Men and reproductive health programs: influencing gender norms

This review outlines programs in Central America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia that are designed to change social norms related to entrenched gender roles. It explains the methodologies each program employed to achieve this goal and presents findings from evaluations conducted to assess their efficacy. It highlights good programmatic models that show that gender-related attitudes and behaviours can change in a direction likely to reduce health risk. Some of the programmatic models described were presented at a four-day conference held in the Washington D.C. area in September 2003 that brought together program implementers, researchers, evaluators, and donors to learn about men and reproductive health programs around the world that have challenged gender norms.

Four themes emerge from the review:

• initiatives affecting gender norms for the sake of doing so are still relatively nascent
• substantive evaluations are not common
• evaluations that specifically report a program’s effect on gender norms – and not only on health outcomes – are rare
• health programs affect social norms related to gender roles even if they do not aim to address these norms directly

Lessons and recommendations from the review include:

• institutional collaboration makes a difference
• sharing personal experiences is a useful starting point
• trained gender-sensitive facilitators are necessary
• program outputs should be creatively integrated into society
• intervention with males should be conducted separately from females
• mass media should be suffused with images of gender-equitable relationships
• quasi-scientific evaluations are the most compelling

[adapted from author]