CAPACITY STRENGTHENING TOOL

Reaching First-Time Parents and Young Married Women for Healthy Timing and Spacing of Pregnancies in Burkina Faso

In Burkina Faso, this project promoting HTSP had three components:

  1. Home visits by animateurs (community health workers)
  2. Small peer groups for young married women
  3. Quality improvements to family planning service delivery (facility- and community-based services).

The project focused on young married women, including first-time parents, and generated knowledge about how to tailor sexual and reproductive health services to meet their diverse needs. This knowledge was generated through an intensive qualitative monitoring and documentation process. The process was innovative in that it engaged frontline implementers— community health workers referred to as animateurs and peer group leaders who led small group sessions with young married women—as generators, analysts, and users of their own shared evidence.

Key findings from the documentation process include lessons learned about:

  • How to engage key influencers and gatekeepers
  • How to effectively plan and run peer group discussions and home visits
  • How to tailor specific approaches to increase demand for family planning among firsttime parents, young married women with no children, and young married women with multiple children
  • Considerations for recruiting frontline implementers
  • How to adapt small group activity cards to the context in Burkina Faso

Last modified: March 25, 2019

Language: English