Gender
This blog offers advice for practitioners wanting to apply gender transformative approaches to WASH programming. This blog was written by Elaine Mercer for the CLTS Knowledge Hub and originally appeared on their website. It has been partly adapted from the workshop ‘Gender Transformative WASH’ (April 2019) that the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) co-facilitated with Dr Sue… Read more
HEART partners hera‘s Alice Behrendt and Marieke Devillé, under supervision of Dia Timmermans, are currently working on a UNFPA funded systematic review investigating factors determining women’s ability to make their own decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use and reproductive health care in lower and middle income settings. The team is working with the UNFPA human… Read more
Girls and women need effective, safe, and affordable menstrual products. Single-use products are regularly selected by agencies for resource-poor settings; the menstrual cup is a less known alternative. The authors reviewed international studies on menstrual cup leakage, acceptability, and safety and explored menstrual cup availability to inform programmes. The review indicates that menstrual cups are… Read more
The aim of this review was to present the recent evidence on the period poverty (lack of access to sanitary products, WASH facilities, dignity, and information about menstruation) impact on the economic empowerment of women. Improving menstrual health management (MHM, also known as ‘period poverty’) can substantially improve girls’ education, health and wellbeing. The literature,… Read more
Between 2013 and 2017, Education Development Trust designed and delivered a large-scale education reform programme in Kenya, intended to improve the life chances of some particularly disadvantaged girls. This was funded by the UK government Department for International Development (DFID) as part of the UK global Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) Step Change programmes. Education Development Trust called their project ‘Wasichana Wote Wasome’ (WWW); Kiswahili for ‘let all girls… Read more
This resource provides an overview of the key issues in relation to Quality of Maternal and Newborn (MNH) Services, and signposts key resources for further reading. Originally designed for the cadre of Health Advisers at DFID, it has been adapted to suit a broad range of actors involved in strengthening policy and programming interventions. This resource has been collaboratively produced by… Read more
This annual review assesses the outputs of the Increasing sustainable access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) programme, and how they contribute to expected outcomes and their sustainability. The review also includes updated recommendations for improving integration of gender into WASH programming and assesses the implementation of the… Read more
The main barriers to women’s economic inclusion in Tanzania are: time poverty (because women have to spend so much time on household chores); lack of education; reproductive health pressures; lack of assets and access to financial services; in the case of agriculture – lack of access to male labour and inputs such as fertiliser; in… Read more
This report focuses on the evidence on the health, economic and other benefits of investing in family planning. Family planning allows people to attain their desired number of children and determine the spacing of pregnancies. It is achieved through use of contraceptive methods and the treatment of infertility (WHO 2015). A large and growing body… Read more
This report looks at the evidence available on effective behaviour change communication for increasing the uptake of family planning methods. It provides information on several different methods. Studies indicate that if a woman has been given advice to adopt postpartum contraception three or more times, the couple are more likely to have adopted a method…. Read more
Social norms are informal rules and shared social expectations that shape individual attitudes and behaviour (Arias, 2015; Marcus and Harper, 2015). Gender norms are social norms that relate specifically to gender differences. A common gender norm, for example, is that women and girls will and should do the majority of domestic work (Marcus and Harper,… Read more