Director
English
Dear Members, Partners, Colleagues, and Friends,
Since I last wrote to you, our world has changed beyond recognition. The future of reproductive health (RH) appears more insecure than it has for decades. We see our funding architecture upended and too many of our stalwart reproductive health heroes stripped of their agency and vocation. Unmet RH supply needs are mounting in a growing number of low- and middle-income countries.
The sweeping cuts have come as a shock to us all, given the prominent role the U.S. government has played in development for years. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimates that the U.S. government accounted for 40% of total donor government funding for family planning, holding steady at $0.6 billion dollars over the last 10 years. Partnerships based on trust and mutual respect, nurtured over a decade, allowed communities to plan, grow, and hope. This was a sudden, swift, sweeping withdrawal.
And yet, our community is resilient. We are not strangers to adversity, and we fight back with an instinct not just to survive but to thrive so that we can continue to meet women’s needs for RH supplies. We are moving quickly from initial despondence to renewed vigor, setting into motion key strategic events and efforts.
One important event was the Future of Family Planning Convening in March, where diverse global experts came together to align priorities and mobilize action. RHSC supported a joint effort there to tell the data story behind the funding cuts. Along with the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Guttmacher Institute, FP2030, Avenir Health, and UNFPA, we built a composite understanding of the gaps, providing insights to help power our advocacy strategies.
These yawning gaps cannot be filled by a single donor. We must look beyond the current unpredictable donor funding landscape, and we must seek instead more diverse, dispersed sources of support. Indeed, Diversification of Financing was one of three priority areas RHSC members focused on at our recent Virtual General Membership Meeting where more than 100 participants workshopped solutions in this first of a series of strategic events.
Recommendations emerging from this first of a planned series of conversations included dedicated work to address both the short-term need to close urgent gaps, and the long-term efforts to build toward a more resilient, sustainable, and country-owned/dictated financing approach, as well as increasing domestic resource mobilization as a key – but not sole – solution to filling gaps.
Our GMM also focused on two other critical areas: further harnessing the power of the private sector, and the application of RH market data to improve procurement, strengthen decision-making, and increase access to supplies. We will share outcomes and next steps with you as the strategic sessions continue in the course of this year.
I was heartened by the strong engagement of members of our Manufacturers’ Group at the GMM, and look to them to play a prominent role in our vision for the future. They share our concern for the future of RH supply access and count on RHSC to create a platform for a healthy and diversified market going forwards. RHSC hosted a dialogue session for manufacturers and global procurers at the 2024 Joint WHO-UNFPA-UNICEF Meeting with Manufacturers in Copenhagen late last year. Both groups were explicit about the current issues they face and equally forthcoming in brainstorming solutions. We aim to celebrate and nurture this frank, trust-based relationship we enjoy with our members in manufacturing and procurement.
As our most recent LEAP report sets out, the private sector plays a crucially important role in our sector. As our community grapples with important questions about the future of contraceptive supply financing, it is critical we understand the current landscape of contraceptive supplies and the potential implications of the shifting roles of the public and private sectors.
Equally, we treasure our relationship with every single one of our members. Recently, we sent out a special call to individuals who have lost their organizations and find themselves cut out of listservs and memberships they could access as employees. We are very clear that RHSC is a partnership of nearly 600 member agencies, but it is the visionaries within them who move the mountains and make the magic. We need you.
When I reference ‘mountains’, I am painfully aware of the daunting need for supplies: donors may take funds away, but nobody is taking women’s needs away. A few days ago, WHO released new data showing that every day in 2023, over 700 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. A maternal death occurred almost every 2 minutes in 2023. So, one woman’s life would have slipped away in the time I have taken to write this last paragraph.
As we all know so well, this is not work for the faint-hearted. But there is courage and great power in our unity of purpose.