New Project Launched: ‘Transforming THET and Health Partnership’s approach to gender’

Working with activists and experts from Uganda, Somaliland and the U.K., we will examine the barriers women face in the health workforce in Low- and Middle- Income Countries (LMICs), and design new tools and guidance which will seek to transform Health Partnerships into powerful agents playing a significant role in advancing women’s development both as individuals and as health professionals.

The project began in February 2019 and will continue throughout the year in three phases: research, tool development and dissemination. The first stage will see THET combine insights from international literature with in-country research carried out by local gender activists in Somaliland and Uganda. This will allow us to gain a better understanding of best practice in gender transformative approaches in health system strengthening, while also improving our understanding of the practical context in which we operate. Based on the insights and findings from the research, THET will develop tools and guidance which will promote best practice in gender transformative approaches across our portfolio of grants management and country programmes work. These tools will be initially piloted with two health partnerships at a workshop in Uganda.  Finally, we will share both the tools and insights from the research with the Health Partnership community through various channels, as well as showcasing them at THET’s Annual Conference in September 2019.

We are particularly excited about the participatory and collaborative nature of this project, which brings together women from a range of backgrounds to work on an issue directly impacting them as individual. This approach enables us to combine perspectives in order to question assumptions about gender in the health workforce and to challenge ourselves to think differently about our own role in this field within the Health Partnership community.

This project will greatly enhance THET’s ability to understand how attitudes to gender impact on our work across Africa and Asia. This will benefit our not only programmes, but also our partners across the UK health community, a multiplier effect that will produce change at a community level across the countries we are working in.

Ben Simms, CEO THET

We look forward to providing further updates in the next few months!