NEWS & EVENTS

Press release: 21 June 2023, Baltimore

Metrics for Management (M4M) is pleased to announce that they have received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, supporting the Measuring Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health (MY SRH) initiative. The initiative will bring together a group of engaged youth leaders and organizations at Women Deliver 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda and will define what matters most to young people to improve the quality of SRH service provision. 

Despite global commitments to improve youth access to SRH services, young people continue to have greater unmet SRH needs than older clients. Improving the quality of services for young people has the potential to improve many SRH-related outcomes and to accelerate economic development in low- and middle-income countries. However, identifying and measuring the aspects of youth SRH services that matter the most to young people continues to be a challenge. 

Focus groups undertaken by M4M with representatives from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and Europe show that poor point-of-service privacy, confidentiality practices, and provider bias are major impediments to young people in seeking and receiving high-quality SRH services. (Read M4M’s published review, informed by these focus groups.) Building on the work together in Kigali, M4M will seek to develop metrics that will drive improvements in services, service access, and responsiveness for youth SRH services through continued engagement with empowered youth, and linkages to global provider networks; guidance, policy, and advocacy agencies; service implementation leaders, and global public health agencies.

“As an organization focused on creating evidence-based and standardized performance measures to improve health services, M4M is excited to create a metric to help improve the quality of youth SRH services,” said Dominic Montagu, CEO and Founder of Metrics for Management. “With youth leading, we will work alongside partners to ensure our measure is truly useful.”