URG proposes to organise a workshop/consultation with Kenyan civil society, the national human rights institution, Parliamentarians, and the media, to provide a space for frank dialogue under the Chatham House rule, where participants can share views, good practices and the challenges identified from their own engagement with the UN human rights system, and to gain further insights as to how to leverage those instruments to advance their own priorities in the realm of SRHR.

Bringing together diverse stakeholders with different levels of experience with the human rights system, and located within different parts of the political and human rights machinery, the workshop is also intended to serve as an open forum in which participants can exchange their own advocacy strategies and experiences for engaging with the human rights system, and thereby facilitate the formation of networks amongst themselves. The consultation will further provide an opportunity for URG to share some of its findings from its country case studies from the reports conducted in partnership with UNICEF and UNFPA, so that participants can acquire practical examples from other contexts and draw relevant lessons that they can subsequently use to shape their strategies and apply to their own work.

With Kenya’s fourth UPR cycle coming up in 2025 – the deadline for submissions by stakeholders is September 2024, while the national report is due in February 2025 and the country will be reviewed later in the spring – , as well as upcoming visits by Special Procedures mandate-holders and pending submissions to the CEDAW and CRC, the workshop will strive to serve as a platform for stakeholders to come together and identify their entry points to the system, devise joint strategies and forge alliances that allow them to better feed into the Kenyan cycle of review-implementation-reporting before the UN human rights mechanisms.

Ultimately, the objective of the workshop is that participants leave the sessions in a better position to participate in the review-implementation-reporting process and to inform recommendations for State action, to support and oversee implementation, and to better feed information on progress back into the UN system.