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A free new online course highlights ways to incorporate gender equality and women’s empowerment into efforts to strengthen health systems around the world. Gender and Health Systems Strengthening is now available through the Global Health eLearning Center to Foreign Service nationals, US government partners, and US Agency for International Development field-based staff.
Gender and Health Systems Strengthening addresses questions such as:
- How do gender norms drive health behavior and affect clients’ decisions?
- How do those norms affect the ways in which health workers provide care?
- What are some key interventions that lead to positive gender and health systems outcomes?
Over 100 participants have signed up for a course study group, offered by K4Health August 4–13. Constance Newman, course author and IntraHealth’s senior team leader on gender equality and health, will be available to answer questions. Those who have taken the prerequisite course, Gender and Sexual and Reproductive Health 101, can register for the study group by emailing lbasall1@jhu.edu.
Throughout the course, participants will consider the intersections between gender equality, women’s empowerment, and health systems strengthening, including:
- gender as a determinant of health service access, health service utilization, and health status
- gender as it affects the provision of health care
- the rationale for and benefits of promoting gender equality in health systems strengthening
- the components of a health system and their gender-related goals and outcomes
Participants will find examples of how to promote gender equality in each of the six components of a health system, as identified by the World Health Organization. For example:
- Health service delivery should respond to the different needs of women, men, boys, and girls. This helps increase service access, coverage, quality, and safety, which in turn contributes to improved health, a more responsive and efficient health system, and social and financial risk protection.
- Health leaders, managers, and service providers must recognize how gender influences education and work in order to recruit and retain the robust workforces we need to meet today's health challenges.
- Health information systems are a source of data for gender analyses and other methods for identifying, understanding, and addressing the ways in which gender roles and inequalities affect health systems.
- Promoting gender equality in logistics and supply chain management fundamentally improves clients' access to essential medical products, vaccines, and technologies.
- A good health financing system raises adequate funds so that even the most vulnerable populations—such as women, girls, people with disabilities, and rural clients—can use services and products without being subjected to financial catastrophe.
- Health systems leadership and governance can be gender-aware or gender-blind. Understanding that gender is a determinant of health can help health leaders to develop policies and plans that consider the economic, social, and educational opportunities and challenges associated with being female or male.
The IntraHealth-led CapacityPlus project is funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). IntraHealth is a partner on the K4Health project led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs. K4Health is also funded by USAID.
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