SRBWI engages participatory research to lift up black women and young women’s voices, leveraging and expanding their collective power. Research partners include:

• Human Rights Watch
• The Institute for Local Self-Reliance
• The Institute for Women’s  Policy Research
• The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
• The Institute for Policy Studies

Participatory Research: 

“We Need Access”: Ending Preventable Deaths from Cervical Cancer in Rural Georgia

The Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Social and Economic Justice (SRBWI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) held a launch for the report titled “We Need Access”: Ending Preventable Deaths from Cervical Cancer in Rural Georgia. 

This groundbreaking report, “We Need Access,” is based on interviews by SRBWI, Human Rights Watch, and nine community-based researchers with Black women living in three rural counties (Baker, Coffee, and Wilcox) in Georgia. The research has found that Georgia state and US federal policies neglect the reproductive healthcare needs of Black women and contribute to an environment in which they are dying of cervical cancer, a highly preventable disease, at disproportionate rates.

This report comes at a crucial time – as you may know, January is Cervical Cancer Awareness Month. Last year 194 countries, with the World Health Organization, set a global goal to end cervical cancer deaths. Our research highlights what can be done to help stop preventable cervical cancer deaths. 

The report is available via Human Rights Watch at the following link: https://www.hrw.org/node/380901 as well as on the SRBWI website, Reports section