On August 9th, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health signed a collaboration memorandum with BKKBN (Indonesia’s National Population and Family Planning Board) to formalize its partnership and recognize a new collaboration for improving research, policies and practice in family planning and reproductive health. The signing coincided with an official announcement that the next International Conference in Family Planning will be held in Jakarta, Indonesia, in November 2015.
For Advance Family Planning, this collaboration marks an expansion of our advocacy approach through a new cost-sharing effort with BKKBN. AFP’s Indonesian partners, Yayasan Cipta Cara Padu Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, will guide BKKBN and other provincial and district-level family planning stakeholders through the AFP Indonesia approach for advocacy strategy planning, identifying relevant stakeholders, and calculating district family planning budgets. Participants will learn how to establish and operate working groups of district-level stakeholders committed to family planning issues and to create a draft family planning strategic plan for each district.
The expansion begins September 2014 and will be implemented in four provinces (Maluku, Papua, South Sulawesi, and East Java), with participation from 30 districts. AFP Indonesia will provide follow-up implementation support to three districts in each province over the next year.