International Women’s Day 2017: Celebrating Successes, Identifying Gaps, and Addressing Challenges

By Dr. Taroub Faramand, March 8th 2017

International Women’s Day 2017, commemorated today on March 8th, provides us with the collective opportunity to celebrate the inspiring successes achieved by women and girls around the world, as well as identify and critically assess the challenging social, economic, health, and development, gaps and barriers that still limit their ability to lead equitable, empowered, and healthy lives free from violence. As we work to ensure that women and girls’ equal rights and opportunities are upheld in our rapidly changing world, it gives me great pride, and redoubles my determination, to think about the important strides that my team and I at WI-HER, LLC have made to improve the equitable health, social and economic opportunities, and developmental wellbeing of women and girls, as well as their families and communities, around the world.

Through our role leading gender integration on the USAID Applying Science to Strengthen and Improve Systems (ASSIST) Project under our fantastic partner University Research Co., LLC, WI-HER works specifically to improve women’s health, including through our efforts in family planning and maternal health. In addition to enhancing direct health services for women and girls, our gender approach equitably engages and works with men and boys, both as male sexual partners who are in a unique position to help improve health outcomes for their female partners and children, as well as in response to men’s own unique health needs and challenges. To achieve improved, gender-sensitive health outcomes, WI-HER systematically identifies and analyzes gender-related gaps that influence risk factors; access, utilization, and adherence to care; care-seeking behavior; and the equitable and compassionate treatment of patients. By identifying and addressing gender and social inclusion gaps, we are making great strides in generating shifts in thinking and action at the individual, household, community, health facility, and national levels.

Through the ASSIST Project in Uganda, WI-HER has the privilege of leading gender-related efforts through the USAID DREAMS Initiative where we designed an innovative, gender-sensitive training-of-trainers program to empower and build the capacity of adolescent girls and young women, “DREAMS Girls”, in relation to ending HIV/AIDS, fostering economic empowerment, and building leadership and entrepreneurial skills. Understanding that women and girls live within complex social systems that often place men and boys in decision-making positions for their partners and families, WI-HER also worked to engage and sensitize the DREAMS Girls’ male sexual partners and parents to the same subject matter, in addition to specialized training on building healthy relationships, HIV testing, understanding reproductive health and family planning, and ending gender-based violence (GBV). Once trained, DREAMS Initiative trainees bring their new skills and knowledge back into their own local communities to train and capacitate a new generation of DREAMS Girls, and their partners and families. Thus far, WI-HER is very proud that our work has influenced very positive results, including a reduction of GBV from 49.1% at baseline to 18.9%, as well as an increase in HIV testing and an increase in the use of modern contraception methods among adolescent girls and their male sexual partners.

WI-HER is also excited to highlight our growing presence in the international development field of public utilities, including power and clean energy, water resources, and waste management! Women and girls have different energy needs, usage trends, perspectives than those of men and boys, and public utility-related inequalities are often closely linked to societal gender roles that can dictate males and females’ ability to access and utilize modern public utility services.

Through our growing partnership with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), WI-HER was a prime contractor and led the development of a Social and Gender Inclusion Plan for the MCC Compact in Ghana. We worked with local stakeholders to identify entry points for greater gender and social diversity to improve outcomes for all. Through our work, we identified that women and girls are often more deeply impacted by inequalities in access to and utilization of power and energy resources and services. For example, gaps in service and insensitivity to local gender roles in energy provision makes it more challenging and expensive for women to electrify their female-headed homes and micro-small enterprises. In addition, women and girls living in homes with little or no modern electricity access often experience higher levels of GBV and lower rates of educational attainment, and local gender norms dictating women and girls’ societal roles can create significant barriers for females pursuing higher education in STEM degrees, which can lead to low levels of female technical experts within the energy sector and low levels of female employee retention.

WI-HER is also engaged in a mid-term evaluation of the MCC Compact in Malawi, focusing on power sector reform, electricity infrastructure development, and improved environmental and natural resource management. As Program Associate Erin Taylor outlined in her recent blog on the gender and social inclusion issues related the MCC Compact in Malawi, energy access and resettlement have highly gendered consequences and human rights concerns. For example, WI-HER found that Malawian women have a unique understanding of the importance of access to power and energy as it decreases their risk of being subjected to gender-based violence. To make the nation’s staple food, nsima, Malawian women take maize to an electricity-powered mill to be ground into fine flour. If there is no electricity to power the mill, women must wait, sometimes all day, and upon their return in the evening they are vulnerable to violence either on their journey back or at home. These key gender issues and others often go undetected during the design and implementation of development projects within the public utilities sector, making it all the more important for us to continue our ambitious work integrating gender and social inclusion.

While we have celebrated WI-HER’s progress on behalf of women and girls around the world, our global community continues to face significant challenges, barriers, and setbacks that deeply impact the overall wellbeing of women and girls, as well as their families and communities. Major global issues (including deadly conflict, global health crises, patriarchal laws and policies, threats to women’s reproductive rights, a lack in women’s active political participation, barriers to women’s economic empowerment, harmful cultural norms, etc.) all place women and girls in harms way and can inhibit them from reaching their full potential with equitable access to vital opportunities and resources.

WI-HER was founded in honor of the strong and devoted women in my life, and their strength and devotion continues to inspire me. I am proud of what our passionate WI-HER team has been able to accomplish to address these key challenges through our global projects, and I look forward to continuing our deep commitment to innovatively identifying and addressing gender inequalities, gaps, and barriers within development, health, social impact, and public utilities projects alongside our growing list of amazing partners. WI-HER thanks you all for your support as we continue our work to improve health, development, and social impact outcomes for women, men, girls, and boys around the world.

Happy International Women’s Day!