In February 2014, an international congress on Promoting Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) took place in Cuenca, Ecuador. Its objective was to share evidence on effective ASRH intervention projects and programs in Latin America, and to link this evidence to ASRH policy and program development. Over 800 people participated in the three-day event and sixty-six presentations were presented.This paper summarizes the key points of the Congress and of the Community Embedded Reproductive Health Care for Adolescents (CERCA) project. It aims at guiding future ASRH research and policy in Latin America.1. Context matters. Individual behaviors are strongly influenced by the social context in which they occur, through determinants at the individual, relational, family, community and societal levels. Gender norms/attitudes and ease of communication are two key determinants.2. Innovative action. There is limited and patchy evidence of effective approaches to reach adolescents with the health interventions they need at scale. Yet, there exist several promising and innovative examples of providing comprehensive sexuality education through conventional approaches and using new media, improving access to health services, and reaching adolescents as well as families and community members using community-based interventions were presented at the Congress.3. Better measurement. Evaluation designs and indicators chosen to measure the effect and impact of interventions are not always sensitive to subtle and incremental changes. This can create a gap between measured effectiveness and the impact perceived by the targeted populations.Thus, one conclusion is that we need more evidence to better determine the factors impeding progress in ASRH in Latin American, to innovate and respond flexibly to changing social dynamics and cultural practices, and to better measure the impact of existing intervention strategies. Yet, this Congress offered a starting point from which to build a multi-agency and multi-country effort to generate specific evidence on ASRH with the aim of guiding policy and program decision-making. In a region that contains substantial barriers of access to ASRH education and services, and some of the highest adolescent pregnancy rates in the world, the participants agreed that there is no time to lose.
This paper explores semi‐formal interactions between SRI‐investors that take the governance route rather than deploy a best‐in‐class logic or exclusionary screening. On the basis of a stakeholder typology of the investor and of the chosen topic of interaction, namely compliance with the core ILO labour conventions, the paper formulates 10 expectations about management reactions to the concerns raised by investors. These expectations cover responsiveness, acknowledgment of positions and general attitude. The expectations are then related to the factual discourse by management responding to such concerns raised by investors. Based on data obtained from the Portfolio21‐correspondence, which is a joint initiative of European investors, it is found that management is very willing to discuss cases but at the same time denies the truth‐value of the allegations. Here, the problem of information asymmetry comes to the fore.
BackgroundThe uptake of findings from sexual and reproductive health and rights research into policy-making remains a complex and non-linear process. Different models of research utilisation and guidelines to maximise this in policy-making exist, however, challenges still remain for researchers to improve uptake of their research findings and for policy-makers to use research evidence in their work.MethodsA participatory workshop with researchers was organised in November 2017 by the Academic Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Policy (ANSER) to address this gap. ANSER is a consortium of experienced researchers, some of whom have policy-making experience, working on sexual and reproductive health and rights issues across 16 countries and 5 continents. The experiential learning cycle was used to guide the workshop discussions based on case studies and to encourage participants to focus on key lessons learned. Workshop findings were thematically analysed using specific stages from Hanney et al.’s (Health Res Policy Syst 1:2, 2003) framework on the place of policy-making in the stages of assessment of research utilisation and outcomes.ResultsThe workshop identified key strategies for translating research into policy, including joint agenda-setting between researchers and policy-makers, as well as building trust and partnerships with different stakeholders. These were linked to stages within Hanney et al.’s framework as opportunities for engaging with policy-makers to ensure uptake of research findings.ConclusionThe engagement of stakeholders during the research development and implementation phases, especially at strategic moments, has a positive impact on uptake of research findings. The strategies and stages described in this paper can be applied to improve utilisation of research findings into policy development and implementation globally.
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