The year 2012 was an extremely fulfilling year for the Asian-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW) in many different ways. It was filled with many memorable and striking events.
One of ARROW’s more outstanding moments was organising the meeting “Beyond ICPD & the MDGs: NGOs Strategising for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Asia-Pacific” (‘Beyond ICPD & the MDGs’) in May 2012 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia that enabled the regional political articulation of the SRHR agenda in the ‘KL Call to Action.’
This key meeting brought together a wide range of cross-generation NGOs and activists working on SRHR, migration, poverty, food security, climate change and religious extremism across 27 different countries in the region and enabled ARROW to deeply understand the regional agenda from the perspective of these diverse stakeholders. It also concretely established the credibility of ARROW as a key regional NGO in the lead-up to 2015.
The second most outstanding moment was co-chairing the Bali Global Youth Forum at the end of the year. This co-chairing was led by Rishita Nandagiri, a youth member of ARROW’s Programme Advisory Committee, with the Executive Director. The Bali Global Youth Forum was the first in a series of thematic forums initiated under the ICPD Beyond 2014 secretariat as a means of informing the 20-year-old Programme of Action of new and current paradigms. ARROW anticipated that the forum, as the first of ICPD Beyond 2014 activities, could potentially enable civil society to push the SRHR agenda forward. ARROW invested staff time quite heavily in the forum and was actively involved in all task forces.