Supporting Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Advocacy in Zambia

Zambia’s severe HIV/AIDS epidemic has rightfully dominated much of the country’s health and development agenda for the last decade. The role of family planning and reproductive health care, however, has largely been overlooked and excluded from Zambia’s HIV/AIDS response. Meanwhile, restrictive U.S. policies and stagnant funding levels have further weakened its reproductive health infrastructure during this time. High unmet need for family planning—coupled with persistently high rates of unplanned pregnancy and maternal death—and Zambia’s youthful population all point to an urgent need to reprioritize reproductive health services and contraception.

In a bid to help Zambian partners achieve this goal, PAI recently approved a one-year advocacy grant to three local NGOs to rebuild political will and financial support for sexual and reproductive health rights, services and supplies. Youth Vision Zambia, Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia (PPAZ), and Youth Media will target parliamentarians and ministerial officials (health, finance and planning) through a series of briefings, as well as through a media campaign in the capital, Lusaka, designed to reach policymakers and civil society leaders. The central objectives of the advocacy initiative are the adoption of a reproductive health policy—one was drafted 10 years ago but never implemented—and increased budgetary support for reproductive health services and supplies by the end of 2009.

This grant builds on past PAI work in Zambia documenting family planning policy and funding trends, this time in support of local partners who are well-positioned to engage their own policymakers on sexual and reproductive health and rights issues. Zambia was one of the original case studies of the Global Gag Rule Impact Project.  And it was during a PAI-sponsored congressional staff trip to Zambia in 2003 where we gathered video footage for the website not realizing PAI would instead wind up producing its first documentary, Access Denied: U.S. Family Planning Restrictions in Zambia.