Family Planning High Impact Practices List
High Impact Practices (HIPs) are a set of evidence-based family planning practices vetted by experts against specific criteria and documented in an easy-to-use format. A HIP is measurable and it should have demonstrable impact in achieving various family planning outcomes including: modern contraceptive uptake, reduction in unintended pregnancy, reduction in overall fertility, or at least one of the primary proximate determinants of fertility (delay of marriage or sexual initiation for adolescents, birth spacing, exclusive breastfeeding and postpartum abstinence). Vetting criteria also include: replicability, scalability (i.e., potential application in a wide range of settings), sustainability, and cost-effectiveness. HIPs are categorized as:

Service delivery and social and behavior change HIPs are further categorized according to the strength of the evidence base for each practice as proven or promising.


Enabling Environment HIPs
Brief Title | What is the high impact practice in family planning? |
Increase allocation and efficient use of domestic public financing for voluntary family planning at national and sub-national levels. | |
Keep girls in school to promote health and development. | |
Galvanize commitment to support family planning programs. | |
Strengthen capacity for leading and managing for excellence in family planning programs | |
Comprehensively develop, implement, and monitor policies to support high-quality family planning at scale. | |
Engage communities and health sector actors in a collaborative process to jointly identify problems, and to implement and monitor solutions to hold each other accountable for improvements in the quality and responsiveness of family planning services. | |
Invest in supply chain management by increasing data visibility and use, accelerating product flow, professionalizing the supply chain workforce, and capitalizing on private sector capacity. |
Economic Empowerment – Evidence Review: Economic Empowerment has been identified as a possible future High Impact Practice in Family Planning. The TAG determined that the existing evidence does not merit the practice to become a HIP yet. The following evidence review provides a summary of the evidence on the impact of Economic Empowerment on Family Planning outcomes.
Service Delivery HIPs
Brief Title | What is the high impact practice in family planning? |
Proven | |
Integrate trained, equipped, and supported community health workers (CHWs) into the health system. | |
Offer contraceptive counseling and services as part of facility-based childbirth care prior to discharge from the health facility. | |
Support mobile outreach service delivery to provide a wide range of contraceptives, including long-acting reversible contraceptives and permanent methods. | |
Proactively offer voluntary contraceptive counseling and services at the same time and location where women receive facility-based postabortion care. | |
Use marketing principles and techniques to shape the provision of contraceptive services and products to improve access, choice and use, for target populations. | |
Promising | |
Train and support pharmacies and drug shops to provide family planning information and a broad range of quality contraceptive methods. | |
Offer family planning information and services proactively to women in the extended postpartum period during routine child immunization contacts. The extended postpartum period is defined as the 12 months following a birth. | |
Organize private providers into branded, quality-assured networks to increase access to provider-dependent contraceptive methods and related services. |
Social and Behavior Change HIPs
Brief Title | What is the high impact practice in family planning? |
Proven | |
Use mass media channels to support healthy reproductive behaviors. | |
Implement interventions demonstrated to encourage couples to discuss family planning/reproductive health and make equitable, joint decisions to reach fertility intentions. | |
Implement interventions that address social norms to support an individual’s or couple’s decision-making power to meet their reproductive intentions. | |
Implement interventions to strengthen an individual’s ability to achieve their reproductive intentions by addressing their knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and self-efficacy. | |
Promising | |
Engage and mobilize communities in group dialogue and action to promote healthy sexual relationships. | |
Use digital technologies to support, maintain, and adopt healthy sexual and reproductive behaviors. |
Enhancement HIPs
Brief Title | What is the high impact practice in family planning? |
Apply a systems approach to make existing contraceptive services adolescent-responsive, i.e., responsive to the needs and preferences of adolescents. | |
Use digital technologies to support service providers in delivering quality contraceptive services. | |
Use digital technologies to support health systems and service delivery for family planning. | |
Provide vouchers to clients to facilitate equitable access to and choice of voluntary contraceptive services. |
Suggest Citation
Suggested citation: High Impact Practices in Family Planning (HIPs). Family planning high impact practices list. Washington, DC: The High Impact Practices Partnership; August 2022.
For more information visit: www.fphighimpactpractices.org, contact: www.fphighimpactpractices.org/contact/ or join the conversation with #HIPs4FP