Engaging young male slum dwellers in Bangladesh in SRH education is a considerable challenge. Slum-dwellers tend to suffer from a poorer mental and physical health status than the rest of the population and their knowledge of SRHR issues is very low. They have high probabilities to be confronted with early sex, early marriage, drugs and violence. Interventions so far mostly targeted women; the attention garnered towards men is still substantially limited. The key component in our proposal is to develop a proof of concept of the usage of enhanced and locally tailored psychodrama methods to address the deeply rooted norms, beliefs and needs that underpin sexual behaviour. The intervention design will engage young men to explore existing and alternative attitudes towards their own and their peers? sexual health and relationships and will create guided dramatic acting that will serve to investigate individual problems and clarify issues, facilitate insights, personal growth, and integration on cognitive, affective, and behavioural levels. Both the design of the intervention and the pilot testing will involve a process of co-construction, under the guidance of internationally seasoned methodological innovators, to maximise the chances of the intervention. The study will subsequently also develop psycho-education counselling modules and will serve to explore enabling factors, local forms of socialisation and education of sexuality of urban male to formulate innovative strategies to disseminate education on sexuality, gender and SRHR.

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The Climares consortium has been brought together to co-create and bring about new forms of research partnership and dissemination that include (researchers at) Dutch and African universities, as well as civil society and citizens groups from Africa and Europe. This is done through the use of the consortium’s key values Co-creation, Interdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinary, and Equal partnerships (CITE), in building the consortium’s innovative “‘Knowledge ∞ Action Chains”. The workshop that this funding would allow will enable spreading these techniques through a co-written Open Access article, as well as further developing the concepts and bringing about more partnerships through them.

Many people survive humanitarian crises through transactional sex – the exchange of sex for cash, goods or services. This research seeks to understand why and how people engage in this practice and what consequences it has. The study uses an approach that enables persons engaged in transactional sex to speak for themselves. Research locations are Colombia, DRC and Pakistan. The study results will help to redress biases in humanitarian services and protection policies for people affected by forced displacement.

In the Dialogue-and-Dissent Theory of Change, collaboration and ownership go hand in hand: connecting helps build voices and complementary capacities and synergies that can make change happen. This project researches these assumptions, focusing on CSOs’ political roles, situating the study in India. We propose studying collaborations focusing on Indian CSOs’ agency and work at domestic levels, to learn how differentiated capacities, understandings, viewpoints and forms of power and legitimacy shape CSOs’ roles as they interact with each other and navigate opportunities, dependencies and constraints, while exploring implications for ownership and autonomy. We study Dialogue and Dissent programmes in their wider civil society contexts, which facilitates understanding relative contributions of different CS manifestations. Research of governmental and private-sector engagement with civil society will facilitate establishing how political realities co-define CSOs’ access to actors and processes and how Dialogue and Dissent contributes to the development of instrumental sources of legitimacy and capacities, while identifying challenges. Objectives: understanding how collaborations between different types of CSOs at grassroots, national and international levels contribute to inclusive and sustainable development; informing civil society support policy that does justice to diversity, collaboration dynamics, and context. Six postdocs will be hired.