Thirty years after the Cairo declaration on population & development: have family planning measurements caught up?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: The 1994 International Conference on Population Development (ICPD) initiated the transition of family planning (FP) programmes from focusing on population control to promoting human rights and women's empowerment. The indicators used to measure success of FP programmes, however, continue to focus on estimating modern contraceptive uptake. Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) and unmet need are the main indicators used. We aim to assess the views of those working within the FP community from the Global North and South on the use of current indicators for FP programmes. While there have been calls for new measures, understanding the barriers to changing existing ones is essential for adopting and implanting these new measures. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 31 participants from five distinct groups; academics, NGO workers, government officials, funding agency workers and advocates. Participants were working in countries worldwide, including both the Global North and South; the latter were mostly based in Francophone West Africa. Interviews explored several themes including FP targets and indicators. We applied a thematic analysis. Results: Participants' views ranged from those who believed in the need to eradicate current indicators from FP programmes to those expressing contentment with current indicators and their benefit in measuring success. Most of the participants acknowledged the benefit of indicators in assessing progress or as a starting point, yet they identified multiple limitations to their use, including the possibility of implicit coercion, skewing training to focus on long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) promotion, and prioritising modern contraceptive methods over natural ones. Some expressed anxiety that challenging the status quo could lead to funding cuts. Participants identified challenges in adopting new indicators and emphasised that funding for FP programs remains largely concentrated among international agencies based in the Global North, which results in maintaining certain traditional demographic approaches. Conclusion: Current indicators affect the understanding of success of FP programmes and influence how FP services translate on the ground. We provide international stakeholders' perspectives on the barriers to be overcome to support development of new indicators, including non-use of contraception as a success as long as it is a full, free and informed choice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".