Agency for All
Improving Health & Well-Being by Increasing Power to Act
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Photo credit: Shujaaz, Inc. |
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First Lady Jill Biden Attends Shujaaz’s Konnect Festival
Congratulations to Agency for All local partner, Shujaaz, Inc, for hosting the United States First Lady Dr. Jill Biden at the Konnect Festival in Nairobi, Kenya on February 25th!
Co-hosted by MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation and attended by more than 60 Shujaaz fans, the event promoted agency among youth by encouraging them to take control of their reproductive health. Dr. Biden attended a structured networking event designed to help youth break down barriers and have frank conversations about condom use, birth control, and HIV/AIDS. “These are issues that really all people need to talk about and yet, somehow, they don’t, and the consequences of not talking about it are so dire,” Dr Biden said.
The activity was part of a full day of games, watch parties, and other events boosting safe sex and healthy dating practices. The Shujaaz Konnect Festival and Shujaaz’s work with Agency for All is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
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Agency for All and Partner Activities for March 2023 |
Agency for All at the United Nations's CSW67 Conference
Agency for All and partners presented at the United Nations’ 2023 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) on March 13, 2023 in New York City. The session, entitled Envisioning Equality: Building Insight and Action from Data Innovations, explored new frameworks of gender empowerment, agency and norms, data use technologies and more. For the session, Dr. Jean Christophe Fotso, Executive Director of EVIHDAF and Dr. Abhishek Singh, Professor, International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai were joined by Dr. Lotus McDougal, Assistant Professor, Dr. Katherine Hay, Distinguished Fellow and Senior Strategy Advisor, and Dr. Anita Raj, Professor at the Center on Gender Equity and Health, University of California, San Diego which leads the Agency for All Consortium. For more on CSW67, click here.
Workshop in Addis Ababa on the Preliminary Assessment of SBC Programs in Ethiopia
Agency for All hosted a workshop with local partners on March 30-31, 2023 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to review recommendations from Phase One of the an assessment of SBC programs in Ethiopia between 2015 - 2021. Presenters shared the methodology of the assessment, challenges faced by SBC implementers, and lessons learned. Participants provided valuable feedback on the recommendations and discussed outstanding information gaps which will inform Phase Two of the assessment. The final assessment report will help to plan and fund future SBC interventions in Ethiopia.
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Virtual Webinar: Emerging Gender & Social Norms Measures: Lessons Learned from across 4 Sectors and 5 Countries |
Date: April 25, 2023
Time: 6 AM PDT/9AM EDT/1 PM GMT/4 PM EAT/6:30 PM IST
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The EMERGE (Evidence-based Measures of Empowerment for Research on Gender Equality) project will host this webinar at which presenters will share highlights and lessons learned from their experiences developing and testing novel social norms measures in diverse contexts and development areas. The measures shared assessed social norms related to unpaid work, fertility, economic resilience to climate change, and intimate partner violence. Presenters will represent work from Nepal, India, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria.
The EMERGE project, created by the Center on Gender Equity and Health at UC San Diego, is focused on the quantitative measurement of gender equality and empowerment (GE/E) to monitor and/or evaluate health and development programs, and national or subnational progress on UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Girls.
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Agency for All's Latest Technical Brief |
Agency for All has completed a new technical brief: Advancing Shared Conceptualizations of Agency: Emerging Insights. This brief synthesizes stakeholder feedback from the first round of consultations to explore, discuss, and document practitioner perspectives on agency and empowerment in SBC programming across sectors. These consultations will help Agency for All address conceptual and measurement gaps in health-related SBC research and practice. We look forward to hosting more in the future!
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“There is no ‘ideal’ woman”: Reconsidering the meaning of agency and empowerment |
The author of Agency for All’s latest LinkedIn article is Nitya Yerabandi, a first year undergraduate student at UCSD, majoring in Human Biology. Working with Agency for All Director Dr. Rebecka Lundgren and Dr. Lotus McDougal in the Center on Gender and Equity, Nitya is currently screening articles for the scoping review on Conceptualizations and Measures of Agency.
Key takeaways from Nitya's research experience:
- Agency goes beyond decision-making.
- We need to broaden our understanding of agency in research by being more inclusive of people’s choices.
- Agency and feminism are not one-dimensional.
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New Paper! Validation of the Fertility Norms Scale and Association with Fertility Intention and Contraceptive Use in India
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Nandita Bhan et al developed and validated a 10-item Fertility Norms Scale (FNS) and examined its associations with family planning outcomes in India. Their FNS captured expectations around pronatalism, early childbearing, and community pressure.
They found that the FNS indicated better predictive value among women compared to men for key reproductive outcomes. This measure may be useful for social norms-focused evaluations in family planning and warrants cross-contextual study.
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New Paper! Lessons Learned from a Mixed-Method Pilot of a Norms-Shifting Social Media Intervention to Reduce Teacher-Perpetrated School-Related Gender-Based Violence in Uganda
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Check out this article by Agency for All Project Director Rebecka Lundgren et al on a social media intervention pilot in Uganda. Working closely with educators, the pilot yielded lessons learned on using SBC to prevent online violence and promote gender equity by focusing on positive social norms, norms-shifting through engaged peer-influencers, and sharing educational resources to promote behavior change.
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USAID's 2023 Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Policy |
The new USAID Gender Policy is out providing "the vision for USAID’s work to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment around the world.”
Highlights include:
- A push to increase women's and girls' agency by better funding community-level women’s movements
- An intersectional approach that addresses overlapping inequalities for those with overlapping marginalized identities
- An emphasis on locally-led efforts that bring attention to "attention to addressing power dynamics within and between local actors and networks that may perpetuate gender-based inequalities"
- A focus on gender norms, men and masculinities, youth, and a commitment to new partnerships.
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