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In Ethiopia’s Amhara region, almost half of all girls are married by the age of 15. By the time they turn 18, nearly three out of four girls are married. Early marriage presents many health risks for these girls that are compounded by their lack of economic autonomy.

To address this vulnerability, ICRW is working with CARE Ethiopia to improve the sexual and reproductive health and economic well-being of adolescent girls by combining health programs with economic empowerment interventions to reach 5,000 married girls in Amhara.

ICRW is evaluating the intervention by comparing an implementation model that combines both reproductive health and economic empowerment training to models that provide each in isolation and against a comparison group receiving no programming. The goal is to better understand the potential synergies between health and economic interventions and outcomes. The core indicators being examined include changes in girls’ sexual and reproductive health, such as their use of contraceptives, and changes in their economic independence, such as whether they use savings accounts. Through exploring these questions, the project aims to offer tested best practices to apply in future programs for girls.

Half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and almost all global population growth will occur in towns and cities in developing countries in the coming decades. As the world's urban poor population increases, the need for reproductive health services also is accelerating. The Urban Health Initiative (UHI) addresses family planning and reproductive health needs of the urban poor in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal.

ICRW, through the Measurement, Learning and Evaluation (MLE) project, will conduct rigorous evaluations of the UHI in Uttar Pradesh, India. The goal is to measure the project’s impact on the prevalence of contraceptives, identify which interventions are most cost-effective and which ones are most likely to increase the use of contraceptives among the urban poor. The UHI project will explore a variety of approaches to improve the availability of contraceptives, such as integrating family planning into existing maternal and child health services and improving demand through vouchers. Ultimately, the MLE project aims to assist the Uttar Pradesh government in revitalizing the state’s family planning program in urban areas.

The MLE website features selected research and publications on urban reproductive health, presentations, feature stories and updates on activities. Visit MLE's website to access ICRW's report on the findings from an analysis of the baseline survey results from urban samples in six cities in Uttar Pradesh, India.

A majority of women in India are exposed to HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STI) because of the behavior of their spouses. Yet few interventions focus on addressing the HIV and STI prevention needs of married women. To fill this gap, ICRW launched an innovative four-year program to engage women and couples in culturally-appropriate, HIV/STI prevention programs based in reproductive health clinics. The program partnered with the University of Connecticut and received financial support from the U.S.-based National Institute of Mental Health.

• Alcohol Use and STI among Men in India: Evidences from a National Household Survey
• A methodology for building culture and gender norms into intervention: An example from Mumbai, India

ICRW is evaluating the implementation of India’s Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005 (PWDVA), which is designed to protect the rights of women who experience domestic violence and facilitate their access to justice. In collaboration with the Lawyers Collective Women’s Rights Initiative (LCWRI), we are monitoring efforts to improve the ability of key agencies to implement the law.

ICRW is working to document how various interventions conducted by LCWRI strengthen India’s overall response to violence. Interventions include capacity development workshops for law enforcers (police, protection officers and magistrates), legal aid to women facing violence at home, and awareness-building campaigns about the law among women and the public. ICRW is using surveys, interviews and group discussions in three major states to assess various stakeholders’ attitudes toward the law. ICRW is also designing a monitoring system to track the effectiveness of the PWDVA on a yearly basis.

ICRW is a partner on AIDSTAR-One, which provides rapid technical assistance to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and U.S. government country teams to build effective, well-managed, and sustainable HIV and AIDS programs and to promote new leadership in the global campaign against HIV. AIDSTAR-One leverages the expertise of its diverse partner organizations to provide targeted assistance in knowledge management, program implementation support, technical leadership, program sustainability and strategic planning.

Through this partnership, ICRW draws from its expertise on gender and women's vulnerability to HIV to develop gender-responsive HIV programming. ICRW also provides technical leadership in the area of preventing alcohol-related HIV risk.

Grassroots paralegals are community-based volunteers who provide legal education and legal aid. Grassroots paralegals can be an important ally in ensuring that women exercise their right to property and assets. ICRW and Uganda Land Alliance have been working together to develop, use, and disseminate training curricula and field tools for paralegals on gender and property rights and to deliver key messages about women’s property rights to both paralegals and their communities.

ICRW also worked to build the ability of Uganda Land Alliance and the grassroots paralegals to document their cases to assess over time patterns in cases and communities’ needs, understand who their clients are, and identify successful approaches to handling cases. Regular process evaluation exercises focus on knowledge gaps in communities, building paralegals’ knowledge of women’s property rights, paralegals’ working relationships with local leaders, and increasing local awareness of the paralegals as a resource. Lessons learned from these efforts will increase the effectiveness of training programs as ICRW and local partners promote grassroots paralegal efforts throughout Africa.

ICRW is working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its partners to strengthen their attention to gender in various agricultural projects in Africa and South Asia. ICRW reviews project designs and advises the foundation on how to address the distinct issues that affect the work of women and men farmers. ICRW also guides implementing organizations on ways to improve outreach to women farmers.

For example, ICRW provided recommendations to TechnoServe in Kenya and Tanzania in an effort to increase the incomes of small-scale farmers by improving the quality of their coffee in order to sell it in global markets. ICRW’s recommendations included approaches to guarantee that women benefit from the program along with men - such as having full membership in farmers’ cooperatives - increasing their leadership opportunities, and receiving payment for their labor on the coffee crop.

Investing in women is recognized not only as the right thing to do but also the smart thing to do. Mounting evidence demonstrates that increases in women’s income lead to improvements in children’s health, nutrition and education. But more rigorous evaluation of projects aimed at women’s economic development is crucial to maintain their support and apply lessons learned to future projects. To address this need, ICRW is working with UNIFEM and the World Bank to demonstrate and measure the impact of women’s economic development programs on women’s empowerment and broader development goals.

The Results-based Initiative is implementing six innovative projects aimed at increasing women’s economic capacity. The projects include providing time-saving technology to bamboo handicraft producers in Laos and Cambodia and business support services to women micro-entrepreneurs in Peru. ICRW, with local partners, will measure the projects’ impact on women’s decision-making capabilities, control over resources, personal security and autonomy. ICRW anticipates that the resulting best practices and lessons learned will generate further action on women’s economic empowerment as a priority area for development programs overall.

The Gender, Land and Asset Survey was developed and piloted by ICRW and its partners, Associates Research Uganda, Limited and the University of KwaZulu-Natal to measure the full spectrum of women’s and men’s property rights – including ownership, use, control and decision making over land, housing and productive assets, such as small farm equipment. The first round of the survey interviewed more than 2,000 men and women in South Africa and Uganda about their relationship to property. The survey was able to quantitatively demonstrate differences not only in women’s and men’s ownership of assets but also differences in documentation and decision-making and point to different socioeconomic factors and life-cycle stages that influence women’s property rights. The second round of the Gender, Land and Asset Survey focuses on understanding the nature of ownership, use, and decision-making within couples living in a context of customary land tenure.

As a pioneer in the effort to quantify women’s property rights on a large scale, ICRW is using the findings of this survey to demonstrate the links among property rights, women's empowerment and domestic violence; to promote more widespread and rigorous measurement of gendered asset rights; and to identify policies that can improve women's rights over land and assets.

Related Resources

• ICRW's Gender, Land and Asset Survey used as case study
• Publication in which the above case study appears - A Toolkit on Collecting Gender & Assets Data in Qualitative & Quantitative Program Evaluations by Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP)