This blog spotlights MCGL’s Choices, Voices, Promises program, a gender-focused curriculum for very young adolescents (VYAs) between the ages of 10-14 years, as well as parents and communities. The intervention aims to help VYAs discover alternatives to conventional gender roles and behaviors using a curriculum of age and developmentally appropriate activities designed to stimulate discussion and reflection among VYA girls and boys.

Local women-led and women’s rights organizations still face significant barriers to participation in the formal humanitarian architecture. They often report feeling looked down upon by larger organizations, unheard in decision-making spaces, and forced to defend their expertise. In this interview, Ms. Theresia Ngoe discusses the discrimination that local women-led and women’s rights organizations are facing in the humanitarian space and how to tackle the barriers that keep them from accessing funding and resources.

Household surveys, a principal source of data on violence against women and girls (VAWG), often underrepresent the extent of the problem due to the survivors’ shame, stigmatization, fear of consequences, and other barriers. This blog outlines a recent IFPRI discussion paper on a randomized experiment in Senegal comparing two methods of survey data collection on VAWG, showing that an anonymous approach yielded consistently higher reported levels of violence across a diverse set of VAWG indicators, as compared to in-person interviews.

This blog argues that acts of discrimination are institutionalized in systems and decision-making processes that exclude underrepresented groups at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and disability. In order to realize the right to health for these groups, it is necessary to identify and eliminate inequities in accessing health information and services.

In the last decade, the problem of gender-based violence (GBV) in displacement settings and its devastating consequences on the lives of emergency-affected persons has been documented extensively. This blog highlights the World Bank’s Strengthening Disaster Risk Management and Climate Resilience Project’s efforts in Haiti to reduce GBV risks during emergency evacuation and displacement by expanding the network of resilient and safe emergency shelters in high-risk areas.

The Common Framework for Tracking Government Spending on Family Planning (FP) is an approach that holds governments accountable for meeting their commitments to fund FP supplies and service. Data collected using the Common Framework are summarized in FP budget scorecards, easy-to-understand visual snapshots that illustrate how much governments are actually allocating and spending on FP, as well as how transparent the government is in making FP budget data available to the public. This blog captures the experiences of four organizations using the FP budget scorecards to present findings and achieve their advocacy goals.