Since 2001, Africa’s leaders have committed the African Union and their Governments to promote and protect the right to health in a series of international and continental legal protocols and declarations. These commitments provide a comprehensive package for addressing the challenges of maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS, violence and disease. However, the urgent action needed to address what African Governments have described as a “continental state of emergency” can only be achieved by ensuring firm policy and programme linkages between Sexual and Reproductive Health, HIV/AIDS and Gender Based Violence. The article encourages African Health Experts and Ministers of Health meeting in Maputo to ensure that the draft Action Plan contains targets and indicators that enshrine on key components of the Abuja Declaration.
Values, Policies and Rights
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has in 2004 developed guidelines as a practical tool to assist States to both understand and fulfill their obligations on the right to food. The guidelines were adopted in September 2004. This report and fact-finding mission by Rights and Democracy in collaboration with Foodfirst Information and Action Network in 2006 is an effort to apply the FAO Guidelines in a practical context in Malawi and in doing so, to illustrate the distinct advantages a human rights framework provides for policy and program development in relation to food security. The report identifies a number of legal, policy, institutional and economic constraints to the right to food and makes recommendations to address these.
This is the report from a ground-breaking workshop on sexual rights held in Sweden. Some of the key issues discussed included who defines a right and how they are defined, going beyond identity politics sexuality and morality regarding women, men and transgendered people who sell sex for money.
The document recaps what it means to apply a holistic rights-based lens in development practice, be it in health, in education or in any other sector. It directs us to the corresponding behaviors one would expect to see enacted in health, education or any other development work when applying such an optic. The points within the document present when and under what conditions the adoption of an explicit rights-based approach is more likely to make a lasting difference to equity.
The starting point for this study is the principle that a rights-based approach should be used in framing public policy. The study therefore seeks to address the challenge of combining the ethical aspect of social rights with viable ways of strengthening citizens' entitlement to such rights in highly inequitable and relatively poor societies. It includes an analysis of various aspects of social protection systems (health care, social security and poverty reduction) and their potential to guarantee social rights in structurally heterogeneous societies.
he United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and other organisations working to achieve the goal of universal access to reproductive health have to negotiate highly sensitive and embedded beliefs and practices. In certain contexts challenging female genital cutting, child marriage and instituting gender equity, access to contraception, sexual and reproductive health and information are highly contentious issues. Rather than perceiving cultural perspectives to constrain positive social change, UNFPA’s Culture Matters approach illustrates how development actors might work sensitively with the dynamics of culture to enhance the achievement of development objectives and human rights within a variety of social, cultural and spiritual settings.
This key issues guide reviews current policy issues relating to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), examining questions of definition and exploring key debates. The guide also highlights current and future challenges for attaining greater levels of sexual and reproductive well-being, and considers the role of innovative technologies and approaches in achieving sexual and reproductive health and rights for all.
All over the world, young people are stigmatised and discriminated against in relation to their sexual and reproductive health. Stigma, discrimination and the violation of human rights are intimately connected, reinforcing and
legitimising each other. Their manifestations are varied, occurring in families and communities, in health services, at places of work, and in schools.
Violence against girls in Southern African schools is steadily rising, but not enough is being done to prevent and censure abuse in educational institutions. The incidence seems high because more girls are reporting cases of abuse in schools, founder and director of the Girl Child Network (GCN), a Zimbabwean rights NGO. But there are other reasons as well, such as the increasing incidence of poverty: girls from poor homes are lured by teachers with promises of cash. Even the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS is another reason - the myth that sex with a virgin can cure the disease is still very prevalent, and desperate men will do anything. One of the sobering realities highlighted at the gathering, organised jointly by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa and ActionAid International to focus on the problem, was that girls in African schools are repirted to be three times more likely to be abused than boys.
This report presents the results and analysis of a survey conducted to develop understanding of what NGOs and child rights coalitions would need in order to mainstream children's rights into the UN treaty body system. The survey found that NGO and child rights coalitions that report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child have not, for the most part, made purposeful ventures into the reporting processes of other treaty bodies. The research also illustrates that mainstreaming means different things in different contexts.