Dr. MUKARWEGO Beth Nasiforo, chairperson of NUDOR
Make Way, a program which advocates the well-being, including the rights of people with compound vulnerabilities has disseminated Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights(SRHR) to serve Rwandan institutions, social activists while also informing government decisions and policies.
Disseminated last week, the tools aim to increase and improve capacity, skills and knowledge of civil society groups and organisations.
The ultimate goal is to enable them to undertake game-changing intersectional SRHR lobby and advocacy. This toolkit consists of a wide range of tools – each with a different purpose – for the steps that make up an advocacy cycle.
Some tools build a conceptual understanding of intersectionality or help clarify values while others guide the user in applying the principles underlying intersectionality in their approach to policy analysis, communication and community engagement.
For example, the intersectionality self-assessment tool encourages organisations to undertake a thorough self-evaluation and to assess their current level of commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity and social justice.
It provides guidance and resources to help organisations identify areas for improvement and develop a roadmap towards becoming a more equitable organisation.
In other areas, the Meaningful Youth Engagement (MYE) tool is a guide to effectively involving young people in youth-focused programmes.
Its goal is to identify some of the gaps in planned youth participation, and to offer practical solutions alongside scenarios for making youth participation an essential part of any youth programme.
The tools are diversified to an extent that they even provide for people in churches with the Intersectional See-Judge-Act (ISJA) tool.
The latter is an action-focused method for analysing religious issues. It can be used to identify and analyse matters from a religious perspective, to facilitate personal and social transformation.
Giving an example, a religious representative who was among pioneers who contributed to development of the tools said “when in church you hear a case of pregnancy out of marriage, the tool provides a guidance how you can handle the lady. You don’t jump straight to the conclusion before taking a number of steps and consideration of factors.”
Speaking during the dissemination, Dr. MUKARWEGO Beth Nasiforo, the chairperson of National Union of Persons with Disabilities said “The tools will assist to find out the challenges related to persons with disability which exclude them in the society, including in religious places, churches where persons with disabilities are not featuring anywhere.”
She said that in health, the persons with disabilities do not get medical services as they require.
She said that in some instances, the persons go to the hospital and nobody attends to them because they think that the persons with disability do not deserve it.
In other cases, some people with hearing disability, they are also affected when they meet the doctor who cannot use sign language.
Or else, the little people, they also cannot access the desk of the cashier to pay the medicines themselves.
“The tools today are being disseminated to the society, so that they can change the mentality,” she said.
“Those who are trained to use the tools can advocate for the tools to be used everywhere.”
She gave an example of intersectional community scorecard tool, which suggests that people with disabilities should know their rights to marry, to give birth, enjoy life all other people.
The Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) organisation is a partner in this project. Franklin Murangira Gakuba, the country representative of VSO said at the launch. “We are not looking at the disability alone; we are looking at the disability and poverty, disability and rural setting for example. When you are planning to implement a program you need to ask a question on whether it uses intersectionality lenses in looking at problems. It is important for VSO to be here because our mission is to promote a fair world.”
He said that, if you use the tools in employability sector, you can assess how the labor market is supporting the people with disabilities and see existing challenges, then decide what you need to do.
“But at the beginning, they are focusing on SRHR services,” he said.
