inroads Partnership Fund grantees 2018-20

The inroads Partnership Fund supports inroads members in their pursuit of research, evaluation, interventions, arts, and activities focused on understanding and ending abortion stigma. Grantees will generate evidence about the various causes, consequences, and manifestations of abortion stigma and/or pilot innovative strategies for defining, reducing, and mitigating stigma.

Each year, we try to make the selection of Partnership Fund grantees more participatory, with Steering Committee members and inroads network members volunteering to review the applications. After an extensive review process of so many great applications, we present to you this cycle’s grantees from six countries around the globe. The 2018-2020 grantees hail from Pakistan, Uganda, Kenya, Poland, Honduras, and Mexico, and we are excited to see how their projects will manifest.

Peace Foundation, Pakistan

To work with young people to develop and pilot edu-tainment activities to reduce abortion stigma. Activities will include developing folk songs, folk games, community theater, community dialogue meetings and a painting competition.

Centro Las Libres, Mexico

To partner with Ibis Reproductive Health to conduct formative research with individuals who have been criminalized for abortions (including people seeking abortion and abortion providers) as well as the general public. Based on this formative research, the team will conduct and pilot test two messaging campaigns: one targeting the general public, and one targeting government representatives.

Centro de Derechos de Mujeres, Honduras

To conduct a multi-center investigation, from 4 countries, to generate evidence about the stigma present in decision makers, officials, former officials and other stakeholders, to understand how their reasoning is configured to maintain the absolute prohibition of abortion in in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Kobiety w Sieci, Poland

To shift the narrative about abortion towards the perspective of reproductive justice and experience of those who had an abortion and those who support them in Poland. Activities include graphic materials, developing a media guide for journalists, conducting storytelling meetings with collectives in Poland, and hosting cross-regional capacity development sessions with activists from Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Volunteers for Development Association, Uganda

To increase knowledge and participation among religious leaders. Will reduce community-level stigma by holding community dialogue meetings, individual and institutional security promotion workshops, prayer days, and residential trainings.

Women’s Spaces Africa, Kenya

Through the My Voice Project, Women’s Spaces Africa will work with young women with disabilities in Nairobi to reduce self-stigma on abortion through a training of trainers who will become ambassadors of the project, and to reduce community stigma around girls and women with disability by holding community sensitization forums.