Fifteen Years On, the Ouagadougou Partnership Faces Its Harder Test

When nine French-speaking West African countries gathered in Ouagadougou in February 2011 to place family planning at the centre of public health policy, few outside the sector took notice. Fifteen years later, the Ouagadougou Partnership (OP) is marking its anniversary with a record worth examining, and a warning that the next five years will be decisive.

The members are Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Togo. Together with civil society, young leaders, donors and researchers, they have built what the coordination unit (UCPO) calls a regional space for dialogue and collective action on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The headline figures, as reported by the UCPO, are striking: about 30.3 million unintended pregnancies averted, 8.9 million unsafe abortions averted, 1.8 million maternal deaths averted, and around 4 million additional users of modern contraception. The target for 2030 is 13 million female users.

Some of the most telling progress is in policy and money. All nine countries have national family planning action plans, or broader reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health plans, under implementation or renewal. In Niger, Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire, family planning methods are free nationwide, and Guinea is considering the same.

In 2023, Côte d'Ivoire's Prime Minister raised the national budget for procuring family planning commodities from 400 million to 2.5 billion XOF, while Mali created an employers' fund for reproductive health. The Partnership also adopted a research agenda in 2022 and has funded eight projects led by West African institutes, aimed at feeding local evidence into policy.

The harder questions lie ahead. The UCPO itself concedes that unmet need persists and that gains must be preserved even as efforts accelerate. Its Director, Marie Ba, put the responsibility plainly: to ensure the 2030 ambitions translate into the lives of women and young people.

The real test is whether commitments survive budget cycles. Domestic financing is the weak point of nearly every donor-backed health programme in the region, and announcements, however historic, only matter if they appear in annual budgets year after year.

The Partnership's call for stronger domestic resource mobilisation, better integration of young people's needs, and support for civil society is the right agenda. A ministerial round table with health and finance ministers on the margins of the 81st UN General Assembly shows the finance side is being brought into the conversation.

There is also a lesson for Anglophone West Africa, Ghana and Nigeria included.

The OP shows what a regional compact can do when countries share targets, data and accountability. Family planning, as the Partnership rightly stresses, is not only a health issue. It shapes girls' education, women's economic participation and, ultimately, how far poverty reduction can go.

A caution for readers: the cumulative figures above are modelled estimates published by the Partnership's own coordination unit, so they should be read as the programme's self-assessment, not independent evaluation. Fifteen years in, the strongest proof of success will be sustained national budgets and falling unmet need, not anniversary statistics.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,

International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. (USIP)

[email protected]
+233555275880

Source: Unité de Coordination du Partenariat de Ouagadougou (UCPO), press release (corrected version), "15 Years of the Ouagadougou Partnership: Impact Review and Renewed Vision for SRHR/FP," Dakar, October 5, 2026 (distributed by APO Group).