WHRAP South Asia

Women’s Health and Rights Advocacy Partnership (WHRAP)-South Asia

Women’s Health and Rights Advocacy Partnership (WHRAP) is a regional strategy of the Asian-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW) which promotes advocacy for marginalized women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights in the region. WHRAP- South Asia positions itself as an international partnership with a regional voice. It brings together women led organisations and other civil society actors for evidence based advocacy on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR). Over the last eight years WHRAP- South Asia has facilitated and contributed to processes aimed at improving quality of life of marginalised women in South Asia through strengthened civil society engagement and accountability for health governance.

WHRAP in the South Asian sub-region is implemented as a partnership program between the Danish Family Planning Association (DFPA) as the international partner, ARROW as the regional partner, five leading national women’s organizations including the Beyond Beijing Committee (BBC) in Nepal, Naripokkho in Bangladesh, Shirkat Gah in Pakistan, Centre for Health Education, Training and Nutrition Awareness (CHETNA) and SAHAYOG in India as national partners.

WHRAP was first implemented in 2003 in four South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. In its Phase II (from 2006-2010), WHRAP-South Asia reached out to 9 broad categories of stakeholders from local to the global level to achieve results like grassroots women beginning to demand accountability, increased responsiveness of the health care providers and health systems, greater public visibility of SRHR and maternal health issues, monitoring role being played by media, alliances and partnerships at various levels for SRHR, maternal health and many others. In the same phase it has directly reached out to more than 160,000 women on the ground building their capacity in monitoring the heath systems and to articulate their demands more confidently. This has forced the health systems to begin respecting these community groups and start paying attention to the issues that they are raising.

Another significant part of this partnership is the thirty eight (38) Community Based Organisations which are local partners of the national organizations who work directly with the women on the ground.

The immediate objectives of WHRAP – South Asia Phase III for the next three years are:

Increased demand for quality SRHR services
Increased civil society participation and advocacy at all levels for policy and programmes attention to SRHR.
Strengthen the organization and management of WHRAP-South Asia

WHRAP-South Asia’s success has led to expansion of the modality in China in 2008 and in six countries (Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Laos and Vietnam) in South East Asia in 2009. From 2011, WHRAP-South Asia is expanding to Afghanistan, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka to cover the whole of South Asia. Please visit www.whrap.org for more.

WHRAP South Asia Website

ARROW

ARROW is an NGO in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. We are grateful to all our donor partners, especially our core funders SIDA, without whose support our work would not be possible.