Find the Family Planning Investment Impact Calculator at http://www.guttmacher.org/fp-impact-calculator.
What health benefits can be achieved by investing in family planning? The Family Planning Investment Impact Calculator is an interactive tool for estimating these impacts in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) or, collectively, for all LMICs in a subregion or region. It allows users to produce data and graphics on the following:
- The number of women and couples who would receive modern contraceptive care
- Unintended pregnancies, unplanned births and unsafe abortions averted by increased contraceptive use
- The number of women’s and girls’ lives that would be saved
- Cost savings that would be achieved
The calculator estimates impacts of actual, planned or hypothetical investments in family planning and assumes investments would go toward the total costs of providing contraceptive care—both family planning service delivery costs and associated programs and systems costs. The calculator should not be used for investments focused on individual components of service delivery.
The Family Planning Investment Impact Calculator is designed to estimate impacts based on the costs associated with the current service provision environment. The calculator does not account for the additional indirect costs that would be needed to scale up services to meet the needs of a large number of additional users—e.g., for new infrastructure development, workforce expansion, etc.
Impact estimates must be viewed in the context of current funding for family planning. For instance, the estimated impact of an investment amount equal to a country’s current funding could reflect current impact, or it could be considered additive if the investment is intended to supplement the current funding level. The country-level estimates of current contraceptive use available in our country profiles provide helpful context for the impacts of funding on the number of women and couples receiving contraceptive care. Note that the country profiles are from the 2019 Adding It Up project and 2024 profiles will be published in early 2025.
The Family Planning Investment Impact Calculator is part of the Adding It Up project and draws on the methodological approach used in that project’s Just the Numbers policy analyses to document the impacts of foreign assistance for family planning provided by the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. While this methodology was originally developed to estimate the impacts of foreign assistance, the calculator can be used to estimate impacts of funding from any source, including domestic funding, or from a combination of sources.
Estimating contraceptive users served
The Family Planning Investment Impact Calculator provides an estimate of the number of women and couples who could be provided with modern contraceptive care in a year for any given investment amount. It then produces estimates of the numbers of unintended pregnancies, unplanned births, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths that would be averted, using established ratios of the number of events averted per contraceptive user.
The calculator estimates impacts for only a one-year time period (2024). Assessing the impacts of funding over a multiyear period would require accounting for continued contraceptive use, which is not feasible with this tool. Country-level per-user contraceptive costs have been updated to 2024 US dollars, and demographic data and the distribution of contraceptive methods used (or method mix) inputs are from Adding It Up 2024, the most up-to-date comprehensive analysis of the costs and impacts of investing in family planning in low- and middle-income countries.1,2 Full details on how the numbers of contraceptive users, the method mix and the annual cost for each method were estimated are provided in the Adding It Up 2019 methodology report.2 Note that an Adding It Up 2024 Methodology Report will be published in 2025.
To estimate the number of women and couples who would be expected to receive contraceptive care at any given investment amount, the calculator divides the entered annual funding amount by the average annual cost of contraceptive care per user from 2024. The average annual cost of contraceptive care is based on the method mix and the cost for annual use of each method, as of 2024.
Annual costs per user include both direct costs (contraceptive commodities, drugs, supplies and health worker salaries) and programs and systems costs (program management, staff supervision, monitoring and evaluation, human resources development, transport, telecommunications, health education and outreach, advocacy, infrastructure, equipment, commodity supply systems and health information systems). Programs and systems costs are based on United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates of regional indirect markup rates that are applied to all direct costs.3 UNFPA produces current indirect markup rates which are applied to costs at the current level of care, prior to scale-up of services. UNFPA also produces indirect markup rates that represent the large, immediate investments thought to be needed for health systems to initiate expansion of capacity and improve service quality to meet international standards. The Family Planning Investment Impact Calculator uses pre-scale-up costs only and does not account for additional costs that would be required to scale up services to meet the needs of additional contraceptive users.
Estimating impacts per user served
To estimate the pregnancy-related impacts of the entered funding amount, the calculator uses ratios of impacts per contraceptive user served, taken from Adding It Up 2024 (publication forthcoming).
The pregnancy-related impacts generated by the calculator are unintended pregnancies, unplanned births, unsafe abortions and women’s and girls’ pregnancy-related deaths. The calculator estimates the difference between the annual numbers of these events expected to occur if all women in need of contraception were using modern methods and the current annual numbers of these events. Estimates of unintended pregnancies expected are based on method-specific contraceptive use–failure rates among women using modern methods and an estimated pregnancy rate among women not using any method of contraception.2
The ratio of pregnancies averted per additional modern method user is estimated by dividing the number of events that would be averted if all women who currently have an unmet need were to use a modern method of contraception (i.e., the estimated number of events if all women were to use a modern method minus the estimated current number of events) by the total number of women with an unmet need for modern methods.
Currency conversion
This tool uses ExchangeRate-API for currency conversions. Estimates will reflect the currency value at the time the tool is used (exchange rates are updated daily).