Gender equality in GHI country strategies

One of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s key priorities in the Global Health Initiative (GHI) is to make the country programs focus on women and girls.

So are the US programs living up to her promise?

A report released Wednesday examined seven GHI country strategy documents with an eye toward women, girls, and gender equity.

According to the report, researched and written by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the answer is yes. All of the countries in the analysis addressed the health of women and girls as one of their priorities. Some countries also included women and girls as decision makers in their health programs, addressing the idea of gender equality more broadly.

GHI, which was introduced by President Obama in 2009 as a six-year, $63 billion plan to unify the U.S. government efforts in global health,
has seven core principles. One is “a focus on women, girls, and gender equality.”

In the fall of 2010, a U.S. Government Interagency Task Force on Women and Girls developed a draft guidance on the women, girls, and equality
principle in the fall of 2010. It had three requirements: a gender analysis; a women, girls, and gender equality narrative; and a
measurement and evaluation component. All were to be included in the GHI plus countries’ country strategies.

The report analyzed the country strategies and found that most of the countries had addressed at least one of the requirements in the guidance in their country strategy. It also found that the principle of gender equality had a clear impact on each of the countries' strategies.

One of the countries, Bangladesh, addressed all three requirements, while Nepal was the only country that did not address any of them. However, most of the countries, including Nepal, addressed six or seven of the ten key implementation elements provided by the guidance.

Read the entire report here.