AFGA found that the impediment to women’s accessing family planning counseling, 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, and train them in the delivery of sexual and reproductive health counseling and services within the comfort and privacy of women’s homes.

Presently, AFGA employs 49 Community Outreach Midwives in Kabul, Nangarhar, Herat, Balkh, Laghman, and Parwan. These midwives provide counselling and services on contraceptive use, distribute short-term contraceptives such as condoms and pills, ante and post-natal care and advise, sexual health screening and specialist advise to victims of gender-based violence. In order to meet the growing demand, AFGA aims to increase the number of its outreach midwives and expand to 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. In 2023, AFGA provided 229,937 outreach services to 66,619 clients through 58 COMs in 6 provinces of Afghanistan.