PRB PACE ANNUAL REPORT

The project was awarded to PRB by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in November 2015, under Cooperative Agreement AID-OAA-A-16-00002. PACE built on the successes of its predecessor project, IDEA, to ensure family planning and population issues were included in policies and programs as key to sustainable, equitable economic growth and development. Under PACE, PRB worked closely with global actors, national and local governments, and nongovernmental partners to strengthen capacities in advocacy, policy communication, and negotiation. The project also increased commitments to multisectoral approaches such as Population, Health, and Environment (PHE), and analyzed, synthesized, and disseminated information and data to propel policy and advocacy audiences to act. PACE addressed gender, youth, and equity as well as the Office of Population and Reproductive Health (PRH)'s technical priority issues by incorporating them across project activities. Policy communication training was a key component of the PACE project. In September 2016, PACE conducted a policy communication workshop in collaboration with the Advocacy for Better Health (ABH) project in Uganda for national and district-level advocates. Trainees from the workshop promptly put their newly-acquired policy communications skills to work, producing two project-level results. A participant from a Ugandan civil society organization used her skills to train community advocacy groups to use evidence to communicate to local policymakers, leading to the re-stocking of health clinics in Uganda. Another participant, from a civil society organization focused on HIV care and treatment, put her skills to work reaching out to the media, holding one-on-one meetings with parliamentarians, engaging policy communities, and attending a high-level parliamentary meeting, resulting in the reinstatement of HIV funding in Uganda. In Tanzania, a participant from a civil society organization had a significant impact on changing country-level policies by influencing the Tanzanian government to integrate the demographic dividend into the country's National Development plan. In Nepal, a Women's Edition-Asia journalist received a PACE travel grant to report on uterine prolapse, resulting in a story that provided hope on the issue and elicited ongoing comment on social media among diplomats and policymakers. In Maharashtra, India, a journalist at the Maharashtra Times wrote a series of stories about child marriages that are illegal but still in practice in rural Marathwada, resulting in a high-level committee to study the issue of child marriages in the state and a promise of new safe hostels for girls and financial aid for girls to keep them in school. The PACE project also convened the African Great Lakes Conference in Uganda in May 2017, which galvanized a new funding commitment for conservation and PHE. The conference introduced 300 participants from 15 countries to the PHE approach and the benefits of including family planning in conservation and sustainable development projects. Significantly, five of the conference resolution solutions focused on PHE and related topics. At the end of the conference, the MacArthur Foundation made a new financial commitment for conservation of the African Great Lakes, which included PHE in the funding call for proposals. In Nairobi, Kenya, long-term investments in capacity building for the Kenyan parastatal, the National Council for Population and Development, are generating new resources for RH in Nairobi County. The project has strengthened skills and yielded increased RH allocations in Nairobi, demonstrating the impact of PACE's capacity-building efforts.