Abstract
Driven by the increasing demand for and popularity of family planning, increasing population size, and changing demographics with more couples entering their fertile years, the financing requirement for contraceptives has become increasingly onerous. Strategies to finance contraceptives include expansion of the donor base; increased use of cost recovery, including revolving drug funds; greater use of the private sector; and direct government financing of contraceptive procurement. None of these is mutually exclusive, and to ensure contraceptive security, most countries are likely to use some or all of these approaches, and many others. Evidence suggests that many governments are beginning to finance contraceptive procurement using national resources, but limited data are publicly available regarding the global extent of this financing.
This brief details the findings of a survey of the extent to which national governments of developing countries are using national resources to finance contraceptive procurement. The brief examines the different types of financing used, some of the benefits of this type of financing, and some of the issues it raises. Hopefully, this study can be repeated to track spending and will spur more rigorous efforts to measure this practice.
