Addressing Reproductive And Child Needs Among The Urban Poor In Uttar
Pradesh, India
Twenty percent of the world's births occur in India , resulting in 70,000 babies born daily. The USAID-funded IFPS (Innovations in Family Planning Services) Project provided three year pilot grants to District Urban Development Agencies in Allahabad and Meerut to implement sustainable, community-based reproductive and child health programs in 68 slums with a total population of 160,000.

Using a community-based distribution approach with strong linkages to a broad range of urban development activities, medical services and an increasing emphasis on social marketing, these projects integrated family planning, antenatal care and child health services into existing urban development efforts.

At the end of the three years, external evaluations found that use of modern methods of contraception nearly doubled, antenatal care and tetanus toxoid coverage were well above state averages, and child immunization rates had increased two and a half times.

A client in the Dabai neighborhood of Meerut told an evaluation team "Before the project and the community health worker, we did not use family planning. We did not know of any alternative methods. Kamala (the community health worker) told us about all the methods, made pills and condoms available to us in our homes, and referred us for IUDs. Now we can control how many children we have and we do not need to go on having endless numbers of children."

In addition, the evaluation team was told that the community was now having their children immunized and was using ORS for diarrhea cases - significant events in a state where one in five children has received no vaccinations at all, and the infant mortality rate is 28 percent higher than the national average.

Based on the successful pilots, the IFPS project has expanded the program to nine districts covering 1.12 million slum dwellers.

Date: 2003