Impact evaluations aim to measure the outcomes that can be attributed to a specific policy or intervention. Although there have been excellent reviews of the different methods that an evaluator can choose in order to estimate impact, there has not been sufficient attention given to questions...

In the 1980s, signs that sub-Saharan Africans would welcome family planning in numbers sufficient to make a difference in fertility rates were scattered and weak. Pessimists cited formidable cultural and socioeconomic barriers; optimists provided resources for pilot projects, coupled with...

Demand for children and demand for contraceptives are not independent of the system of supply. And client transactions are the major means for lowering costs. Family planning workers, providers of services and mass media campaigns, are the harbingers of new ideas and new delivery systems that...

The Matlab Project in Bangladesh and the Kundam Project in India have demonstrated that a significant rise in contraceptive prevalence can occur in socioeconomic environments that are generally conducive to high fertility and mortality. The author describes the inputs and outputs of these two...

Family planning was introduced in Zimbabwe as a voluntary movement in the 1950s. Volunteers formed a Family Planning Association in the mid-1960s. The government became interested in family planning in the late 1960s after analysis of the 1961 population census. It gave the Family Planning...

Both projects described here, Matadi and Kananga, helped health providers in those two cities offer clinical family planning services. But their approaches differed markedly. The family education program in Matadi concentrated on pioneering community-based distribution of contraceptives, with...

While a private sector exists in every society, the nature of its involvement in family planning service delivery varies widely across countries. This paper reviews the role of the private sector in family planning and discusses how much more of the demand for contraception can be met through...

This paper evaluates the Profamilia's outreach effort of 1986. Profamilia is an affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and provides more than 60 percent of Colombia's family planning services. This paper focuses around the question of Profamilia's ability to provide more...

Training programs mainly address market failures related to lack of skills (technical, cognitive, non-cognitive). This paper conducts a comprehensive review of training programs effectiveness in developing countries. Based on relevant international experiences, the paper highlights key design...

The paper reviews the literature on the characteristics and impact of opinion leaders on the diffusion of new knowledge, concluding that there is no clear evidence on whether opinion leaders are more effective if they are similar in socioeconomic attributes to the other farmers rather than...