Voluntary family planning empowers women, builds wealth, improves health and ultimately reduces the human footprint on the planet. When women have access to voluntary family planning, the whole planet benefits. 

Ensuring access to voluntary family planning is a cost effective, powerful strategy that can advance sustainable development throughout the world. Family planning contributes to a host of positive health and development outcomes, including the promotion of healthy, productive families and communities, more prosperous and stable societies, environmental sustainability, and resource and food security. 

Whether or not a woman has access to family planning at the village level can determine if she has enough firewood to cook with and enough food and clean water for her family. It can determine whether she and her infant survive childbirth, whether her children are healthy, and whether they go to school. At the global level, it can mean the difference between the earth supplying food and water to 8 billion or 9.2 billion people by 2050. Voluntary family planning also impacts the level of greenhouse gases in the air and the rate of species loss in many biodiversity “hotspots.”

This section of the Family Planning Advocacy Toolkit provides links to trusted sources of information on the overall connections between family planning and various aspects of development, including health, economic growth, the environment, food security, education, overall poverty reduction, and national security.

For evidence briefs, reports, and fact sheets that focus on the links between family planning and development in general, please visit the Toolkit section on Using Evidence to Advocate.

If you would like to suggest an additional resource for the family planning and development section of the toolkit or share your perspective, please fill out our feedback form.