Ihatsham Akram, Senior Policy & Advocacy Advisor
EVA completed its 2nd year of implementation in December 2015. Of the many good things that one comes across while reading the project annual report, what stands towering is the 7,410 citizens across the nine districts that EVA has capacity built to raise their voices for their health rights.
There is a long way to go but the foundation has been laid for an accountability drive that rests in the minds and hearts of these citizens who are learning to call for their rights through different empowerment interventions of EVA. These EVA-Citizens provide the critical mass that can be the source of the empowerment to wider society within their reach at whatever level they exist. EVA-Citizens include ordinary men and women, LG representatives, journalists, religious leaders, duty bearers, health workers, screen-writers, teachers and many more. In their own circles these EVA-Citizens can help spread and consolidate the change that they are hosting under the EVA flag.
In the coming years it will be of extreme significance that the energies of the Critical Mass of EVA Citizens are multiplied and channelled strategically for the optimal use of generating the responsiveness of the system and not wasting the opportunity.
Facilitating them in growing into a bigger mass through bringing them together, helping them exerting their energies at the right nodes of the health and governance system of the country and making them aware of the power they can together possess would be key elements of the growth of EVA Citizens.
EVA-BHN 