For many young women in the community, especially those who are already mothers, the three month injection or the monthly pill didn’t give them the long-term protection they wanted. With aspirations to finish school, raise their child, or focus on their career, women continued expressing interest in long-acting reversible contraception (LARC). Even with our quarterly pop-up clinics for LARC methods with our partner, WINGS, the demand for greater pregnancy prevention was rising. 

In July of 2020, thanks to the generous support of our donors, we were able to re-open our clinic doors offering ongoing free access to both short-acting and long-acting reversible contraceptives to the community through a long-term partnership with WINGS. Now, with the addition of full-time nurse, young men and women can get everything from condoms to a 5-year implant or 10-year IUD. In just the first month, and with all of the protective COVID-19 measures in place, our clinic was able to increase patient capacity by over 40 percent. Many of the women seen in the first month were young women from our Young Mothers Program who jumped at the chance to prevent an unplanned pregnancy during the next few years.  Now, 90% of the young mothers in our program are using reliable modern contraception.

The clinic builds on the relationships that Guatemala Youth Initiative has fostered over the past two and a half years, and leverages technical expertise from WINGS, an organization with twenty years of experience providing sexual and reproductive health services in Guatemala. Through our network of youth leaders and community connections, we have become the hub for sexual health questions and services. “I wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it” Alicia, a current youth leader, said bluntly, “I wouldn’t have been able to continue using contraceptives during quarantine, or at all, if it wasn’t for Guatemala Youth Initiative.” Over the past couple of months, our staff have fielded calls from dozens of young people across the community who are only willing to confide in us. 62% of all of our clinic appointments were with youth under the age of 25.

In January 2021, Guatemala Youth Initiative and WINGS worked together to add a second location for contraceptive services. The addition of a second location, which is accessible to an entirely separate set of communities near the landfill, increased demand even further. The first quarter results in 2021 have GYI and WINGS on track to together prevent over 1,000 unintended pregnancies between the two locations by the end of the year (calculated using Marie Stopes Impact II). Complemented by our sexual education workshops and our young mother workshops, these services open up a new future for the young people of a community where teenage pregnancy is all too common. Guatemala Youth Initiative has been working in sexual health in Zone 3 for over three years now, and this is just the next step!