DATE / TIME:

2021•10•21    11:00 - 12:00

Location:

Kuala Lumpur

COVID-19 vaccination holds the potential to alleviate the health systems burden, contribute to economic and social recovery, and reverse some of the exacerbated gender inequalities during the pandemic. Yet gender, a known barrier to access and delivery as demonstrated in many other vaccination efforts and health areas, is not well understood, considered, and addressed at national levels. These include how restrictive gender norms, physical access, and information gaps, that are often amplified by other intersecting vulnerabilities, are tackled in vaccination deployment strategies.

For example, at a policy level, only a handful of countries referred to gender in the policy or strategy documents. In countries such as Bangladesh and Timor-Leste, women account for less than 38% of those who have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine (August 2021). Gaps in evidence, real-time reporting, and science communication, including to dispel cultural myths, and pre-existing gender-related health barriers such as divisions of care work and autonomy or decision-making may explain these gaps. The Gender and COVID-19 research agenda-setting initiative, in collaboration with partners in the region, aims to conduct discussions and knowledge exchange on this topic to drive support more cohesive research on the set priority areas.

A prioritization scoring survey is now live and available in French, Spanish and Portuguese where the list of research questions was compiled from a global online discussion across five thematic areas.

Speakers

Kalani Sachs-Robertson
Humanitarian Action and Disaster Risk Reduction, ROAP
UN Women
Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA) Working Group

Dr. Lavanya Vijayasingham
Postdoctoral Fellow
United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH)

Panellists

Dr. Kira Fortune
Coordinator
Unit on Social Determinants of Health and Violence and Injury Prevention
WHO WPRO, Manila

Dr. Gunjan Taneja
Program Officer
Vaccine Delivery
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, India

Chee Yoke Ling
Executive Director
Third World Network (TWN)

Registration is now closed.

Watch the webinar via the Youtube Livestream link here: https://go.unu.edu/ZRuQu.