FHI - Uganda

Helping children made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS

SEPTEMBER 2009—In Uganda, the ROADS Program is teaching people living with HIV how to write wills and create "memory books" for their children. The program is also helping older children acquire the skills they need to manage their parents' property. Read more in this story from IRIN PlusNews.

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arrow graphic Legal Education and Will Writing (manual from FHI/Nigeria, 2007)
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FHI supports the Ugandan government and local partners with research on improving women's access to and choice of contraceptive methods, reducing acquisition and transmission of HIV, and finding safe and effective treatments for malaria. We collaborate with other NGOs, universities, and professional organizations to address these and other challenges in the field of public health.

Current Highlights

There is substantial unmet need for family planning in Uganda. FHI and the Uganda Ministry of Health are working to meet this need by revitalizing long-acting and permanent contraceptive methods and promoting the provision of DMPA by community-based health care workers.
To improve access to and client continuation of contraception, FHI also is surveying drug shops to see whether they would be suitable outlets for providing injectable contraception.

FHI is providing technical assistance on and NIH-funded study to determine the safety and effectiveness of an extended regimen of nevirapine in infants born to women infected with HIV. The goal of this work is to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV during breast-feeding.
Service providers often deny DMPA to women who are late for their scheduled reinjection. FHI is analyzing pregnancy rates among clients up to four weeks late for reinjection to reassure providers that pregnancy is unlikely in these women, thus eliminating one of the barriers women face in continuing use of this method.
Results of a previous study by the POLICY project found that people living with HIV and AIDS in Uganda preferred to receive family planning and HIV/AIDS services in one location. FHI is developing and promoting provider training and job aids that address the family planning needs of couples with HIV or at high risk of HIV infection.

Screening Checklists to Initiate Use of Contraceptives

FHI, in partnership with the Ugandan Ministry of Health, has developed four screening tools to assist family planning providers in Uganda to efficiently and effectively perform the essential screening process when providing contraceptives to clients, as follows:

Determine whether a client may safely and effectively use their contraceptive method of choice
Rule out pregnancy among women seeking to initiate their contraception of choice.

You can download the checklists in PDF format from the links below:

Checklist for Screening Clients Who Want to Initiate DMPA (2007, PDF, 174 KB)
Checklist for Screening Clients Who Want to Initiate Use of the Copper IUD (2007, PDF, 194 KB)
How To Be Reasonably Sure A Client Is Not Pregnant (2007, PDF, 68 KB)
Checklist for Screening Clients Who Want to Initiate Combined Oral Contraceptives (2007, PDF, 166 KB)

Other Tools and Reports

Network: Hormonal Contraception and HIV (2007, PDF, 1.21 MB)
Family Health Research: Improving Access to Family Planning (2007, PDF, 326 KB)
Family Health Research: Integrating Services (2007, PDF, 225 KB)

FHI's strong partnerships with U.S. and host-country governmental agencies, international NGOs, universities, and local and faith-based organizations play a vital role in our high-quality research and programs.