Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

Guarantee sexual and reproductive health and rights
63
Programs for
adolescents
need to be
scaled up to
provide full
services to
the entire
adolescent
population
limited impact on the prevalence of malnutrition in women and children. Current
research suggests that interventions may be more important before conception,
because the risks of a poor outcome are as great from being underweight
before pregnancy as from being underweight during pregnancy (Allen and
Gillespie 2001). Programs therefore need to target nonpregnant women and
adolescents. One approach is to decrease nutrient depletion by reducing early
and unwanted fertility, which can improve both reproductive health outcomes
and nutritional status. Family planning services and programs to encourage
later marriage can both be important here. So can improving women’s diet and
nutritional intake through food security measures, diet diversity, and reducing
infections such as intestinal worms.
Interventions for adolescents
All the health services and interventions mentioned above should be designed
for married and unmarried adolescents as well as for adults. Young married
and unmarried girls are among the most underserved groups, yet their needs
may be the most pressing. Many service providers—including doctors, nurses,
midwives, and traditional birth attendants—do not recognize the need among
this age group, particularly among unmarried adolescent girls, for reproductive
health advice, information, and services. Programs for adolescents are small,
with limited coverage. They need to be scaled up to provide full services to the
entire adolescent population.
Interventions to involve men as partners in reproductive health
Men influence their partner’s reproductive health, in part through decisions
about contraceptive use and desired family size. That makes them important
allies in efforts to improve women’s health (Greene, Rasekh, and Amen 2004).
Two types of program models have been developed recently to engage men.
One involves men as partners. This type of program works within traditional
reproductive health arenas such as family planning and maternal health services
and seeks to increase men’s involvement in women’s reproductive health.
Such programs are based on the principle that couples, not individual women
or men, are responsible for reproductive health outcomes. Thus men must collaborate
with their female partners and be accountable to them, to ensure positive
reproductive health outcomes.
A second model supports men as agents of change by motivating them
to actively address gender inequalities. Such programs recognize that gender
norms and the unequal balance of power between women and men have negative
consequences for the health of both women and men (UNDAW 2003).
They seek to change gender roles and norms by challenging attitudes and
behaviors that compromise both men’s and women’s health and safety. Evaluations
of these programs have not yet been conducted so their impacts are not
known.