In both Nigeria and Togo, a key barrier to men’s involvement in FP was the common thinking among the male participants that FP is the woman’s domain. That said, while the Togo study demonstrated common misperceptions around FP among men, there were also clear socioeconomic motivations that led men to consider (or use) FP. Recent qualitative studies from Nigeria and Togo demonstrate that men want and expect to be part of the decision-making process about family size and childbearing. In addition, spousal discussion of family planning has been found to be significantly related to male engagement and contraceptive uptake in varying contexts. The Malawi Male Motivator project is an example of a peer-led program that used a randomized evaluation design to demonstrate that engaging men and promoting couple communication lead to greater reported family planning uptake among men. Finally, emerging areas for reaching men included mobile health interventions (mHealth), hotlines, and engaging religious leaders. Community dialogue and mass/social media can address men’s knowledge and attitudes as well as community norms, whereas, clinic-level activities generally focus on access to methods. Promising activities included community dialogue (i.e., community engagement), mass and social media, and clinic-level provision of information and services. ![]() Social marketing generally increases men’s access to contraceptives whereas outreach by male motivators can improve men’s knowledge and attitudes, address community norms around FP use, as well as increase access to methods. Among the programs identified, those that were considered “proven” (i.e., strong evidence) included social marketing and outreach with male motivators/peer educators. ![]() Notably, an identified gap in the review was the need for more robust evaluations of programs that target men. Finally, Hardee and colleagues recently reviewed 47 interventions that reached men as users/clients (for condoms, vasectomy, withdrawal, and Standard Days Method) to provide recommendations to strengthen FP programming for men. A more recent review of evidence of changing gender norms among men to improve reproductive health outcomes demonstrates that programs that use a gender-transformative approach (i.e., promote gender-equitable relationships between women and men) and those that include multiple components were the most successful. The studies at the time of the review demonstrated that men’s involvement was related to men’s positive support for women’s contraceptive use and that men were not necessarily a barrier to use. One earlier review of evaluations of men’s involvement in sexual and reproductive health programs demonstrated that 10 years after the 1994 ICPD conference there was still little programmatic engagement of men and few evaluations of interventions engaging men in sexual and reproductive health programs. Several systematic reviews have examined programs targeting men to identify effective strategies for engaging men as partners and strategies to improve men’s own reproductive health needs. The evidence on male targeted FP programs has evolved over time. Programs that involve men can increase spousal communication frequency, address gender inequitable norms, and lead to greater FP use. Engaging men is particularly important given that husbands and male partner opposition are often given as reasons for contraceptive non-use by women. ![]() Following the 1994 ICPD meeting, there was increasing attention to engaging men as partners to increase couple communication and encourage men’s support for women’s FP decision-making. Prior to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), family planning (FP) efforts almost exclusively focused on delivery of clinical services to women.
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