African Population and Health Research Center

The African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) is committed to generating Africa-led and African-owned evidence to inform decision making. The center’s mandate is to generate and support the use of evidence for meaningful action to improve the lives of all Africans. This grant will enable APHRC to strengthen its capacity to conduct impact evaluations across several sectors, such as education, nutrition, and health. (Strategy: Evidence-Informed Policymaking)

The African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) is a premier African research institution and policy focused think tank whose mission is to generate evidence, strengthen research and related capacities, and engage policy actors to inform action on population health and wellbeing. In 2021, APHRC and Ibis Reproductive Health, another Hewlett grantee, undertook an ethnographic study to document the lived experiences of women and girls in Senegal who had been accused of infanticide, a highly prevalent practice in Senegal, where abortion is completely restricted. This grant will support APHRC and Ibis to conduct a robust dissemination of the findings, co-developing advocacy tools to support improved policies, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the circumstances that lead girls and women to commit infanticide, as well as improve their social and professional reintegration after incarceration. (Strategy: Global Reproductive Equity)

This grant to the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) will support a national abortion incidence study in Kenya. In partnership with the Guttmacher Institute, APHRC will use mixed research methods to produce an updated estimate of the number of induced abortions in Kenya and the magnitude and severity of unsafe abortion-related complications. The previous estimates were done in 2012 and since then the abortion landscape in Kenya has shifted dramatically with the availability of self-managed medication abortion as well as increasing criminalization efforts from anti-abortion actors. This project will have a focus on evidence dissemination with policy advocates and government partners as well as research capacity-building efforts between the two research institutions involved. This grant is aligned with the Global Reproductive Equity strategy outcome that safe abortion is legal and/or decriminalized in a greater number of East and Francophone West African countries and is accessible to more women and girls in these countries.