Selection of SFPS Sites

The SFPS Project carries out country-specific activities in the following four countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo. Because USAID discontinued bilateral assistance to these countries in 1995, the SFPS Project serves as a means for USAID to continue to support family planning (FP) and reproductive health services in these countries.

Because the number of service delivery sites in these countries is too large to support all of them, SFPS selected 190 sites in the four countries to benefit from SFPS assistance during the five-year period of the project. Since USAID’s main criteria for extending assistance to a project is good performance, SFPS applied this same criteria in selecting these 190 sites and the health centers which performed satisfactorily under past projects were given priority.

In the first two years of the SFPS Project, the service delivery component was behind schedule in implementing support to the service delivery points in basic areas such as providing equipment and contraceptives. As a result, SFPS decided that to ensure that country-level programs take off over the next three years, the project needed to focus each year on a certain number of priority sites in each country until all 190 sites are covered. The average number of priority sites selected per country per year is 10, although this number can be exceeded in some countries. By the end of the project, SFPS plans that all sites will have benefited from assistance by the project.

The criteria used to select the priority sites in each country were as follows:

• Minimum infrastructure: Priority sites have a minimum of infrastructure in terms of equipment, building, staff, and accessibility to the population.

• Performance: As stated earlier, priority sites are chosen based on performance. In site selection, performance is measured in terms of quality (based on 10 selected indicators) and in terms of quantity of services/contraceptives provided (based on the goal of increasing CPR by 1% per year).

• Staff motivation: Sites where staff are deemed the most motivated according to experience in past projects and currently, are given priority, since these sites have the most potential for impact.

• Institutional balance: In selecting priority sites, SFPS also sought to find a balance amoung in-country institutions that deliver FP services. By diversifying these institutions, the project does not rely only on public sector sites.

• Geographical balance: Finally, SFPS sought to find a geographical balance among sites so that, for example, not all sites are based in the capital or in one or two cities.

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