Background
In rural areas of Myanmar, midwives are the main health care providers. These communities suffer from limited access to family planning services and the midwives’ heavy workload means they cannot meet the existing demand. Auxiliary midwives are community health volunteers who could help reduce the midwives’ workload, but Myanmar’s current policies do not allow auxiliary midwives to provide family planning services.

About the project
This project was created to increase the use of contraceptives among women residing in three hard-to-reach townships – Linkho, Pinlaung and Laeway. The project team trained auxiliary midwives and built their capacity, enabling them to provide family planning services in the communities. By sharing these tasks with auxiliary midwives, the goal was to build the communities’ knowledge of family planning and increase the access of services by expanding the number of trained family planning service providers.

Results
So far, 78 auxiliary midwives from Linkho, Pinlaung and Laeway have been trained and supplied with condoms, contraceptive pills and pamphlets to distribute in the communities. The auxiliary midwives have held family planning education sessions in the target areas, where 701 people have participated so far. The project team’s evaluations show that both the auxiliary midwives’ and the community members’ knowledge of family planning has increased significantly since the start of the project.

Year: 2016

The project team plan to use the results of this project as a document to change the current policy and allow auxiliary midwives to provide family planning services in hard-to-reach-areas.