Bringing the Voices of Women and Girls Forward to Improve Access to and Quality of Sexual and Reproductive Health Services: Naripokkho’s Journey over Four Decades

Over the past decades, Bangladesh has shown considerable improvement in several maternal and child health indicators, including the maternal mortality ratio, total fertility rate, and contraceptive prevalence rate. However, some of these have now stagnated. The population control ideology initially drove the government’s approach to women’s fertility control, but the current national policies state the importance of a rights-based approach. However, on the ground, women’s rights are not always considered. Naripokkho is a women’s rights organization established in 1983 that has advocated for women’s bodily autonomy for four decades. It adopts a bottom-up and top-down approach to advocacy and keeps women’s needs, concerns, desires, and rights at the forefront. To understand and be able to bring the voices and lived experiences of women forward, Naripokkho has adopted a four-pronged approach, starting with discussions with its members and proceeding to campaigns, which lead to investigations, sometimes research, and, based on findings from all these, finally to implementation. This, then again, leads to more discussions and campaigns. Throughout this process, partnerships with civil society organizations and the media have been instrumental in advocating for the needs and demands of women with local authorities and governing bodies (such as government oversight committees), the national authorities (health departments, ministries, and Members of Parliament), and at the international level UN bodies, as well as regional and international NGOs, etc. Naripokkho’s several successful movements on sexual and reproductive health and rights using this approach to advocacy are presented here, along with implications garnered from those experiences.