Like all other efforts to provide contraceptive information and services, unmet need strategies could benefit from additional funding. Higher total costs are inevitable if contraceptive use is to spread in a country. An efficient strategy, however, produces the most impact for the money. Unmet need strategies are likely to be a relatively efficient way to enlist new users of family planning. Since people with unmet need already have an interest in controlling their fertility, programs may be able to reach them more readily than people whose attitudes will need to change before they use family planning. Also, adopting unmet need strategies often means sharpening the focus of current program efforts, refining them so that they address specific reasons for unmet need more pointedly. Such refinements should increase the efficiency of these efforts.

While no estimates of the costs of unmet need strategies have been made, an estimate of the costs of serving 50 million more women in 1996—that is, half of the estimated unmet need group in 1996—can be made based on regional estimates of costs per current user of family planning for 1995 made by the United Nations Population Fund (220). The estimate includes consumer expenditures as well as program expenditures. If half of 1996 unmet need were met in each region, the additional cost per region would be: Africa US$450 million, East Asia $10 million, Southeast Asia $50 million, Southern Asia $430 million, Latin America and Caribbean $100 million, and Near East $60 million.

As the concept and measurement of unmet need continue to advance, opportunities are growing for unmet need strategies that help programs to meet the needs of all women and men for safe, satisfactory, and effective family planning and other reproductive health care.