The Global Fund recently published a new report Investing in the Future: Women and Girls in All Their Diversity.
This report focuses on the partnership that support the Global Fund to advance the health and rights of girls and women in all their diversity. The report explores gender-responsive policies and processes, meaningful engagement, investing in people, systems for health, and strengthening partnerships and innovative collaboration.
The Global Fund’s gender-responsive approach across the three diseases in its Global Fund Strategy 2017-2022 has driven specific investment approaches for women and girls, sometimes across a region and sometimes in a locally specific way.
The report highlights the importance of networks such as Women4GlobalFund (W4GF) and how many W4GF Advocates are leading Global Fund community related work and discussion in their own countries. W4GF works with the Secretariat to organise monthly webinars on pertinent topics, which enabled community members to engage directly with the Secretariat and receive updates on relevant policy and program issues. For more on W4GF webinars click here.
W4GF has also developed a community-based monitoring and accountability feedback toolkit to support communities to track and review the impact of national programs and services supported by the Global Fund. To review this click here. Community-based monitoring is a means for service users and/or local communities to gather, analyse and use information to improve access to and quality of services on an ongoing basis. This can include monitoring human rights or gender related-barriers to accessing services as well as barriers related to service delivery, governance, budget tracking, performance-based financing, domestic financing and procurement and supply chain. It can be focused on a specific area such as the quality of programs for adolescents.
The report also touched on important issues and gaps such as the need for quantitative and qualitative gender disaggregated data. “One glaring gap that continues to hamper appropriate responses is the quantity and quality of data for key and vulnerable populations. In addition to often not having robust size estimates for program design, there is a lack of sex or gender disaggregation in reporting of coverage of key interventions for these populations. For example, very few countries have necessary data and strategic information critical to inform tailoring of HIV program for transgender women. Whilst there is confusion about population size and HIV prevalence everywhere, the existing data on HIV prevalence indicates alarming trends: HIV prevalence among transgender women can range from 1.1% in Bangladesh to 24.8% in Indonesia and 38.5% in the Dominican Republic. This underscores the importance of developing a complex, focused public health program specifically tailored to the needs of this population. Even if programs do collect sex or age disaggregated data, they are either not systematically used for tailoring services, nor reported upwards to the Global Fund. As a result, the programs fail to address the specific gender-related risks and barriers to services and may decrease access to services for particular communities.”
To read more follow this link Investing in the Future: Women and Girls in All Their Diversity.