The World Health Organization, Department of Reproductive Health and Research (WHO/RHR), in collaboration with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), supports a growing partnership of international agencies known as the IBP Initiative. This partnership was initiated in 1999 and formalized as a IBP Consortium through a Memorandum of Understanding with WHO/RHR in 2003, with WHO/RHR hosting the secretariat.
Learn more about who we areThe IBP is dedicated to strengthening the capacity of the family planning/reproductive health community to identify, implement, and scale-up effective practices through sharing knowledge and resources, minimizing duplication, and promoting collaboration.
Learn more about the IBP Consortium
The IBP partnership is committed to improving the quality of family planning, maternal health, adolescent health, and child health, to increased gender equity, and to prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections.
See our current mission, vision and objectivesIBP members work collaboratively to reduce duplication and harmonize approaches at the global and country levels to scale up effective practices.
The IBP Initiative is a network that consists of and connects reproductive health professionals and advocates throughout the world through their work at the global, regional and country levels and through our online communication tools. Find out more about partnership
In 2011 the IBP partners started a second decade of activities.
As partners, we commit to working collaboratively to improve access to and the quality of maternal and neonatal health, family planning, adolescent health, to increasing gender equity and to the integration of STI/HIV prevention and care.
See the
WHO/Lancet series of articles:
Reproductive
health a matter of life and death
"The IBP partnership will be a proven leader for advancing the scale up of effective practices that contribute to universal access to and sustained quality of family planning/reproductive health services."
IBP partners, with support from WHO/RHR, developed the Knowledge Gateway to support virtual knowledge networks that now reach every country of the world.
Through
these virtual networks we link health professionals within and
across countries to share knowledge and experience and
resource materials and tools. Our goal is to improve access to
information and build on experience to inform and transform practice.
As a partnership we support performance improvement and change management techniques that facilitate the implementation, scale-up and sustained use of effective family planning/reproductive health practices at the country level.
Read the IBP 2011–2016 strategyInternational
Conference on Family Planning, Dakar, Senegal
29 November -
2 December 2011
This
conference examined cutting-edge research and programmes that are
helping to advance the health and wealth of families and nations
worldwide. The
IBP sponsored a series of six interactive knowledge-to-action sessions at the conference.
FHI 360A pioneer in promoting evidence-based practices, the IBP Consortium has been instrumental in improving reproductive health around the world. FHI’s participation as an IBP Consortium partner has contributed to many important achievements. We promoted critical global family planning standards and helped various countries update their family planning guidelines based on these standards. We identified and promoted local evidence-based practices to strengthen family planning programs in Kenya. And we helped make the 2009 International Conference on Family Planning in Kampala the resounding success that it was.
These and many other accomplishments would not have been possible without the strong partnerships and commitment to quality that IBP has championed over the past 10 years,
Population CouncilIn 2002, a consortium of international and national partners including Population Council and WHO initiated a Post Abortion Care (PAC) Initiative for Francophone Africa to increase access to and quality of PAC services in this West African region... As programs were replicated in the following years, dissemination of materials and information was noted as a main challenge. In response, IBP served as an ideal forum to share scientific evidence, standardized guidelines and best practices between Initiative members...
IBP’s role in the PAC Initiative for Francophone Africa was pertinent to the success of this regional commitment to PAC services; IBP allowed communication and exchange of best practices between colleagues and organizations working on similar issues and overcoming similar challenges. This network also reinforced the collaborative regional effort the Initiative intended."
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health / Center for Communication ProgramsThe development of the Knowledge Gateway platform has enabled rapid large-scale information exchange and transfer within the reproductive health community that was not previously possible. Given its common goals with IBP, CCP’s global and country projects benefitted from IBP’s pioneering work in information exchange through dynamic on-line networks, which often focused on issues and technical advancements that contributed to shared objectives to improve reproductive health in developing countries. CCP also gained expertise and built capacity internally through working with IBP on a wide range of information-sharing challenges. Working together to improve access to reproductive health through the introduction, adaptation, implementation and scaling-up of best practices has limited duplication of effort among partner organizations and has resulted in greater achievements. ..
