Since the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994 there is no doubt that conceptually, great strides have been made in the area of sexual and reproductive health. The rights based discourse is now centre stage; vulnerability is being understood a lot more than it was earlier; the issues of male responsibility are being anchored in the gender debate and sexual minorities are beginning to find a voice in development programming. At the same time large numbers of people do not have access to quality services for their sexual and reproductive health needs. As a result, in the new millennium, even ten years after ICPD, people living in resource poor settings have not become participants of the development process. Ensuring universal access to SRHR services is our unfinished agenda and let us search innovative approaches and strategies to meet this challenge.
Research Summary: Access is a function of ‘financial accessibility’ (the extent to which people are able to pay for care), ‘geographical accessibility’ (the extent to which services are available and accessible to people) and ‘cultural accessibility’ (the extent to which services are impeded by cultural taboos). WHO defines Access as ‘a measure of the proportion of a population that reaches appropriate health services’. There is no universally accepted definition of what is meant by ‘universal access to SRH services’. WHO has come up with a working definition, which includes prevention, diagnosis, counseling, treatment and care services relating to: Antenatal, perinatal, postpartum and newborn care, Family planning services including infertility and contraception, Elimination of unsafe abortions, Prevention and treatment of STIs, HIV/AIDS, RTIs, cervical cancer etc, along with Promotion of healthy sexuality. For all practical purposes, universal access is a situation in which SRH services reach the poor, marginalized, socially excluded and underserved groups living within defined geographical/ administrative boundary. Underserved groups of SRHR services are groups which are not normally or not well served by established service delivery programs - examples of such under-served groups are adolescents, men, the urban poor and those who live in remote areas, and unmarried people. (See details in Literature review on Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights: Universal Access to Services, focusing on South Asia at
http://www.realising-rights.org/docs/SRH%
20Literature%20review.pdf )
Resources: IPPF SARO will be releasing a Social Audit Manual on 30th October 2007 at Hyderabad. Though social audit is a technique practiced by social activists for the last many years, there is no detailed literature available on either its theoretical framework or its practical steps/tools. Social Audit Manual is prepared to fill this gap and thereby to help development organizations to implement and monitor programs based on rights based and participatory principles and techniques. If you would like to book a copy, please write to access@ippfsar.org
News: A Regional Training Workshop for HIV/AIDS Programme Managers in the South Asia Region will be held from 5 to 6 November 2007 in Kathmandu, Nepal. The workshop is aimed at enabling IPPF Member Associations in the region to look inwards in order to integrate HIV into all their work of setting up of Centers of Excellence (for details, contact aids@ippfsar.org ).
Events: IPPF SARO will organize a Religious Leaders’ Workshop on Family Based Violence as a Reproductive Health issue from 27 to 28 October 2007 at Hyderabad, India. The workshop is expected to discuss family based violence as a reproductive health issue and will promote South –South dialogue among religious leaders to catalyze positive changes in the family health scenario of Afghanistan and Bangladesh. For further details, please write to access@ippfsar.org