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Gender inequality and harmful gender norms remain widespread in the EU. While sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are at the core of gender equality and women’s rights and empowerment, their attainment varies greatly across the EU: women and girls, particularly those marginalized by systemic oppression, face significant barriers to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education, which violates their human rights and hinders progress towards gender equality. At the same time, dramatic changes taking place in Europe, from the backlash orchestrated by anti-rights actors to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, threaten progress towards gender equality and many of the rights and values that the EU aims to protect.  In this context, IPPF EN, together with member associations and partners, is working to progress towards a more gender equal world where people in all their diversity are released from harmful gender norms and fully empowered to make decisions over their lives and bodies. To move toward this, we work to strengthen national support in the EU Institutions and Member States for gender equality and women’s rights by: ensuring that policy and decision makers at all levels (EU, National and Local) are creating progressive legislative and policy frameworks that protect and advance gender equality & women’s rights; educating and empowering young people, as a new generation of EU citizens, to become leaders and drivers of the long-term change process needed around societal norms and behaviours; increasing the capacity of civil society actors to act in a strategic and coordinated manner when promoting gender equality and women’s rights. *** 2022 RESULTS!  Our achievements for the first half of 2022 include:   80 activists trained on strategic communication and security; 2 pieces of national research and 2 toolkits to support social movements in their strategic communication campaigns on gender equality and SRHR; More than 80 EU decision-makers reached and informed about relevant gender equality issues and 21 inputs submitted into EU processes, contributing to 8 advocacy wins related to gender equality and SRHR; 13 joint cross-border amplification and mobilization actions and 59 pieces of communications content delivered towards decision-makers, citizens and media to support social movements and demonstrate international solidarity where women’s rights are under attack 23 educators strengthened their capacity to train other educators in delivering Gender Transformative Sex and Relationship Education    What’s next: Gender assessments for four of our members and our Regional Office to improve IPPF EN ability to deliver gender transformative projects A new gender transformative strategy by YSAFE, IPPF EN's youth network, to engage more youth as champions for gender equality, plus a series of podcasts produced by YSAFE on SRHR/gender equality. An EU advocacy and communication workshop for our members to strengthen capacity on national advocacy and share best practices *** Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) grants 2023: Call for proposals As part of the 2023 operating grant of the EU-funded Citizens, Equality, Right and Values (CERV) programme, IPPF European network regional office (ENRO) is launching a call for proposals for its EU based member associations (MAs) and Affiliated Collaborative Partners (CPs). Through a regranting scheme, IPPF wants to strengthen the European response related to gender equality within different EU countries through its members. EU-based MAs and CPs will have the opportunity to fund initiatives which will directly contribute to one of the programme’s strategic objectives at the level of EU Member States. To ensure the alignment of the regranting scheme to the programme’s four strategic objectives, the call is open to specific MAs and CPs only, as per the criteria described under each programme objective. More information can be downloaded below.    

IPPF EN established its Movement Accelerator Programme (MAP) in 2019 in response to the proliferation of attacks across Europe and Central Asia over many years on gender, equality and women’s rights. The EN MAP focuses on strengthening the strategic communication and mobilisation capacities of organisations and social movements in several European countries. Our goal is to work with and learn from diverse groups of actors, and to support with the knowledge-sharing, solidarity and resourcing needed to help fight back against attempts to control women’s bodies, and to accelerate social and political change. The activities that we carry out or support through the EN MAP include research into values and attitudes to provide a basis for strategic communication; development, testing and employment of new and powerful context-specific narratives and strategies; monitoring of harmful anti-rights discourses; and support of grassroots social movements, including capacity sharing and provision of grants for strategic initiatives, and generating international solidarity and visibility for national human right defenders and the causes they fight for. Since 2019, IPPF EN has hosted IPPF’s global Winning Narratives Centre, a multi-stakeholder initiative to accelerate impact on social and political change through the sharing of resources, learning and expertise. The Winning Narratives Centre has at its heart a community of practice that connects activists and organisations from around the world with academics, consultants and creative and research agencies to develop, contextualise and test powerful new narratives. It is currently supporting partners in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific to pilot values-based communication strategies.

Our 2019-2021 project addresses sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as a barrier to the social inclusion of young people. We know well that the groups who are already the most marginalized in Europe are also those who are most at risk of SGBV. YSAFE, IPPF EN’s regional youth network, formed a coalition to take action, joining forces in Portugal, Serbia and Romania with three community-focused organizations engaged in supporting young LGBTQ* people, young Roma people, and young women and others at risk of gender-based discrimination. Together, we have produced a comprehensive toolkit including 38 full new workshop plans and thorough advice on combining them into an appropriate series to respond to a target group's needs. It covers all major current SGBV issues, including SGBV topics that are often left behind in classical sexuality education. There is extensive guidance on how to deliver the toolkit workshops digitally as well as in person, and new monitoring and evaluation tools to measure the effectiveness of the toolkit activities when they are used online. We analysed the effect of our piloting on over 320 young people and have proven that our tool delivers real impact in shifting attitudes and increasing competencies around recognizing and preventing SGBV. Young educators in the three countries have had their capacities raised to deliver workshops using the toolkit, and our dissemination activities have resulted in many more organizations in the EU and beyond incorporating the new toolkit into their existing programme of educational activities. You can learn more about the process and its results directly from some of the young people involved, who collaborated on a mini-series of episodes of YSAFE’s podcast.

YSAFE, IPPF EN’s youth network, created the project “Sharing Innovations” as a response to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the impact they had on the delivery of relationship and sexuality education (RSE). It is an Erasmus+ project aiming to improve access to sexuality education online. We are collaborating with seven national sexual and reproductive health and rights organizations (IPPF EN members in Portugal, Cyprus, Estonia, Spain, North Macedonia, Latvia, Serbia) and the End FGM EU network to create a new set of guidelines on delivering safe and effective digital sexuality education. It will incorporate everything that we have learned during the first year of the pandemic about pivoting quickly to online RSE delivery into a user-friendly tool. Young sexuality educators will be testing the tool out in 6-month programmes of activities they will design themselves, focused on different national priorities around sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) prevention. We expect the results to be published in the summer of 2022.

Young people and groups with vulnerabilities in the Western Balkans face a great many barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, they have borne the brunt of additional obstacles to accessing information, support and care. COVID-19 has demonstrated how fragile national health systems are and highlighted countries’ unpreparedness to deal with health emergencies. But it has also stimulated creativity by civil society and other actors to counter these barriers, with digital outreach and support playing an expanding, crucial role. Youth Voices, Youth Choices is a project dedicated to learning from the COVID-19 experience in the Western Balkans to ensure sexual and reproductive health services, information and education become more accessible and youth-friendly in the long term, especially for marginalised groups. Running from 2020 until 2023, it brings together IPPF members and partners in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Kosovo, supported by IPPF EN’s Regional Office. Project partners have conducted research into the impact of the pandemic on young people’s SRH needs and access to services and information, and the role of integrated digital services, with a focus on communities living in remote areas and unfavourable social conditions. They are sharing good practices and empowering young people as campaigners and advocates using digital and offline education tools. And working in multi-stakeholder partnerships, they are developing policy recommendations to support advocacy and youth-led campaigns for stronger health systems and increased access to care, in and beyond emergency situations. COMING SOON! On 26 October 2022, IPPF EN will launch a set of regional policy recommendations based on our research into how the pandemic affected young people. Check out our YVYC resources page! Take a look at our Stories section for a new interview series with young people on how COVID affected their access to SRHR information, education and care, and their vision for the future.         This work is funded by MSD for Mothers.

The Youth SpectActors project, implemented in Serbia, Romania, Latvia and Estonia, addresses the root causes of gender-based violence (GBV), namely traditional patriarchal systems based on harmful and rigid gender norms around masculinity and femininity, gender-based discrimination and unequal power relations. Young people are at the centre of our intervention, because of the far-reaching impact of GBV in their lives – as survivors, perpetrators, or bystanders. We believe that young people have a key role they play as change agents. To this end we run theatre-based workshops where boys and girls who participate literally walk in one another's shoes to help challenge and dismantle 'gender roles'. Gender roles are merely roles that we are playing all our lives, and this is why playing them on the stage makes perfect sense. By dismantling archaic stereotypes, we can foster equality and prevent violence and coercion within relationships. Relationship and sexuality education, in school settings and outside, plays a key role in ensuring the safe emotional and physical development of young people.     This project was funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (REC 2014-2020).