Victoria White, MPH; Dr. Margaret Greene, PhD; Dr. Elaine Murphy, PhD

December 2003

This 64-page report from The Synergy Project highlights fourteen programmes designed to change social norms related to entrenched gender roles. The report explains the methodologies each programme employed to achieve this goal and presents findings from evaluations conducted to assess their efficacy.

From the Introduction
"In September 2003, program implementers, researchers, evaluators, and donors came together in a four-day conference in the Washington, D.C., area to learn about men and reproductive health programs around the world that had challenged gender norms. Participants in the conference were particularly interested in those programs that could show through evaluations that gender-related attitudes and behaviors had changed in a direction likely to reduce health risks, specifically, those associated with violence and unsafe sex. Identifying these programs and the strategies that made them successful hasimplications for future gender-related reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and maternal and child health programming because they may serve as models to be adapted, scaled up, or replicated elsewhere. This review aims to highlight these good programmatic models, some of which were presented at the September 2003 conference."

Four general themes emerged in the process of conducting the review for this report.

• "Initiatives affecting gender norms for the sake of doing so are still relatively nascent.
• Substantive evaluations are not common. There simply is not a large enoughsample of thorough and systematic data on the efficacy of these programs as a whole.
• Third, evaluations that specifically report the program's effect on gender norms—and not only on health outcomes—are rare.
• Fourth, health programs affect social norms related to gender roles even if they do not aim to address these norms directly."

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Intro
• Conceptual Framework
• Review of Literature
  • CANTERA (Central America)
  • New Visions Program for Boys and Young Men (Egypt)
  • Better Life Options Program for Boys (India)
  • Conscientizing Male Adolescents Program (Nigeria)
  • Mobilizing Young Men To Care Project (South Africa)
  • Men As Partners Program (Africa/Asia)
  • Talking Man-To-Man (Brazil)
  • Program H (Latin America/Caribbean)
  • Puntos de Encuentro (Nicaragua)
  • Stepping Stones (Africa/Asia)
  • Soul City (Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Latin America)
  • The Strength Campaign (United States)
  • The Respect Campaign (Western Europe)
  • Peer Advocates for Health (United States)
• Matrix of Programs
• Analysis and Discussion
• Conclusion
• Ref
• Annotated Bibliography

Click here to download the report in PDF format [686 KB].

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