Building alliances to advocate for strengthening reproductive health policies and programmes in India

Involving civil society in addressing public health issues has been in public discourse in recent times. In India, activism around primary health care for the marginalized community is known. However, building national level civil society alliance on reproductive and sexual health issues with a rights based approach for evidence based advocacy with state is a fairly new but promising step towards empowering communities to claim their own health rights along with other partners. Centre for Health and Social Justice (CHSJ) has played a key role in the last 3 years in building national and state level alliances to review health policies and programme implementation for strengthening policies and practice in.

This paper will describe CHSJ’s innovative role in building national and state level alliances of civil society groups and in activating these in reviewing reproductive health policies and implementation with evidence based strategies, using rights framework. Different methods used for gathering evidences will also be discussed. One of the strategies used has been organizing national consultations whereby different stakeholders including government take part. Citizen’s report is one of the measurable outputs among other deliverables which is prepared and shared with government. Some of these alliances have steered different methods of evidence building on poor quality of health care related to family planning, maternal health services, etc. One of the national networks has been instrumental in empowering rural communities in monitoring operational aspects of public health programmes and in re-energizing the village health committees.

Additionally, this paper will focus on challenges, opportunities and threats of sustaining civil society partnerships based on CHSJ’s experience, which may be portrayed as a learning opportunity and promising practice for building and strengthening such alliances in bringing about policy and programme level changes and in facilitating socially excluded groups in claiming their health rights.