It has been a year of significant achievements for SRHM and for the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) community as a whole.
Along with the SRHR community, in 2019 we commemorated the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, culminating in the Nairobi ICPD25 summit in November. We acknowledge and celebrate the dramatic changes the past 25 years have witnessed related to the advancement of SRHR. At the same time, we recognize that ongoing inequalities and discrimination against certain populations continue to occur. The need for action, meaningful participation, community engagement, significant scale-up of investments and effective and renewed accountability in laws, policies, programmes and implementation remains. Next year brings the 25th Anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and we eagerly anticipate opportunities for expanding and intensifying action to achieve SRHR for all.
At SRHM, our transition to Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters was announced in early 2019 and is now firmly established. We thank all our supporters, contributors and collaborating partners for working together to advance SRHR for all. We are looking forward to a successful year and hope you will join SRHM in realising its goals for the year to come!
The team at SRHM send their best wishes around the globe for peace and we hope you enjoy reading what we’ve been up to this year.
Eszter Kismődi, Chief Executive and Julia Hussein, Editor-in-Chief
OUR JOURNAL
Our impact factor continues to rise and in July 2019, an impact factor of 2.119, for 2018, was announced. Although important to us, the impact factor is not the only metric we value. We are pleased to see that articles carry on being submitted from all corners of the globe. We pay close attention to papers that hold promise and where possible, liaise with authors intensively to help improve their work. We seek out diversity and make efforts to ensure that those least heard are represented in our publications.
The open issue goes from strength to strength, with a record of 40 non-editorial articles already available online. These papers cover topics of abortion, sex work, HIV, violence, family planning, sexual pleasure, infanticide, FGM, maternal health and more in the SRHR field. The open issue accepts papers on a rolling basis throughout the year.
Our first themed issue of the year, The impact of politics on sexual and reproductive health and rights, was launched in March 2019 and contains 15 papers. Taken together, the articles paint a compelling picture of how governments, political leaders, activists, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), lawyers, and others are all engaging in the politics of SRHR, with profound impacts, both positive and negative, on the everyday lived realities of people around the world.
Our second themed issue for the year, on the Elimination of stigma and discrimination in sexual and reproductive health care, opened with its first paper in August 2019. The articles originate from various settings from across the world and represent a diversity of perspectives including secondary school students in Kenya, formerly trafficked women in Nepal, refugees and displaced youth in Uganda, people using post exposure prophylaxis for HIV in Brazil and abortion providers across three continents.
This year marked the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). To mark the anniversary, SRHM, in collaboration with UNFPA, produced a collection of ten articles, ICPD25: Accelerating accountability for SRHR, which was released at the summit, along with a series of videos related to the papers. The collection of papers was guest edited by Gita Sen and Anneka Knutsson, with Eszter Kismődi and are available as part of our open issue.
As countries define their policies and programmes on Universal Health Coverage (UHC), there is a unique opportunity to ensure that these efforts include SRHR interventions that are grounded in evidence and based on principles of human rights. This themed issue aims to establish a knowledge platform to inform these efforts. The call for papers closes on 31 December 2019.
The tireless efforts of our partners across the globe have meant that 5 issues of SRHM in translation have been published and disseminated. These include Arabic (two issues), Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish issues.
MORE THAN A JOURNAL
Being ‘more than a journal’ means that SRHM creates and participates in spaces which motivate improvements in research, policy and practice, building capacity and inspiring new thinking and action.
Strategic dialogue and advocacy
SRHM, in collaboration with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health and other partners, held various dialogue meetings throughout the year on SRHR and UHC with human rights in focus in order to generate joint thinking towards the generation of knowledge and action, including a meeting March 2019 in Geneva and one in May 2019 in New York.
SRHM actively participated in the Women Deliver conference tin Vancouver, Canada. Our lively booth provided a fantastic opportunity to talk to authors, colleagues, friends and promote our journal.
In pursuit of our interest in a future themed issue on gestational surrogacy and sexual and reproductive justice, SRHM co-organised various strategic discussions over the year, including with UN treaty monitoring bodies and Special rapporteurs and has participated in dialogue meetings and conferences, including the International Surrogacy Forum held in Cambridge in June 2019. Our Call for papers on surrogacy and sexual and reproductive justice is coming soon!
SRHM also actively participated at the World Association for Sexual Health Congress in Mexico City in October and contributed to the elaboration of the WAS Congress Declaration on Sexual Pleasure.
At the ICPD25 Nairobi Summit, SRHM partnered with This-Ability Trust to co-organise a one-day consultative forum on the SRHR of women with disabilities. The activity was undertaken in collaboration with Humanity & Inclusion’s Making it Work project, with support from the United Nations Population Fund and the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi. As a result of the Forum, a Call to Action has been launched which urges all stakeholders to accelerate accountability and action on SRHR for all women and girls with disabilities.
Blogs, media releases, videos and webinars
We continue to broaden our efforts and approaches for communicating evidence and knowledge and put forward suitable articles for media releases. An example is Sara Johnsdotter’s paper on how compulsory genital examinations and persistent questioning by police can be invasive and traumatic for the girls at risk of female genital mutilation. A paper on menstrual hygiene has also attracted significant media coverage. We are expecting more media releases in early 2020.
In October, we launched our webinar series, with our first webinar on gender justice perspectives of criminal abortion laws, exploring ways to connect these important discourses to the universal health coverage agenda.
Over the course of the year, we featured several video interviews and book reviews on our website, including Mindy Roseman on her book with Alice Miller, Beyond Virtue and Vice: Rethinking Human Rights and Criminal Law, Richa Kaul Padte on Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography and Katrina Karkazis on Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography. Please visit our blog page!
Regional partnerships
As part of our global strategy, we were delighted to hold a meeting in Rabat, Morocco in collaboration with Association Ensemble pour la Santé de la Reproduction and Ecole Nationale de Santé Publique to construct a plan for the development of a SRHM Francophine Africa regional hub and to strengthen the French translation issues of the journal. Participants included colleagues from Benin, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Morocco and Tunisia and our editorial advisory board members from Belgium.
We are very excited to start the establishment of an SRHM South Asian regional hub and SRHR Knowledge Platform with partners from the region and with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, India. This knowledge platform aims to bring together multiple stakeholders and actors to build greater capacity and collaboration towards rights-based knowledge generation that is linked to policy, programmatic action and advocacy.
The SRHM Team
Edna Epelu joined our team as an Operations Manager at the beginning of the year. Edna has several years of experience in the humanitarian and private sector. She is passionate about, and committed to, projects that bring transformative social and economic change.
We warmly welcome Pete Chapman who joined SRHM as Managing Editor in October 2019. Pete has over 15 years of experience in medical publishing and editing and has worked with many international publishers and women’s health journals.
We also welcomed four new associate editors this year, Mindy Jane Roseman, Joyce Wamoyi, Nina Sun and Nambusi Kyegombe.
Sapna Desai joined us as a trustee in 2019. She has been affiliated with SRHM for over ten years, in previous roles on the editorial advisory board and as an associate editor.
Sarah Hodgson joined our board of trustees as a Finance Specialist in 2019.
Sarah is finance professional with over 15 years of experience in the financial services sector.
We said our fond farewells to Sarah Pugh in September and warmly wish her well in her future endeavours. We are very thankful to Sarah for her contribution to SRHM.
None of the achievements above would have been possible without the continued support of the Open Society Foundation, UNFPA, the Women’s Refugee Commission and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
We wish you all the very best for 2020!