Resource author(s): Diana Santillán, Lyn Messner, Heran Abebe Tadesse, Emily Brown, Diana Santillán, Lyn Messner, Heran Abebe Tadesse, Emily Brown
Key topics: Gender and Inclusive Development, Health
Regions: Sub-Saharan Africa
Related countries: Ethiopia
This gender strategy, which includes the 2019 and 2020 updates, guides gender integration for the USAID Transform: Primary Health Care project. Integral to developing the strategy was a gender analysis that identified gender gaps and opportunities the project needed to address to achieve its intended results.
Key technical and cross-cutting project area leads for the project engaged in a highly participatory process to co-create the strategy. This process began in June 2017 at a half-day visioning session. In May 2018, the team held a data consultation meeting with project staff, partners, and other stakeholders to validate and interpret the gender analysis findings and jointly develop recommendations to address gaps and opportunities. For this 2020 update, which occurred in the context of COVID-19-related travel and gathering restrictions, the team conducted an online survey instead of hosting an in-person workshop to review the gender strategy.
Following are the strategy’s vision, purpose, and objectives developed during these meetings:
- Vision: By 2021, the Transform: Primary Health Care project has achieved gender and health transformational agendas through responsiveness to gender-based violence, and gender and health needs, with a focus on reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health and nutrition (RMNCAH-N).
- Purpose: To provide guidance for evidenced-based, gender-transformative interventions that address the existing gender gaps and opportunities identified by the 2018 project gender analysis across the Transform: Primary Health Care project’s four result areas.
- Objectives: This gender strategy aims to strengthen and guide gender integration efforts, including preventing and responding to GBV, and address gender gaps and opportunities that affect health, especially RMNCAH-N, across all project result areas; prioritize gender gaps and opportunities identified in the gender analysis findings that can be addressed through advocacy and project activities; guide implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of gender-transformative activities in alignment with the project’s annual theory of change and work planning process; and generate learning from gender-transformative project interventions to contribute to a body of evidence of the contributions of gender integration to improved health outcomes
The gender strategy is a living document. The project revisits the strategy on an annual basis, prior to the annual theory of change and work planning processes, and modifies or develops new activities to respond to emerging gender needs, gaps, and opportunities.
EnCompass is the gender partner for the USAID Transform: Primary Health Care project, which is implemented by Pathfinder International along with Ethiopian and other international partners.
