Overall family planning financing by source

Overall family planning financing by source

Overall family planning financing by source

Definition:

A country’s overall family planning (FP) financing, by funding source. Financing for a country’s overall FP program include direct costs (contraceptives, supplies, health worker salaries) and indirect costs (informational materials, public education, facility costs, supply chain management, staff supervision, etc.).There are typically three sources for FP financing: i) government expenditures (includes internal and other government funding), ii) international donor contributions (includes the United States Agency for International Development [USAID], the United Nations, Global Fund, other bilateral donors, or other international donor sources), and iii) out-of-pocket consumer spending for commodities and services purchased in the private sector, service fees in the public sector, private sector prepayment schemes, including private health insurance, and government sponsored health insurance including social health insurance and community based health insurance, and national donors.

This indicator is usually expressed as percent:

  • (FP financing by domestic government expenditures/Total FP financing) x 100
  • (FP financing by international donor contributions/Total FP financing) x 100
  • (FP financing by private sources (which includes out-of-pocket consumer spending)/Total FP financing) x 100

The FP Financing Roadmap, which was discontinued in July 2024, expressed this indicator as a percent of two sources: domestic and external.

Data Requirements:

Total FP financing for a country; amount of FP financing coming from various sources: domestic government expenditures, international donor support, and out-of-pocket consumer

Data Sources:

Data for this indicator are obtained either directly from a country’s government, UNFPA’s Family Planning Expenditures Tracking surveys (administered by Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute [NIDI]), the World Health Organization’s System of Health Accounts country reports, Track20’s Family Planning Spending Assessment (FPSA), or the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) which collects and analyzes donor government funding for FP. Note that there may be a lag in publishing financing data by each of these data sources.

Indicator Type:

Percent

Purpose:

This indicator helps evaluate a country’s financing environment for their overall FP program. Global funding for FP is a stool with three legs: domestic government expenditures, international donor contributions, and consumer spending (FP2030). Although the importance of each “leg” varies significantly across countries, a mix of financing from a combination of sources is required to achieve predictable, adequate, and sustainable financing for FP (HIPs, 2018).

Issues:

In countries that provide FP along with other reproductive health, maternal and child health, or primary health care services, evaluators may have trouble identifying government financing for FP specifically. Likewise, it is difficult to disaggregate bilateral FP funding from broader population, reproductive and maternal health totals, and the two are sometimes represented as integrated totals. In addition, FP-related activities funded in the context of other official development assistance sectors (e.g., humanitarian assistance, education, civil society) have remained largely unidentified. Therefore, it may be problematic to identify such cross-sectoral FP-specific funding (FP2030).

Related content:

Total Market Approach

References:

FP2030. https://progress.fp2030.org/finance/. Accessed July 2024.

High Impact Practices in Family Planning (HIPs). Domestic public financing: Building a sustainable future for family planning programs. Washington, DC: USAID; 2018 Apr. Available from: https://www.fphighimpactpractices.org/briefs/domestic-public-financing/