Part of REACHOUT’s communication strategy was to attend and present at national, regional and international conferences – both to target other academic and research audiences to share learning on areas of mutual interest and also to network and engage with policy makers and practitioners. Over time our approach to conferences has adapted based on learning of what has the most impact and encourages engagement with stakeholders, evidence, and current debates. Our relationship with organisations like Health Systems Global (who organise the major two-yearly global conference) has deepened and we decided to invest time and resources in helping to found and…
This Reader brings together case studies from the small grants programme. These studies explore some of the core spheres of health systems research: care-seeking; financing and contracting; governance; human resources; and service delivery with a gender lens. Each case study in this Reader demonstrates the importance of using a gender analysis in health systems research. This analysis enabled the researchers to explore new ways of looking at the world around them, it built new skills, and it led to some unexpected findings. It also demonstrates how such an approach can be applied in practice. We hope that this Reader will…
This editorial discusses a collection of papers examining gender across a range of health policy and systems contexts, from access to services, governance, health financing, and human resources for health. The papers interrogate differing health issues and core health systems functions using a gender lens. Together they produce new knowledge on the multiple impacts of gender on health experiences and demonstrate the importance of gender analyses and gender sensitive interventions for promoting well-being and health systems strengthening. The findings from these papers collectively show how gender intersects with other axes of inequity within specific contexts to shape experiences of health…
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) affect the poorest of the poor. NTD programmes can and should rise to the challenge of playing a part in promoting more gender equitable societies. Gender equity shapes poverty and the experience of disease in multiple ways; yet to date, there has been little attention paid to gender equity in NTD control efforts. Drawing on a synthesis of relevant literature, the tacit knowledge and experience of the authors, and discussions at a meeting on women, girls and NTDs, this analysis paper distills five key lessons from over 20 years of gender mainstreaming in health. The paper…
As the drive for Universal Health Coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has led to a push for greater health service access, the issue of sustaining and embedding quality in the ways in which these services are delivered has gained prominence. Measurement of quality and attribution of its effects in health is challenging at any level. But little is known about how quality is assessed within community health programmes, who are on the frontline of health service delivery in many low- and middle-income settings. The degree to which new initiatives like the Lancet Commission on Quality in Health Systems…
Equity is at the core of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 3: ‘ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages’. Improving health requires accelerated efforts to address inequity, in particular, among marginalised populations who are most affected by the burden of disease. Increasingly, the importance of gender equity within global health leadership is being recognised, and SDG 5: ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’ is supported by a target on ensuring women’s equal opportunities for leadership. In many countries, more than 75% of people engaged and working in global health are women,…
Gender equity is imperative to the attainment of healthy lives and wellbeing of all, and promoting gender equity in leadership in the health sector is an important part of this endeavour. This empirical research examines gender and leadership in the health sector, pooling learning from three complementary data sources: literature review, quantitative analysis of gender and leadership positions in global health organisations and qualitative life histories with health workers in Cambodia, Kenya and Zimbabwe. The findings highlight gender biases in leadership in global health, with women underrepresented. Gender roles, relations, norms and expectations shape progression and leadership at multiple levels.…
In Cambodia, civil war and conflict lasted almost 30 years, from 1970 to 1998. Health workers were among the 3.3 million professionals who were executed during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975- 1979). After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, it is believed that only 40 doctors were left in the country. Now, after a 20-year period of strengthening the health system and developing human resources for health (HRH), over 19,000 people are employed in the health sector in Cambodia. Women make up most of the health workforce, and yet rarely hold senior roles, and have fewer opportunities than men to…
This chapter explores how gender analysis can be incorporated into health systems implementation research. This is the process of analysing how gendered power relations influence the implementation of an intervention, as well as the extent to which the research process itself progressively transforms gendered power relations, or at least does not exacerbate them.
Despite the importance of incorporating gender analysis into existing research programmes, it is not without its challenges. This brief outlines some of these challenges, along with ways in which Research in Gender and Ethics (RinGs): Building Stronger Health Systems has responded to them. RinGs is a cross research programme consortium (RPC) bringing together three health systems RPCs – Future Health Systems, ReBUILD, and RESYST – to better understand gendered dynamics in health systems and to galvanise gender analysis in health systems research.