ReachHealth

The goal of USAID’s ReachHealth project is to help communities in the Philippines reduce unmet need for family planning and decrease teen pregnancies. CCP leads the social and behavior change component of the five-year USAID-funded project.

The ReachHealth team works with the Philippine government and other stakeholders to implement social and behavior change activities at the national and local levels.

To date, the CCP team has led two innovative formative research studies to understand the root causes of teens’ and adults’ reproductive health behavior. One study, of more than 200 teens and their influencers, used a human-centered design approach to understand —from the young people themselves — what they are doing and what they need regarding their reproductive health. The study of adults used in-depth interviews and four newly created tools to understand the motivations and barriers to family planning behavior.

In October 2020, ReachHealth launched the “It’s OK to Delay” Facebook campaign after a national family planning communication strategy workshop with the Department of Health and Commission on Population and Development identified young, sexually active adults who want to delay their first as an overlooked and underserved audience. The campaign reached more than 3.5 million people in its first three months.

In February 2021, ReachHealth launched Konektado Tayo (Let’s Connect!) on Facebook after research found that teens expect their parents to talk with them about love, sex and relationships but parents do not feel equipped to have these conversations. The campaign works with the Department of Health, the Commission on Population and Development and the Department of Education, among others, to help support parents and give them the skills to have these important, but sometimes awkward, conversations.

Later in 2021, ReachHealth will launch its largest campaign, Usap Tayo sa Family Planning (Let’s Talk about Family Planning), aimed at encouraging couples with at least one child to use family planning to achieve their family goals.

ReachHealth’s social and behavior change activities also support health care providers and community health workers with new materials that will allow them to share complete and consistent information on the range of available family planning methods. These tools and campaigns are eagerly awaited in a country where, according to the 2017 NDHS, 20 percent of couples rely on withdrawal and use of all family planning hovers around 54 percent, far from the government’s goal of 65 percent.