AFGA found that the impediment to women’s accessing family planning counselling, advise and services were due to their confinement to their homes, long distance to their nearest clinics, and lack of female healthcare workers. In order to mitigate these challenges, AFGA designed a project that would select midwives from the community, train them in the delivery of sexual and reproductive health counselling and services within the comfort and privacy of women’s homes.

Presently, AFGA employees 71 outreach midwives in provinces of Kabul, Nangarhar, Herat, Balkh, Laghman and Parwan. These midwives provide counselling and services on contraceptive use, distribute short term contraceptives such as condoms and the pill, emergency contraceptives, provide ante and post-natal care and advise, sexual health screening and specialist advise to victims of gender-based violence.

The key achievements of AFGA’s outreach midwives includes Provision of more than 0.5 million SRH services by reaching 120,000 clients annually. The project is presently funded by IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation) fund.

In order to meet the growing demand, AFGA aims to increase the number of its outreach midwives and expand to the other provinces, AFGA plans to use the network that these outreach midwives have managed to develop to distribute other medications, micro-nutrients, and share information on public health matters directly to women in peri-urban communities.