RESEARCH AREAS
Adolescence | HIV and AIDS | Food Security & Nutrition| Economic Development | Reproductive Health | Violence against Women | Research Areas
Reproductive Health and Population Projects
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DISHA (Development Initiative on Supporting Healthy Adolescents) |
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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.
Read the results of this project (1.2 MB).
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.
Developing Innovative Monitoring and Evaluation: Building Capacity among Community-Based Organizations 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 will distill 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 Chandana Saha.
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 Anju Malhotra or Sreela Dasgupta.
Gender, Power, and Susceptibility to STIs/HIV in India
In the southern Indian city of Banglore, ICRW is partnering with the University of California/San Francisco and two Indian NGOs to study the relationship between women's lack of power and their susceptibility to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV. Findings will guide interventions on use of barrier contraceptive methods (such as condoms) and on improving gender-power relationships for women.
For more information, please contact Rohini Pande.
Inner Spaces, Outer Faces Initiative (ISOFI)
ICRW, in collaboration with CARE International, is creating an innovative methodology to address gender and sexuality constraints in reproductive health programming, particularly HIV/AIDS programs. ISOFI uses community-based and participatory methodologies to address the underlying concerns related to gender inequality and sexuality.
The pilot project is being implemented in India and Vietnam. The second phase will refine the methodology and document the measurable effect the integration of gender and sexuality into reproductive health programs has had within the community.
For more information, please contact Sarah Degnan Kambou.
Reproductive Health Commodities
ICRW, in partnership with the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, is undertaking a multi-year project to examine factors that constrain or facilitate women's access to and use of legally available reproductive health commodities. In India, the study explores the relationship between the demand for medical abortion and its availability. In South Africa, the project focuses on the relationship between the demand for and the availability of emergency contraception.
The project will survey manufacturers, providers and users of these emerging commodities to gauge whether they are transforming women's options for controlling reproduction. The research findings will be used to develop recommendations for future research, policy, advocacy and coalition building between reproductive health and economic development communities while strengthening in-country expertise on this issue.
For more information, please contact Priya Nanda.
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.
Women's Reproductive Histories
What is the context in which women become pregnant? How much control do women have? ICRW is analyzing data on women's use of contraceptives, pregnancy outcomes, childbearing desires and empowerment. The study is looking at how women's childbearing preferences change over a woman's lifetime, how and when they use contraceptives and how they react to unintended pregnancies.
ICRW is using longitudinal data from an innovative household survey conducted in Madhya Pradesh, India. These data combine the power of quantitative data with a richness of contextual data usually reserved for qualitative methods. ICRW is analyzing data on more than 9,000 pregnancies occurring over the life course of a representative sample of 2,400 married women, ages 15 to 39 with at least one child.
For more information, please contact Jeffrey Edmeades.