Please note - this is a temporary window. id21 is joining forces with Eldis and therefore the id21 website has been suspended. Soon all id21 content will be available on the Eldis website.

Taking a healthy interest? Male involvement in reproductive health

Involving men in reproductive health programmes is now a key concern. Despite plenty of rhetoric, the practicalities of so doing remain obscure. How can men be involved without undermining the right of women to control their own bodies and make their own decisions? How can men get involved, for example, in efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancy, promote safe motherhood or prevent sexually transmitted diseases? Research from the Population Council (South and East Asian Office) analyses the experiences of NGOs in India and asks whether lessons learned from successful micro-level experiments could be scaled up within the mainstream of reproductive healthcare delivery to improve outcomes.

The report brings together the experiences of a number of Indian NGOs which have involved men as supportive partners in reproductive health programmes. Grassroots NGOs have forged ahead focusing on men through their community-based programmes, providing a wealth of practical knowledge. For most of these NGOs, the decision to include men grew out of the realisation that there could be only limited improvement in women’s reproductive health without men’s support and active involvement. As men tend to be responsible for household decisions on most matters of reproductive health, women within various programmes themselves demanded that men be approached and involved. It is clear that there is a high, unmet demand for male reproductive health services. Further common themes to emerge include:

Women want and need the support and understanding of their partners.
Men are often interested in becoming more involved, especially during pregnancy and in the care of infants, but can suffer pressure to conform to accepted gender roles.
Health care providers and community outreach workers are key to the success of involving male partners, but may require training and support themselves to help men discuss potentially embarrassing topics.
Timing, location and structure of programmes can encourage or discourage partner involvement for example a successful programme for truckers placed centres designed to look like resting places at strategic points along highways.
Misconceptions and myths about men’s bodies and how their sexual behaviour affects their health and their partners' have rarely been addressed in past programmes.
Being able to access information and care anonymously and with confidentiality can help overcome communities’ resistance to involving young people, especially girls, in reproductive health programmes; where this has been the case, programmes have been successful in changing behaviour in young people.

The experiences documented reveal that the importance of male involvement in reproductive health programmes is being addressed at the grassroots level. However, hard evidence of the beneficial impacts of involving men in reproductive health is needed if its importance is to be understood within the mainstream of service delivery. Suggestions for further work include:

forging closer links between grassroots NGOs and researchers early in the development of programmes to allow assessment of the effectiveness of involving men, providing evidence that their involvement is critical to achieving programme goals
finding ways of scaling up the lessons learned in small-scale efforts to public sector programmes that provide services for the whole population, spreading the benefits of involving men in reproductive health care to a greater number of women and men.

Source(s):
‘Men as Supportive partners in Reproductive Health. Moving from Rhetoric to Reality’, edited by S. Raju and A. Leonard, Population Council South and East Asia Regional Office, 2000 Full document.

Funded by: Population Council South and East Asia Regional Office

id21 Research Highlight: 3 January 2001

Further Information:
Saraswati Raju
Center for study of Regional Development
Jawaharlal Nehru University
NewDelhi-110067
India

Contact the contributor: saras@jnuniv.ernet.in

Population Council South and East Asia Regional Office

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DfID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Articles featured on the id21 site may be copied or quoted without restriction provided id21 and originating author(s) and institution(s) are acknowledged. Copyright © 2009 IDS. All rights reserved.

id21 is funded by the UK Department for International Development. id21 is one of a family of knowledge services at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. id21 is a www.oneworld.net partner and an affiliate of www.mediachannel.org. IDS is a charitable company, No. 877338.