Resources

This toolkit is funded as a part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership project, which includes an initiative to identify and address concerns among religious leaders and faith-based communities around vaccination. From 2020…

Guião de Promoção e Protecção dos Direitos da Criança para os Líderes Religiosos Para a promoção da Saúde, Educação e Protecção da Criança Guide to religious leaders for the promotion of health, education and child protection in Portuguese The involvement…

Channel of Hope for child protection was implemented in Morang district since 2014. The district is located in the south-east part of Nepal that shares the border with India. The district headquarter, Biratnagar, is the second largest city in Nepal.…

This note to religious communities developed by Arigatou International for the World Day of Prayer and Action, outlines the scope and consequences of child marriage. It also provides examples of practical action, which religious communities can take all year long…

As part World Vision's external launch of 'It takes Nepal to end child marriage' campaign, and given the causes and consequences of child marriage, discussion on various aspects were conducted in three parallel thematic sessions. The discourse book captures the…

Overview of Ethiopian Faith-Based Organizations’ response for the abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Child Early Forced Marriage (CEFM) from 2010-2016. This report provides a baseline to engaging FBOs for future programming and provides evidence on how FBOs have…

A toolkit for faith leaders This toolkit was designed as a guide for religious leaders of both Christian and Islamic faiths in Nigeria as they address the challenges faced by adolescent girls on the issues of early marriage, education, reproductive…

A policy brief on Early and Forced Marriage This policy briefing presents Islamic Relief’s position on issues of early and forced marriage (EFM), the key definitions, causes and impact of these practices. It presents briefly our strategy to end EFM…

Protecting the sanctity of marriage This background paper explores the issues of early and forced marriage from an Islamic faith perspective and dismantles some potential misconceptions. It provides a case that early and forced marriage is not Islamic and promotes…

The Collective Action for Adolescent Girls Initiative (CAAGI) is a two-year pilot funded by Christian Aid, and jointly implemented by Development and Peace Initiative (DPI) and Gender Awareness Trust (GAT). The project aims to improve significantly the choices and opportunities…

The American Jewish World Service (AJWS) and its partners in 2014 launched the Early and Child Marriage Initiative in India to support and strengthen a national effort to end child marriage and enable girls to realize the full spectrum of…

Also available in French: Dakar Declaration French

The Collective Action for Adolescent Girls Initiative (CAAGI) is a two-year pilot funded by Christian Aid, and jointly implemented by Development and Peace Initiative (DPI) and Gender Awareness Trust (GAT). The project aims to improve significantly the choices and opportunities…

Early and Child Marriage, AJWS India Restrictive beliefs about gender often make it difficult for girls and women in India to gain access to high education or the job market. These barriers reinforce the idea that a girl’s best option…

The global health community is focusing on immunization in relation to universal health coverage, targeting missed populations and closed communities. However, there are widely acknowledged historical politico-economic factors affecting UHC. In high-income countries, there is continued resistance to immunization within…

The  Review of Faith and International Affairs has just published a special series on Religion and Development See Journal here edited by Jill Olivier with a grant from JLIF&LC through DFID support Includes the following articles: Innovative Faith-Community Responses to HIV…

Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty The center, with funding from the GHR Foundation, published an evaluation and analysis of NIFAA's early work in 2011, two years after NIFAA's founding. The report demonstrated NIFAA "offers a sustainable and replicable…

Andrew Tomkins, Jean Duff, Atallah Fitzgibbon, Azza Karam, Edward J Mills, Keith Munnings, Sally Smith, Shreelata Rao Seshadri, Avraham Steinberg, Robert Vitillo, Philemon Yugi http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60252-5/abstract

Preventable child deaths outrage everyone. Immunization campaigns save millions of children’s lives and therefore unite widely divergent communities. But the untapped potential for partnerships to extend vaccination coverage, especially involving religious actors, is large. Two critical challenges are important and offer great promise: extending newer vaccines (notably against rotavirus and pneumococcus) and reaching underserved populations (“the fifth child”). The support and cooperation of religious communities, at global and national levels, is essential for both—leaders and communities can help address challenges and prevent the grave problems that arise when religious leaders oppose vaccination (such as in Pakistan and Nigeria). In building partnerships there are four priorities: (a) informing populations and building trust; (b) focusing on underserved populations; (c) overcoming barriers to vaccination campaigns in tumultuous countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo where faith networks are especially vital players; and (d) helping through holistic health approaches to “connect the dots” among different public health and welfare efforts to meet the needs of people and communities.

Religious leaders, with their tremendous authority at the grass roots, are key to garnering community support for broad immunization coverage. This workbook, designed for communication and programme officers and their immunization partners, provides guidelines on forging alliances on immunization with religious leaders and groups. It also offers advice on options that can be taken when confronting resistance to immunization, illustrated by success stories from three countries.

This annotated bibliography is a companion piece to the full report “LOCAL FAITH COMMUNITIES AND IMMUNIZATION FOR COMMUNITY AND HEALTH SYSTEMS STRENGTHENING”

This is a broad scoping review mapping and understanding the available literature on ‘religion and immunization’. The goal is to note where evidence and information can be found and to identify key areas for further research, engagement and partnership. An annotated bibliography accompanies the Report

On March 24th and 25th, 2014, the International Interfaith Peace Corps (IIPC) in partnership with the Government of the Republic of Senegal cohosted an international summit entitled Vaccinations and Religion: Issues, Challenges, and Prospects. The summit brought together more than 80 African Muslim government officials, medical professionals, and religious leaders to identify the challenges associated with vaccination in resistant and hard-to-reach communities in Africa in order to issue a declaration in support of disease prevention and help raise awareness within Muslim-majority communities about the necessity and importance of vaccination. Ultimately, the goal was to identify strategies to increase vaccine acceptance in their domestic constituencies.

The scoping report for the JLI F&LC Immunization Hub.

CCIH webpage on immunization and Christianity Also includes videos and resources from CCIH parters on the topic including: Video from Dr. Richard Lane on Exploring Religious Objections Christians Reaching the Unreached with Vaccines in Nigeria  CBCHS Fights Cervical Cancer with Vaccine

IHP, in partnership with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), has published this resource guide and toolkit.  The Model Practices Framework provides strategies to identify and engage faith-based organizations as partners in community health promotion and disease…

The CORE Group Polio Project (CGPP) and its partners in India, Angola, and Ethiopia have led successful social mobilization efforts to reach difficult-to-access populations critical for polio eradication.These include extremely poor rural and urban communities, ethnic and religious minorities who…

Speakers presented about the unique contributions of faith based organizations, faith institutions and faith leaders, to achieving the promise of vaccines in health services delivery, community mobilization and advocacy. Latter Day Saints Presentation Muslim Aid: FBO partnerships in Pakistan IMA…

This manual has been created to guide trainers in equipping faith leaders to address the harmful traditional practices (HTPs) of female genital cutting (FGC) and early marriage (EM) with their congregants. As such, the manual has been tailored to meet…