|
"The World Bank and Reproductive Health: Opportunities for Collaborative Advocacy"
Strategic Workshop
Brussels, 20 April 2005
As one of today’s biggest donors and lenders of development assistance to the Least Developed Countries, the World Bank, plays a particularly significant role in many fora and on many levels there is a need for an upscale from the SRHR NGO community. Since the 1980s its loans to reproductive health and family planning services has doubled. The mix of projects span over a range of programmatic needs, including contraceptive procurement, training, social marketing and management information systems.
The World Bank and its development partners increasingly work through broader frameworks such as the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) and Sector-Wide Approaches (SWAps). It is essential to find out in what way the PRSPs and other strategies and ways of doing business implemented by the World Bank can be used proactively to ensure that the ICPD goals will be met.
The World Bank is a big, complex organisation. Only a few NGOs working in SRHR have the capacity to access it, both with regards to advocacy, but also with regards to actually accessing the available funds at global, national and local levels. Donor governments, which have supported the ICPD through their influence and financial support, have not been very successful in influencing the World Bank to do more in the area of sexual and reproductive health and rights. And the SRHR NGO community has not had much success in addressing the PRSPs together with their partner in the South.
There is a great need to develop capacity and strategies among SRHR NGOs for understanding the (potential) role of the World Bank when it comes to SRHR issues. Furthermore we need to develop strategies for how NGOs can work to increase support for the ICPD agenda through both PRSPs and World Bank support. One important part of this will be looking at how SRHR NGOs could work with other networks and organizations, since the World Bank operates in a multi dimensional approach.
|
|
|
