Track20 developed the service-statistics based indicator “Estimated Modern Use” to help countries track changes in trends between surveys, and to be used as a cross-country, international FP indicator. EMU is intended to represent the coverage of a family planning program over a year.

With the EMU, countries can use their own data to answer the questions:

• “Since our last survey, has our trend slowed down, stayed the same, or accelerated?”
• “What does the trend mean for our programming and investments?”

Track20 developed the SS to EMU Tool that converts service statistics (SS) data into the single metric, EMU. The SS to EMU Tool transforms several types of generally available service statistics data (family planning commodities distributed, family planning visits, or family planning users) into a single, comparable metric (EMU) and calculates annual growth rate and method mix. Through the process of using the SS to EMU Tool, the user also completes a comprehensive data quality review that includes data visualizations that facilitate identification of outliers and data anomalies – some of which may be valid, but some of which may indicate data quality issues that can be eliminated.

Once calculated, a country's EMU can be used for national, sub-national and global monitoring, or as an input to Track20's Family Planning Estimation Tool (FPET).

Review the presentation to learn more about how and why EMU was developed, what you can learn about your service statistics by using the SS to EMU Tool and how to use the results. The brief provides basic background on the EMU and tool and select examples of how they have been used by countries.

The SS to EMU Tool and technical guides are included later in the training in the Using the SS to EMU Tool and All Training Resources section.

Once you complete this section, move on to learn about the data involved in calculating EMU.

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