Maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high in sub-Saharan
Africa with over 800 women dying a day from preventable causes related to
pregnancy and childbirth. Almost all
these women are among the rural poor in developing countries. A landmark announcement was made at the 2012
London Summit on Family Planning where donors and leaders around the world
pledged their commitment to ensure that 120 million women gain access to
voluntary family planning services by 2020.
Read more in the press release here: http://www.londonfamilyplanningsummit.co.uk/1530%20FINAL%20press%20release.pdf
At this summit the Ugandan President, H.E Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, said “In developing countries like
Uganda, women continue to die so needlessly during pregnancy and childbirth.
Yet the causes of these deaths are well known and so are the solutions. The
causes are largely preventable. Use of relatively cheap technologies, including
family planning can lead to rapid improvements in conditions of women.”
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| Sayana Press |
At this meeting a donor
consortium made up of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, DIFD, USAID,
UNFPA, and Pfizer, Inc. agreed upon the purchase of 12 million doses of Sayana® Press to help reach some of the 120 million women pledged by the
Family Planning 2020 goal. Sayana Press
is a form of the injectable birth control, very similar to the method Depo
Provera. Depo, as many of you know, is a
shot that women get to prevent pregnancy protecting them for 3 months. In its current form, Depo Provera must be
administered in a clinic by a trained practitioner intramuscularly with a one
inch long needle. The new product,
Sayana Press, is the same medicine (Depo) but in a different injection
system. This system, called Uniject, is
a technology that was developed by PATH, and is an all in one injection
device, with a small needle that can be injected subcutaneously. The Uniject system allows for
the same drug, Depo Provera, to be delivered to women outside the clinic
setting. Therefore unskilled community
health workers can take the injection to women in the most rural of areas and
administer it without them having to come to a clinic. The donor consortium and PATH have a strong
hunch that this will greatly increase access to family planning for the women
who need it most.
PATH won a grant to coordinate
the introduction and evaluation effort for Sayana Press. Within our grant we will be introducing the
product in four to six countries and conducting a large outcome evaluation in 3
countries between 2013-2016. I was hired
on the Reproductive Health, Sayana Press team, to provide technical support of
the evaluation.
Plans are well underway to
introduce in Senegal, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Niger. We will be evaluating in Senegal, Uganda, and
a third country yet to be determined. I
am currently in Uganda conducting district visits in 22 selected districts that
the Ministry of Health would like to introduce. The purpose of my trip is to
visit with government district health teams and discuss the project and get
some information from them that will help with introduction. In addition, I am visiting a health care
center in each district where women receive family planning services.
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| Community health worker in Uganda with Sayana Press |
More about our project here: http://www.path.org/projects/uniject-dmpa.php
I feel honored to be a part of this team and excited about
the next 3 years.
