What Dreams May Come
A small grants competition supports locally led change
In Nepal, young people with disabilities have the same dreams as their peers, including a desire for basic sexual and reproductive health care and services.
Historically, they have faced physical and cultural barriers to accessing reproductive health and family planning services. That is improving, thanks to new national disability-inclusive family planning and reproductive health guidelines developed by the Blind Youth Association Nepal in partnership with Nepal’s national Family Welfare Division.
“Nepal’s constitution seems very progressive with inclusive principles, [but many laws] were designed without our consultation,” says Ramchandra Gaihre, the association’s president. “We believe in the principle of ‘nothing about us, without us.’”
The guidelines, which are published on the Family Welfare Division’s website, include information on improving access to family planning and reproductive health services; minimum standards for high-quality care; and strategies to reduce disability-related barriers to information and services related to family planning, reproductive health, safe motherhood, and other health services.
Funding to develop the guidelines was provided by USAID through The Pitch, a competition that provides modest, time-bound grants to local organizations. Semi-finalists “pitch” ideas to address challenges in their country’s family planning and sexual and reproductive health programming that stem from knowledge and information flows.
Twelve organizations, including six youth-led organizations, have received funding during three seasons of The Pitch, from 2021 to 2024. Seven awardees sustained or scaled up their efforts after the initial funding period.
Key to their success has been an unwavering focus on local context and local needs.
Projet Jeune Leader — a youth-founded, community-based organization in Madagascar — published a magazine series called Ampitapitao! (or “Pass it On!”).
Ampitapitao! encouraged readers to submit feedback and opinions that could help contextualize issues and solutions related to youth reproductive health for national decision makers.
Youth and local communities are rarely included in national policy and program decisions in a meaningful way, leading to a disconnect with the knowledge, experiences, needs, and preferences of local communities — particularly when it comes to issues affecting young people.
Fifty-one communities across three regions received magazines and submitted 8,000 comments about youth-focused policies in family planning and reproductive health. Projet Jeune Leader shared that data with Madagascar’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health.
“We were able to meaningfully engage with policymakers on sensitive topics,” says Laura Leeson, Project Jeune Leader’s director of evaluation and strategic development. “In Madagascar, these discussions are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.”
Decision makers said the magazines provided their first source of “contextual data” needed for their advocacy work. Some said they wanted to use, discuss, and share the magazines with their colleagues. A senior official in the National Ministry of Education remarked that the magazines contained “knowledge and data that the decision maker cannot imagine” about how health education programs were being implemented.
The magazine series also led to new funding opportunities.
“We are seeing that donor organizations have a huge need to understand local context,” Leeson says. “They have been very impressed with the local knowledge captured and presented in the magazines, finding it both relevant and credible.”
Stand with a Girl Initiative, a youth-led organization in Nigeria, used their funding to create “Data Made Simple,” a project to interpret and simplify adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health data into storybooks.
“If [young people are] unable to understand the data, then it becomes difficult for them to advocate for the issues,” says Mercy Bolaji, a program technical consultant with Stand With a Girl Initiative.
The organization trained young “data advocates” who used these simple, user-friendly, and responsive storybooks to educate community members, family planning service providers, and decision makers.
“We were able to publish the storybooks in Indigenous languages,” says Bolaji. “This serves those adolescents who are unable to read and write — and even decision makers — in order to ensure that when programs are done or when solutions are made, it directly targets the needs of these people.”
Data Made Simple reached 5,250 community members, service providers, and religious leaders with sexual and reproductive health information, including resources to combat gender-based violence and prevent early marriage. More than 80 decision makers made commitments to respond to adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health needs.
The initiative started in five states in Nigeria, scaling nationwide with additional backing from Grand Challenges Canada.
Common among all three Pitch innovations was their alignment with national priorities, which led to sustained collaboration with government agencies. In each case, USAID’s modest investments generated additional funding or government collaboration to sustain the work.
In Nepal, for example, the government has since supported the production of other materials like flip charts of family planning methods in easy-to-read formats, Braille, and large print.
“After [the guidelines] implementation, any activity we design is owned by the government because the core team at the Family Welfare Division is oriented on how to use the guidelines,” says Gaihre. “The understanding level [of challenges facing people with disabilities] among existing staff within the department is now very, very high.”
About this Story
Anne Kott is Senior Program Officer II at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and a team lead for USAID’s Knowledge SUCCESS project, which designed and led The Pitch competition.
The project champions the use of knowledge management to address pressing challenges in family planning and reproductive health programs within USAID’s family planning program countries.
