ASSOCIACAO PARA PLANEAMENTO DA FAMILIA

Associação para o Planeamento da Família – APF (Association for Family Planning) is an NGO, established in 1967 with health purposes. Its primary goal is to help people making free and responsible choices, concerning their sexual and reproductive life. APF develops activities around all national territory through its six regional delegations. Our teams engage more than 100 professionals and voluntaries from several domains of social intervention: health, education, community and youth intervention. APF’s history has been linked to the fight for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. Since its establishment, APF has had a leading role in Portugal in matters concerning Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE). Through the years, we have been advocating for CSE. We had designed several CSE programmes that have been used in schools and in other contexts. We also design pedagogical CSE materials for children, youngsters and parents. We work next to vulnerable families to improve their parenting skills. For our intervention we became a pioneer NGO in Portugal. In a similar way, APF has been developing intervention in matters of prevention and gender equality and gender related violence. Recently APF has assumed a leading role in prevention of trafficking in human beings and by supporting the victims of these crimes, within a protocol established with the Portuguese State Secretary for Citizenship and Equality. We work also on STI’s prevention and community-based screening. Our services target vulnerable people such as sex workers, drug users, migrants and ethnic minorities. Thereby, in a general way we act by: • promoting education for sexual and reproductive rights and gender equality through intervention programs, developed in schools and in the community, accomplishing campaigns, producing and disseminating educational and informational materials, intervening in the media; • enabling support services to young people, families and vulnerable groups through our helplines, mobile units, parents’ schools and facilities; •capacitating professionals of several areas – health, education, community and family mediation, security forces – to reinforce the intervention in APF issues, carrying out training programs and technical counselling actions; • promoting knowledge through investigation (diagnoses and new intervention strategies) and disseminating its results through our website and scientific events; •advocating in public policies concerning sexual and reproductive rights issues.