SysteMALEtizing Resources for Engaging Men in Sexual and Reproductive Health

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SysteMALEtizing Resources for Engaging Men in Sexual and Reproductive Health:
Family Planning/Contraception and Other Reproductive Health Services

Download printable brochure (PDF: 836KB)

Family planning programs have perhaps evolved the most, from historically focusing exclusively on women to now involving men as agents of change. Following the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, many programs viewed men as obstacles to family planning and involved them simply as allies in the goal of increasing contraceptive prevalence among women. Gradually, programs emerged that factored in men’s own reproductive health needs, making services more attractive to men, improving men’s access to services and information, and increasing providers’ comfort in working with men.

Programs have also come to recognize the crucial role that men play in women’s successful contraceptive use, and have responded by providing better couple counseling, promoting partner communication, and improving men’s knowledge of the range of available contraceptives and their potential side effects. Male engagement in family planning has most recently come to mean more than achieving fertility goals and providing clinic-based services for men: engaging men can improve reproductive health and rights for men, women, and the entire family. As a result of this expanded view of male engagement, programs now vary greatly in the approaches they take to working with men.

Please note: some of the following links lead to PDF or Powerpoint documents that may take a little while to load. If no helper program is available, they will download automatically to your hard drive.

Program Examples:

    Men in Agrarian Settings:

    Men as Clients and Community Leaders:

    Men as Clients and Partners:

Programmatic Tools:

    Men as Agents of Positive Change

    Men as Clients:

Research and Evaluation: