ACORCA Launch: Building African Leadership in Abortion Research & Communication

ACORCA-COARCA: Our Story
Unsafe abortion remains a preventable but persistent cause of maternal deaths and injuries across Africa. Those most affected are often already marginalized by poverty, geography, age, or social exclusion. Barriers to safe and comprehensive abortion care (CAC) are widespread — from restrictive laws, to limited public and provider knowledge, to poor service coverage and entrenched stigma.
High-quality, policy-relevant data is essential for reform and scaling access to CAC and post-abortion care (PAC). Yet abortion research in Africa faces major hurdles: stigma, legal restrictions, low funding, and limited demand from policy-makers. These challenges can deter early-career researchers and make it harder to share findings openly. The result is a shortage of quality, up-to-date and publicly available data and insight — including on the scale and severity of unsafe abortion throughout the region.

Shifting the centre of gravity
Historically, many abortion studies in Africa have been designed and led by institutions outside the continent, shaping research agendas, authorship, and funding flows. While international collaboration has great value to researchers in the Global South, it is now time for African researchers and institutions to lead on issues that directly affect their communities.
Encouragingly, capacity-building efforts are creating a growing pool of skilled and competent African abortion researchers. The next step is ensuring they set the agenda, manage resources, and lead studies.

Enter ACORCA-COARCA
The African Coalition for Research and Communication on Abortion – Coalition Africaine pour la Recherche et la Communication sur l’Avortement (ACORCA-COARCA) has formed over the past year to meet this need. Bilingual in English and French, the Coalition is designed to shift power and decision-making from the Global North to African institutions.
Its ambitions:
African-led research that addresses urgent national, regional, and continental questions.
Direct fund management by African institutions.
Shared learning across linguistic and geographic boundaries.
Effective communication and engagement to ensure data can be understood and insights used for policy and practice reform.
Early involvement of research users — from advocates and health providers to policymakers and journalists — to ensure findings are relevant and actionable.
Highlighting inequities — prioritizing research on disparities in abortion access, especially in underserved regions.

Why a coalition?
From the outset, ACORCA’s founding partners agreed that a networked coalition structure would be an effective vehicle to provide shared learning and to build research capacities throughoutthrough the region. Coalitions pool expertise, increase visibility and provide mutual support — vital when abortion researchers face ideological attacks. ACORCA-COARCA supports, rather than competes with, its member organisations, enabling them to pair skills, share findings, and reach decision-makers through diverse networks.
The Coalition will also work alongside other established advocacy and research networks in the abortion space, such as the Catalysts network, the Africa Research Excellence Fund and the HRP Alliance.

Where did ACORCA-COARCA come from?
In late 2024, researchers, advocates, and technical experts from across Africa came together to jointly design the work of the new Coalition. Sixteen founding member institutions from Central, East, Southern and West Africa shaped the coalition’s mission, strategies, governance, and values.
With seed funding from the Guttmacher Institute, one of our early supporters and technical partners, ACORCA-COARCA has:
Established three Coalition Working Groups with defined aims and strategies
Elected an 11-member Executive Committee representing all African sub-regions
Set up a Secretariat in Rwanda, hosted by our member organization, Health Development Initiative.
Launched a small grants programme to support early-career researchers through mentorship with senior African abortion experts

Join us at our launch
The coalition will officially launch at the International Conference on Family Planning in November 2025. We invite interested parties to attend our side event (details here) for a breakfast event on Tuesday 4th November (Room K, Third Floor), or you can tell us about your interest to attend here.
We are now actively expanding our network and welcome new members. This includes African institutions or individuals, or international organisations as Observer members.

Looking ahead
ACORCA-COARCA’s ambitions are bold but grounded in sustainability. Priorities include:
Expanding membership, especially in North Africa and Lusophone Africa
Creating regional partnership forums for sub-regional action
Facilitating multi-country studies led entirely from Africa
Strengthening technical expertise in abortion measurement and communication
Elevating female African researchers into leadership roles
Engaging media, health providers, and policymakers through member-led initiatives

A call to funders and partners
Supporting ACORCA-COARCA is more than backing individual projects — it’s investing in structural change. Funders are urged to provide direct, sustained financing to African institutions, recognising their capacity to deliver rigorous, impactful abortion research.
With a blended financing model — donor grants, research funding, and affordable membership fees — the coalition aims for resilience and independence. The payoff: stronger health systems, better policies, protected reproductive rights, and a new generation of African abortion researchers recognised across the continent and beyond.
With lives and rights at stake, the time to consolidate African leadership in abortion research is now.
From: ACORCA-COARCA’s Executive Committee
For more information about us, visit our website: https://acorca-coarca.org/
Or contact us: [email protected]