High occurrence of missed or induced abortion cases (approx. 2.2 million, including 700,000   cases of post-abortion complications) reported during 2013 (Population Council, Islamabad)
showing use of unsafe methods of abortion, poor access to post-abortion care services, and
lack of information on safe abortion and family planning methods. Under the circumstance,
Ipas experimented an innovative way to benefit women through their interventions aimed to eliminate barriers, women face for seeking care—which include stigma, discrimination, the lack of social support and power to make one’s own reproductive health decisions. There was thus a strong need to enhance the capacity and role of healthcare delivery system in general and the community based services in particular for providing easy to access essential safe abortion care and contraceptive services to the community- mainly to reduce out-of-pocket expenses, when seeking care from private sector, especially in rural areas.

Lady Health Workers (LHWs) Program is an initiative of public health sector that extends
outreach health services (family planning, immunization, obstetrics care, nutrition, etc.) to rural populations and urban slum communities through deployment of nearly 100,000 LHWs across the country. During 2018-19, Ipas Pakistan, an international NGO, collaborated with the IRMNCH&N Program of DOH – Punjab to implement a project in ten districts of Punjab on Capacity Building of LHWs as the community intermediaries for “Uterine Evacuation (UE) and Post Abortion Care & Family Planning” (PAC&FP) services. On the successful implementation of the Ipas interventions, a third party evaluation (KAP study) was desired to see its impact.

Pak One Health Alliance® through an open competitive process, signed an agreement with Ipas Pakistan and carried out this KAP study during Oct – Dec 2020. The core objective behind this study was to evaluate the LHWs knowledge, attitude and practices on Ipas developed SBC tools and key messages on UE/PAC through survey and structured questionnaires