Beyond Rhetoric: Operationalizing the Rights-based Language in Uganda’s Costed Implementation Plan
KAMPALA, UGANDA (July 6, 2015) — The human rights dimensions of family planning programs have been recognized for nearly half a century. Increasingly these rights have been affirmed and codified in numerous declarations, conventions, and treaties, endorsed by governments and the international community.
While recognition of the importance of family planning programs adhering to human rights principles has grown, operationalizing the human rights language in national policies and plans has been much more limited. Uganda has taken on this challenge of closing the gap between what is written and how services and programs are delivered.
The Ugandan government’s new Family Planning Costed Implementation Plan (CIP) (2015-2020), developed to reflect its FP2020 goals, explicitly pledges to protect and fulfill human rights in the provision of family planning services. The CIP repeatedly states its dedication to ensuring that family planning services are provided according to human rights and quality of care standards.
The Evidence Project, together with IPPF’s Sustainable Networks Project (SIFPO2), are taking part in a groundbreaking process spearheaded by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and Reproductive Health Uganda (RHU) to develop an action plan for a rights-based approach to family planning in support of the MOH’s CIP.
The process began with a two-day stakeholder consultation in March 2015 co-hosted by the MOH and RHU. A total of 40 experts participated, representing the MOH, District Health Officers, RHU, Parliamentarians, donors, family planning implementing partners, the Population Secretariat (POPSEC), the Ugandan Human Rights Commission and other civil society organizations. Participants shared updates on their rights-related activities, analysed case studies that highlight factors that enable or challenge individuals’ ability to realize their rights, and compared the rights-based language in the CIP with a comprehensive framework for voluntary rights-based family planning.
“Uganda’s CIP is unique among existing CIPs because of its strong and explicit rights language, thereby serving as a model for other countries,” notes Dr. Karen Hardee, Director of the Evidence Project and one of the co-authors of the framework used in the exercise.
The level of engagement and support for a human rights approach to family planning was high throughout the consultation. By the end of the meeting, participants prioritized human rights challenges to address at the policy, service delivery, and community level and identified partners to engage in developing, implementing, and evaluating a national action plan.
Participants from the Ugandan MOH, UNFPA, and FP2020 contribute to a strategic action plan for a rights-based approach to family planning.
Building on the March consultation, the MOH invited a similar set of stakeholders for a two-day meeting in May 2015 to translate the rights language in the CIP into practice.
To help with this process, the Evidence Project developed a resource guide, “Rights-based Family Planning: 10 Resources to Guide Programming.” The guide pulls together existing resources for putting into action a rights-based approach to family planning programming, highlighting each resource’s aims, scope and content, and how to use it.
The Evidence Project also contributed to a strategic action template that participants used to identify the key implementation activities needed to operationalize the four priority areas participants identified as the focus of the action plan:
- Implementing existing policies
- Informing people about their rights
- Addressing cultural and religious barriers
- Implementing rights-based family planning service delivery
This information will be turned into an action plan for implementation of rights-based family planning in the CIP.
To continue the momentum of the consultations, a coordination task team that includes representatives of the MOH, UNFPA, Human Rights Commission, and Uganda Family Planning Consortium was formed, with RHU serving as the Secretariat. Over the coming months, the team will finalize the action plan, concentrating on mainstreaming the plan into existing MOH structures and procedures and the CIP’s performance monitoring plan. And the Evidence Project will document and evaluate implementation of the action plan, providing important insights for Uganda and other countries on how to move beyond rhetoric and make voluntary, rights-based family planning a reality.