Healthy Families, Brighter Futures Family Planning

Susan Ajok leaves her home early in the morning, five days a week to ride to the clinic. “I spend the morning at the clinic and so I ensure that before I leave I prepare a meal for them and return to spend sometime with my young children”, she says. At the clinic Susan volunteers as the a community health worker- helping women women keep themselves and their families health through family planning. 

Susan is one of the many volunteer health workers that were trained to counsel individuals about the range of natural family planning options.  But with the stigma still surrounding family planning, they need to work with the health facility staff, local leaders and religious leaders in helping women and couples.

Community health workers have been trained to strengthen the delivery of family planning services. In those same areas, with support from Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau we mobilized religious leaders to speak with their communities and congregations about family planning, thereby generating demand for services. The religious leaders also made referrals to Village Health Teams and facilities for family planning services. UPMB joined these three cadres—family planning providers from the facilities, community health workers, and religious leaders—to form quality-improvement teams, which meet monthly to share progress and address challenges related to promotion and delivery of family planning services.

For Susan, working alongside the clinic staff and religious leader makes her job easier, because this is a relatively new method. She loves the job because during her breaks as women are waiting for their children to get immunised, amidst all the crying, she gets time to talk to women about other things including on issues like hygiene, the importance of immunization and the natural family planning methods including other contraceptive options available in the clinic. 

Brenda is the clinical officer who oversees these activities at the clinic, she says, some women do not want contraceptives that are painful to administer and they fear the side effects, and with their own beliefs, this method is acceptable to them. 

If a woman decides to use this natural method, Susan can counsel her and get one of the staff to administer the method of her choice. 

Susan is highly motivated thanks to her innate desire to help others. But she was also motivated by her belief in family planning. She was one of six children, two of whom died young. She says, “Before, people reproduced without planning how their children will be in the future. How will they eat? How will they study?”

Like many African women, she made the choice to use family planning to space her children, so she could better support them. Fortunately for Betty, her husband supported her decision.

A deep need

Wherever it’s been introduced, Karin Clinic staff has helped increase access for women and adolescents, including new family planning users.

Family planning is being progressively scaled up throughout in the communities. We are training more village health workers to counsel and administer. That way, women can get the contraceptive wherever works best for them. More people are realizing that planning their families is one of the keys to success. “These days, family planning helps a lot,” says Susan.

Family planning—is helping teenagers like Acii, whose boyfriend refuses to use contraceptives, and young women like Atoo, who sells used clothes in the market to feed her four children. It’s helping couples like Olive and Gerald, who dream of a better future for their two small children.

“There are lots of women interested,” Susan says.

Friends there is need to support village health workers like Susan to get to more women out there. 

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