New actors, financial mechanisms and reformed aid reporting: What role for SRHR in post-2015 financing for development?

As governments around the world prepare to adopt a new development framework and supportive financial flows, the OECD Development Assistance Committee is exploring new ways of measuring and reporting on resource flows enabling development, including population assistance. These changes will affect the evidence base, discourse about and donor incentives related to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). They may lead to: i) reduction of grant aid in favour of instruments that are less suitable for SRHR, like loans and market-like instruments; ii) expansion of the range of development stakeholders to include those with market power that can steer the discussion away from the needs of the most under-served populations; and iii) diversion of attention and resources away from SRHR. The discourse over how to provide, incentivize and report on development assistance in the new framework demonstrates the crucial relationship between knowledge, evidence, practice and power in relation to funding for SRHR in developing countries. With all that is at stake, although the OECD debate on the future of the development finance measurement system may seem highly abstract, this is a high-stakes game that SRHR advocates need to have a hand in. Those who seek to improve SRHR are well served to engage in these discussions as early and often as possible before the momentous decisions over the coming months.