How self-injection contributes to contraceptive autonomy and the power of making self-injection count

This opening plenary of the Making Self-Injection Count workshop highlighted how self-injection data can help close the gender data gap by providing key information and insights on the experiences of women and adolescents. Presenters discussed how self-injection can contribute to contraceptive autonomy by enabling women and girls to make and actualize their own decisions. The session featured personal stories from a self-injection ambassador, self-injection provider, and self-injection client.

Objectives

By the end of this session, participants were able to:

• Describe the importance of self-injection for contraceptive autonomy, and self-injection in the context of self-care.
• Describe the landscape of self-injection data availability.
• Understand experiences of self-injection from the lens of a provider, user, and advocate.

Key takeaways

• While progress is being made, self-injection data availability is still limited compared to other contraceptive data sets.
• Disaggregation by client age, district, and DMPA-SC delivery mode (self-injected vs. provider-administered DMPA-SC) is essential to DMPA-SC data tracking.
• High-quality data systems give us insight into women’s and girls’ preferences, client access to family planning, provider training needs, and global supply management opportunities.

Presenters

• Caitlin Corneliess, MPH, Project Director, DMPA-SC Access Collaborative
• Fannie Kachale, Director Reproductive Health Services, Ministry of Health, Malawi
• Briana Lucido, WHO Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research
• Dr. George Swomen, MD, Programme Officer of Special Projects, Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria (PPFN)
• Fatimata Deme, President, Senegalese Women’s Network for the Promotion of Family Planning
• Matilda, Volunteer, Kibalinga Health Centre in Uganda