Future of Contraceptive Technology

More than 214 million women in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy still lack access to effective and acceptable contraceptive methods. Despite decades of efforts to expand the availability of modern contraceptives such as pills, condoms, injectables, implants, and IUDs, their needs remain largely unmet, especially among adolescents. In response, the Family Planning program at the Gates Foundation launched a strategic initiative to drive the development of innovative contraceptive solutions. Quicksand’s research contributed to this effort by capturing grounded, context-specific insights to help shape more effective, desirable, and user-informed contraceptive technologies.

Research and Ideation Overview

The project was implemented across Kenya and India, countries identified as strategic bellwethers for East Africa and South Asia. These locations provided a meaningful cross-section of the sociocultural, geographic, and service delivery conditions faced by women in low-income settings. The fieldwork spanned across urban, peri-urban, and rural areas, with visits to homes, schools, hospitals, markets, agricultural fields, and community spaces to observe daily life and engage in immersive, first-hand conversations with women and their communities.

To translate insights into actionable ideas, Quicksand facilitated two CT Innovation Labs—ideation workshops designed to bring together a diverse set of voices, including women, their partners, doctors, nurses, teachers, community leaders, and youth advocates. These sessions served both as a platform to validate research findings and as a space to collaboratively explore new directions for contraceptive technologies. Ideas generated through this process were deeply informed by women’s lived experiences and enabled by an ecosystem of local and global experts working together to reimagine contraception from the ground up.

Data Analysis and Synthesis

The analysis phase surfaced a broad spectrum of insights ranging from socio-cultural norms and systemic barriers to personal perceptions, aspirations, and decision-making behaviours related to contraception. These insights were clustered thematically and visualised to support sense-making and dissemination.

A pivotal component of the synthesis process involved mapping a woman's reproductive journey across four key life phases from adolescence to menopause each shaped by distinct roles, expectations, and needs. Within these phases, we explored the intersecting dimensions of agency, stigma, information access, and relationship dynamics, which together influence contraceptive decision-making. To bring this complexity to life, we developed detailed user profiles that illustrated demographic characteristics along with psychosocial and behavioural factors.

By positioning these profiles along the reproductive journey, we were able to identify critical inflection points that could inform the design of contraceptive methods tailored to women’s evolving needs. This layered, user-centred understanding became the foundation for ideation and design exploration.

Design Considerations and Outputs

The final outcome of the project was a set of forward-looking design considerations that emerged from co-creation workshops held during the CT Innovation Labs. These were not prescriptive blueprints, but generative prompts; distilled from recurring user needs and aspirations that could serve as a springboard for designing next-generation contraceptives. Each consideration reflected a tension, opportunity, or behaviour that future products could respond to, whether in terms of form factor, delivery mechanism, user control, or integration into daily life.

Two key outputs were developed:

1. The CT Innovation Lab Report – A comprehensive publication that presents rich, in-depth findings from the research such as synthesised user profiles and actionable considerations for the design of new contraceptive solutions. This report is intended for program designers, product developers, public health practitioners, and funders seeking to ground innovation in real user insights.
2. The CT Innovation Lab Toolbox – A repository of tools, templates, and creative assets used during the ideation workshops, designed to be reused and adapted by stakeholders working on future contraception-focused innovation efforts.

This foundational body of work sets the stage for future efforts in the contraceptive innovation ecosystem. By embedding human-centred design into the earliest phases of strategy and product development, the project established a model for how new contraceptive technologies can be shaped by the nuanced, evolving needs of women. In a landscape where modern contraceptive options often fail to align with women’s realities, the project’s impact lies not just in the tools or ideas generated, but in the shift it enabled—from designing for women, to designing with them.