A planning workshop was held on January 21-22 in Bangkok, Thailand to discuss the next phase of DAWN’s contribution to advancing the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) agenda: the EQA (Equality, Quality and Accountability) Project.

Following on from the twentieth year reviews of ICPD and Beijing, and the Post 2015 Development Agenda, DAWN hopes to chart a fresh course to focus on instigating and promoting changes at the policy level and programmatically on the ground.

DAWN’s recent work on SRHR has included an assessment of the MDGs in relation to SRHR in Mexico, India and Nigeria1, a review of key SRHR issues in terms of what’s been achieved and what lies ahead2, and a set of regional advocacy tools across six regions for use in the review process3. Based on research and advocacy during the recent regional and global processes in collaboration with key partners, DAWN and partners pinpointed gaps in Equality – Quality – Accountability (EQA) as needing critical attention in the next phase.

These three gaps reflect fundamental failures by governments and their development partners to understand and act in accordance with the human rights foundation of the ICPD PoA. Successfully integrating SRHR into the post-2015 development agenda requires attention to remedying these gaps and re-positioning SRHR within a framework of human rights as articulated in the PoA.

This project will focus on the three largest Asian countries – China, India and Indonesia. These are countries of great size and diversity, so a multiplicity of issues and challenges can be addressed. The differences by region, age, ethnicity, religion, and other features, as well as significant variations in legal and policy-making processes, provide rich variation for the study of challenges and advances. It will be important to include not only the approaches and actions of national governments but also of international agencies, private foundations, non-governmental organizations and social movements, as well as of regional and local governments and other bodies where possible.

In the planning workshop, researchers from the three countries discussed the current status in each country of issues related to SRHR, specific services and rights to be focused on, and challenges to be addressed in the research.

1 DAWN, 2012. Breaking Through the Development Silos. Sexual and Reproduction Health & Rights, Millenium Development Boals & Gender Equity. Experiences from Mexico, India and Nigeria. Available online at https://dawnfeminist.org/feminist-resources/sites/default/files/articles/breaking_through_the_development_silos.pdf

2 Available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rgph20/10/2

3 Available at https://dawnfeminist.org/feminist-resources/archive/dawn-regional-advocacy-tools-srhr-cairo20