We work to ensure that our services are of the highest quality and are accessible to all people, particularly the poor, marginalized, and underserved.

As a service provider committed to guaranteeing sexual and reproductive rights, a significant component of our work focuses on ensuring that all people have access to health services and information of the highest quality. Latin America and the Caribbean is frequently characterized by the highest levels of social inequality in the world. Poor, rural, and indigenous people lack access to the most basic needs, in particular reproductive health services. By providing health services to the most vulnerable populations, including women, we help to improve community wellbeing and contribute to poverty reduction in the region.

Reaching Vulnerable Populations
Geographic, economic, and social barriers, such as long distances to the nearest clinics, high transportation costs, and time spent away from work, are often insurmountable obstacles to accessing health services. In response, many of our Member Associations employ mobile health units to reach isolated, rural, and poor areas. Vehicles ranging from jeeps to boats bring health supplies, information, and services, often for the first time, to areas ranging from indigenous communities in the Bolivian highlands to people displaced by conflict in Colombia.

Ensuring High Quality Services
Quality health care includes the right to benefits from scientific progress and technology. We seek to offer a full range of existing contraceptive choices at our Member Associations, including emergency contraception. As the only means to prevent unwanted pregnancy after sex, emergency contraception offers an important method for everyone, especially survivors of sexual violence and adolescents. IPPF/WHR is committed to expanding access to emergency contraception in the region, including public advocacy at the national and international levels. Our Quality of Care model establishes standards for care at all of our service delivery points.

Recognizing Gender, Rights, and Sexuality
We consider gender equity, human rights, and a positive view of sexuality to be cross-cutting issues that guide all of our efforts. Promoting gender equity ranges from considering the role gender plays in negotiating condom use, to ensuring that women are involved as leaders within the IPPF/WHR community. An important component of our work in gender equity is addressing gender-based violence at our clinics, including screening clients for physical, psychological, and sexual violence, and offering counseling and referrals to services.

Sexual and reproductive rights motivate all of our work; these include the rights to privacy, freedom of thought, information, and the right to choose whether and when to have children, among others. We also support a positive approach to sexuality that goes beyond medical and biological concerns to consider aspects like sexual pleasure and expression, sexual orientation, and sexuality as part of a free and empowered life.






Our recent publications on increasing access to services:

Millennium Development Goal 5b Fact Sheet

UNIVERSAL ACCESS to reproductive health is key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. MDG 5, “Improve Maternal Health,” particularly target 5b, “Achieve Universal Access to Reproductive Health,” is the most off-track of all MDGs, even though the critical importance of reproductive health to development has been widely acknowledged. Universal access to reproductive health is the key to:

  • reducing maternal mortality
  • preventing unwanted pregnancies
  • curbing the spread of sexuality transmitted infections, including HIV, and AIDS
  • empowering women and girls
  • building a more sustainable world for all people
Reaching Out: Volume 31, Fall 2009

In this Fall 09 issue of Reaching Out, you will learn of some of the steady progress we are making in partnership with our 41 Member Associations.  We capture our commitment to improve health and choices for millions left in the shadows. Although there is an overwhelming need for contraceptives in Latin American and Caribbean, IPPF/WHR is stepping in to pick up the slack. Our mobile health units in Bolivia travel on treacherous terrain to serve women like Dinonicia Olimbo Vega who lives in a remote village and walks two hours with her 5-year-old daughter to see a doctor.  And, Alex Sanger contributes an OpEd about Fetal Personhood Laws.