The Power of Evidence: The Utility of “Gender Transformative” Language in Evaluating Health Programmes

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  • Bold commitments towards gender equality in health must be met with concrete changes to the underlying structural and systemic drivers for true transformation to occur. In this episode, host Johanna hears perspectives from those evaluating health programmes. They discuss the utility of gender-transformative language in health programme evaluation and explore how programmes can change norms, attitudes, and power relations. The guest’s highlight that health programme evaluation is more than just rubber-stamping—saying whether an intervention was transformative or not. The work as evaluators has to go beyond this and be more comprehensive and complex to really analyse what parts of the programme benefit women independently of the outcome, giving communities a voice in this analysis. The episode ends with the call to use language strategically to drive gender equality in global health.

    Guest speakers

    • Faiza Benhadid, Senior Gender and Human Rights expert at UN and Centre for Arab Women for Training and Research (CAWTAR).
    • Manuel Contreras-Urbina, Senior Social Development Specialist, The World Bank Group.

    Related links

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