Entrants's Name: Sarah Onyango

Country: Kenya

Field: Health

Innovation - idea: Formed in July 2004, the Kenyan Reproductive Health Steering Committee (RHSC) has launched a national outreach effort and coalition building campaign to build a strong pro-choice advocacy platform and counter powerful religious and political conservatives who are waging a relentless attack on women’s sexual and reproductive health needs and rights. Launching a sophisticated multi-pronged advocacy strategy, RHSC is building power and influence to change policies to improve the health and lives of women and their families by reforming highly restrictive abortion laws.

Innovation - why it is pioneering: RHSC members represent a broad range of Kenya’s medical, legal, women’s rights and human rights professionals and advocates. Their goal is to educate and inform the public and garner support to defeat the politics of fear and distortion about abortion and women’s human rights. The new coalition has propelled a cogent argument about needed revisions to Kenya’s legal restrictions on abortion into the political and social dialogue in Kenya. And, that dialogue has become an increasingly vicious debate over sexual and reproductive health and rights in Kenya. We are successfully presenting a coherent opposition to a politically motivated, well-organized and well-financed attack on women’s health and rights and defending health care professionals who are being harassed, intimidated and arrested without just cause.

Strategy - how it achieves impact: RHSC developed and implemented multi-pronged and multi- level strategies to collectively act to expand and protect the reproductive health and rights of Kenyan women and their health care providers. We mobilized to provide a rights-based critique for the Constitutional Review process to combat restrictions on abortion. We reached out to and involved a range of people who have never before been mobilized to advocate and demand a policy change to protect and extend the sexual and reproductive rights of all women in Kenya. Our coalition is consciously designed to be open and flexible in both strategy and membership. We organized support for health care providers who face serious death threats and imprisonment.

Our strategic approach confronts a mounting threat by the churches and other religious institutions, whose anti- abortion messages and abrogation of due judicial process has resulted in an atmosphere of fear and reprisals for women and their health care providers. We have developed a platform that can only grow in its power by presenting coherent alternative opposition to this conservative ideology of religious and political intolerance. We analyzed the process of past law reform in Kenya and other countries in preparation for writing a revised abortion law. We all learned to be effective communicators; creating relationships with key journalists; using media to advance our opposition to the hypocrisy of the radical conservative movement; and as a call to the conscience and commitment of Kenyans to protect the health and rights of women. Building upon specific expertise, some members are undertaking a large scale letter and email writing campaign to authorities and decision makers. Members learned from each other by analyzing and responding with scientific facts and reason to the propaganda emerging from many quarters

Strategy - growth plans: In the next 2 years, RHSC will strengthen the coalition’s media and advocacy strategies and sharpen and tailor our messages to reach different groups of Kenyans to continue to garner broad public support. The coalition has recognized that we must build large and organized constituencies, if we are to bring about major policy change. Therefore, we plan to engage in community organizing activities to expand our mobilization to include grassroots constituencies—to demand changes in public policies that are the systemic roots of their health and economic problems. We will document our experiences, the process of creating the coalition and different advocacy strategies, organizing tactics, setbacks and accomplishments. This will be used as a document for our own self reflection about our work and to explain our purpose and create partnerships with communities. We will disseminate this widely through print, media, and by making presentations to colleagues in other African countries who are confronting similar attacks on health and human rights.

Impact to date: The RHSC has successfully organized professionals from various backgrounds to educate, support, and lobby for safe abortion laws, women’s rights and health equity. In the past, this was considered to be an issue solely for medical doctors. Through this process of coalition building, members have gained knowledge and advocacy skills and experienced individual transformations. We have become emboldened and encouraged to state our positions on abortion and to plan and act collectively and decisively.

The effect of harassment, death threats, and imprisonment of health care professionals has caused some providers to withhold from their medical commitment to providing safe abortion services and post-abortion care to women. The well financed and organized conservatives had filled the airwaves with inaccurate information and fear trying to impose their views on the public. They put the medical profession on trial in their effort to suppress women’s rights—in an effort to convert issues related to private sexual morality into law. In response, our coalition developed relationships with individuals who control print and electronic media; and we have begun to effectively and strategically use the media to shape the debate about liberalizing the abortion laws in Kenya and about equity in health and human rights for women. We have met with the Attorney General of Kenya to discuss with him about women’s health and the need for policy changes. This was no small accomplishment

Future impact: 1. The coalition building of the RHSC will have strengthened its advocacy activities, engaged grassroots members, and will be capable of thinking through new ideas and promoting them—being pro-active not re-active. Through mobilization, strategic planning, and collective action with a broad based consensus, RHSC will have transformed into a social movement capable of advocating for and obtaining social justice, gender equity, and human rights.

1. The coalition building of the RHSC will have strengthened its advocacy activities, engaged grassroots members, and will be capable of thinking through new ideas and promoting them—being pro-active not re-active. Through mobilization, strategic planning, and collective action with a broad based consensus, RHSC will have transformed into a social movement capable of advocating for and obtaining social justice, gender equity, and human rights.

Sustainability - resource base: PPFA-INTERNATIONAL in New York has provided funding, technical assistance, systematic thinking and evaluation of our work as well as general support of the RHSC goals and strategies. We have asked them to continue to provide education and assistance to take our coalition to the next level of community organizing at the grassroots level. We are meeting with a foundation in May to secure additional funding for our expansion to mobilize greater numbers of constituents in this fight for human rights.

By working with a broad coalition, we are garnering excellent intellectual support from movement colleagues to advance our outreach activities to gain ever-widening population support.

Our members, who all volunteer their time, are professionals who are deeply committed to the health and well being of Kenyan women. Our various perspectives and skills from the fields of medicine, law, women’s rights and human rights have been utilized in framing the strategies and debate about abortion in Kenya. We have all used our expertise, time and personal resources to support the legal defence of the health care professionals as well as in implementing an array of advocacy strategies to educate and influence policy.

Major challenge for the field: The major challenge is the moral absolutism of the religious and political conservatives that disdain and attack tolerance, diversity, individual freedom and human rights. The issue of abortion in Kenya has been challenged by strong, sophisticated, well funded conservative political and religious forces. For the past four years, the review of the Kenyan National Constitution has been complicated and contentious. All opposition perspectives have been ignored and representatives have been made tangential in the debate. In Kenya, abortion is permitted only to save the life of a woman. This law flies in the face of the high rates of death and physical suffering and lifelong disabilities of women as a result of unsafe abortion.

As in the USA, and elsewhere, Kenya’s radical conservatives are not focused on improving the health and well-being of women and their families – but on creating legislation regarding private morality and demonizing sexual behaviour as sin. We must continue to organize to create a groundswell of dissent and develop well-reasoned alternatives to eliminate rather than contribute to human suffering and poverty.

Contact Information:

Name: Dr Sarah Onyango
Country: Kenya