Women's Integrated Sexual Health programme

The Women’s Integrated Sexual Health programme (WISH) expanded sexual and reproductive health care services in 26 countries across Africa and Asia and strengthened national stewardship for delivering these services in the future.

The programme:

• Strengthened individuals’ knowledge and choice and built community support for sexual reproductive health rights.
• Created a stronger enabling environment for sexual and reproductive health and family planning (SRH/FP) and rights. It did this by improving government policies, domestic financing, accountability and quality improvement systems.
• Improved access to and choice of voluntary family planning and other sexual reproductive health services through evidence-based innovations and best practice.

Options led the enabling environment component of WISH in 10 countries. We strengthened the capacity of civil society actors to hold governments to account for SRH/FP commitments, supported the development and implementation of favourable policies for SRH/FP, strengthened national stewardship of quality improvement for SRH/FP and provided technical assistance for improved domestic financing.

We worked with local actors including government and civil society to:

• Ensure increased funding for FP/SRH in line with policy commitments.
• Develop strong quality improvement systems and processes.
• Develop and implement evidence-based policies that address the needs of women and girls, particularly among the poor, young people and people living with disabilities.
• Strengthen accountability structures and participatory decision-making spaces.

What we achieved:

• Improved national stewardship over SRH/FP quality improvement (QI): We developed a scorecard to measure two indicators of quality improvement: the status of government stewardship over SRH/FP quality improvement; and efforts by the programme to strengthen this process. Digital QI tools and scorecards were developed and used in Bangladesh, Tanzania, Malawi and Uganda.
• Greater public sector investment in SRH/ FP: Our tailored technical assistance to government and targeted advocacy support to civil society organisations (CSOs) led to an increase in budget allocation for SRH/FP of over $9 million across 6 countries. This work also led to the inclusion of family planning in health insurance benefit packages in Nigeria and Madagascar.
• A more favourable policy and planning environment: We played a pivotal role in facilitating the development of a National Family Planning Policy in South Sudan. We contributed to the execution of decentralised planning and budgeting policies in four districts in Uganda and 17 districts in Tanzania.
• Accountability systems to influence and track commitments and policies: We enhanced the capabilities and reinforced networks of CSOs in Malawi, Madagascar, Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria. This enabled them to analyse data, generate and package evidence and use it to advocate for better SRH/FP.

As part of the programme design, we developed and put into action the ‘pathways of change’ (PoC) methodology to ensure flexibility and adaptation during implementation of the programme. The PoC framework played a critical role, not only during the programme’s inception, allowing interventions to be tailored based on individual country contexts, but also during COVID-19. It enabled the programme to adjust to COVID-19 restrictions and achieve intended results.

WISH was funded by UK aid and delivered by two consortiums led by MSI Reproductive Choices and IPPF.