A wellness intervention for comprehensive family planning, contraceptive services, sexuality education and mental health in Lebanon

 

Lebanon has the largest refugee population per capita globally, with refugees from Syria, Iraq, Sudan and the West Bank and Gaza. Access to quality sexual and reproductive health information and services among refugee and host populations experiencing vulnerabilities is compounded by pre-existing and emerging social, political and economic barriers, which are further compounded by growing instability. Alongside these unmet needs are rapidly expanding mental health demands among women and adolescent girls. Current services provided by public health centres across Lebanon are fragmented and under-resourced. Strategies such as reducing societal stigma and discrimination, fostering supportive relationships and promoting awareness through comprehensive education are important steps toward addressing, at the primary care and community levels, the root drivers and entrenched social and cultural norms influencing poor sexual, reproductive and mental health outcomes.

This project will use a people-centred and gender-transformative lens to improve accessibility and quality of comprehensive family planning, contraceptive services and sexuality education with a sensitivity to unmet mental health needs. A multi-component intervention will be designed collaboratively with women, care providers, community associations and a steering committee to provide comprehensive services and support to refugee and host populations experiencing vulnerabilities. An interactive and locally accessible digital platform will be leveraged to strengthen integration among the interventions and to support their implementation within various public primary health care centres. Mixed-method approaches will be used to assess the acceptability and potential scalability of the intervention to other sites.

This project is part of a cohort of new research projects in the Middle East and North Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean to support research on the understudied area of the interface between mental health and sexual and reproductive health and rights.