In advocacy work for the right to safe abortion, movement building and strong national coalitions are central to ensuring coherence in promoting common goals and agreed messages across sectors. Movement building was a central theme at the Campaign’s International Forum –Developing an Advocacy Agenda for Abortion in the 21stCentury and Making Change Happen, 5-7 September 2018. At the end of the meeting, we proposed to provide small grants to a number of Campaign member groups to initiate national coalitions in their countries. In early 2019, we received applications from and provided grants to support national coalition-building meetings in Ecuador, Gabon, The Gambia, Madagascar and Peru. All these meetings shared the overall aim of discussing common strategies and developing opportunities for movement building.
A summary of the Peru coalition meeting is below. The full meeting report is available here.
PROMSEX (Centro de Promocion y Defensa de los Derechos Sexuales y Reproductivos) hosted this meeting on 20 February 2019 in Lima. The aim was to create a space for dialogue between representatives from various regions across the country on national challenges to achieving safe abortion. There were 69 activists who participated from different organisations and institutions from nine regions in Peru and a range of age groups. There were presentations on experience in Argentina and Central America, treatment in the health system, lack of awareness of technical standards on the part of some health care professionals, lack of political will to implement better services, and social stigma around the subject of abortion. There was a panel on how to achieve a new regulatory system for abortion, including both legal challenges and treatment challenges. It was agreed to maintain communication at local and national levels, hold more face-to-face meetings, and continue mapping who is working in this area and what strategies are being used, in order to share them and incorporate them in national and local work.