A Little Bit of Sugar Helps the Pill Go Down: Resilience, Peace, and Family Planning; Comment on “The Pill Is Mightier Than the Sword”

The article by Potts et al, “The Pill is Mightier than the Sword,” points out that family planning has an important role to play in building peace by increasing women’s empowerment and their agency, ultimately helping peacebuilding efforts. Evidence has demonstrated that family planning programs are cost effective, produce quick results, help women and couples meet their desired fertility levels, and produce a multitude of benefits around economic productivity, community engagement, conservation, resilience, and peacebuilding. In order for policy audiences from a variety of sectors, including conflict and peacebuilding, to appreciate these benefits, it is important to find common ground and articulate co-benefits that will help them appreciate and value the role of family planning, as it were, give them sugar to help the pill go down. This commentary examines how resilience, peacebuilding and family planning efforts need to focus on co-benefits in order to build on the successful interventions and opportunities that Potts et al highlight.