Ten Years of PEPFAR: A Conversation about Evaluation, Advocacy and Grantmaking
Since the inception of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003, the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) has contributed to advocacy for policy changes that would advance sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls. CHANGE and its allies sought to eliminate the Congressionally-mandated “abstinence-only” budget allocation (or earmark), replace abstinence-focused prevention guidance with more comprehensive guidance, and focus greater attention on gender inequalities and violence against women. The advocacy effort helped change U.S. law and policies on these matters. In February 2013, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies published a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the program. This evaluation included an assessment of how PEPFAR policy and guidance concerning gender issues, abstinence and HIV prevention evolved, and examined the effects of PEPFAR-supported activities in partner countries. At this Advocacy Evaluation Breakfast, Kimberly Scott (Senior Program Manager at IOM), Serra Sippel (President of CHANGE), and Shira Saperstein (Deputy Director and Program Director for Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Moriah Fund) will discuss the report’s findings, the impact of policy advocacy in the US on the lives of women in PEPFAR countries, and the role of funding organizations in the advocacy process.
You may find IOM’s Evaluation of PEPFAR here.
Kimberly Scott has been a Senior Program Officer on the Institute of Medicine’s Board on Global Health since 2005. She was the study co-director for the current evaluation of PEPFAR, and served as the deputy study director for the IOM’s first evaluation of PEPFAR, released in 2007. Prior to the IOM, she was a Health Care Analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Before coming to Washington DC, she worked at Duke University’s Center for Health Policy on foundation-sponsored HIV-related programs that integrated mental health services for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Earlier, Scott was the Executive Director of a Ryan White Title II Care Consortium in North Carolina for six years.
Serra Sippel, President of the Center or Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), has been advocating for women’s health and rights for nearly two decades. During the course of her career, she has led the international program at Catholics for Choice (CFC), and advocated for the health and rights of women at a Texas-based homeless shelter, and of women incarcerated in the state of Indiana. Serra also has collaborated with women’s rights activists around the world to secure and promote sexual and reproductive health and human rights at the United Nations.
Shira Saperstein is the Deputy Director and Program Director for Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Moriah Fund, a private foundation based in Washington, DC and operating in the United States and internationally. In 2012, Moriah made roughly $11 million in grants to organizations working on women’s rights and health, economic justice and education reform in the United States, pluralism and equal rights in Israel, and global human rights. Moriah’s Women’s Rights program seeks to enable women to manage their own fertility and protect and promote their sexual and reproductive health; and to transform the legal, political, economic and cultural structures that sustain gender discrimination and violence and that limit women’s full participation in society.
Moderated by David Devlin-Foltz, Director, Advocacy Planning and Evaluation Program, The Aspen Institute.
At this Advocacy Evaluation Breakfast, Kimberly Scott (Senior Program Manager at IOM), Serra Sippel (President of CHANGE), and Shira Saperstein (Deputy Director and Program Director for Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Moriah Fund) will discuss the report’s findings, the impact of policy advocacy, and the role of funding organizations in the advocacy process.