The Digital Family Planning Landscape

• This field likely contains several hundred tools, at minimum.
• Many apps in our review were developed with no evidence base at all. Across the literature, this was especially true for client-focused apps, many of which did not move past their pilot stage.
  • Regional- and organizational-specificity often limited the reach and scalability of a tool. The current system of funding for development efforts also contributes to the problem.
• Of policy-focused apps included in the review, most were limited in evidence, but far-reaching in scale.
• Most tools identified lacked any grounding in behavior change theory.
  • Without foundations in theory or evidence, the majority of educational apps lacked comprehensive, validated content.
  • Tools designed with community involvement and behavior change theory were more likely to have sustainable impact at scale.

• Family Planning Perceptions Dashboard, with its use of real-time Facebook data to visualize trends in family planning conversation online. While this tool is dated and out-of-use, it’s worth looking at for its approach to family planning surveillance with social media.
• AskNivi, with its use of natural language processing to connect clients with family planning services, education, and care.
• PROMPTS ‘Triage Bot,’ with its rapidly adapting natural language processing algorithm that reflects service outages due to COVID-19.
• FP-SDGs Model, with its aggregation of global data across numerous sources, modeling the impacts of family planning investment within the context of broader SDG aim.

Note: These tools all use big data sources or methods.

Principles for Digital Development

• This resource should be researchers' go-to. It’s a set of nine guidelines/best practices for designing sustainable, community-driven technologies, intended to combat that pilot-itis and coordinate global digital development initiatives.
• These principles include, but are not limited to:
  • Building for sustainability
  • Designing with the user
  • Being data driven
  • Working with open source software
• Each principle has some great accompanying resources: case studies, recommendations for frameworks and tools, advice for each step of the project lifecycle, and so on.

High Impact Practices (HIPs) in Family Planning

• The HIPs will give you a good evidence-based overview of what works and what doesn’t in FP programming. They’re a collection of 18 best practices, grouped across:
  • Service delivery
  • Enabling environment
  • Social and behavior change

Other Relevant Briefs

• Digital Health for Social and Behavior Change
• Digital Health for Systems: Strengthening FP Systems through Time and Resource Efficiencies