Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced last November that the organization would invest an additional $120 million in family planning programs over the next three years — a 25 percent rise on its current funding levels — to meet the Family Planning 2020 goal of giving 120 million additional women and girls voluntary access to these contraceptives by 2020.
The foundation continues to invest, too, in expanding the range of contraceptives available to women such as injectables that community health workers can deliver directly from pharmacies or eventually that women and girls can self-administer from the comfort of their own homes, Kellie Sloan, director of family planning at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told Devex associate editor Richard Jones in an interview on the sidelines of last month’s International Conference on Family Planning in Nusa Dua, Indonesia.
“We believe in method mix — in other words, not one device fits all — and the more you have the more you meet the needs of women and girls,” she explained.