A Tool for Monitoring the Performance Of Family Planning Programs in the Public And Private Sectors: An Application in Nigeria

grams. Few of these systems attempt to monitor the expansion of services and supplies among commercial-sector providers.1 Although national contraceptive prevalence surveys, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys, provide information on the total service environment (including clinical and nonclinical services and supplies in the public and private sectors), these surveys are conducted infrequently because of both data collection costs and the slow processing of results. Thus, there is a real need for a low-cost monitoring tool that can provide national data to family planning managers between sporadic, large-scale surveys. In this article, we present an example of a monitoring instrument that can be administered on a quarterly, biannual or annual basis—a one-page questionnaire to be attached to national household development surveys, which are routinely conducted in the developing world by a census bureau or other government statistical offices. The questionnaire collects information on household composition, sources of family planning information, types of methods currently used and sources of services and supplies. Such an instrument can allow program planners to monitor the provision of services and supplies in the public and private sectors, to assess the performance of alternative information, education and communication efforts, and to evaluate progress in reaching different segments of the population. It is easy to administer and process, and produces quick results. As such, it is ideal for countries that have limited reLinda Lacey is professor of city and regional planning and research fellow at the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA; Victoria Adeyemi is senior statistician at the Federal Office of Statistics, Lagos, Nigeria; and Alfred Adewuyi is professor of demography, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. The authors wish to thank Amy Tsui and Albert Hermalin for their extensive reviews of an earlier draft. Thanks are also extended to O. O. Ajayi and staff at the Federal Office of Statistics for their assistance, and to the U. S. Agency for International Development for their financial support. The contributions of the late W. Moye Freymann in promoting the development of the tool in Nigeria are also gratefully recognized. A Tool for Monitoring the Performance Of Family Planning Programs in the Public And Private Sectors: An Application in Nigeria