Building evidence and generating new knowledge through research

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Home 9 Our Work 9 Building evidence and generating new knowledge through research

Ipas conducts policy- and program-relevant research on abortion in collaboration with diverse global, regional, national and local partners. We generate new knowledge for the larger reproductive health and rights community. We also focus on targeted research to understand more about women’s needs and wants regarding reproductive health care and how they make decisions about contraception and abortion.

Our priorities

  • Building national-level evidence for turning policy into practice—with the aim of increasing access to high-quality abortion care around the world
  • Evaluating the effectiveness and impact of sexual and reproductive health and rights programs
  • Testing new approaches to build programmatic evidence
  • Generating new evidence for important unanswered questions in the sexual and reproductive health and rights arena
  • Using methods that raise up the voices and stories of people closest to our work

Why do this research?

  • Formative and intervention research identifies existing gaps and generates new knowledge for the larger reproductive health and rights community.
  • Study findings inform the development of improved national policies and health system practices.
  • Ipas’s growing body of evidence enables us to evaluate and improve our programmatic effectiveness.

Our contributions to the global evidence base on abortion include groundbreaking national abortion incidence and morbidity studies, operations research on measures to improve the cost-effectiveness and quality of abortion services, and evaluation of community-based interventions. Ipas also works to strengthen service-delivery monitoring and evaluation within national health systems to help improve programs and measure impact.

Abortion Care Quality (ACQ) Tool

The first ever global standard for measuring the quality of abortion services in low- and middle-income countries is here

Research highlights from 2023

Ipas staff and partners carried out important research and analyses in 2023, leading to more than 20 publications. Here’s an overview of highlights from the year.

Selected current research

Abortion care in humanitarian settings

Self-managed abortion: barriers and opportunities

Ipas contactTamara Fetters

Location: Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya and Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda

Abortion care in humanitarian settings

The magnitude and severity of abortion-related complications and factors associated with severe and near miss events in three African humanitarian settings

Ipas contactTamara Fetters

Location: Jahun, Nigeria and Bangui, Central African Republic

Abortion self care

A prospective, comparative study of clinical outcomes following clinic-based versus self-use of medical abortion using mifepristone with misoprostol

Ipas contactsKristen Shellenberg 

Location: Cambodia, Nigeria, Ghana

Abortion service quality

Abortion Service Quality (ASQ) Initiative

ASQ website

Ipas contact: Bill Powell

LocationNigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Argentina

Postabortion contraception

Accelerating contraceptive uptake through post-pregnancy care models

Ipas contact: Kristen Shellenberg

Location: Pakistan, India and Kenya