When I was working as a health educator in Cameroon, there was a moment that shifted not only the trajectory of my time there, but my entire paradigm for maternal health programming.
After completing an interactive (and I thought successful) family planning promotion activity for the women who came to the health center, one of the participants spoke up.
“I understand and agree with what you’re saying,” she explained. “But this is something I already know and can’t talk about with my husband.”
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In the plight to eliminate gender disparities, it is convenient to view women as the gatekeepers of successful programming. Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus famously identifies women as the more responsible household decisions makers. As of 2014, the institution accepts women at a rate of 96% over men into their microcredit programs. International Women’s Day, which falls every year on March 8, is celebrated in the major cities of Cameroon with state-sanctioned parades of women marching through town centers while wearing the designated cloth of that year (often to the begrudging comments of men wondering why there isn’t an International Men’s Day).
In light of the extreme gender inequities facing women across the globe, these initiatives are not without their merits. The socio-economic empowerment of women is undeniably a critical issue that needs to be addressed if we want to live in a world where everyone’s livelihoods are being sustainably met. But excluding men from the picture of any intervention, particularly those that focus on women and girls, is building a barrier where one did not necessarily exist before.
At the most practical level, excluding men from programs designed to uplift the status of women can often be a logistical dead end. In the case of my initial family planning activity in Cameroon, which was designed to promote overall family health through birth spacing, focusing solely on women yielded no results. In that rural community, husbands were the financial and household decision makers. We had essentially been preaching to a voiceless choir. The women were excited about the possibilities of using natural and clinical methods of taking a two-year break between each pregnancy. However, this was a topic that they were not socially equipped to bring up with their spouses and one they could not afford themselves. The key group that we needed to have a conversation with was men. We needed to promote family planning – not women’s planning. Men are just as crucial actors in this process as women, and by failing to acknowledge the role that they played in understanding and adopting healthy birth spacing, we had set up our intervention for failure.
When an intervention works exclusively with women or has a non-integrated staff, there is an additional deleterious effect of downgrading it as a niche program. As the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children‘s 2005 report “Masculinities: Male Roles and Male Involvement in the Promotion of Gender Equality” points out, “Too often, gender mainstreaming efforts are marginalized as a women’s issue rather than an inclusive concern.” These programs send the message that men have nothing to gain, and that they are not a part of the solution. Whether the program is a prenatal counseling sensitization or a financial management skills series, the visual of having an exclusively female audience or training staff allows those looking in from the outside to misinterpret the ultimate aims of gender equality.
Just as any other element of sustainable livelihoods programming, including men as partners to understand, promote, and live out gender equality must begin early. It starts in schools. It starts in homes. It starts from the planning stages and day one of any program. The framework provided by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s 2006 “Gender Handbook in Humanitarian Action” maps out how girls, boys, women, and men can successfully and equally be integrated into the context of displacement camp management. From the design of camp policy, to access to services, to participation in governance structures, and capacity building, there is a role that everybody can and is expected to play.
For my event, we couldn’t go back in time to change who we had invited. But the woman’s comment inspired a program the following year that allowed the health center’s male and female staff to recruit and train 10 men to become family planning dialogue-starters in their communities. Comprehensive gender inclusion is a crucial element of approaching interventions through a sustainable livelihoods framework. If we truly believe that gender equality is a universal fight and not a “woman’s issue,” then we must approach it as such.