The theme for this year’s Human Rights Day is “Stand up for Someone’s Rights Today”. The first step in doing this is to make visible, through numbers and stories, those that are more vulnerable, discriminated against and marginalized. This requires the ability to measure and monitor how inequalities based on gender as well as ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, or gender identity affect access to health services and health outcomes. To address this, it is an appropriate day for WHO to release a new tool for strengthening gender-sensitive national HIV and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) monitoring and evaluation systems.
This tool provides step-by-step guidance to strategic information specialists and monitoring and evaluation officers of HIV and SRH programmes on how to:
- ask the right questions in order to uncover gender inequalities and their influence on health;
- identify and select gender-sensitive indicators;
- conduct gender-analysis of SRH and HIV data; and
- strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems to enable appropriate data collection and gender analysis.
The tool is jointly published with UNAIDS and has been used by nearly 30 country teams of strategic information specialists, civil society and HIV programme implementers to analyse their own SRH and HIV data from a gender equality perspective. The tool can be used for training monitoring and evaluation specialists as well as a resource guide for SRH and HIV programmes to develop gender profiles of their SRH and HIV situation.
“Know your epidemic, know your response”
“Know your epidemic, know your response” has been the cornerstone of the HIV response. This tool supports this approach by helping identify inequities and underlying drivers and hence, improve evidence-informed SRH and HIV programmes for all, but particularly for women and girls.