Country:
Funding:
UGX 18,000,000
Ownership:
Partners:
Status:
Tested and Ready to scale up
Strategic Focus:
Reproductive Health Supplies
Target Beneficiaries:
Teenagers and young people living in refugees and hosting communities of West Nile, VHTs and VSLAs
Type of Solution:

A service that helps young men and women living in rural and refugee settlements to access affordable family planning services by reducing the distance and associated costs through a last mile distribution network of village health teams.

Introduction

iKitty’s social mission is to reduce the high statistics of unintended pregnancies and STIs among teenagers and young people. It aspires to change this narrative by using locally based networks of VSLA groups and VHTs to provide mobile distribution of safe contraceptives and menstrual supplies.
Teenagers and young people have challenges accessing contraceptives in their neighborhood. Currently, they’re faced with stigma, long distance and high costs in accessing contraceptives, but if we use the networks of existing friendly VHTs and VSLA groups in their own neighborhoods to provide mobile distribution of safe and affordable contraceptives to them, then we’ll observe an increase in contraceptive uptake which reduces unintended pregnancies and STIs among teenagers and young people.

Progress and Results

During the experimentation period, the team focused on testing how the young men and women would prefer to be served the family planning commodities using village health teams. As such, they experimented with three male and two female distributors  with various age groups. The commodities distributed include male condoms and emergency pills. Pregnancy test kits were also added to the stock.

The team learnt that using peers as VHTs to distribute commodities makes the service look user friendly, thus approachable

  1. Needs Assessment: The team conducted an experiment to discover whether market opportunities exist in the VSLA groups and VHTs for distribution of contraceptives and whether teenagers/young people will be more comfortable using them as opposed to what currently exists.
  2. Effectiveness of the Boda-Boda Model in the Last Mile Distribution of Contraceptives: The purpose of this experiment was learn whether Boda boda model distribution is effective to increase uptake of contraceptives by teenagers & young people. The team learnt that when target beneficiaries get the right information on contraceptives and when the service provider is youth friendly and hails from one of the villages, the fear in teenagers and young people is minimal hence proving boda boda and peet-to-peer distribution methods is effective.

Challenges and Lessons Learnt

Despite the team being very passionate about their project they do need a set of process-related skills for example: the ability to share responsibilities, manage time, set and meet deadlines and communicate effectively. Due to these observations the team is still falling behind in terms of group projects.

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