IMPLEMENTATION PERIOD: 2018 – 2021

DONOR:  Safe Abortion Action Fund (SAAF)

PROJECT GOAL: To improve access to safe, quality abortion services, and family planning, in accordance to WHO recommendations for Women in Eastern European and Central Asian countries.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES:

• To improve the stakeholders knowledge from the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia’ on the latest WHO recommendations on safe abortion and family planning and on the importance of evidence-based national regulations, in order to obtain their political commitment to improve the quality and access to safe abortion services.
• To improve the knowledge base of the quality of abortion services and post-abortion family planning, including on the existence and quality of national guidelines/protocols on abortion in order to evaluate their compliance to WHO  recommendations.
• To improve regulatory environment by making available national guidelines/protocols on abortion and post-abortion family planning, based on the latest WHO recommendations in at least five countries in the region and by improving the quality of existing policy documents and M&E system in the remaining countries.
• To strengthen the regional collaboration and networking among the countries’ SCOs and professional associations, to enable them to share experience, the developed policy documents, examples how they overcome increasing religious fundamentalism’ opposition and movement against abortion.

PROJECT ACTIVITIES:

• Conduct a regional conference on safe abortion and WHO recommendations for 35 stakeholders from EECA countries.
• Conference planning and organization, tickets and hotel booking for the participants.
• Offer assistance to countries teams to conduct the evaluation of the access, quality of abortion care in 12 EEAC countries, including on the existence and quality of national guidelines/protocols on abortion in order to evaluate their compliance to WHO recommendations.
• Coordinating the national activities by the identified country Coordinators.
• Offering support for development of the national guidelines/protocol on abortion based on the latest WHO recommendations and the M&E system of data collection (abortion number and quality: methods used, pain control, etc).
• Revision and update the existing already national guideline/protocol on abortion and of the system of data collection on abortion according to the latest WHO recommendations in the rest of the countries.
• Organize country level advocacy meetings in 5 countries, to launch the developed national guidelines/protocol on abortion, based on the latest WHO recommendations and discuss it with the main national stakeholders.
• Launch the regional network – the coalition of regional stakeholders from the 12 countries of EECA region.
• Develop/update the communication tools for the regional coalition (webpage, Facebook, etc.) in order to strengthen the regional communication, a compartment on the web page of RHTC and a Facebook dedicated to safe abortion will be created.
• Develop a communication strategy, to maintain and motivate the active communication among coalition members.