1. Gavi Project
The overall goal of the Gavi Gender Policy is to identify and overcome gender related barriers to reach zero-dose and underimmunised children, individuals and communities with the full range of vaccines. This encompasses:
- Focusing primarily on identifying and addressing underlying gender-related barriers faced specifically by caregivers, adolescents and health workers.
- Encouraging and advocating for womenโs and girlsโ full and equal participation in decision-making related to health programmes and wellbeing
- In the specific pockets where they exist, overcoming differences in immunisation coverage between girls and boys.
- Increase sustainable, in-country knowledge and expertise for gender related programming.
Country Health System Strengthening applications received by Gavi are starting to include gender-related programming mainly in the investment areas of Service Delivery, Demand Generation, Health Workforce, and Governance. This progress is a result of strong government and Alliance partner commitments. However, there is still scope to improve the applications and there is also need to have dedicated support for robust planning, implementation, and monitoring. In addition, of the applications designed in 2023, few included gender specific Targeted Country Assistance to support implementation of gender responsive programming.
This initiative aims to address this weakness and to demonstrate how gender specific technical assistance can change the ways the grants are designed and implemented with equity as its key principle. With this additional support, a standard can be set that can guide future grant design and implementation processes. This is an opportunity to help institutionalise new thinking that can be supported through Gavi funding streams going forward. The technical assistance will be provided by those who understand the context and gender norms and who are also in positions to work closely with government and partners.
The type of technical assistance needed will differ depending on where the country is in the Gavi grant cycle and the level of understanding of partners to integrate gender in the immunisation programme. The types of assistance envisioned include the following for each part of the Gavi grant cycle:
Pre-planning
Conduct gender analysis (rapid or deep depending on country need and data already available) and identification of recommended approach and strategies to overcome gender-related barriers and empower women.
Planning
Active participation in FPP discussion providing technical assistance and advocacy (ensure gender expertise is included in at least four of the writing teams {specifically Human Resources for Health (HRH); Leadership, Management, and Coordination (LMC); Service Delivery; Demand Generation and Community Engagement}); support the design of interventions and budget, support design of gender-integrated Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) plan to monitor gender indicators/strategy efficacy.
Implementation, Monitoring, Reporting
- Technical assistance on implementation and monitoring of progress; support for course correction and reprogramming; including active participation in Joint Appraisal (JA) preparations and JA meeting.
- Testing and scaling up gender responsive practices.
- Advocacy and capacity building of government and CSO implementers.
- Case studies and data collection used to inform the Joint Appraisals.
Therefore, the project aims to:
- Ensure countries have the required gender technical assistance to support the design, implementation or monitoring of gender responsive or transformative programming (depending on where the country is at in the Gavi grant cycle)
- Facilitate peer to peer learning of gender technical assistance providers
- Collate lessons learned at country level on gender integration that will help inform Gavi 6.0 objectives and plans and will be published for all partners to learn from
- Using lessons learned, develop guidelines on gender Technical Assistance and gender related programming