ARROW marked the year 2005 with a number of firsts for the organisation:
1. In January, ARROW saw the transition from the co-
founder and Executive Director of ARROW, Rashidah Abdullah, to the new in-coming Executive Director, Saira Shameem;
2. ARROW published and launched two critical publications this year – Monitoring Ten Years of ICPD Implementation: The Way Forward To 2015 and the Women of the World: Laws And Policies Affecting Their Reproductive Lives – East and Southeast Asia, which informed critical people as well as decision-making processes on the status of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in the region;
3. The culmination of ARROW’s work in capacity building for monitoring at the grassroots level; taking this evidence to local, national and regional level advocacy; and all this based on the concept of genuine partnerships for advocacy; lead to the first Women’s Health and Rights Advocacy Partnership (WHRAP) high-level and very successful Regional Policy Dialogue in June;
4. It was the first time ARROW’s work in building partnerships lead to international recognition of not only ARROW’s capacity for coordinating joint advocacy interventions with partners, but that of a whole partnership that was conceptualised, established and coordinated by ARROW, when ARROW-WHRAP was selected as one of 200 organisations chosen internationally to speak at the United Nations NGO Hearing in New York, as a lead up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) +5 Inter-governmental Summit that was held later in the year;
5. It was also the first time that a national level partnership that was established and coordinated by ARROW and aimed at building capacities for advocacy on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (Indonesian Reproductive Rights Advocacy and Monitoring Project
