New approaches to healthcare funding often rely on outdated attitudes to gender. How can donors ensure that gender analysis is effective? Should they move beyond a narrow focus on women as a separate group? Researchers from the UK University of Manchester argue for a new approach to gender in healthcare funding.
In many countries, donors are changing the way they finance health programmes. They are moving away from funding individual health projects and now encourage aid for government-managed health sector programmes. This new form of funding requires innovative forms of gender analysis and gender-sensitive interventions in the health sector.
The researchers examine donor-funded health sector programmes drawing on evidence from many countries, including Ghana and Bangladesh. These programmes integrate gender, but in a limited way. This kind of gender analysis focuses on improving services for women and increasing their use of such facilities. But strategies that simply target women are inadequate, the researchers argue, because they:
- treat women as a separate group, rather than looking at the relations between men and women
- focus on women as mothers, ignoring ways in which gender inequalities affect women’s health throughout their lives
- fail to recognise ways in which gender inequalities impact on the causes of poor health among the population as a whole
- cannot address gender bias in health service design and delivery
- ignore the key issues of households as providers of healthcare.
New approaches must recognise the ways in which gender relations impact on the provision and use of healthcare. Donors should identify the health sector as a structure in which gender is always present, even if women are absent. This involves:
- looking at the ways in which men and women within households provide as well as consume health services
- considering the interactions between the paid and unpaid economies
- recognising that gender biases in institutions mean that men and women have different access to health services, both as consumers and providers
- acknowledging that a health programme may deliver different benefits to men and women
- accepting that gender bias in institutions in the health sector damages programme effectiveness and sustainability.
Source(s):
‘Sector programme support: the health sector. A gender aware analysis' by
D. Elson and B. Evers, report for the DAC/WID Task Force on Gender Guidelines
for Programme Aid and Other Forms of Economic Policy Related Assistance (1998)
Funded by:
Special Programme, Women in Development, DGIS, Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, The Netherlands
id21 Research Highlight: 19 September 2001
Further Information:
Barbara Evers
Development Studies Programme
Department of Sociology
University of Manchester
Manchester
M13 9PL
UK
Tel:
+44 (0)161 275 2461
Fax:
+44 (0)161 275 2462
Contact the contributor: Barbara.Evers@man.ac.uk
Manchester University, UK
Other related links:
BRIDGE specialises in gender and development resources.
The Centre for Health and Gender Equity promotes gender equity and social
justice in international population and health policy.
See this WHO factsheet on gender, health and poverty.
The Gender in Development Programme (GIDP) advises, supports and
facilitates UNDP gender equality policy.
