European Donors Support to Reproductive Health and Family Planning: Overall Policy and Funding Trends - April 2012
When analysing recent data on European donor support for family planning (FP) and reproductive health (RH), Countdown 2015 Europe partners would like to draw the attention to the following four major trends in Europe:
- European donors remain committed to FP/RH, even within a tense economic climate and with most governments having shifted to a new political (mostly centre-right) orientation after elections in the past two years. At the same time, there has been an increasing focus on achieving results and demonstrating impact of official development assistance.
- Four very interesting recent initiatives in support of FP/RH are worth being supported and followed closely: The 2010 Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health; the UN Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health; the West African Family Planning conference held in Ougadougou (early 2011); and the planned FP Summit organised by the UK government with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for July 2012, focused on mobilizing resources and support for family planning.
- European donor core funding to UNFPA increased by 10% between 2009 and 2010. Due to the relative ease of measuring this figure, it often becomes a proxy indicator for donors’ financial commitment to FP/RH.
- General lack of transparency on specific funding for FP/RH, especially through bilateral support, remains a major challenge.
These trend analyses were based on policy and funding data from the Countdown 2015 Europe database. The data collected on the website provides added complementary value to the data already collected on aid flows to reproductive health and family planning
More overviews of European donor funding for RH/ FP per individual country are also available online.
