Family Planning for Rural Colombian Women

Dear Women for Conservation community, 

After two months of presidential elections causing roadblocks in our family planning work, we have another family planning brigade planned for later this summer in Santa Marta, Colombia! 

We have been doing extensive outreach in partnership with ProFamilia to evaluate locations with the strongest need for family planning access, and communities in and around Santa Marta expressed keen interest in participating. This next event aims to provide critical education, health checks, and contraceptive resources to 50 more women in the Santa Marta region.

Many women in and around Santa Marta face barriers to accessing reproductive care, a foundational resource that opens doors to other critical opportunities and even basic human rights, such as education, careers, bodily autonomy, and long-term health. At Women for Conservation, we want to ensure that all women have access to this life changing right, because when women thrive, communities thrive. 

In one recent brigade in Pueblo Bello, Cesar, one woman named Mónica shared that she traveled four hours from her home in Nuevo Colon to reach the event: two hours on motorcycle and two hours on foot. She came to access family planning resources to support her personal health, her family’s health, and to make informed decisions about her future – in her community, which has little access to formal healthcare, childbirth can be a tremendous strain on a woman’s body. With access to knowledge and resources for family planning, Mónica can ensure a healthy future for herself and her family.

Thanks in part to your support, we have been able to provide more than 4,300 family planning services to women and men in Colombia. That’s 4,300 people, like Mónica, that now have more control over their futures and their financial and physical well-being. Thank you to each and every one of you who has contributed to this cause. Together, we can help all women access the resources they need for a healthy and fulfilling life.

With gratitude,

The Women for Conservation Team

Links:

• See Monica's testimony here

Dear Friends,

Thanks to your foundational support of this project, Women for Conservation funded voluntary family planning services for 235 more women in 2025, including our first workshop in Bonla, Liberia reaching 22 women. Providing access to this essential care means that 235 more women are equipped to take control of their reproduction, giving them greater opportunities in their education, career, and finances. Many of the women we work with tell us that these services allow them to complete their education, an opportunity which young women often lose when they become pregnant and have to leave school to care for their children. We also provide women with sustainable livelihood training in the production of artisanal, local, and organic goods that can be sold to supplement a family’s income. All of these factors work together to create stronger and healthier women, which leads to stronger and healthier communities. 

Through family planning, we also reduce pressure on the surrounding environment, which is particularly important in delicate and high-biodiversity ecosystems like rural Colombia and Liberia. Family planning has been instrumental in Women for Conservation’s approach to protecting endangered & endemic species, such as our work protecting the critically endangered Blue-billed currasow in El Paujil, Colombia. 

Our services this year included: 

• 57 individuals reached through family planning education
• 26 medical assessments
• 92 subdermal contraceptive implants
• 26 tubal ligations
• 8 follow-up health checks.

This year, our objective was to expand to more rural areas without healthcare access; we are happy to announce that we reached four new communities, including our first initiative on the Pacific coast of Colombia and our first education workshop in Liberia. 

Our partners in Liberia, the Liberian Youth Biodiversity Network, hosted a family planning education workshop for 22 women as part of their sustainable livelihoods project. LYBN taught participants about the power of family planning to give them autonomy over their livelihoods, and the unique power women have as environmental stewards. They also learned about the importance of the protection of native endangered species, like the pangolin, which lives in Liberia and is highly threatened from habitat loss and poaching. 

Another key accomplishment of 2025 is our outreach to the Indigenous communities of the Sierra Nevadas de Santa Marta. The communities we connected with live in remote, isolated villages with little to no access to sexual and reproductive health services; we provided transportation and care to around 50 Indigenous women, breaking barriers and helping these women take control over their reproductive schedule. 

Family planning is a key tool to fight poverty, advance women’s health and gender equity, and fight climate change and biodiversity loss. We would like to extend a sincere thank you to the GlobalGiving community and to our wonderful partners for supporting this worthy cause. 

To many more accomplishments in 2026!

Warmly,

The Women for Conservation Team