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COVID-19 CORONAVIRUS UPDATES:
We're closely monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and our priority is continuing to deliver care to the women who need us. Click here to read more.
Contact our Senegal support office to talk about our work.
Looking for services in Senegal? Use the contacts below to speak with our advisers.
FacebookOperating in a context with a low contraception prevalence rate of just 12.2%, high maternal mortality rate and high unmet need for family planning, Marie Stopes Senegal has been working tirelessly since 2011 to improve access to services across the country.
We are working in close collaboration with the government of Senegal to improve access to sexual and reproductive health services through different strategies.
We were also the first reproductive health organisation in Senegal to engage with the private sector through social franchising, and are one of the few organisations to provide family planning services through both centres and social franchising.
Marie Stopes Senegal's mobile outreach model is a demonstrated and effective approach for increasing access to family planning services for remote and rural communities.
Our team in Senegal runs nine mobile outreach teams covering most of the country's regions. In a region with a high unmet need for family planning services and limited awareness and acceptance of them, Marie Stopes Senegal began delivering high quality information and counselling together with voluntary short and long-acting contraception.
In Senegal our mobile teams also provide a broader range of services to increase access and to reduce the stigma of visiting mobile outreach sites for women, given existing cultural and religious barriers. Thanks to outreach, many women in Senegal now have access to contraception that they otherwise would not have had.
In 2005 only an estimated 1% of Senegalese women were using modern methods of contraception, including long-acting and reversible contraception (LARC) methods. From June 2014 to June 2015, our mobile teams delivered services to 10,035 women - 55% of which had never used a modern method of family planning before, and 95% of which chose a LARC method.
In recent years, Senegal has made great strides increasing access to modern contraception methods. However, unmet need among key urban populations remains high; standing at 70% for unmarried young people, for example - one of the highest rates in the world.
32% of Senegalese girls have begun childbearing by the age of 18, and young people in Senegal lack access to accurate sex education and ability to choose what contraceptive method to use, partly due to general stigmatisation of sex before marriage.
In efforts to reach Senegalese youth, Marie Stopes Senegal has established six youth-oriented centres in the country's main universities. The centres provided over 14,000 people with contraception and sexual health services between October 2013 and May 2015.
