Browse by Theme: Reviewed 2021

By Alice Allan and Christina Wegs:

The Family Planning Summit, held in London on 11 July 2017, was a chance to re-energise support for global efforts to reach an additional 120 million women and girls with contraception information and services by 2020. Since the first Family Planning Summit in 2012, there has been progress towards that goal, with an additional 30.2 million women and girls able to have access to modern contraceptive methods. But there is still a long way to go and some major challenges to overcome – including the withdrawal of key donor funding from vital components of comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights through the US government’s Global Gag Rule – the elephant in the room at the Summit.

Having finished up a week of intense discussions on cash programming in Geneva earlier this month, I have to say that even I, a cash advisor who is avidly passionate about cash-based programming, am all “cashed out!” However, there is one major takeaway from the Global Cash Forum that I can’t help thinking about. I was struck by how much the discussion about how best to deliver cash at scale efficiently and effectively dominated the whole day – and for good reason.

CARE International provides humanitarian and development assistance in 79 countries around the world. We are committed to evidence-based delivery, continuous improvement, value for money, and providing appropriate, flexible aid to communities. So cash was always going to be on the agenda for us.

Just past the halfway point of FP2020 – and looking towards next week’s Family Planning Summit – it’s time to celebrate and showcase progress towards our 2020 commitments but also crucially reflect on what more needs to be done to reach women and girls, especially in emergency settings.

Cash transfers have gained significant momentum over the past few years. Various studies demonstrate that cash-based responses have the potential to support longer-term gains beyond consumption. For that reason, stakeholders in the humanitarian sector are increasingly exploring new ways to measure the breadth of changes that cash can generate in people’s lives, in particular related to households’ capacities to deal with shocks and stresses, manage risks and transform livelihoods to cope with hazards and opportunities.

On 11 July, the international Family Planning Summit will be held in London, hosted by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and UNFPA. One of the Summit’s four priority areas is on reaching the ‘hardest to reach’, including women and girls in humanitarian settings. But why is family planning in emergencies so crucial, and how can it be truly life-saving?

On the plane to Accra just over a week ago I read Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me (the origin of the term “mansplaining”), and it struck a chord with me. A colleague from Kenya who hadn’t heard the term before asked if there was such a thing as “white-splaining”. And, indeed, there is. But, recently, I’ve been concerned with another phenomenon: “toolsplaining”.