This analytical report was written collaboratively by the members of the Postabortion Care (PAC) Initiative for Francophone Africa Committee with support from USAID's Bureau for Africa/Office of Sustainable Development and the Support for Analysis and Research in Africa (SARA) project. The report can be used as a reference and informs policymakers and program managers about the core issues in taking PAC services to scale in West Africa.

Complications due to unsafe abortion cause a large number of maternal deaths. The World Health Organization's (WHO) study in 1999 estimated that the direct causes for 18 percent of these deaths were attributable to abortion-related complications. In Francophone Africa, efforts to increase access to and quality of services for abortion-related complications usually have been limited to small pilot programs, which, despite their promise, often fail because of policy or programmatic hurdles. In recent years, ministries of health in several countries in West and Central Africa have begun to pay more attention to women's health and safer motherhood and are seeking to introduce PAC services.

This document builds on a four-day international conference on postabortion care held in Senegal in 2002. The conference disseminated groundbreaking information on PAC operations research conducted in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, and Senegal. The committee hopes that disseminating these experiences will result in the widespread adoption, adaptation or replication of PAC programs and, ultimately, in establishing sustainable and accessible quality PAC services in the region.