Increasing Demand for Family Planning through Interventions to Change Shared Behaviors and Beliefs in Mozambique

The Vale a Pena Team, led by Population Services International (PSI) and in partnership with N’weti and ThinkWell, will catalyze national solutions through which Mozambican adolescents are enabled to use family planning (FP) and make healthy decisions about their lives. In response to DFID’s Invitation to Tender, the Team will implement a user-centered design (UCD) approach to design and implement social and behavior change communication (SBCC) and service delivery solutions that effectively respond to the knowledge, beliefs, and needs of adolescent girls and their influencers. This will be done through a five-stage process: foundation, inspiration, ideation, application, and replication. Through its targeted interventions, the Team will achieve the project’s goal of creating at least 24,000 additional FP users, particularly among rural adolescent girls. To achieve this goal, the Team will build on their existing networks of FP providers and communication agents, implementing transformative changes for adolescents within their networks through the UCD approach and scaling what works. Key to the Team’s approach is co-creation and continuous engagement with adolescents and their influencers, allowing the Team to gain a deep understanding of the project’s beneficiaries and unlocking creativity during project design and implementation that would not occur through traditional FP project approaches. The UCD approach will also support the Team to develop holistic approaches that move the needle on FP use among the diverse segments of the adolescent girl population, engaging a range of actors and influencers and developing multiple channels for SBCC and service delivery. Further, the Team will build a strong evidence base for the interventions it designs through operational research and coordinates with the government and other implementing organizations to use these learnings across the health system.