On 27 September 2023, SRHM hosted a webinar to launch the special journal issue ‘Donor funding for SRHR advocacy’. We were joined by over 100 participants from around the world. Expert speakers discussed effective resource mobilization for SRHR movement-building and advocacy, giving overviews and insights from their papers published in the special issue.
While recent efforts within the SRHR movement building and funding have looked at funding flows and donor perceptions, there is a lack of sustained attention to funding patterns that look at the unique challenges related to SRHR advocacy and movement-building. The dynamic, uncertain and long-term nature of advocacy and movement-building efforts raises critical questions around how funding is understood and implemented.
The special issue of the SRHM Journal, ‘Donor funding for SRHR advocacy’, seeks to query assumptions and processes of funding for SRHR advocacy and movement-building and initiate a dialogue between different stakeholders on how SRHR funding can better support advocacy efforts and movement-building.
Speakers
Alex le May
Head of Learning Innovation and Partnership, Amplify Change
Alex le May has been with AmplifyChange for 9 years in which time the fund has awarded 1225 grants and received over 10,000 proposals from local civil society mostly in Africa and South Asia. He is currently Head of Learning Innovation & Partnership, developing learning communities across AmplifyChange’s grantee partners and supporting local civil society organisations to get recognition for their impact and expertise.
Alex shared highlights from his paper on ‘”Is there an alternative to grant-funding for sexual and reproductive health advocacy? A survey of the income-base of Amplify Change grantees”
Alex le May presentation
Lisa Lamont Adams
Disability justice activist
Lisa Adams is a disability and gender justice expert with over twenty years of directing disability justice programming, intersectional advocacy and inclusive grantmaking internationally working with governments, activists, social justice organisations, donors, UN agencies and human rights institutions. A core part of her work has been engaging feminist activists with disabilities and their allies on sexual and reproductive health justice, cross-movement building and intersectional research.
Lisa talked on “Forgotten by donors: a call to action by persons with disabilities to resource disability justice within sexual and reproductive health rights funding”
Lisa Adams presentation
Sanjana Gaind
Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships
Women’s Fund Asia
Sanjana, is the Director for Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships at Women’s Fund Asia. She leads the fund’s work on advocacy for increased and improved resources for feminist movements in Asia. In her work on gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, she has worked on integrating creative methodologies like sports, films, theatre etc to advance SRHR of all people. Sanjana is currently based in Goa, India.
Sanjana shared her experiences with Women’s Fund Asia, on “Shifting paradigms through feminist funding”
Dr. Barbara Klugman
Strategy and evaluation practitioner
(Dr.) Barbara Klugman is a South African freelance strategy and evaluation practitioner. She was deeply involved in the advocacy that won several sexual and reproductive rights policies in South Africa and worked for some years as the Ford Foundation’s sexuality and reproductive health international programme officer.
Barbara shared from her commentary “Effective social justice advocacy: a theory of change framework for assessing progress – reflections on the terrain since its publication in 2011”
Barbara Klugman presentation
Moderator
TK Sundari Ravindran
Senior Editor SRHM
TK Sundari Ravindran is currently Principal Visiting Fellow at the United Nations University’s International Institute for Global Health. She holds a Ph.D in Applied Economics and served for twenty years as Professor of Public Health at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum. She has been a researcher and an activist for close to four decades. She was a founding co-editor of Reproductive Health Matters (now Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters). Sundari is a founder-member of CommonHealth, a National Coalition for Reproductive Health and Safe abortion (India). She has also been associated with Rural Women’s Social Education Centre (RUWSEC), a grassroots women’s health organisation in Tamil Nadu since its inception in 1981.