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Adolescence | HIV and AIDS | Food Security & Nutrition| Economic Development | Reproductive Health | Violence against Women | Research Areas
ADOLESCENCE PROJECTS
Adolescent Reproductive Health and Sexuality in India: A Contextual Approach to Intervention Research
ICRW is coordinating multi-site intervention research studies to develop effective programs for adolescent sexual and reproductive health and development in India. Married and unmarried, as well as urban and rural adolescent women and men are included in these programs.
The interventions address five broad concerns in adolescent reproductive health and sexuality: developing capabilities, skills and support; gender bias; sexual vulnerability; providing reproductive health services and information; and the role of men and boys, family, and community.
Read more about this project.
For more information, please contact Rohini Pande or Sunayana Walia.
Child Marriage
While many countries have national laws and have signed international agreements forbidding early marriage, girls under the age of 18 continue to marry throughout the developing world, as gender roles, traditional marriage systems, and poverty dictate the practice. ICRW is engaged in advocacy to build strong leadership and support among U.S. policy-makers for improving the health, security, and well-being of adolescent girls in developing countries through a particular focus on preventing early marriage and promoting the health needs and rights of married adolescents.
For more information, please contact Kathleen Selvaggio.
Coalition for Adolescent Girls: Building Evidence
The Coalition for Adolescent Girls seeks to make the world's adolescent girls and their needs and strengths more visible, and to mobilize support for greater investment in them. The Coalition's work contributes to the development of powerful messages about girls, and the cultivation of the world's leaders in development and other fields to take up their cause.
ICRW, in partnership with the Population Council, the Center for Global Development and the Coalition secretariat, are undertaking the synthesis and analysis of the evidence necessary to frame and support the Coalition for Adolescent Girls' Call to Action. The Call to Action will mobilize both traditional policy-makers and "non-usual" actors to increase their commitment and resources for the benefit of adolescent girls in the developing world.
For more information, please contact Margaret Greene.
DIME (Developing Innovative Monitoring and Evaluation Capacity in India)
ICRW is providing technical assistance to three community-based organizations in India to design and implement simple and feasible monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems for their programs on adolescent reproductive health (ARH). The organizations are: Gujarat AIDS Awareness and Prevention Unit (GAP), Foundation for Education and Development (Doosra Dashak), and SAMUHA.
Community-based groups implementing ARH projects recognize the importance of M&E to enhance the effectiveness, credibility, and replicability of their projects, but most groups lack the technical capacity for high quality M&E. ICRW's goal is to help build technical capacity on the most essential elements of M&E for these selected groups, without requiring them to invest unduly in full-blown research or dilute the attention devoted to their programmatic efforts. Based on the modules developed and lessons learned, ICRW is distilingl an M&E framework that is efficient, workable and effective, and can be used to streamline future M&E efforts in India and elsewhere.
For more information, please contact Rohini Pande or Sunayana Walia.
DISHA (Development Initiative on Supporting Healthy Adolescents)
ICRW is undertaking a three year initiative aimed at developing, implementing, and testing integrated approaches for improving the reproductive health and lives of young people in the Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand. ICRW is partnering with six youth-serving grassroots organizations in the two states: IDF, CENCORED, DORD, AID, Badlao, and TCS. The project aims to delay marriage and childbearing among youth, provide them with alternatives to early marriage, increase their access to reproductive health information and services, and increase the capacity of local groups in addressing the interconnected needs of young people.
ICRW provides extensive technical and capacity-building support to the partner organizations in the following areas: design and implementation of integrated interventions; program monitoring and evaluation; data collection, management and analysis; strategic communication of lessons learned; and advocacy with key stakeholders for addressing and meeting the needs of youth.
Read about DISHA's integrated approach.
Read about the results of a baseline survey designed to assess needs in the areas where DISHA is being implemented.
For more information, please contact Anjala Kanesathasan.
Girls and HIV/AIDS: Developing Gender-Sensitive Strategies to Reduce Young Women's and Girls' Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS
In many societies, gender norms create an imbalance in power between women and men that limits women's sexual autonomy and gives them less access to resources. Such inequalities are root causes of women's particular vulnerability to HIV infection.
Young women and girls are even more vulnerable, with less access to key resources than men and older women in terms of knowledge and skills, economic opportunities, social support, and political influence. ICRW is currently working with UNICEF headquarters and country offices in Botswana, Burkina Faso, and India to develop and implement program and policy strategies that address gender and age-related needs of adolescent girls.
For more information, please contact Sarah Kambou.
ICRW's Strategic and Measurement Support to the Nike Foundation
ICRW is providing the Nike Foundation and its partners with strategic and measurement support on programmatic efforts to empower girls in poor countries. ICRW has been a key partner in the development of the Foundation's strategy to support development and poverty reduction efforts by using its resources and expertise to leverage and initiate holistic programs that work to improve youth lives and empower girls.
Nike Foundation-funded initiatives aim at enhancing girls' capabilities, opportunities, and choices by addressing economic opportunity, health and security, leadership, voice and rights, education, and social opportunity. ICRW has developed a measurement framework to evaluate the impact of initiatives funded by the Nike Foundation and is currently implementing the framework by measuring and tracking the impact of specific initiatives in partnership with Foundation grantees.
For more information, please contact Margaret Greene.
Men & Gender Equality Policy Project
Coordinated by ICRW and Instituto Promundo, this three-year research project is running from 2007 to 2010 in India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Chile and potentially additional settings. Funded so far by the MacArthur Foundation, the Foreign Ministry of Norway, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor, this project includes:
- Policy research and analysis on the potential points of leverage for changing male gender norms and men's behaviors related to sexual and reproductive health and maternal and child health. This research involves developing national and comparative policy tools for analyzing existing policies and identifying strategies for achieving large-scale change related to men.
- The International Men and Gender Equality Survey, a standardized questionnaire (one applied with women and one with men, 1000 of each) to measure men's behaviors and attitudes on a range of issues related to gender equality. This survey builds on a Norwegian questionnaire for women and men on men's behaviors and attitudes, gender-based violence, fatherhood, sexual and reproductive health, domestic work and work-life balance. Additional questions are being added from a South African survey on violence, and from the Gender Equitable Men (GEM) Scale.
- In-depth qualitative interviews with men engaged in care giving professions. What led these “pioneers” to this work? What kinds of resistance and affirmation have they encountered? This research will provide insights into the deeper processes of social change in our diverse settings.
With the results of our research, our team will be organizing national and international briefings on the factors that contribute to changes in men's gender-related attitudes and behaviors.
For more information, please contact Margaret Greene.
Nike/CAMFED Collaboration
ICRW is collaborating with CAMFED in the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe to document and assess their unique approach to improving the economic livelihoods of young women. ICRW is supporting CAMFED's efforts to develop a more comprehensive evaluation of its program through a retrospective review of existing program documents and data archives, along with a field-based rapid assessment of ongoing progress.
ICRW has been working with CAMFED to integrate monitoring and evaluation into project planning, implementation and analysis. The monitoring and evaluation will provide the opportunity for communities to be involved in learning throughout the project cycle, as well as generate information that can be shared with stakeholders and used to inform the scaling-up of CAMFED's education and empowerment programs for girls and young women in Africa.
For more information, please contact Margaret Greene.
kNot Ready: Exploring Policy and Program Initiatives to Delay Early Marriage for Girls
Some 25,000 girls a day will marry over the next 10 years, so ICRW is launching a two-year initiative, Knot Ready, to explore initiatives to delay early marriage for girls. For this initiative, the ICRW team will undertake a review and analysis of intervention programs and policies that aim to delay age at marriage for young women in India, and to formulate recommendations for more effective strategies and approaches for reducing the prevalence of early marriage.
In the past few years, research and advocacy have been successful in documenting, and bringing to the attention of program practitioners and policy-makers, the enormous costs of early marriage for girls. Unfortunately, a thorough documentation of good practices, challenges and processes in program and policy initiatives to delay age at marriage is currently lacking.
The findings from this project will address this gap, enabling both policy-makers and development organizations to better address the problem of early marriage by providing specific, evidence-based strategies to counteract it.
For more information, please contact Sreela Das Gupta.
Poverty and Fertility Linkage: Strengthening the Evidence
Poverty reduction has come to occupy center stage of development efforts. Using secondary data from Mexico, the research looks in part at whether conditional cash transfers help children born to very young mother overcome disadvantages in education.
This project contributes to the evidence showing that poor reproductive health undermines the chances of the poor to escape poverty, but that specific interventions may help overcome the disadvantages of very early, high or poorly timed fertility.
For more information, please contact Margaret Greene.
Women's Empowerment and Son Preference
Son preference has been documented in India for the past 100 years, and it has left a marked gap between the numbers of boys and girls in the country. Evidence also suggests that son preference in families with daughters can lead to girls' malnutrition and stunted growth.
This project will expand research on son preference by examining how declining sex ratios relate to fertility reductions, discrimination against girls and other development indicators in South Asia.
Read ICRW's report, Son Preference and Daughter Neglect in India.
For more information, please contact Rohini Pande.