The GFF is committed to ensuring all women, children and adolescents can survive and thrive. Countries will not achieve this goal without deliberate actions and progress in young girls’ and women’s access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).The GFF is working to ensure that SRHR is prioritized in country health plans—an area that has been historically underfunded.

Our approach goes beyond funding scale-up of specific services to facilitate a broader dialogue on policy and financing reforms needed to increase access to SRHR interventions, including:

  1. Strengthening country supply chains and procurement systems for family planning commodities;
  2. Ensuring more efficient resource allocation for SRHR; and
  3. Building robust data and results measurement systems to track funding and progress on priorities and commitments for SRHR.

These concerted actions are even more urgent now as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt the delivery of essential health services.

The GFF’s support to SRHR is comprehensive and goes beyond the health sector to remove some of the most pressing obstacles to the health and well-being of women and girls. For example, the GFF provide funding for the education sector in Bangladesh to improve learning and retention of girls in school as a key strategy for driving further improvements in adolescent and maternal health outcomes.

Eighty percent of country investment cases supported by the GFF prioritize adolescent health, and nearly all GFF partner countries are seeing positive trends in SRH outcomes.

For example:

  • In Afghanistan, couple years of protection (CYPs)—the estimated protection provided by contraceptive methods during a one-year period—has increased by 55 percent since 2017.

  • In Ethiopia, the modern contraceptive prevalence rate for women living in rural areas increased by more than 5 percent in the past three years.

Over the next five years, mobilizing additional domestic and global resources for SRHR is a top GFF priority. In response to the increased demand from many West and Central African countries, which have been receiving disproportionately low levels of external financing for SRHR, the GFF will place a greater emphasis on helping our partner countries in this region close SRHR financing gaps. The GFF will scale up investments based in school, community and facility service delivery models that will reduce barriers to reaching adolescent girls and provide them with a safer environment.