In Liberia, where one in three rural women have an unmet need for family planning, accessing comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services remains out-of-reach for many. But, thanks to the success of a recent Sayana Press pilot program, more women will gain access to a family planning option that can be delivered in their own home by a trusted community health worker.
In early 2019, community health workers in Rivercess County were trained to administer an injectable form of family planning called Sayana Press to increase access to family planning at the community level. From February to November 2019, over 100 community and frontline health workers distributed the injection to women throughout all six districts of Rivercess County.
A woman receives a Sayana Press injection from a community health worker.
Following the rollout, we partnered with Liberia’s Ministry of Health to conduct an evaluation of the Sayana Press pilot program’s effectiveness to understand and inform potential scale-up to other counties. Key findings show that the Sayana Press pilot was perceived as an overall success: introducing injectable family planning at the community level was widely embraced (and often preferred) by participants; community health workers—who had not previously been trained in administering injectables—showed competency at administering Sayana Press, while their supervisors were successful at overseeing this new task; and integrating the injectable into the existing supply chain also proved effective.
The evaluation showed encouraging results, while also highlighting several areas for improvement for national scale-up, including where community entry and continued trust building will be necessary to improve knowledge and uptake of Sayana Press.
By targeting the county’s hardest-to-reach communities, the pilot has helped to generate evidence about the success of injectable family planning methods in rural communities and inform planning for the inclusion of Sayana Press within the basic community service delivery package nationwide.
Read the evaluation report to learn more.
