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This paper aimed at estimating the resources required to implement a community Score Card by a typical rural district health team in Uganda, as a mechanism for fostering accountability, utilization and quality of maternal and child healthcare service.

This report addresses the relationship between population growth, age structure, and conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The literature reviewed for this report presents strong evidence that age structure and population growth matter for conflict. There is particularly strong evidence that points to the relationship between young age structure and conflict, although studies that disaggregate types of conflict and characteristics of young age structures (urban, male, etc.) tend to offer...

Research has highlighted disparities in family planning outcomes by wealth and by region separately. This analysis examines regional disparities within specific poverty groups. Twelve USAID family planning priority countries with recent DHS or AIS surveys were selected for the analysis, including 11 DHS surveys (Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Malawi, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda Uganda, and Zambia) and one AIS survey (Mozambique). The measure of absolute...

Background: In the past decade, the negative impact of disrespectful maternity care on women’s utilisation and experiences of facility-based delivery has been well documented. Less is known about midwives’ perspectives on these labour ward dynamics. Yet efforts to provide care that satisfies women’s psycho-socio-cultural needs rest on midwives’ capacity and willingness to provide it. We performed a systematic review of the emerging literature documenting midwives’ perspectives to explore the...

The aims of this paper are: 1) to highlight how multi-stakeholder country platforms, built on development effectiveness principles, in line with the globally agreed recommendations of IHP+2, can be reinforced within the framework of the Global Strategy and its supporting mechanisms and are key to the Global Strategy’s successful implementation; and 2) to lay out key considerations for new multi-stakeholder country platforms, along with the relevant mechanisms and a minimum set of standards...

Close-to-community (CTC) providers have been identified as a key cadre to progress universal health coverage and address inequities in health service provision due to their embedded position within communities. CTC providers both work within, and are subject to, the gender norms at community level but may also have the potential to alter them. This paper synthesises current evidence on gender and CTC providers and the services they deliver.

The DHS Analytical Studies 71 examines subnational variations in fertility preferences and family planning outcomes associated with poverty in married women in 12 recent Demographic and Health Surveys. Poverty is measured based on a standard set of criteria for unsatisfied basic needs and the ownership of specific assets. Households are categorized into three poverty groups: not extremely poor, extremely poor but not asset poor, and extremely poor and asset poor. This brief summarizes the...

Background: Striving to foster collaboration among countries suffering from maternal and child health (MCH) inequities, the MASCOT project mapped and analyzed the use of research in strategies tackling them in 11 low- and middle-income countries. This article aims to present the way in which research influenced MCH policies and programs in six of these countries – three in Africa and three in Latin America. Methods: Qualitative research using a thematic synthesis narrative process was used...

This report provides a brief examination of how and where gender analysis is incorporated into Political Economy Analysis (PEA). An initial review of the literature indicates that gender is not systematically included in PEA. This was also conveyed by a number of experts consulted for this report, who stated that few if any PEAs to their knowledge had included a gender analysis, with the issue usually treated only in passing. The report nevertheless highlights the existing examples of...

Since 2007 the World Bank's gender approach has moved away from the Wolfensohn-era emphasis on gender as central to social development concerns, towards a business case model that involves a far greater role for the private sector in efforts to reduce poverty and achieve gender equity. Using a case study of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and its project, 'Doing Business', to promote the ease of doing business across the world, I ask what this new direction entails for the Bank's...

This report is about how women entrepreneurs can contribute more to the quality and direction of economic and social development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Economic growth in the Middle East has been remarkable since 2004, mainly because of higher oil prices. Rapid job growth has followed, driven mainly by the private sector. Yet the region still faces two important challenges: the first is to create better jobs for an increasingly educated young workforce; the second...

This chapter aims to shed light on the nature of men’s and women’s enterprises in Africa, to assess the extent to which the constraints and obstacles faced by women and men entrepreneurs may differ, and to address whether the constraints and obstacles entrepreneurs face affect the productivity and performance of men’s and women’s businesses differently.We begin with a brief overview of gender in the economy, followed by a more detailed analysis of available Enterprise Survey data where key...

This report examines the legal, administrative, and regulatory barriers that are preventing women in Kenya from contributing fully to the Kenyan economy. Building on the 2004 Foreign Investment and Advisory Service (FIAS) report, “Improving the Commercial Legal Framework and Removing Administrative and Regulatory Barriers to Investment,” this study looks at the bureaucratic barriers facing women in Kenya through a gender lens. The report makes specific recommendations to address...

This paper brings together gender analysis, small scale enterprise analysis, and gender budget analysis in a development context. The paper demonstrates that gender matters not only to the ownership of an SME, but also to its most likely principal activity, the stock of the assets that it possesses, the labour that it utilizes, the costs that it faces, the revenues that it generates, and the profits that it earns. In particular, lower earnings for female-owned SMEs can be attributed to the...