Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights
Useful Links
Eldis Health Policy Feed
Eldis HIVAids Feed
Print Current PageHD4: Realising Rights: improving sexual and reproductive health for poor and vulnerable populations
Director: Hilary Standing, Institute of Development Studieshttp://www.realising-rights.org
Realising Rights: improving sexual and reproductive health for poor and vulnerable populations programme record
Good sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is increasingly recognised as essential both to human wellbeing and to efforts to reduce poverty. Improving access to high quality SRH services and enabling poor people to claim their rights to SRH are a necessary step towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Poor SRH is a source of enormous suffering for millions of the world's poorest people. It accounts for a high proportion of the global burden of ill health, particularly for reproductive age women. Yet it is a largely invisible burden in many countries. Despite two decades of sustained effort, progress on improving SRH has remained slow and SRH rights are often not understood or remain unrealised in practice. As well as being a denial of human rights, denial of SRH and rights affects physical security, bodily integrity, health, education, mobility, and economic status.
This programme brings together researchers from several disciplines to focus on populations in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia with the greatest access and entitlement problems in SRH: the very poor, young people - especially girls and young women, and other hard-to-reach groups such as migrants and those most vulnerable to stigma.
The main objectives of the programme are to:
- Improve the evidence base on the high levels of SRH morbidity, mortality and unmet need among poor and vulnerable populations and communicate it to policy and advocacy audiences;
- Find innovative ways to improve access to existing and new low cost SRH technologies and services by poor women and men;
- Improve knowledge of how SRH rights can be translated into reality in locally appropriate and sensitive ways;
- Build capacity to put sexual and reproductive health and rights onto national and local policy agendas.
Some of the work of the RPC will be concentrated in RPC partner countries of Ghana, Kenya and Bangladesh but geographical coverage will be much wider and take advantage of the international and regional research and service delivery sites and networks of the consortium partners.
The members of the RPC Consortium are: