This Panel is the follow-up to the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Rethinking Family Planning Measurement with a Reproductive Justice and Rights Lens (2023–2026), which undertook a comprehensive, consultative process to critically examine global family planning indicators and identify priority directions for improved measurement.
This new panel follows from the earlier panel’s work that identified contraceptive agency as the centering measurement construct for assessing family planning contraceptive need and use. This follow-on panel proposes a focused, three-year programme of work organised around a central thesis: that meaningful measurement of contraceptive agency requires attention both to the individual-level capacities and experiences of people making contraceptive decisions, and to the enabling environment that shapes, constrains, or supports those decisions.
This Panel's objectives are to:
- Develop a concise, survey-ready measure of contraceptive agency.
- Advance measurement of the social, normative, and systemic conditions that shape contraceptive agency through rights and justice lenses.
- Inform post-2030 indicator frameworks.
- Engage diverse, multi-regional researchers and practitioners around agency measurement.
Related work:
Report from the previous IUSSP Panel:
Papers on contraceptive agency published in the previous IUSSP Panel's special issue of Studies in Family Planning:
- Moving Past a Legacy of Controlling Women: Key Frameworks to Center Women and Girls’ Choice and Agency in Sexual and Reproductive Health Measurement
- Agency in Family Planning: A Scoping Review of the Measurement of Agency in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
- Development and Validation of the Agency in Contraceptive Decisions Scale in Uganda and Nigeria