Q&A: Why family planning and reproductive health two-way learning is key

Ensuring family planning and reproductive health interventions are rolled out at all levels and that there isn’t duplication, is one of the big challenges in the sector, according to Nandita Thatte, lead at the IBP Network, a global alliance hosted by the World Health Organization and dedicated to improving family planning and sexual and reproductive health outcomes.

According to data, over 218 million women of reproductive age in low- and middle-income countries who want to prevent pregnancy don’t have access to contraception. By disseminating evidence-based guidelines and tools at all levels of operation and ensuring that local evidence and experience from communities is fed back to global decision-making, policymakers could help improve services for women globally, Thatte said.

“In general, there's just a feeling that — despite large footprints that many of our partners have on the ground — there's always this challenge of getting that global evidence-based resource down to the communities,” Thatte said.

By leveraging the collective experience of its partners, the IBP Network is helping to tackle the problem.

“In family planning, we've invested quite a bit in evidence-based clinical products like contraceptives — the pill, injectables, and other contraceptive methods — and the focus increasingly is on efforts to identify evidence-based programmatic or systems-related interventions to help get those methods and services out there,” Thatte explained.

Speaking to Devex, she explained how family planning and reproductive health problems can be solved through increased sharing of learning, IBP Network’s role in facilitating that, and its lessons since launching 20 years ago.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you explain a bit more about the challenges in rolling out evidence-based resources in the family planning and reproductive health space?

In general, there's just a lot of different kinds of information out there from different sources that get used very differently. For example, you have large, global bodies like WHO putting out important evidence-based guidelines to ministries of health and other policymakers, but there's a struggle to make sure that those guidelines are getting used at the programmatic levels by INGOs or civil society.

At the same time, you’ve got local organizations, civil society groups, and others implementing excellent programs and generating local evidence, but is not always reflected in the global literature.

All this in an environment where funding agency are putting out calls for interventions and projects that can be duplicative and overlap with one another.

And how do you tackle that?

There are a number of strategies we use, but one consistent pattern that has emerged is the effective deployment of community engagement and knowledge management. While seemingly intuitive, we repeatedly see how impacts are created from distributing knowledge and information down to the grassroots level, and in a symbiotic manner, feeding grassroots level knowledge back to the global community.

The network that we have been cultivating for over two decades was in some ways the first organization to employ these types of interactive dialogues in family planning and reproductive health. We have provided a space for a range of partners — from United Nations agencies to implementing partners like INGOs and civil society — to share information on evidence-based guidelines, resources, best practices, as well as programmatic challenges they are facing. We have helped provide that exchange of information to help reduce some of the duplication and foster a culture of learning across partners.

Tell us more about the creation of the IBP Network and its aims. 

IBP was created from a desire to develop a partner-driven forum that could elevate the most practical and relevant strategies in a field inundated with information. It was meant to focus on knowledge exchange and dissemination — how do we share evidence-based guidelines with each other to avoid duplication and complement efforts?

Since its inception, it has evolved from a knowledge-sharing platform to a network that also helps foster implementation, collaboration, and partnership. I think our most impactful work has occurred when we’ve been able to connect partners that likely otherwise wouldn’t have encountered each other, but whose interaction has yielded perspectives that enable a better cross-cultural understanding of what works in global health programming.

With that in mind, how has the IBP Network evolved, and what lessons has it learned along the way?

IBP always strived to be a trusted resource, which I think rests on its ability to remain a neutral platform where highly technical information can be shared. The advent of digital technologies has allowed us to amplify our platform in ways that weren’t possible when we began.

We’ve experimented with webinars, a new online platform, social media channels, and other innovative means of sharing information to experiment with how evidence-based practices can be best shared across our partners. We have also revisited methods as old as time, like storytelling to document local evidence and field-based experiences to share with a wider audience.

While being innovative and creative is important to communicating our message, being sustainable and consistent is likewise key by helping us to maintain a neutral and reliable platform. We aim to consistently support our new partners as they learn how to utilize our network while remaining an existing resource to our long-time members. Other projects or initiatives come and go, but IBP and its tools has really stood the test of time and has become a sustainable network for family planning and reproductive health professionals.

A key lesson we continually seek to refine, and one that is at the core of our mission, is trying to meet the moment and listen to the needs of our members — whether that's member organizations in our network or just family planning and reproductive health professionals. We want to make sure that our values are aligned and that we are able to foster mutual benefits in all our partnerships.

Where is the IBP Network heading in the next 20 years?

I'd love to see IBP continue to be a go-to platform where sexual and reproductive health and rights professionals can share experiences, research, and foster collaboration. We're also being more intentional about how we govern our network to be more inclusive and diverse in the organizations that we engage with and partners that we promote.

Given our long history in sharing information and collaboration, we're well-suited to act as a reference for the science around sustainable partnerships in development. We're trying to capitalize on this experience by developing indicators and measuring our impact more systematically.

I would also like IBP to continue providing innovative opportunities, to document and showcase local experiences around evidence-based practices and family planning and reproductive health by providing a collaborative space for small, local CSOs [civil society organizations] and NGOs to share their stories on a global level with audiences they would have trouble reaching individually.

There are a lot of different networks working in global health and development and even within family planning and reproductive health. The idea is not to duplicate but to build on each other’s work and complement the unique efforts we are all pursuing.