November 19, 2015
Announcement

The votes are in for USAID Learning Lab’s Collaborating, Learning and Adapting case competition! Advancing Partners and Communities’ story about social inclusion of transgender (trans) persons in the Dominican Republic (DR) is the Fan Favorite winner! Inclusion, Not Exclusion follows the story of Valentina, a trans woman living in the DR, as she overcomes stigma and discrimination to advocate for the equal rights of trans persons in her country.

December 03, 2015
Event

Save the date for the launch of the 2015 State of the World Population Report. The launch will be held at the Woodrow Wilson Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave NW on December 3, from 10am-12pm. This year's report will focus on a transformative agenda for women and girls in a crisis-prone world.

Queenie, or Q as she sometimes goes by, is an HIV positive, transgender (trans) person living in Guyana. When Q fell ill after defaulting on anti-retroviral therapy (ART), she was hesitant to resume her treatment. Given the stigma and discrimination Q had experienced in the hospital as a trans person, she was not looking forward to going back alone. So she reached out to Guyana Trans United (GTU), an organization that supports the trans community, for assistance.

December 01, 2015
Event

On Tuesday, December 1, at 9 a.m. EST, the Health Communication Capacity Collaborative (HC3), with support from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is hosting the first webinar in a series of three that focus on increasing the demand for life-saving underutilized commodities for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH). This webinar will bring together technical experts in gender and RMNCAH programming to share best practices and experiences in developing effective programs to reach and work with men and boys in resource-constrained settings.

November 13, 2015
Announcement

Through Advancing Partners & Communities (APC), FHI 360 has developed the first mobile phone applications based on the traditional paper-based Family Planning Checklists.

In the Dominican Republic (DR), transgender (trans) persons experience stigma and discrimination in many different ways and are denied the same opportunities as other Dominicans. In recent years, more efforts have been directed at improving the quality of life for the trans community. However, these initiatives focus mainly on HIV prevention and treatment, ignoring the multiple socioeconomic and health needs of these marginalized individuals.

Key populations in the Dominican Republic have HIV prevalence rates that are six to twelve times higher than the national average of 0.8 percent. Although there are multiple players committed to tackling the concentrated HIV epidemic, large gaps in coverage and access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services remain.

November 02, 2015
Announcement

The USAID ASSIST Project has just launched an eLearning course on Improving Health Care Quality through USAID’s Global Health eLearning Center. Free and open to learners from around the world, this course is the first of its kind to focus on quality improvement approaches and methodologies for low-resource settings.

January 25, 2016 to January 28, 2016
Event

APC is playing an active role in the 2016 International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in Nusa Dua, Indonesia from January 25-28. Our members will come together with other experts in the family planning community to share best practices, acknowledge past successes and challenges, and plan for the future.

October 26, 2015
Event

Are you attending the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in November? Come and join SonkeGender Justice, one of the Advancing Partners & Communities Project’s grantees, for an interactive and exciting pre-workshop about men in family planning on November 11, 2015!

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Photo credits: cover of report Kristen Devlin/JSI; USAID; Joshua Yospyn/JSI; Shahzad Noorani; Eidolon Films; Joshua Yospyn/JSI

Read the Advancing Partners & Communities Final Report

As APC comes to a close after seven years, we look back on how the project has improved the health and lives of countless people in thousands of communities in more than 40 countries.

More women and couples, especially those living in more conservative and hard-to-reach places, can now access a wide range of voluntary family planning methods. More patients know their HIV status and are getting the treatment they need. More survivors of Ebola virus disease are leading healthier lives with less stigma. More people who are vulnerable due to disability or live in challenging places now have access to rehabilitation, counseling, and health care.

Read the report » (PDF, 47 MB)

Our Mission

Advancing Partners & Communities (APC) advances and supports community programs that seek to improve the overall health of communities and achieve other health-related impacts, especially in relationship to family planning.

Read more »

Youth Dashboard

Interactive data dashboard on youth sexual and reproductive health in Asia and the Middle East.

View the dashboard »

Community Health
Systems Catalog

A snapshot of community health systems in different countries.

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APC Grants & Grantees

Strengthening NGOs through APC's grant mechanism and capacity building assistance.

Meet our grantees »

Jump to Country Profiles

Our Impact

APC works to advance and support community programs that seek to improve the overall health of communities, especially in relationship to family planning (FP). Through global technical leadership and collaboration, APC’s goal is to increase support for and commitment to community-based family planning in USAID priority countries. APC aims to increase access to quality FP services, expand the contraceptive method mix, and improve upon organizations’ capability to manage USAID funds and implement high quality and innovative community-based health programs.

Map showing APC office locations and country presence

Search APC Resources

Healthy Families Thrive: Why Community Health Matters in the Journey to Self-Reliance - APC Final Report, December 2019
December 2019 | Report
From October 1, 2012 to September 30, 2019, the Advancing Partners & Communities (APC) project worked in more than 40 countries to improve the overall health of communities, with an emphasis on voluntary family planning. The project was implemented by JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc. (JSI) in collaboration with FHI 360. Over the past seven years, APC expanded from its initial focus on voluntary family planning to a broad array of community-based programs in four main health areas: CBFP, HIV and AIDS, post-Ebola recovery, and vulnerable populations, which include children in adversity, people with disabilities, and victims of war.
Advancing Family Planning in Last-Mile Communities: Voices of Experience
December 2019 | Report
Between 2012 and 2019, APC worked closely with a number of East African FBOs and CBOs to advance family planning in last-mile communities. Along with colleagues from these organizations and USAID, in September 2019 the project held a consultative workshop, “Voices of Experience,” to harvest the wisdom of individuals and groups working in this area and to inform new activities and possible funding going forward.
Developing and Strengthening the Disability and Rehabilitation Sector in Laos: Training Handbooks
December 2019 | Training Curriculum
The APC Laos TEAM offered trainings on Curriculum Development, Psychosocial Support, Training of Trainers (ToT), Project Cycle Management (PCM), and Gender Inclusion to all sub-recipients. These trainings are participatory, reflective and allow as much time as possible for ‘learning by doing’ and practical application of skills and knowledge. The participant handbooks below were used in eight trainings for TEAM sub-recipients.
Developing and Strengthening the Disability and Rehabilitation Sector in Laos
December 2019 | Assessment Tool
This Organizational Assessment template was used by the APC Laos TEAM for all applicants for TEAM funding to look at capacity in grants management, financial management, human resources, activity implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.

Latest News

December 19, 2019
Watch the recording from APCs farewell webinar highlighting the project's critical work and legacy in community health in more than 40 countries over the past seven years (2012–2019).
September 30, 2019
Since 2012, the USAID-funded Advancing Partners & Communities (APC) project has worked in over 40 countries to improve community health systems and build the capacity of local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to provide basic health services, expand access to voluntary family planning, and connect people to health facilities.
July 24, 2019
View the recording of the webinar put on by APC grantee Christian Connections for International Health (CCIH) that talks about practical tools to inform communities in language they can understand of the variety of choices they have to time and space pregnancies. The webinar explored how you can use these tools in your community-based programs or develop your own for the areas where you work. They also looked at how to develop, test, and translate tools that work for communities, and explored an example of a training curriculum developed for Islamic leaders. These lessons are applicable not just for family planning, but for all community-based programs.

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Top photo credits (left to right): Puskar Khanal/JSI; Dominic Chavez/World Bank.