HIGHLIGHTS
- COVID-19’s impact on family planning products needed to be understood.
- Abt synthesized data synthesis from interviews, document reviews, and supply chains.
- We identified actions to mitigate impacts and build more resilient markets
The Challenge
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation funded Abt Global’s efforts to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on India’s reproductive health markets, including its effect on global supply chains. The assessment’s goal was to identify root causes behind the observed supply chain impacts and identify mitigating actions that governments, donors, and private actors could take to strengthen markets’ responses to COVID-19 and prepare for future shocks.
The Approach
For this assessment, Abt:
- Reviewed service delivery and supply chain data.
- Interviewed more than 25 stakeholders responsible for the majority of the supply chain for various family planning and reproductive health products in the Indian market.
- Modeled impacts of COVID-19 on the use of different contraceptive products and the number of unintended pregnancies.
- Engaged global stakeholders to validate and prioritize recommendations and mitigating steps.
The Results
Based on this work, Abt produced a policy brief that highlights main findings, including:
- Products and supply chain stakeholders faced differential impacts based on a range of factors.
- The increased costs of production and distribution are borne by suppliers and marketers – and not yet passed on to consumers.
- Clients and supply chain actors adopted innovative technology and new business models to promote continued market access and minimize disruptions in supply.
The assessment team disseminated these results, as well as recommendations to help markets sustain and grow in the face of this and future pandemics, through domestic webinars and stakeholder roundtables in India, as well as a global webinar focused on donors and large institutional purchasers of family planning and reproductive health products globally.
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