Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state and has one of the lowest rates of family planning use in all of India: Only 29% of married women in Uttar Pradesh currently use a modern method of family planning, well below the national average of 49%. Twenty-one percent of married women there have an unmet need for contraception (9% for spacing births and 12% for limiting future births) (IIPS & Macro International, 2007). Recognizing the need for innovative programs that are able to bring family planning information and services to men and women who currently have an unmet need for family planning or who are using a method that is not well-suited to their childbearing intentions, The RESPOND Project saw an opportunity to partner with India’s growing private sector to improve workers’ access to information and services for long-acting and permanent methods of contraception (LA/PMs). Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, has more than 1,000 small and medium-sized companies. Therefore, RESPOND implemented an employer-based approach to introduce family planning and LA/PMs to companies in the large industrial sector in Kanpur (Yahner & Cisek, 2012).
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