Gender Training Material

In the last decade, there has been increased international commitment to improving reproductive health and ensuring reproductive rights in developing countries. However, field-based organizations continue to struggle with the design and implementation of effective reproductive health programs that can make a meaningful difference in the lives of individuals, particularly women.

Reproductive health issues such as HIV and AIDS prevention, maternal health, and family planning are closely connected to gender and sexuality. There is emerging evidence to show that, in order for reproductive and sexual health programs to really work, they have to include gender equity and sexuality diversity as components of sexual and reproductive health rights.

Starting in 2004, CARE and ICRW (International Center for Research on Women) jointly designed and implemented the innovative Inner Spaces Outer Faces Initiative (ISOFI) to find more effective ways of addressing these inequities in CARE’s reproductive health programs, beginning with a pilot phase in India and Vietnam...

ISOFI was designed so that:

• CARE staff explored and articulated their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of gender and sexuality, and understood how these values and beliefs were expressed by community members.

• The personal learning and change in relation to gender and sexuality by staff was encouraged to affect how CARE as an organization addressed gender and sexuality (in other words, from the bottom up).

• Improved processes and practices in the organization and its programs would enable staff to maximize their own lived experience of gender and sexuality.

This toolkit results from the program’s first phase and is a compilation of training, reflection and monitoring activities. These activities helped to identify, explore, and challenge the social constructions of gender and sexuality in the lives of project staff, the lives of project beneficiaries, program interventions, and CARE as an institution.

The final results of the first phase of ISOFI are documented in a report called “Walking the Talk,” which is available electronically on CARE’s website: www.care.org/reprohealth

Phase two of ISOFI will focus on testing the hypothesis that the systematic integration of gender and sexuality into programs leads to measurable improvements in the sexual and reproductive health status of populations.

To read the full document, please click here