[MUSIC] Hi everyone. I'm standing outside the the UN compound in Copenhagen, a compound that's housing eight different UN organizations. Including WHO and UNFPA. This is where we'll meet Eric Dupont, chief procurement services. Thank you Eric Dupont for hosting us here at UNFPA office in Copenhagen. Maybe first you could explain a little bit about the mission of UNFPA and how this mission and mandate of UNFPA is different or complements the work of other stakeholders. >> Absolutely. So I think the first thing to, to say is that UNFPA is the lead agency in the UN organization with a mandate about repro, reproductive health and, and family planning. And and therefore the mission of UNFPA is really to, to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, that every childbirth is safe, and that the potential of every young person is fulfilled. And Because of this mandate, UNFPA I think is the natural partner of government, of non-government governmental organizations, civil society organizations, as well as donors. Because UNFPA is a global organization. We are present in abotu 150 countiers. And because we are global. Because we are big. We, we have a very broad range of, skill sets. In, in, procurement. You have skill sets in, in, in the, doctors. You have people specialized in the, census and population. Etcetera. And, the way we work with government. We do not want to substitute ourselves and replace the government. We support government. And, the way we do it We do it in different way, we do it in training staff, in building capacity, in advocating for the for, for, for reproductive health to have a high priority, for government, and we help them also with the collecting data, census data for their, for their population. And also by procuring commodities, by purchasing contraceptives on their behalf. >> Why's contraceptives so essential to UNFPA's work and mandate? >> Contraceptive is, is more than the central part of the work of UNFPA, really contraceptives are essential because What UNFPA does is to ensure that people can do proper family planning. And there is no family planning without contraceptives. Without access to contraceptive, you cannot do family planning and today in the world, we estimate that the number of women who have unmet needs in terms of family planning Is about 220 Million. It's huge, and the outcome of that is that every year you have about 54 million unwanted pregnancies. So that's why it's really critical that we ensure that the commodities, the contraceptives are available to those who need them. What are the different types of contraceptives that are promoted by UNFPA and, and why is diversity in contraceptive so important. I think we, we do not supply one type of contraceptive as you said. I think, I think it is very important to to, to keep that in mind. And we supply a very broad range of, of contraceptive because people have different needs. Needs can depend on the lifestyle. Needs can depend on medical reasons. needs can depend on the, also on the, the cul-, the, the cultural reality of the country. And therefore, if we want That people being able to fulfill their needs, we need to provide a broad range of, of contraceptive. Just to give you an idea a mother who is breastfeeding cannot use a contraceptive, a hormonal contraceptive, which has a high dose of hormone. Because that would be dangerous for the child. people would use contraceptives to prevent themselves against HIV. And therefore, they would typically use condoms, like sex workers, for example. So, depending on what are your needs, you have different type of contraceptive. And here I've kind of prepared some, some sample. So these, in these three baskets there are some different types of contraceptives. Which have been classified by, degree of, of effectiveness. And if I take the fi-, this one, the most effective contraceptive. So these are what we call the, intraut-, intrauterine devices. IUD's, where the active element is the, the copper. That it is put inside the, the, the, the, the, the body of the, of the, of the woman and it is it is effective for three to five years. Another type of of very effective contraceptive Is what we called the implant. Sub basically a steel rod is inserted in the arm of the, of the woman and and this is effective for 3 to 5 years depending on the type of of contraceptive depending on the type of of implant. So these are the very, very, what do you call the, highly effic, highly efficient or. Effective contraceptive because once it's inserted inside the body, you cannot forget it. Then, we have what we call the the still very effective, not as effective as the, these I just mentioned, but, still very effective. So, and these are typically the hormonal pills. So, basically a woman would take a pill every day. The, when, when she, she's not in her cycle, and then when she starts the cycle, then she doesn't need to take the, the, the pills anymore. But, then she would take what we call some placebo pills during the time that she has the cycle. When it's over, then she can start again so she doesn't forget. And in, in the example actually I have shown you here. these are not placebo actually. These are pills which contain iron so while she doesn't need the, the contraceptive while she's she's having a cycle her menstruation. Then she would take these and would get additional iron. We also use what Another type of contraceptive is what we call the injectible. Where basically the liquid is inserted into the arm of the woman, and this has, I would say this needs to be done every three to five months, depending on the time. I'm sorry two to three months depending on the time. And then you have other contraceptives which we called the least, I would say efficient contraceptives. And why they are not as effective as the other ones is because you might forget to use, to use them. And these are typical, typically male condoms or female condoms. So there are different types of of, of of female condoms with different designs. One has contained foam, others just contain the ring, so different designs. And then for many condoms there are different colors, different flavors depending on, on the needs. so as you can see I mean we could talk a little bit more about contraceptive but what I'm trying to say that we really have a broad range of contraceptive and the idea is to, to, to meet various needs of different people. >> What are the main barriers you face in the promotion of contraceptives as part of the UNFPA program and what do you do to overcome such barriers? >> That's a very good question. And actually there are I would say three main barriers to to the use of contraceptive. The first barrier are what I would call the supply chain barriers. The second barriers are related to availability of information. And the third barrier are what I would call cultural barriers. So if I take them one by one it ought to give you some example related to supply chain barriers. you can have some gaps in a, in a country about in country logistics for example. Let's think an example ministry of health would like an IT system that would allow them to know in the different districts of the countries what is the stock level. You might have a big stock in a central warehouse but in different districts of the country they might be out of stock, and the people in central ministry of health might not know about, this is just one example, there are many, many supply chain challenges, this is one example. Regarding the lack of information, this would be typical with health workers who I'll train who knows how to use one specific type of contraceptive. And, if a woman come to, to them and she has different needs then the health workers might not give her the right type of contraceptive. And, the third barrier, yes, cultural barriers. in some countries, some specific contraceptive. Might not be might not, or accepted or they might be also some bias or beliefs about contraceptives and their effects which might not be true. So the question now, with all these barriers, how do we overcome these barriers? And this is really what What we try to do at UNFPA, we need to work on these three different fronts. And and, and something we need to, to keep in mind is that we need to, to provide the supply but we also need to create the demand. If we create the demand and there's no supply there would be a gap. And if, if we provide the supply and there's no demand it would be wasted. So regarding the supply chain barriers we have a, we have what we, a, a global program which is called the, the global program, which ensure commodity security. That the, the goods are there, are available and we work with the, with partners. In the world to ensure that we cover, we manage as well as possible the supply chain. For example we might send condoms or other products to a Ministry of Health, then we would work with NGOs to distribute the condoms into different parts of the country. Talking about lack of information, barriers related to lack of information Some activities we would do is to train the health workers, ensure that they are not only knowledgeable with I would say implant but also knowledgeable with IUDs and, and others. And regarding the, the cultural barriers. Some example of how we, we tackle these barriers We work for example with religous organization. If we manage to convince religous organization of the benefits of the different contraceptive. Then this in turn, they will convince the population, or women to use contraceptive. Also other initiatives related to these barriers is To train the husband, and we have something we started some years ago in Niger, which has been very very successful. It's what we call the school of husband, where husbands are trained and are explained the benefits of contraceptive, and why it's good for them, and why it's good for their wife, and why it's good for their family. >> Thank you very much Eric for giving us all these insights and all the luck with your work in the future. Thank you. >> Thank you very much and thanks for giving me the opportunity to answer these questions [MUSIC]
