Areas of Focus

Public Health Data for More Inclusive Policies

A family registering their baby’s birth in Bangladesh.

Enormous data gaps exist in health data, with men used as the default representative for all genders and male health privileged over that of women, children and non-binary people. The gender data gap is systemic and perpetuates inequality. We work to include all genders in data so that all genders are served by data.

Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health (D4H) Initiative

The Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health (D4H) Initiative supports governments to turn high-quality data into action. Gender equity is a cross-cutting priority intentionally woven into the four D4H programs. Each program partners with governments to mainstream gender, including legal gender recognition, into health systems and data use, promoting gender transformative policies.

CRVS
Gender-related interventions include strengthening the link between the medico-legal death investigation system and the health sector to identify and prevent previously hidden cases of gender-based violence; developing gender-relevant CRVS indicators for monitoring and evaluation of system performance and for addressing such issues as child marriage prevention; and ensuring data collection processes and pathways allow for sex and gender disaggregation and data recording for addressing any gender inequalities in death registration.
Data Impact
Our flagship Data to Policy (D2P) program has supported numerous country teams to develop policy briefs on priority topics identified by government partners, to turn data to policy actions that improve the health of women and girls and address health inequities. Other gender equity work involves developing global tools, material and methods on gender data analysis, producing gender statistics reports for ministries of health, and exploring specific topics related to gender equity to inform policy decisions. Some examples include establishing processes and methodologies to measure the burden of gender-based violence and assess the delivery of services to survivors of violence and identifying the impact of noncommunicable diseases on women.
Cancer Registry Program
Cancer Registry Program supports a range of cancer surveillance efforts and south-to-south capacity building initiatives that aim to reduce gender disparities and address sex-specific cancers. While supporting governments to establish population-based cancer registries, the Program sheds light on differentials in disease burden and mortality outcomes, including cervical cancer.
Global Grants Program
Global Grants Program provides an opportunity for countries to identify and improve gender equity in national priority areas. Over the years the GGP has supported a range of gender equity projects including an analysis of sexual and reproductive health data to improve post-abortion care, data quality assessments of sexual and reproductive health indicators to strengthen gender inclusivity in CRVS legal and regulatory frameworks, and efforts to improve data availability on and access to legal gender recognition for trans and nonbinary people.

Legal Gender Recognition in Latin America

Vital Strategies’ Initiative to improve Legal Gender Recognition in Latin America collaborated with civil society and government partners to ensure that the LGBTQI communities in Peru and Ecuador enjoy universal and straightforward access to civil registration and identity documents – as required by the January 2018 Inter-American Court of Human Rights Advisory Opinion. This work focuses primarily on identifying and removing the legal barriers to recognizing gender identities, which primarily affect transgender and intersex people and builds off earlier foundational work in Peru. In addition, the project supported Human Rights Observatories in Peru and Ecuador that track human rights violations among LGBTQI people, especially violence and murders, which the official government statistics ignore, but which must be linked to the civil registration system in order to have accurate and actionable cause of death data.

Peru’s national consumer protection agency, launched a guide on International Transgender Day of Visibility in March 31 to promote good practices in business and address discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (Photo credit: Indecopi Oficial Flickr)

Data Driven Policy Initiative for Women’s Health

The Data Driven Policy Initiative for Women’s Health was implemented to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality due to unsafe abortion in Bangladesh, Rwanda and Uganda through a methodical data quality assessment that focused on identifying key issues for policy development. This project employed different partnership models to strengthen government ability to analyze and use available data to support women’s health. This work builds on earlier work including Thamini Uhai(Value Life), a radio, outdoor, mobile phone and community outreach campaign aimed at increasing the number of women delivering their babies in health facilities in Tanzania. Delivering at a health facility is the best way of ensuring the health of mothers and babies and the best way to ensure that a child’s birth is registered. Vital Strategies has also worked with various partners to strengthen communication activities for civil society groups on the project Voices for Health that supported policy development to improve access to adolescent sexual and reproductive health care in Burkina Faso, Senegal and Uganda.

Data collectors in Liberia gather data on sexual and reproductive health, including abortion, from health facility records in Montserrado, Grand Bassa, Gbarpolu and Rivercess counties.

Environmental Health

Our Environmental Health portfolio covers a range of issues including climate change, lead exposure, air pollution and household air pollution. While lead is more often a concern for children, pregnant women exposed to lead are at risk of experiencing grave reproductive health implications as well as passing on lead poisoning to their unborn child. While poor air quality affects everyone, women are particularly at risk for health concerns due to household air pollution caused by burning unhealthy fuels for cooking inside the home. Our work focuses on developing robust data about the places where women are most vulnerable to air pollution and lead exposure. Uncovering the health outcomes related to air pollution and lead exposure are critical for policy development to improve health outcomes.

Accredited social health activists (ASHAs) participated in a workshop conducted by Vital Strategies designed to equip them with knowledge about air pollution, its impact on health, and mitigation measures to enable them to engage the communities they serve.

Gender-Based Violence Prevention

Every 10 minutes a women is killed. Vital Strategies Gender-Based Violence Prevention Program, led from our Brazil office, focuses on data triangulation, surveillance and primary health care involvement in identifying and supporting women experiencing and/or at risk of GBV. Other efforts are exploring the potential of artificial intelligence for rapid assessment of GBV risk.

Public Health Midwives Receiving Certificates after a Gender-Based Violence Workshop by the Ministry of Health in Sri Lanka.

Policy Accelerator

Policy change is difficult, but the long-term benefits and scale of impact makes it a critical component of public health. Vital Strategies’ Policy Accelerator works with government partners across the various phases of policy development to enact health policies that are equitable, addressing the specific needs of all community members. Recent efforts include work with Project Enable in Ethiopia which is confronting non-communicable diseases (NCD) among pregnant women and developing a policy to protect them from indoor air pollution, improving the health of pregnant women and demonstrating how targeted policy making can address a range of NCDs.

City staff implement traffic-calming measures at a high-fatality intersection in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, currently working with the Policy Accelerator on an anti-speeding policy.