Nov 30, 2017

The Carolina Population Center today announced a new program to generate and synthesize evidence to inform programs and policies to expand contraceptive method choice for youth aged 15-24 at the global and country levels.  This work is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ilene Speizer, a faculty member in maternal and child health at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, is the principal investigator of the four-year award.  David Guilkey, a Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Economics, will serve as co-investigator and senior adviser to the grant.  Both Speizer and Guilkey are Faculty Fellows at the Carolina Population Center.  The award is in the amount of $4 million dollars and will be conducted in up to 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. 

The research conducted under the grant will generate evidence on expanded contraceptive method choice for youth and adolescents through primary data collection and analysis of secondary data. The project will help fill gaps in existing global, country, and program-level data and information to support future evidence-informed investments on expanded contraceptive method choice among youth.

The grant will be administered by UNC’s Carolina Population Center.

“For too long sexually active young people, married or unmarried, have been unable to obtain a family planning method of their choice because of policy and service barriers.  This project will examine strategies to reduce these barriers at the country-level to support young people’s informed choice about when and if to have a child and which contraceptive method to use.  The information from this project will support achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 3 target for universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including family planning,” Speizer said.