DSW Ethiopia Engages in Advocacy with Parliamentarians

Organised by DSW Ethiopia in collaboration with the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (EAS), members of the Ethiopian Parliament met for a half-day advocacy plenary session at the Sheraton Addis on 21 December 2024. Since early March 2024, DSW Ethiopia has been convening and participating in a series of advocacy workshops to consult and discuss with the legislative bodies and decision makers as part of the Youth for Health (Y4H) project, which focuses on adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) budget issues. The latest workshop was one of the last follow-up meetings of the calendar year.

Key stakeholders attending the workshop included representatives from the EAS, Marie Stopes International and the Youth Network for Sustainable Development (YNSD). The latter two partner organisations are part of the consortium that is pooling resources and expertise with DSW to jointly implement the Y4H programme in Ethiopia. During the half-day follow up plenary session the Chairperson of the Finance and Budget Standing Committee from the Federal Parliament  was one of the panelists who presided over the proceedings.

Following the first such meeting in March, most of the stakeholders who attended were able to take part in various other advocacy workshops at regional level and learned a lot about the issues that DSW has been advocating for. The Members of Parliament (MPs), who were also present at every other event, discussed the progress made in line with what were being underlined as call for actions in March. The advocacy efforts have had an impact on the MPs, who took checklists with them during their visits of the grassroots constituents to assess the needs and gaps in the ASRH budgets.

According to one of the parliamentarians, as DSW’s advocacy efforts intensify, the level of awareness of the ASRH budget needs increases among the Members of Parliament, who continue to discuss the issues with the school community and other stakeholders in order to create an enabling legislative environment for the promotion of needs-based ASRH budget allocations.

The Parliamentarians expressed their impression that the earlier advocacy workshops had already borne fruit in terms of creating a strong sense of commitment to further increase ASRH budget allocations at all levels of interaction with the key stakeholders. During the plenary session, the MPs emphasised the need to learn from the practices of other countries in Africa on ASRH budget issues and the specific benefits they have gained budget line coding.

In a reaffirming manner to address the questions raised by the MPs, Bekelech Bayou, DSW Ethiopia’s Programme Manager, explained the possibilities for DSW to facilitate an online platform for the exchange of experiences among the Kenyan Parliamentary counterparts on their ASRH budget practices. “Such an effort is already underway and DSW will soon be able to engage the relevant Ethiopian Parliamentarians and their Kenyan counterparts through online meetings,” she initiated a commitment on behalf of DSW Ethiopia.   

“Kenya’s experiment in allocating a budget for ASRH began at the height of the global public health crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2019. Kenya has, thus far, come a long way through more than five years of experience allocating an ASRH budget that is also coded with the budget lines,” Bekelech explained, and citing a source from the Kenyan Parliament, she further noted that “ such practices have helped the relevant parliamentarians to identify measurable outcomes as they are able to cross-check the accountability of the ASRH budget utilisation to the specified items in question.”

While Ayalew Fikru, Programme Director of  Marie Stopes International in Ethiopia, looked forward to the exchange of experiences initiated by DSW in the Kenyan Parliament, he also appreciated the efforts of the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) to create an enabling policy environment for mainstreaming the issue of increasing the budget for adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH). He saw a practical opportunity for DSW and MSI to capitalise on such an environment to expand their concerted efforts in the advocacy-based Youth for Health (Y4H) intervention.

Y4H is an advocacy-driven project co-funded by the European Union (EU) and its programme in Ethiopia is implemented through a consortium of partners comprising DSW, MSI and YNSD. One of the key activities of this intervention is to advance advocacy at all levels on behalf of the Ethiopian youth whose sexual and reproductive health (SRH) wellbeing can be better addressed through increased budget allocations for their access to services.