S: Towards realising sexual and reproductive health rights in Eastern and Southern Africa: promoting rights and responsibilities beyond the individual. Lancet 2006

Sexual and reproductive rights have been on the international health policy agenda since the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994 [1, 2]. International human rights law provides well established conceptual frameworks for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) rights[3.4], but how far are they relevant to the policy debate on SRH in Eastern and Southern Africa? The gulf between legal human rights and the reality in the region is huge, particularly for poor women, men, girls and boys[5]. The obstacles to making SRH rights a reality in the region are multiple and mutually reinforcing, encompassing socio-cultural norms, gender inequalities, resource and capacity constraints, and unfavourable legal environments. These are the challenges being explored by a new Research Programme Consortium (RPC) on Realising Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights.1 While these constraints might appear intractable, emerging messages from a regional workshop suggest strategies for making the concept of rights more relevant to SRH in this region. On 9 November 2005, the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) held a consultative meeting in Nairobi, Kenya under the auspices of the RPC. The meeting brought together 35 policymakers, service providers, activists and academics from eight countries t