Strengthening Provider Capacity – and Confidence – to Provide LARCs in Kawempe, Uganda

Jun 3, 2021

Contributors: Janet Adongo and Denis Sama

Felicity Mendieka is a midwife from St. Stevens Hospital in Kawempe.

Before the Kawempe Division of Kampala Capital City in Uganda joined The Challenge Initiative (TCI) in February 2019, most health care providers had little confidence in their ability to provide contraceptives, especially long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) due to limited training. As a result, family planning uptake was very low. Felicity Mendieka, a midwife from St. Stevens Hospital, described her situation before TCI:

Previously, I even feared to counsel clients on IUD because I lacked skills on how to insert it.”

In early 2019, TCI supported a training on LARCs for over 30 health care providers from Kampala Capital City. Felicity was one of the health care providers selected by the local government to participate in the training. She shared:

TCI has built my capacity. Through the TCI family planning training that I attended in Jinja, … I perfectly learnt skills of inserting postpartum IUD.”

After the training, Felicity felt more confident to provide family planning services to her clients. She shared her knowledge and skills of delivering quality family planning services with her colleagues at St. Stephen’s Hospital through sisi-kwa-sisi coaching.

I am now the expert at my facility and I feel so good if I counsel a woman and she accepts an IUD and goes home with it inserted. I am training my friends on-the-job by providing onsite mentorship and they are getting excited to acquire new skills too.”

Consequently, TCI has contributed to an 18% increase in annual LARC client volume when comparing the TCI implementation baseline with January 2021. The overall uptake in family planning services at St. Stephen’s has improved by 273% (from 572 FP users in 2018 to 2,135 FP users in 2020) as shown below. LARCs greatly improved by 446% from 324 in 2018 to 1,769 in 2020. And IUDs account for the highest percentage of recorded change of 546% from 110 clients in 2018 to 711 in 2020, followed by implants with 394% from 214 in 2018 to 1,058 clients in 2020.

Date source: HMIS dashboard.