Scaling Up Family Planning Programme VFM analysis

The Project

The Scaling Up Family Planning Programme (SUFP) in Zambia was a four-year programme, with a two-year costed extension, set up in 2012. It was successful in giving 300,000 women and girls access to family planning (50% more than the original target), with poor rural women making up more than 70% of beneficiaries. The overall objective of the programme was to improve reproductive health through providing women with access to family planning. The focus of the costed extension (SUFP II) was to enable the adaptation of the SUFP model and transition to full government management of the programme at all levels, based on lessons learned. This meant the project shifted from a service delivery programme, whereby SUFP directly conducted activities to increase access to FP services, to a capacity development and systems strengthening programme.

LAMP was contracted and worked closely with the programme team to:

• Apply the SUFP VFM framework to a reporting system, which aligned with existing processes as far as possible, for example, annual work plans, and operational performance indicators from M&E logframe and financial inputs from financial management system.
• Generate, verify and analyse year-11 VFM indicators and results.
• Review costs per output indicators, taking into consideration long term discounted results.
• Generate a VFM report for the first year of SUFP II.
• Compare results to baseline surveys taken from SUFP phase 1 where appropriate.

Beyond that, LAMP worked closely with the programme team to:

• Prepare a VfM report for the first year of the 2^nd phase of the programme
• Revise and update the VFM framework reflecting the evolution of the programme from service delivery to systems strengthening
• Make recommendations for further VfM improvements to the programme