This paper lists numerous indicators that could be used to monitor and evaluate family planning and suggests ten potentially useful for most projects. These ten cover all aspects of a family planning program: program inputs, program capacity and process, program outputs, behavioural outcomes among clients, and long-term demographic outcomes. For a specific project, these ten (or any selection made from the indicators here) need to be supplemented with indicators for other reproductive health services, which will be covered in a subsequent note.

As inout indicators, the paper suggests (1) popular approval of family planning, a survey-based measure that should be collected from both men and women to indicate the acceptability of contraception, and (2) the female secondary enrolment ratio, perhaps the chief socioeconomic determinant of demand for contraception.

To represent program capacity and process, two indicators are proposed: (3) a management information score, as a strategic measure of the organization's institutional capital, and (4) couple-years of protection provided per worker, as a measure of program efficiency.

Program outputs are mainly access to services and their quality, represented respectively by (5) proximity of services, or the promotion of married women of reproductive age with services within their rural village or urban neighbourhood or no more than one kilometer away, and (6) the dropout ratio, a measure of method discontinuation that should be sensitive to the type of services clients receive.

The immediate behavioural outcome of a program should be contraceptive use, which is represented by (7) the contraceptive prevalence rate, the proportion of couples in union using contraception.

Demographic outcomes of a program are covered by (8) the total fertility rate, (9) the infant mortality rate, and (10) the proportion of high-risk births among all births, a more practical measure than the maternal mortality rate.

Many alternatives to each of these ten indicators are listed and briefly evaluated against proposed criteria for useful indicators.

Most of the recommended indicators can be obtained from periodic household surveys. Some require a management information system or government statistics. A summary table provides definitions, data sources, and some notes on each key indicator, and an appendix provides data on the majority of these for at least a few countries.