International Conference on Family Planning

The fifth International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) will take place in Kigali, Rwanda, from November 12 to 15, 2018. The 2018 ICFP will be co-hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health and the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Rwanda. The ICFP will be held at the state-of-the-art Kigali Convention Centre, which in the past has hosted the 27th African Union Summit and other high-level meetings. The theme of the conference is “Investing for a Lifetime of Returns.”

Rwanda is one of the family planning success stories of recent history. The first 15 years of the 2000s saw great achievements: a dramatic rise in the country’s contraceptive prevalence rate for modern methods between 2000 and 2015, and a drop in total fertility rate from 6.1 in 2000 to 4.2 in 2015. The use of modern contraceptive methods increased from 10 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2010, and then rose slightly to 48 percent in 2015. Rwanda’s leadership has been highly supportive of family planning; in recent years, the country has invested in its network of community health workers (CHWs), run communications campaigns to drive demand and behavior change, and provided training on long-acting and permanent contraceptive methods. Yet progress has slowed, despite Rwanda’s continued commitment to family planning as a way to ensure a healthy and prosperous future for the sustainable development of its people, and the world. Rwanda has set ambitious goals of achieving a total fertility rate of 3.1 children per woman and 72 percent contraceptive prevalence by June 2018.¹

“The Government of Rwanda is privileged to host the fifth International Conference on Family Planning delegates in Kigali, Rwanda, and is committed to working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute to ensure that the event is successfully hosted in the country,” said Minister of Health Diane Gashumba. “Rwandan President Paul Kagame was one of the distinguished attendees of the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning, at which he joined the co-hosts, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Kingdom, along with other national governments, donors, civil society, the private sector, and the research and development community, in a groundbreaking promise to make affordable contraception available to an additional 120 million women and girls in the world’s poorest countries by 2020.  We are excited to host the family planning community in Rwanda to continue our collective work and learn from each other’s experiences to find new ways to help us realize this goal.”

More information and Registration Here.