It is both important and urgent that the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition advocate for ensuring reproductive health (RH) supplies. In today’s environment of growing demand for family planning and the imminent phaseout of contraceptive donations in many countries, it is imperative to achieve greater political and financial commitment to support long-term availability of high-quality RH supplies.
If developing countries do not adequately address the growing shortfall in funding for contraceptives, they face the risk of losing 30 years of progress marked by dramatic declines in fertility and significant increases in contraceptive prevalence rates. With inadequate or poor-quality RH supplies, there will be unnecessary adverse effects on the quality of RH care, maternal and RH outcomes, and people’s ability to maintain their reproductive health.
Vulnerable populations will experience the most severe consequences of failure to secure adequate RH supplies. As such, advocacy messages must be hard hitting and be designed to galvanize policymakers into action, not tomorrow or the day after, but today.
This guide and toolkit offers general information and guidance on advocacy communication that has been useful to many groups interested in advocating for improved RH policy environments.
The general information is complemented by examples and templates of advocacy tools targeted specifically to the aims the Coalition has set forth for securing long-term availability of high-quality RH supplies.
Note that the advocacy templates and experiences referenced in this guide often refer to data on family planning, specifically contraceptives and condoms. This stems from the relative historical depth of information that family planning (FP) researchers have collected around FP versus RH supplies.
