Introduction

1. Introduction The Asian-Pacific Resource & Research Centre for Women (ARROW) is deeply committed to monitoring international documents to ensure government accountability to the international commitments that they have made. The Millennium Development Goals are the development paradigm today, unfortunately for SRHR organisations and activists, Target 5b was only mandated in 2005, and indicators were instituted in 2007. We lost considerable time within this development framework to ensure that our agenda was represented.

2. Introduction Significant gaps also occur in the indicators around 5A & 5B: No aspects of rights are mentioned. Important issues are left out: notably provision of safe abortion services to reduce maternal deaths, provision of modern methods & the range of contraceptive methods + counselling, access to information & services for young people. As we were late, in the game have not been able to institutionalise the ‘reporting’ framework to analyse the achievements in the way we would like it to be reported. The MDG framework offers limited opportunity for us to mainstream our agenda, or even broaden it to the more comprehensive agenda of Cairo; let alone to push the envelope on the SRR issues that are coming up e.g sexual rights. But we have to work with the paradigm… For us, at ARROW, it was more problematic. Belonging to the women’s health and rights movement, we have always looked at sexual and reproductive health outcomes as results of power inequalities which lead to ill consequences for women’s sexual and reproductive health.

3. Introduction 4) Gender inequalities within the family and society, affect many SRH outcomes such as: Maternal deaths is a demonstrated fact of gender inequality, and lack of govt attention/ resources allocated to women citizens. As only women ‘can die’ from maternal deaths, access or lack of access to life-saving procedures can amount to ‘discrimination’ and falls under the ‘gender’ framework. Violence is a reflection of power inequalities in society and comparably more women then men continue to be targets. Violence against women often results in ill-health - physical & mental and also death (both homicide and suicide) Recognition of women’s autonomy over her sexual life and her sexuality; often unequal to that of men and this is seen in the poor enforcement of the legal age of marriage, limitations on women’s rights to choose there partners and in continued discriminatory practices against women HIV/AIDS is an area where women are biologically vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, also lack of negotiating power.

4. Introduction For us it was logical to combine both MDG 3 on gender equality and MDG 5 on reproductive health including maternal health it was a way to bring the rights and health agendas together. Process-wise there was also limited opportunity to intervene within the reporting processes for NGOs, at the country level and the regional/ international levels. Hence we decided to use the internet as our main medium.

5. The Indicators for MDG3 and the analysis MDG 3 indicators are school, work and parliament; we also chose to look at • Laws on equality: Laws on domestic violence, rape, marital rape, sexual harassment, trafficking • Access to services for victims of violence I.e. recognition of the right to be free from violence, and the recognition of the right to services for survivors • National machineries set up by governments for women’s rights for gender mainstreaming. • Male participation in contraception, spousal opposition to use of contraception Within each indicator we also looked at information or alternative data - CEDAW shadow reports, news articles, short films

6. The Indicators for MDG 5 and the analysis MDG 5 indicators are MMR, SAB, CPR, Unmet need, adolescent birth rate, ANC; we also chose to look at Within MMR - lifetime risk, % of maternal deaths due to unsafe abortion Within SAB - not skilled ‘attendants’ but we need ‘attendance’ - access to EmoC and access to post-partum care Within adolescent birth rate - median age of marriage vs legal age of marriage, sex and sexuality education in schools, access to SRH services within the public health system Within CPR - access to modern methods, access to a range of contraceptive methods, access to services around informed choice Within unmet need - differences between wanted fertility rates and total fertility rates; reasons for non-use of contraception - esp highlighting spousal opposition/ religious prohibition. Unmet need understimated in Asia as DHS methodology in this region and in ME only surveys married women.

7. MDG 5 Homepage at www.mdg5watch.org

8. Drop down menu

9. MDG 3 Pakistan Country page

10. Voices from the ground – alternative reports (Pakistan MDG3) News article link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1300700.stm

11. MDG 5 Pakistan Country page

12. Voices from the ground – alternative reports (Pakistan MDG5) Youtube video link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1300700.stm

13. We designed both an information website - providing the “live & living report” with data, and we linked it to a campaign modality - urging people to sign onto our ‘advocacy asks’ and sign onto our campaign. We sent emails to all UN Permanent Missions, informing them of our advocacy asks, and based on our data and information on MDG 3 & 5.

14. Future intentions Our MDG campaign website will continue till 2015. We aim to add more countries and we would love to work with partners in different countries, from the 12 we already work with. If you are interested, please let us know and we can quickly put up some pages for you, but your national partner should verify the data for us. We also hope to broaden the analysis and allow for more indicators and data to go in, you will get updates from time to time on this through our other information resources.

15. The relevance of the internet to our cause: The ARROW experience Compared to our previous methods over generating reports, we have taken the data direct to the internet. In our own experience, over the past five years, we have been slowly shifting everything to an online mode. ARROW’s website has been steadily evolving, from a website comprised of ARROW’s organisational history and objectives, programmes, projects to including ARROW’s online virtual catalogue (containing thousands of ARROW’s publications in the IDC), highlighting and making available ARROW’s publications in PDF format, featuring websites on women’s health and development (along with websites for donor, funding and UN agencies) and is not only a resource for people to learn about ARROW, but an information portal and advocacy tool for SRHR stakeholders, and this is shown in the increase of hits on ARROW’s website: from 10 328 (2007) to 1 051 954 (2010), which is an increase of 10000%; 19 126 unique visitors and 111 910 visits in 2010 alone.

16. ARROW Homepage

17. The SRHR Info Resources, contains critical pieces of information -Resources, New from the Resource Centre, Upcoming Events, Call to Action, Call for Papers, Job Openings and ARROW Updates – with each Resource containing at minimum 10 pieces of information that currently reaches more than 1700 contacts in the database, comprising of NGOs, activists, researchers, government agencies, donors, students and interested others in the database.

18. We are also doing more email mailouts of ARROWs for Change. AFC circulation: AFC is distributed in 124 countries across the globe, and reaches at least 8,780 SRHR stakeholders, including 5,440 print subscribers, 2,170 electronic copy subscribers and 1,170 SRHR info resource subscribers (as of May 2010; up from a total of 4,853 print subscribers in 2006).

19. We are also moving the tracking of indicators online - SRHR Database of Indicators. URL Link (temporary): http://srhrdatabase.org/staging/

20. Thank you for your time! “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” - Eleanor Roosevelt