Urban family planning session at the UAPS African Population Conference

Entebbe, Uganda, 18-22 November 2019

The IUSSP Panel on Family Planning, Fertility and Urban Development will co-organize with The Challenge Initiative (TCI)*  a panel session on Urban Family Planning at the African Population Conference in Entebbe, Uganda the week of 18-22 November.

The single most significant expected change in the population structure of Sub-Saharan Africa from 2015 to 2050 will be the urban–rural balance. The urban population is expected to expand three-fold from 360 million to 1.137 billion, while the rural population will grow by a more modest 58 percent. In 2015, urban inhabitants comprised 37 percent of the total, and by 2050 this is expected to increase to 55 percent. This has enormous implications for the future of cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

The session brings together a panel of academics, programme implementors and city managers to discuss the contributions of family planning services to urban health and welfare and strategies for engaging local governments to invest in family planning services. This session will be an interactive discussion among actors sharing distinct perspectives from research and real-world experience.

 

The session seeks to raise awareness and knowledge about:

  • the multiple pathways linking urban population growth/family planning availability on one hand, and urban poverty and development on the other;

  • progress that has been made to-date in Sub-Saharan Africa on reaching the urban poor with reproductive health services, including creative approaches to engaging stakeholders; and

  • the ways in which population growth and family planning service availability in urban areas have recently been omitted from the urban health and sustainable cities movements, but how these themes could potentially be incorporated into Sustainable Development Goal 11 on cities, for mutual benefits.



*TCI promotes a “business unusual” approach to financing, scaling up and sustaining high-impact family planning solutions for the urban poor in urban settings in Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya (and India), including ensuring budget allocations from municipalities themselves as evidence of commitment.

The IUSSP Panel and Fellowships on Family Planning, Fertility and Urban Development are funded by a grant (OPP1179495) from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to IUSSP to support a 4-year project to produce policy-relevant evidence on the effects of family planning and fertility change on urban welfare.