By: G Bennie Bravo Johnson I
Over twenty Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights Champions (SRHR-Champions) have benefited a two-day policy advocacy and communicating capacity strengthening symposium from the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Monrovia .
The two-days initiative which run from October 10-11, 2024 aims at empowering participants and stakeholders gained understanding in the current landscape of SRHR in Liberia to advance the implementation of SRHR legally.
At the initiative held at the Royal Grand Hotel in Sinkor, Monrovia, APHRC provided capacity building strengthening enlightening sessions SRHR-Champions on various topics and practical sessions including ‘’Abortion landscape in Liberia, documentation of advocacy work, writing for impact-effective writing skills/ blog writing and basic on grant financial reporting.
Providing the overview of the workshop, Doris Omao, Advocacy and Communication Officer, African Population and Health Research Center said the workshop also seeks to enhance the understanding of SRHR-Champions about the abortion landscape in Liberia, which she believes will serve as sufficient safe guide to accelerate the advocacy of SRHR.
According to her, it is good for SRHR-Champions to be properly inform about the situation in the country with a clear purpose vision and goal before taking in an advocacy work.
‘’We want you to understand the abortion landscape in the country before integrating it in your work to influence policies and policymakers, because it’s possible that it could have change. Something could have change, a law would have been passed, the progress you have made, maybe the number has gone down because of the kind of work you have been doing. So, you are here to know the situation in your country with regards to abortion, post abortion and complication’’ Omao stated.
Accordingly, she added that, this will serve as an eye-opening to the causes that they are advocating for, Sexual and Reproductive health and rights issues.
‘’ so, we colleague will take us through the abortion landscape of Liberia in the first session, while the second session will be on documenting your advocacy work in Liberia. There are lots of progress you have made but we hope this time, you document them. So, it should be documented on paper report, video and in the news. Also, at end of the training, I mean the last day, you will learn blog article and advocacy and lastly, you will gain understating and grant and financial reporting’’ she concluded.
Meanwhile, the participants however, expressed appreciation and excitement to the APHRC team for leaving their country to come to Liiberia to strengthen their capacity for the work they are doing here.
” We want to appreciate you for coming. We want you to know that we take this training very seriously and what will be taught here, we want to assure you that we will properly use the knowledge to strengthen our policy advocacy to ensure that policymakers see SRHR implementation as a human rights issues” they concluded.
