Bureau (BoFED), university partners, and nongovernmental organizations. Their primary focus in applying ImpactNOW will be the linkage between FP uptake and maternal and child deaths.

  • The USAID-funded Health Policy Project applied its new ImpactNow model to estimate the near-term health and economic benefits of achieving family planning goals in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. This report presents the proceedings of the preliminary results dissemination meeting, held in Bahir Dar in May 2014, attended by the Amhara Regional Health Bureau and representatives from the Federal Ministry of Health. Following presentation of the draft results, attendees' discussions and recommendations were recorded to inform the final ImpactNow analysis, to be completed in late 2014.

  • Since 2012, the USAID-funded Health Policy Project (HPP), in partnership with the Ethiopia Public Health Association (EPHA), has trained 52 public health professionals from government entities, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the use of the Spectrum Policy Modeling System suite of tools. Driven by the vision of furthering this initiative, four faculty members from the Department of Reproductive Health at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, the Department of Population Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and the Institute of Public Health at the University of Gondar developed a proposal to integrate four Spectrum Model tools—DemProj, FamPlan, RAPID, and LIST—into the Master of Public Health (MPH) and Master of Science (MSc) curricula.This report summarizes the process followed, as well as successes and lessons learned from the integration of Spectrum tools into the academic curricula at the University of Gondar.

  • This policy brief highlights the USAID-funded Health Policy Project's in-depth analysis of fertility and family planning trends in the Amhara Region, based on the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) 2011. The findings demonstrate that early marriage is pervasive in Amhara (leading to earlier childbearing), and that 22 percent of married women in the region have an unmet need for family planning. There are disparities in the uptake of family planning, with rural women and those with no formal education being particularly difficult to reach. The quality of family planning services was also found to be a barrier to family planning use, with many women receiving inadequate counseling about available contraceptive methods or side effects. Based on the study's findings, crucial actions are recommended for expanding and improving family planning services and reducing fertility in the Amhara Region, which can inform family planning policy development and advocacy in the region.

  • In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), expected national fertility levels and country-level observations demonstrate repeated mismatches in magnitude and/or direction.Thus there is an unfulfilled demand for better explaining, understanding, and communicating how fertility changes. Accurately predicting fertility is critical for understanding how populations may be expected to change, and for managing expectations about the possible impacts of TFR-affecting policy levers. The USAID-funded Health Policy Project produced this poster for the 2015 Population Association of America conference to determine to what extent can the accuracy of predicting fertility in SSA using the proximate determinants framework be improved by implementing revisions, with emphasis on the contraception index.

  • With support from the USAID-funded Health Policy Project, the Ethiopian Public Health Association applied the DemProj module of the Spectrum suite of models to project the size of the Ethiopian population from 2012 to 2050. The projection showed that the population is expected to increase steadily from 83.7 million in 2012 to 171.8 million in 2050. The young (0 to 14 years) age group is projected to decline after 2030, while the working-age population (15 to 64 years) and older age population (65 years+) are expected to continue growing. Ethiopia’s window for capturing a possible demographic dividend is projected to peak around 2040. Based on the data from the model, recommendations were made to accelerate access to family planning services and to increase investments in health, education, and other development sectors to take advantage of the demographic dividend.

  • In recent decades, Ethiopia has made impressive progress in improving socioeconomic outcomes and reducing child and maternal mortality. This brief, prepared by the Health Policy Project, outlines the current status of women and girls in Ethiopia and provides recommendations on how to improve girls' education, gender norms, and family planning to benefit women, their families, and the country.

  • This policy brief highlights the USAID-funded Health Policy Project's application of the RAPID model to forecast integrated data and evidence on population and socioeconomic projections for the Amhara region. The analysis can support experts and policymakers to engage in data-driven decision making, planning, budgeting, and monitoring and evaluation of regional population issues linked with related factors such as the economy, education, health, agriculture, and urbanization. The projections were made according to the Central Statistical Agency 2012 Intercensal Population Survey’s low and high variants for 2007 to 2037.

  • Ministries of health (MOHs) are largely responsible for achieving the commitments that their national governments have made as part of the FP2020 initiative, which aims to enable 120 million more women and girls to use contraceptives by 2020. However, MOHs’ ability to meet FP2020 goals depends on the strength of their stewardship functions, including the support they generate from and collaboration with other actors and sectors.This brief describes four skills that parliamentarians can develop and strengthen to become more effective at lobbying for, demanding, and securing additional funding for FP. It is part of a series of three briefs produced by the USAID-funded Health Policy Project to provide guidance to MOH officials and members of parliament (MPs) on three different approaches to strengthen MOHs’ stewardship functions for FP2020. The other briefs in the series are Stewardship for FP2020 Goals: Working with the Private Sector, and Stewardship for FP2020 Goals: MOH Role in Improving FP Policy Implementation.

  • The Ethiopian Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the Health Policy Project (HPP), recently used the FamPlan model to measure the impact of increased family planning use on the number of infant and child deaths. The results showed that family planning uptake is associated with decreases in high-risk births and infant and child mortality and that faster gains in the contraceptive prevalence rate lead to more dramatic health improvements. This poster—presented at the 2013 International Conference on Family Planning in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—describes the methodology and results of the model application.

  • The GAP Tool (Gather, Analyze, and Plan) is a simple Excel-based tool designed to help policymakers, ministry officials, health officials, and advocates understand and plan for the costs associated with expanding family planning (FP) to achieve their country's contraceptive prevalence or fertility goals. This PowerPoint presentation provides a brief overview of the benefits of and major steps for applying the GAP Tool and includes highlights from a pilot application of the tool in Ethiopia and Nigeria.  

  • The GAP Tool (Gather, Analyze, and Plan) is a simple Excel-based tool designed to help policymakers, ministry officials, health officials, and advocates understand and plan for the costs associated with expanding family planning (FP) to achieve their country's contraceptive prevalence or fertility goals. This brief provides a brief overview of the benefits of and major steps for applying the GAP Tool and includes highlights from a pilot application of the tool in Ethiopia and Nigeria.  

  • Using the ImpactNow model, the USAID-funded Health Policy Project collaborated with the Amhara Regional Health Bureau (RHB) to estimate the near-term benefits of achieving Ethiopia’s ambitious family planning goals in the region. This brief summarizes key health and economic benefits associated with achieving these goals and offers recommendations for the Regional Health Bureau to increase investment in and improve family planning services. The analysis found that if the contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) in the Amhara Region increases from 46 percent in 2014 to 73 percent in 2020 and if women adopt more long-acting and permanent methods (LAPMs), family planning would save the lives of 13,000 mothers and 112,000 children over that time period. Moreover, compared to current trends in the CPR, the Amhara Region would save an additional US$19 million in maternal and child healthcare costs. Using these results, the RHB promotes data-driven FP policy development and can advocate for increased access to family planning and LAPMs to achieve national FP goals in the region. 

  • The USAID-funded Health Policy Project (HPP) in Ethiopia builds the capacity of leaders to increase demand for and use of evidence for family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) services in support of the strategic planning, monitoring, and evaluation of programs, nationally and in selected regions.To strengthen the capacity of national planning bodies, professional associations, training institutions, and research partners in this area, HPP collaborated with the Ethiopian Public Health Association (EPHA) to provide trainings and technical updates on key FP/RH models, including the GAP (Gather, Analyze, and Plan) Tool and a selection from the Spectrum System of Policy Models.

    To ensure that participants would apply the skills learned, HPP and EPHA designed and implemented a pilot mentorship program that paired selected trainees and master trainers as mentees and mentors, respectively.To document the lessons learned and obtain participant feedback on the training and mentorship program, an assessment, including in-depth interviews, was conducted.