Assessment of national family planning programs in developing countries

Today, 34 developing countries have policies and programs to lower fertility, and an additional 32 countries provide family planning services for health and humanitarian reasons. Specific causal relationships and linkages between social and economic development, family planning programs, and fertility levels and changes remain mostly unclear at this point. Based on percent acceptors, percent users, and changes in fertility rates (the most commonly used measures to evaluate family planning program accomplishments), however, the performance of programs on the whole has been moderately encouraging.