Youth Community Scorecards to Improve Family Planning

The University of North Carolina will develop a Youth Community Score Card that allows young and unmarried women and girls to document challenges they experience when seeking family planning services at public facilities and to share these scores with community stakeholders to inform interventions that improve public health care in Kenya.

Quality in reproductive and sexual health services means addressing not only low provider technical competence and knowledge but also low provider effort and bias against vulnerable populations such as young and unmarried women.

In collaboration with Innovations in Poverty Action Kenya, researchers at the University of North Carolina seek to build upon the recent emergence of the community scorecard approach through the development of a Youth Community Scorecard for family planning provision. Community scorecards are easy-to-use, low-tech checklists that enable local community members to monitor and evaluate the quality of care at their local public health facility. The scorecard will be created by young people in the community and tailored to collect data on the challenges they identify. These data points will be used to generate a validated youth quality of care score for each participating health facility. The score will be shared with community stakeholders who will collaborate with them to develop feasible solutions and locally adapted action plans in each of three participating communities in Kisumu County, Kenya. This 18-month project will launch in 2019.

A lack of accountability mechanisms, coupled with disempowered clients who lack knowledge of their patient rights, serves to reinforce low quality service delivery among FP providers in many low-income countries.