TY - JOUR T1 - “New Users” Are Confusing Our Counting: Reaching Consensus on How to Measure “Additional Users” of Family Planning JF - Global Health: Science and Practice JO - GLOB HEALTH SCI PRACT SP - 6 LP - 14 DO - 10.9745/GHSP-D-16-00328 VL - 5 IS - 1 AU - Aisha Dasgupta AU - Michelle Weinberger AU - Ben Bellows AU - Win Brown Y1 - 2017/03/24 UR - http://www.ghspjournal.org/content/5/1/6.abstract N2 - FP2020's overarching goal is framed around the new metric of “additional users.” This measure inherently captures population-level change but has been conflated with other ambiguous metrics, such as “new users.” Therefore, we propose a standard set of terms to provide more consistent measurement. Although commonly used service-level metrics cannot be directly compared to the population-level metric of additional users, we describe 2 modeling approaches that can allow service-level data to inform estimates of additional users.In July 2012, the London Summit on Family Planning reenergized the reproductive health field by establishing a new commitment to bring modern contraception to women and girls with an unmet need for family planning—those who say they do not want a child soon or at all but are not currently using contraception. At that time, it was estimated that 222 million women in the developing world had an unmet need for modern contraception.1 Most of these women were concentrated in the world's 69 poorest countries.2 The family planning community committed at the Summit to enabling an additional 120 million women in these 69 countries to use modern contraception by 2020.2–4 The community felt that designating a single number would help rally the community and push forward a renewed focus on family planning.3Nearly 5 years later, the widely recognized “120 by 20” goal supported by the Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) global partnership can be credited for galvanizing renewed commitment to family planning. However, the new metric of “additional users”—an aggregate metric that estimates how many more modern contraceptive users there are now compared with the estimated 2012 baseline number—has created confusion about the definition and meaning of several other related family planning metrics, including “new users,” “acceptors,” “first-time users,” and “adopters.” It has also raised the question of how … ER -