London - Marie Stopes International (MSI) programmes served 6 million clients in 2008, one million more than the previous year, according to an annual management report released today. MSI programmes averted 7 million unwanted pregnancies, 5 million unintended births and 1.9 million unsafe abortions during the period January-December 2008. Most of MSI’s health impact occurred in rural areas or urban slums in developing countries. MSI’s family planning and safe abortion services saved 1.8 million years of productive life due to premature mortality or disability, and spared individual households and national budgets nearly £600 million in costs, or £20 for every £1 invested by MSI in the developing world.
“MSI service delivery and other efforts made a large-scale impact on the lives of millions of women, men and children globally in 2008,” wrote MSI chief executive Dana Hovig in his annual letter to the MSI Global Partnership.
“We continue to expand and improve the quality, efficiency and impact of our programmes. We are striving to do more and to be better.” Last year, MSI: - added nearly 100 clinics to an existing network of 464 clinics and hundreds more outreach sites in rural areas and urban slums
- expanded its BlueStar social franchising network, launched in 2007, to 575 private sector franchisees in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, the Philippines and Viet Nam
- provided approximately 1.2 million women or men with long-acting and permanent clinical contraception, a 16% increase. Implants more than doubled (122%) and intra-uterine devices increased by more than 30%
- delivered 592,715 safe medical and surgical abortions, inside and outside MSI clinics, a 29% increase
- accounted for at least 10% or more of all modern method contraceptive use in seven countries: Malawi (35%), Tanzania (29%), Uganda (19%), Yemen (17%), Sierra Leone (16%), Kenya (14%), and Nepal (11%)
- launched operations in five new countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan and Zambia
- led efforts to defeat a bill in the UK Parliament that would have restricted abortion rights
“We must continue to learn, adapt and improve so we can be a global solution for the 200 million women worldwide who are still waiting to exercise their right to quality family planning and reproductive healthcare,” said Hovig.