Background
Article 25 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities affirms that 'persons with disabilities have the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination on the basis of disability' and to access 'the same range, quality and standard of free or affordable health care and programmes as provided to other persons, including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based public health programmes'. IFPLAN; a 3-year project seeks to improve access to family planning services and information for people with disabilities in Northern Nigeria by increasing their knowledge of intention to use, and perceived support from others to access available family planning services.
Materials/Methods
This project currently in its design phase (as it regards the SBC component) is heavily leveraging human centred design as a tool in co-designing behavioural change strategies.
Results
Consortium partners organised a three-day co-creation workshop in Kaduna, engaging people with disabilities and their representative organisations. They took part in a creative process through which they were able to draft a wide range of social and behaviour change approaches targeting different audiences; such as people with disabilities, families and communities, health workers and decision-makers in other to increase the right information regarding family planning for PWDs.
Conclusion
Human centred design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you're designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you've made with the people you're designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in your community. For IFPLAN, that's a tool we have started using for our SBC Design approach and we are keen to leverage learnings from this approach towards sharing with the larger FP community as it regards improving FP access for underserved populations.
