Ipas Collaborative Fund

Ethiopia

Nikat Charitable Association is passionate about promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), including abortion rights, and ensuring that women have the reproductive health resources they need.

Grant focus: They will raise awareness of how to access safe abortion for commercial sex workers and advocate for policies and strategies to provide essential sexual and reproductive health and rights services.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia Media Women Association enhances the capacities of journalists in Ethiopia, advocating for accurate and comprehensive reporting on sexual and reproductive health and rights issues.

Grant focus: The association will build the capacities of local radio journalists to understand and report on the importance of sexual and reproductive health and rights, including safe abortion.

India

PRASAR is an NGO that works with diverse groups, including adolescents, women of reproductive age, farmers, and marginalized communities. Recent amendments to India’s abortion law aim to enhance access to safe abortion services, especially for vulnerable women. However, awareness of the law and recent changes is limited, particularly in rural areas. As part of the Sanjha Prayas network, PRASAR collaborates with grassroots organizations to raise awareness on how to access safe abortion, targeting local influencers and decision makers.

Grant focus: They will integrate safe abortion content into civil society organizations’ agendas, challenge stigmatizing social norms, and increase awareness among community influencers and gatekeepers about the rights of young women, particularly their right to access safe abortion.

India

Bihar Gram Vikas Parishad, an NGO, implements need-based programs, primarily targeting mothers, children, flood victims, farmers, differently abled individuals, youth, and decision-makers. Recent amendments to India’s abortion law aim to enhance access to safe abortion services, especially for vulnerable women. However, rural community awareness about the law and recent changes is limited. As part of the Sanjha Prayas network, Bihar Gram Vikas Parishad collaborates with grassroots organizations to increase awareness of how to access safe abortion, targeting local influencers and decision makers.

Grant focus: They will integrate safe abortion content into civil society organizations’ agendas, challenge stigmatizing social norms, and raise awareness among community influencers and gatekeepers regarding the rights of young women, particularly their right to access safe abortion.

Indonesia

Rahima is an NGO that works to uphold women’s rights from an Islamic perspective.

Women often face discrimination based on their reproductive functions, making them vulnerable to violence. To address this, Rahima created a reproductive health education module and teaching materials for religion teachers at Madrasah Aliyah (similar to high school) to incorporate sexual and reproductive education.

Rahima also became one of the initiators of the Indonesian Women’s Ulama Congress, known as Kongres Ulama Perempuan Indonesia (KUPI)—the world’s first congress of women “ulama,” which are advanced Islamic scholars who serve as spiritual and community leaders.

Grant focus: The grant will enable Rahima to update and integrate a sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) perspective into its Women Ulama Training Module. By graduating from this training, women will be capable of delivering education that raises awareness of SRHR, particularly sexual and gender-based violence, in Islamic boarding schools.

Kenya

Life Lifters Kenya is a CBO that aims to empower rural girls in Kenya through leadership, SRHR training, mentorship, and scholarships, enabling them to make informed decisions and advocate for their own rights.

Grant focus: They will implement a project dubbed EmpowerHer, a comprehensive training and advocacy program in Nandi County focusing on sexual and reproductive health and rights. It aims to educate teenage girls on delaying early sexual debut and preventing pregnancy and unsafe abortion.

Kenya

K-PEN is a CBO dedicated to challenging poverty in urban slums and rural districts of Kenya, particularly emphasizing women and youth.

Grant focus: They will use their grant for improved access to information on safe, self-managed medical abortion among women and girls in Migori County.

Kenya

This community-based organization has been implementing health, education, and economic livelihood activities among the Loita Maasai pastoralist community and is a second-time Collaborative Fund grantee.

Grant focus: They will use their grant to implement the I CARE HER (ICH) Project, a 10-month collaboration supported by Ipas Africa Alliance, which aims to strengthen an existing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) intervention within the community. This project builds on previous efforts supported by Ipas, addressing the intersection of SGBV, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and climate change.

Kenya

Stage Media Arts (SMA) is a CBO that focuses on empowering youth through theater to promote sexual and reproductive health and rights services and uptake, aiming to strengthen youth development and active participation in their communities.

Grant focus: They will implement a project titled Empowering Voices, which aims to reduce abortion-related stigma and challenge harmful social norms within Bungoma County through an educational campaign. The goal is to reach 3,000 community members, resulting in increased support for abortion care by June 2024.

Malawi

Go Fund a Girl is a youth-led organization in Malawi, focusing on empowering young women who have survived gender-based violence to become agents of change.

Grant focus: Go Fund a Girl will integrate disability inclusion into SRHR. The intervention’s primary goal is to empower girls and women to transform social norms, reducing abortion stigma and resistance to SRHR to achieve a gender-equitable and SRHR-inclusive society.

Guatemala

Aprofam is a private, non-profit institution established in 1964 with the legal mandate to provide comprehensive health services, emphasizing quality and gender equity, with a specific focus on sexual and reproductive health.

Grant focus: Through the grant, they plan to improve the quality and accessibility of sexual and reproductive health services by enhancing knowledge, attitudes, and practices among health providers and their networks when serving girls, adolescents, and women.

Mozambique

Associação Juvenil OTHOKO is a local association established in the city of Cuamba, Niassa Province. The organization specializes in youth activism and mobilizing young individuals in HIV/AIDS prevention efforts.

Grant focus: They will use their grant to foster the integration of sexual and reproductive health and services, specifically safe abortion services, into climate change response plans; assist community disaster management committees in developing response plans that address sexual and reproductive health and rights in humanitarian settings; and establish and rejuvenate women-led community coalitions to cultivate reproductive justice in humanitarian settings.

Nigeria

This second-time Collaborative Fund grantee integrated safe abortion into ongoing health programming for civil society organizations in Gombe State, including disability inclusion. The goal is to increase awareness and address disability rights in the context of safe abortion and contraception in Gombe State.

Grant focus: They will use the new grant to help incorporate disability inclusion into health programs for civil society organizations in Nigeria.

South Africa

MB Teen Lifestyle is working to prevent early unwanted pregnancies, gender-based violence, and HIV infections among adolescents and young people in South Africa.

Grant focus: They will use their grant to raise awareness about the risks of illegal abortions through community-based and media campaigns and to strengthen the referral network for sexual and reproductive health services and psychosocial support for adolescents and young people in the township of Mamelodi.

Zambia

With a strong focus on reproductive health rights and safe abortion advocacy, CTYA is a leading Zambian youth-focused NGO. It empowers young people, particularly adolescent girls and women, to achieve sustainable human development and combat marginalization.

Grant focus: They will use the grant to enhance access to sexual and reproductive health and comprehensive sexuality education for 5,000 adolescent girls and young women aged 15-24 at universities and colleges in Livingstone and Choma districts by April 2024.

Entashata Loita Community Based Organization (CBO) serves the Maasai pastoralist community in the arid and semi-arid lands of Loita Division in Kenya, sharing climate adaptation strategies and advocating for women and girls’ rights to education and abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

Their work: As the first CBO to reach communities in Loita Division for interventions, they have linked over 50 girls for education sponsorship and their dialogues on FGM have caused more and more families in these communities to abandon the practice. They have reduced destruction of a critical water resource in the Naibala community and partnered with local women’s groups to initiate modern beehives, boosting the women’s livelihoods.

Action Hope Malawi (AHM)

AHM leverages their expansive connections at both the community and government level to promote policies and create programs that provide information, training, and advocacy to youth-serving organizations, policy makers, and community members—enabling women and youth to utilize their rights and make safe and responsible decisions about their sexual and reproductive health.

Their work: AHM’s self-made Male Champion model has been adopted by Malawi’s Government in the fight against gender-based violence. Having already successfully pushed for adoption of guidelines for youth empowerment in governance structures and establishment of on child marriages by-laws in the Zomba district, AHM is working tirelessly to lobby the Malawi government to grant access to safe abortion services and postabortion care.

PROFAMILIA Nicaragua

Having long provided nursing staff specialized in reproductive health and family planning to the community, this local nonprofit has begun the implementation of a Comprehensive Sexuality Education project with the technical and financial support of Ipas Central America and Mexico.

Their work: The process began with the training of facilitators who will supervise events in the youth clubs of PROFAMILA clinics, providing information about healthy and safe sexuality with respect to their rights and without guilt—dispelling stigma and empowering decisionmaking. In addition, a digital campaign has been launched through PROFAMILIA’s social networks to help adolescents make informed, assertive, and autonomous decisions about sexuality and reproductive health.

Nucleus of Women’s Associations of Zambézia (NAFEZA)

NAFEZA is a network of 33 feminist organizations. Located in the Located in the Zambézia province of Mozambique, they work to strengthen the solidarity of women’s associations and community-based organizations while coordinating advocacy actions that raise the status of women and girls.

NAFEZA has joined Ipas to advocate in partnership with the health sector to educate and facilitate access, so that girls and young women can make more informed choices about contraception and receive safe, stigma-free abortion services if needed.

SAIF Advocacy Foundation

SAIF Advocacy Foundation is a registered non-governmental organization working to promote the sexual reproductive health & rights of women and girls in Gombe State, Nigeria.

Their work: They are supporting regional Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to integrate postabortion care (PAC) services in their programming. To date, fifteen CSOs have been identified and had Values Clarification and Attitude Transformation (VCAT) conducted to change their attitudes and perspective towards abortion.

Onelife Initiative for Human Development

This non-governmental, not-for-profit organization works in Nigeria towards the social development of young people. They use multi-sectoral interventions with a youth-based focus in the areas of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), Governance and Policies and Enterprise Development (with heavy agribusiness tilt).

Their work: Currently, they are conducting a baseline survey in two States in Nigeria (Akwa Ibom & Oyo States), targeting out-of-campus students in order to inform curriculum development of sessions with students regarding their preference of Private Patent Medicine Vendors (PPMVs).

Development organization-DEAP

DEAP is registered civil society organization working in Punjab and Sindh providing services in education, health, disability, livelihood and water/sanitation sectors. DEAP also provides free food items, free educational assistance and financial support to those in need.

DEAP collaborates with Ipas Pakistan to inform the community about abortion with pills, postabortion care and contraception through training of Lady Health Workers and coordinates logistics for training of providers and community sessions with women and girls to orient them to Pakistan abortion law, safe pathways of Uterine Evacuation/Post-abortion (UE/PAC) and comprehensive contraceptive care (CC).

The Zambian Youth Platform (ZYP)

ZYP is a network of adolescents and young people, youth leaders/workers and their organizations, committed to the emancipation of young people in Zambia.

They are currently implementing the Youth Community Advocacy Project (Y-CAP), which aims to improve the quality of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services and increase access to comprehensive abortion care (CAC) for adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in Chipata and Livingstone districts. This project addresses systemic inequalities and obstacles to CAC access, aiming for systemic improvements that will benefit all AGYW in Zambia.