Sharon Cromer, Acting Assistant Administrator, from USAID’s Africa Bureau in Washington, and USAID/Uganda Mission Director, Dave Eckerson visited Marie Stopes Uganda’s recently to see for themselves the work the organisation is doing. Marie Stopes Uganda is one of USAID’s newest partners and will be implementing a new US$10 million programme over five years to increase access to affordable family planning over a wide geographic area in Uganda.
The programme is called 'ACT-FP – Increasing Affordability, Coverage and Training Capacity in Family Planning' and funding will focus on a number of elements: increasing coverage across the country through funding eight mobile outreach teams (two of them new); adding an affordable long term and permanent methods voucher to Marie Stopes Uganda's existing output based aid project, and training public health workers. The project also includes a number of other exciting elements such as advocacy initiatives to encourage the shifting of tasks such as contraceptive surgery to clinical officers; activities to encourage people to change their behaviour and use family planning and GIS mapping to ensure that health sites for outreach visits are located in the best possible areas and reach as many people as possible.
Ms Kromer, who was in Uganda for a couple of days, took time out from her busy schedule to visit Marie Stopes Uganda’s Kavule Centre in Kampala. She spent two hours there meeting team members as well as a number of clients both before and after they had had a family planning service. She also observed a vasectomy!
Speaking after Ms Kromer's visit, Megan Rhodes, Health Team Leader at USAID/Uganda who helped to organise the visit said: "Access to high-quality, voluntary family planning is a key objective for USAID/Uganda, and it was great to be able to demonstrate our commitment to this goal through a partner like Marie Stopes Uganda".
Jon Cooper, Chief of Party at Marie Stopes Uganda said: "It was a boost for us all to receive such an enthusiastic senior USAID delegation and show-off the Marie Stopes model in practise. This funding is a huge endorsement of our excellent Marie Stopes Uganda team and programme. It will enable us to scale-up to provide more, better focussed, quality services to the underserved across Uganda".