Project profile — Improving the Resilience of the Health System to ensure Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

• Congo, Democratic Republic (100.00%)

• Population policy and administrative management:
Population policy and administrative management (13010) (25.00%)
Reproductive health care (13020) (25.00%)
Family planning (13030) (25.00%)
Personnel development for population and reproductive health (13081) (25.00%)

• Gender equality (significant objective)
• Environmental sustainability (cross-cutting) (significant objective)

The project aims to enhance the quality, offer, demand and use of basic healthcare services and sexual and reproductive health services for women and girls in three isolated and fragile provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Targeted provinces have known humanitarian crises and conflicts over the past years, accentuating the situation of fragility of vulnerable people, especially women and girls. Moreover, these conditions increased an already generalized poverty and exacerbated the degradation of the healthcare system, that manifests itself by a chronic lack of services in reproductive health. The project also aims to promotes and advocate for model norms and practices in gender equality and for women’s and girl’s rights. The activities should contribute to increase the demand and use of sexual and reproductive health services and to fight against gender based violence in targeted areas. Direct beneficiaries would be 163,8000 women aged from 15 to 49 years old in three provinces of the DRC (Sankuru, Kasaï and Kasaï Central).

The expected outcomes of this project include: (1) improved quality and use of preventive and curative sexual and reproductive health services, particularly for women and girls in targeted areas; and (2) improved equitable access for women, girls, men and boys to sexual, reproductive, maternal, neonatal, infantile and teen services through the implication of civil society organisations, women’s organisations and women’s rights groups.

Results achieved at the end of the project (September 2024) include: (1) enabled 252,952 pregnant women to have 4 prenatal consultations; (2) provided prenatal consultation services to 329,504 pregnant women; (3) 380,242 women become new users of modern family-planning methods during the 3 years of the project; (4) trained 418 clinical providers (183 men and 235 women), including nurses, midwives and doctors, in gender-based violence management, and sexual and reproductive health and rights services; (5) strengthened capacities of 300 traditional chiefs and religious leaders in the fight against early marriage and harmful cultural practices; (6) trained 200 nurses and retrained as midwives; and (7) provided obstetric fistula repair to 296 women routinely and through a number of organized campaigns.

• Proactive disclosure