Maternal Health – Page 2

Gender Analysis Toolkit (Jhpiego 2016)

April 3, 2016

The 2016 Jhpiego Gender Analysis Toolkit is a practical guide for public health professionals seeking to understand how gender can impact health outcomes, both through service delivery and access to information and care. Its primary focus is sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health.

The purpose of the Gender Analysis Toolkit is to provide research questions to guide data collection when performing a project-level gender analysis. The Toolkit provides illustrative questions related to the five domains described in USAID’s Automated Directive System 205, which are: 1) Laws, regulations, and institutional practices; 2) Cultural norms and beliefs; 3) Gender roles, responsibilities, and time used; 4) Access to and control over assets and resources; and 5) Patterns of power and decision-making. The tool presents illustrative general and health area-specific questions organized in matrices related to different levels of the health system.

Click here for full toolkit.

Community Video for Nutrition Guide: Using Participatory, Community-Led Videos to Improve Maternal, Infant, and Young Child Nutrition (SPRING, Digital Green 2015)

March 20, 2016

This Community Video for Nutrition Guide is a joint product of SPRING and Digital Green (DG), an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) registered in the United States and India. This guide is based on our organizations’ combined experience in implementing a proof of concept project between January and October 2013, formally known as the SPRING/DG Collaboration and Feasibility Study. This 10-month project focused on integrating content on high-impact maternal, infant, and young child nutrition (MIYCN) practices, including information on key hygiene-related behaviors, into the existing DG community-led video project, which is predominantly focused on promoting improved agricultural practices among small-scale and marginal women farmers. The target audience was pregnant women and/or mothers with children under the age of two participating in existing self-help groups (SHGs) in 30 villages in two blocks of Keonjhar District of Odisha, India. The SHGs also included a wider representation of female community members, who were targeted as key influencers for the recommended behaviors. Given that the target audience included a large number of influencers that wouldn’t be adopting the practices themselves, the project not only tracked adoptions, but also promotions of MIYCN behaviors.

The guide is specifically intended to provide organizations, projects, and practitioners interested in using or testing community video for MIYCN with the critical information and tools needed to initiate, produce, and disseminate a participatory community-video approach for MIYCN. This guide is intended to be used in combination with DG standard operating procedures (SOPs), which can be accessed openly on its website linked here. Although focused on promoting MIYCN, the Guide builds on the DG agriculture focused platform, to which other content can be added or emphasized, such as information promoting sexual and reproductive health and family planning, nutrition-sensitive agricultural practices, community institution building, government schemes, animal husbandry, financial inclusion programs, nonfarm income-generating activities, and a whole range of other topics.

Click here for full guide.

Evidence of Effective Approaches to Social and Behavior Change Communication for Preventing and Reducing Stunting and Anemia: Findings from a Systematic Literature Review (SPRING 2014)

March 17, 2016

Evidence suggests that simply increasing knowledge and awareness of good nutrition practices rarely leads to sustained behavior change, nor is sustained change in nutrition behavior likely to be achieved through a single activity. Several specific behaviors or practices impact nutritional status during the critical first 1,000 days (pregnancy to age two), while complex, contextual determinants also influence individual decisions to consider, test, adopt and sustain a given behavior or practice. The field of Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) is a collection of approaches and tools informed by behavioral theories and used to design public health interventions.

This review, part of a broader effort by SPRING to support governments and other stakeholders in their delivery of high impact nutrition practices, provides a summary of peer-reviewed evidence regarding the effectiveness of SBCC approaches to increase the uptake of three key nutrition behaviors: women’s dietary practices during pregnancy and lactation, breastfeeding practices, and complementary feeding practices. SBCC interventions have been broadly categorized into three areas: interpersonal communication; use of media; and community/social mobilization. This review also identifies gaps in the evidence and recommendations for further areas of study.

This review includes a total of 91 studies identified using the Ovid MEDLINE database. Recognizing the potential value of a broad array of study designs, results from five study types are included: reviews (including meta-analysis), randomized controlled trials, longitudinal studies, repeated cross-sectional studies, and cross-sectional studies. Excluded studies include those with data from high income countries, those published prior to 2000, those written in a language other than English, and those that focused exclusively on refinement of a research methodology. Other exclusions are noted in the text.

Click here for full review.

Enhancing Nutrition and Food Security during the First 1,000 Days through Gender-sensitive Social and Behavior Change (CORE Group Technical Resource Guide and Brief 2015)

March 6, 2016

This technical resource guide, along with the complemenary technical brief, is designed to build the capacity of development practitioners working in nutrition and food security to plan, implement, and evaluate gender-sensitive SBC programming in order to improve nutritional outcomes for pregnant and lactating women (PLW) and children under two. It does this by providing an overview, rationale, critical actions, best practices, resources, and tools for integrating gender-sensitive SBC into project activities.

The technical resource guide seeks to achieve three main goals:

Increase the reader’s knowledge about the importance of gender-sensitive SBC programming in nutrition and food security programs/projects;
Strengthen the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and documentation of gender-sensitive projects and gender mainstreaming of organizations to reduce gender gaps in nutrition outcomes; and
Share resources and tools to support gender-sensitive SBC programming

Promoting Equal Chances for Women and Men to Use and Benefit from ICT-enabled Solutions (IICD report 2015)

January 10, 2016

This publication explores issues of gender in ICT4D project and is based on case study research conducted among Connect4Change projects in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The publication pulls together insights and learning around the effects of ICT uptake and use on women’s empowerment and gender relations in agricultural value chain development, maternal and child health, and hospital management information systems projects, and includes the 3 case studies as separate and stand alone documents for more information.