Bangladesh’s adolescent and youth population—one of the largest and fastest-growing in the world—has urgent and varied needs for family planning services and sexual and reproductive health care. Yet a strong tradition of early marriage and childbearing, set against a backdrop of conservative social and gender norms, means adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health and rights have historically been overlooked in national family planning programs.
The USAID-funded, Pathfinder-led Accelerating Universal Access to Family Planning Project, popularly known as Shukhi Jibon, is working to change this. This publication highlights Shukhi Jibon’s multi-pronged approach to advancing cost-effective solutions that enhance health providers’ skills and responsiveness, facility readiness, community engagement, and young people’s service-seeking behavior and contraceptive uptake—all of which can be scaled up across Bangladesh.
