| Organization | UNFPA Supplies Partnership |
| Location | Up to 54 low- and middle-income countries1 |
| Amount | $10 million |
| Approval date | February 2026 |
| Funded by | Coefficient Giving |
Summary
This grant will provide $10 million over two years to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Supplies Partnership, where the majority of the funding will be used to procure reproductive health commodities to fill gaps in low- and middle-income countries. We funded this grant because we think it is highly cost-effective, offers substantial learning value about pooled procurement mechanisms and a new partner, and creates options for scaling.
Published: September 2026
The challenge this grant addresses
The United Nations estimates that 165 million women aged 15-49 worldwide (8% of all women 15-49), including 30 million (16%) in low-income countries, have an unmet need for family planning.2 This means they are sexually active, able to become pregnant, and hoping to avoid pregnancy, yet use no contraception.3 This leaves them at risk of unintended pregnancies that can negatively impact their health, finances, and well-being.4 There are several barriers to addressing unmet family planning needs. This grant aims to address one of those barriers: commodity supply.
How this grant could help
This grant provides unrestricted support to the UNFPA Supplies Partnership. Through its pooled procurement fund, it buys contraceptives and other reproductive health commodities in bulk,5 and allocates these commodities across its 54 focus countries using an algorithm based on factors like contraceptive demand.6 UNFPA typically delivers commodities directly to countries, where national governments and implementing partners then distribute them to health facilities so users can access the commodities through existing service delivery channels.7 UNFPA also provides some health systems strengthening support.8 We expect that this grant will lead to more commodities being procured, and therefore more commodities being available to people who would like to access them, ultimately providing more couple-years of protection (CYPs).9 Our estimate is that this grant will provide approximately 920,000 CYPs that would not otherwise have been provided (i.e, "counterfactual" CYPs). We expect the grant to be used for the following types of work:
- Procuring commodities directly. This includes commodity procurement costs, freight, testing, and packaging.10 They also distribute some commodities via a Match Fund mechanism, designed to incentivize domestic government.11 UNFPA has told us that about 91% of the commodity funding is used for family planning products (such as contraceptive implants, injectables, and pills);12 the remainder is used for other reproductive and maternal health supplies.13
- Health systems strengthening. This includes advocacy and technical assistance, introducing new or underused contraceptive methods, and supply chain strengthening.14
- Program support costs. This includes monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and administrative costs.15
Our reasoning
Our current best guess is that the direct impact of this grant is 19x as cost-effective as our benchmark.16 This high cost-effectiveness estimate is largely driven by:
- the relatively low program costs per person of procuring commodities
- our understanding that some of this funding could increase government funding for family planning commodities (via the Match Fund17 )
- our understanding that there are currently large and increasing supply gaps for family planning commodities, so many commodities would be providing counterfactual access
In addition to the direct benefits that we’ve modeled, this grant also has high potential learning value for GiveWell. This is GiveWell's first grant where funding will be distributed through a pooled procurement fund, and we anticipate we will learn more about this funding mechanism. If our confidence in UNFPA’s approach increases, we could consider other similar pooled funds. Key questions we hope to learn more about include:
- How well can we understand marginal impact when funding flows through a pooled mechanism?
- How does UNFPA's M&E compare to other family planning or commodity procurement program implementers?
- How easy is it to transparently engage with this program, and what do their existing reporting channels for donors look like?
- What share of procured commodities expire or are wasted before reaching users?
We expect to commission some additional monitoring and evaluation work to support our learning on some of these questions.
Pooled procurement could offer an efficient way to deploy funding at scale with our existing capacity. The UNFPA Supplies Partnership's annual funding gap is far larger than this grant,18 and if this grant increases our confidence in their program model, we could scale up funding to UNFPA or similar pooled funds relatively quickly.
How we could be wrong
Our key uncertainties about this grant are:
- We have limited ability to learn about direct impact. UNFPA's pooled procurement model means our funding will be distributed via their allocation algorithm, and we will not be able to identify which specific commodities or countries received marginal GiveWell funding.19 Our guess is that this wouldn’t make a huge change to our estimate of the cost-effectiveness of this grant unless marginal funding was directed to specific regions with lower units of value per CYP,20 which is unlikely.21
- We have concerns about whether UNFPA’s M&E will be sufficient to understand what share of commodities will reach counterfactual users. We believe that UNFPA’s supply chain monitoring focuses on tracking procurement and delivery to countries,22 but that its monitoring on delivery from the country-level to the user is relatively weaker.23 Given that, we expect to consider funding external M&E to supplement what we can learn from UNFPA’s M&E. We would likely want this external M&E to monitor whether the commodities are reaching users who wouldn’t have had access to contraceptives otherwise, so we can learn whether our current assumptions are off and identify potential program improvements.
- We have substantial uncertainty about several key parameters in our cost-effectiveness estimate. Our cost-effectiveness estimate includes downward adjustments that are attempting to account for various ways that procured commodities may not result in counterfactual contraceptive use (such as supply chain losses, expiry, and people switching from private-sector sources), but the precise adjustments are very uncertain. However, our rough estimate would remain above our funding threshold even if our combined downward adjustment were −79%, versus the −54% we use as a best guess, leading us to feel confident in this grant despite the uncertainty in our model. We asked two organizations with direct experience in commodity procurement programs to review our key assumptions, and both broadly found our overall adjustment level reasonable, while noting the appropriate magnitude is highly uncertain.24
- We have substantial uncertainty about family planning programs in general. We have high uncertainty about how to compare the value of an additional year of voluntary modern contraception relative to other types of program outcomes like averting deaths or increasing income, as well as uncertainty about how many unintended pregnancies are averted per year of contraception. We also have qualitative uncertainties not fully captured in our model, including how to value reproductive autonomy and whether our approach adequately captures the range of potential benefits and harms from contraception. See our page on valuing contraception for more.
This page summarizes our research at the time of approval and was reviewed by the grant recipient.
Sources
- 1This grant will go towards a pooled commodity fund, which the UNFPA Supplies Partnership will then allocate across its 54 focus countries. Therefore we do not know if the funding from this grant will contribute to UNFPA's program in any given country.
- 2United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). Model-based Estimates and Projections of Family Planning Indicators 2024, custom data acquired via website
- 3The full definition of women with unmet need for family planning is "women who are fecund and sexually active, who wish to stop or delay childbearing, but who are not using any form of contraception. A woman is also considered to have an unmet need if she was pregnant at the time of data collection, but reported that the pregnancy was unwanted or mistimed, or if a woman was postpartum amenorrhoeic, not using family planning and her most recent birth was unwanted or mistimed." United Nations, World Family Planning 2022, p. 4
- 4For more on our analysis of the potential benefits of providing contraception, see How We Value Contraception.
- 5"UNFPA is the lead agency within the United Nations system for the procurement of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) supplies and the world’s largest public-sector procurer of contraceptives. We leverage the significant volume of contraceptives procured annually to secure cost-effective, quality products to meet global needs." UNFPA, What We Do: Deliver SRH Supplies.
- 6
- "Operating in 54 countries with the greatest needs, it is the world's largest provider of donor-funded reproductive health supplies." UNFPA, At a Glance - the UNFPA Supplies Partnership.
- "UNFPA uses an algorithm to allocate commodity funding to countries based on need and population size.The algorithm allocates funding by scoring countries against a set of key indicators, with each country’s share of total commodity funding determined by its proportion of the overall score…These variables generate a total score, which is then weighted by total contraceptive demand." UNFPA, Response to GiveWell Questions, 2026 (unpublished).
- 7"It is part of the programme guidance that UNFPA delivers commodities at the port of entry of all the programme countries. It is the responsibility of the country governments to ensure port clearance and for downstream supply chain costs…on a case by case basis and for countries most in need like Haiti and Yemen, waivers are granted for the use of programme resources to support downstream distribution." UNFPA, GiveWell Questions for UNFPA Supplies, 2026 (unpublished). UNFPA confirmed this summary of their typical operations in a comment on a draft of this page.
- 8"It supports 54 of the world’s lowest-income countries to strengthen their health systems by improving supply chains, advancing policy, diversifying financing, and expanding access to quality-assured contraceptives and maternal health medicines." UNFPA, The UNFPA Supplies Partnership.
- 9Couple-years of protection (CYP) is a standardized metric used in family planning to measure contraceptive commodity provision. CYPs allow different contraceptive methods - which provide different durations of protection - to be compared on a single scale. "The CYP for each contraceptive method is calculated by multiplying the number of units distributed…to clients over a defined period…by a conversion factor that quantifies the duration of contraceptive protection provided per unit distributed and per procedure." USAID, Couple-years of protection (CYP)
- 10"Supplies: Procures quality-assured contraceptives and life-saving maternal health commodities, including freight, testing and packaging." UNFPA, The UNFPA Supplies Partnership.
- 11"The UNFPA Supplies Match Fund provides an incentive for governments to increase domestic financing contributions, awarding $28.3 million in matching funds to 29 countries in 2025." UNFPA Annual Report 2025, slide 12.
- 12"On average, the annual commodity portfolio is distributed among various product categories as follows: Contraceptives (91%)..." UNFPA, GiveWell Questions for UNFPA Supplies, 2026 (unpublished).
- 13UNFPA, conversation with GiveWell, January 2025 (unpublished).
- 14Systems strengthening includes domestic resource mobilization (such as advocacy and support to negotiate compact arrangements), method mix (to introduce and scale up new or lesser used products), and supply chain strengthening (logistics management information systems to ensure products reach last-mile users.) UNFPA, conversation with GiveWell, December 2025 (unpublished).
- 15"Performance/MAV Allocation Plan:...HR - Salary and associated personnel costs. Surveys. LMA [Last Mile Assurance]. Monitoring/planning/evaluation." UNFPA, Response to GiveWell Questions, 2026 (unpublished). "The LMA process generates visibility on how UNFPA programme supplies are managed at different levels of the supply chain." UNFPA, What We Do: Last Mile Assurance.
- 16Read about our benchmark for comparing different programs here.
- 17"The UNFPA Supplies Match Fund provides an incentive for governments to increase domestic financing contributions, awarding $28.3 million in matching funds to 29 countries in 2025." UNFPA Annual Report 2025, slide 12.
See here for our estimate of matched funding for this grant.
- 18UNFPA estimates an approximately $330 million remaining funding gap for 2026. UNFPA, Response to GiveWell Questions, 2026 (unpublished).
- 19UNFPA, conversation with GiveWell, December 2025 (unpublished).
- 20Our estimate of the value of a couple-year of protection is built from the outcomes we expect averting an unintended pregnancy to prevent, including maternal and child deaths and economic strain on families. Because these risks vary by location, we think that we would value providing a couple-year of protection differently across different settings. The estimate we use in this analysis, 0.7 units of value per couple-year of protection, is based on data from low-income countries; for comparison, our estimate for Indonesia (an upper-middle-income country) is roughly 0.35 and our estimate for Democratic Republic of Congo is 1.05. We have not adjusted for the specific mix of countries this grant will reach because we expect countries with higher and lower values to roughly offset each other, and because a relatively large portion of commodities are going to low-income countries.
- 21We believe this is unlikely because UNFPA has told us that additional funding is proportionally allocated, and would not typically be used to top-up funds for a specific country. UNFPA, conversation with GiveWell, December 2025 (unpublished).
- 22Our understanding is that the main components of UNFPA's supply chain monitoring include their "Control Tower," providing real-time administrative data on UNFPA-procured commodities, and quarterly stock review reports by central warehouses on stock status, commodity gaps, and expiration risks.
- "Control Tower: A unified data & orchestration hub…by bringing together data from countries, regions and global partners into one single trusted view shared by all, the Control Tower allows us to see where products are at risk, which countries face shortages, and where action is needed most urgently." UNFPA, Supplies Partnership Webinar, January 2025 (unpublished). At the time of the webinar, UNFPA had piloted the Control Tower system in one country and planned to expand the system.
- "Quarterly Stock Review (QSR) The QSR uses self-reported data from central warehouses. It assesses country product stock status, identifies commodity gaps, and diagnoses the risks of stockouts and product loss." UNFPA, Response to GiveWell Questions, 2026 (unpublished).
- 23Our understanding is that for user-end data UNFPA primarily relies on health facility surveys, conducted in each country once every three years. "Health facility surveys supported by the Performance funding stream for managing accountability and visibility (MAV) and conducted in countries every three years." UNFPA Supplies Partnership, 2024 Results Report, Performance Measurement Framework.
- 24Conversations with organizations with commodity-procurement expertise, 2025–2026 (unpublished).