The new project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), ExpandPF, was officially launched on March 26, 2024 in Lomé in the presence of emissaries from the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), partners and of the Minister of Health and Public Hygiene, Prof. Mustafa Mijiyawa.
According to the executive director of ATBEF, Noélie Koevi-Koudam, “ExpandPF presents itself as a boon that ATBEF intends to exploit optimally with all partners to make the offer of family planning an accepted service, requested voluntarily and offered with quality.” Scaling up high-impact practices in the field, she continues, “will constitute one of the approaches to be carried out in order to envisage significant results. All our gratitude to USAID for the trust and opportunity offered to IPPF and through it to a national NGO (ATBEF) to demonstrate its expertise in the context of this activity,” she added.
ExpandPF is a comprehensive program with a budget of $45 million over five years. The countries of intervention are Cameroon, Mauritania, Ivory Coast and Togo. An amount of 16 million dollars is reserved for the implementation of the project in Togo.
The main objective of the program is to improve access to family planning services, postpartum care and the involvement of community health workers, particularly in underserved urban and peri-urban areas. According to the project manager, Dr Angoran Bénie Hortense, the initiative is broken down into three main objectives. The first is to increase demand for family planning and sexual and reproductive health services; the second is to improve the quality of services and finally to strengthen the adoption at the national, international and regional level of high-impact health measures. “It is through collaboration with all partners, both national and regional, and the community we want to serve, that we will together take up the challenge of ensuring each individual has the right to take control over their sexual health. and family planning,” she commented.
For more than 4 decades, ATBEF has worked alongside the Togolese State to promote equitable quality services, sexual and reproductive health rights, through an operational network of 6 fixed service points, three clinics mobile and a cohort of nearly 500 community health workers. “It will therefore be together with these partners and stakeholders that we intend to meet the challenge and strengthen the well-being of our populations,” indicated the executive director of ATBEF.
Atha ASSAN