Everyone should have access to health care and be protected by health systems regardless of gender. Yet, every day we see how gender hierarchies can create inequalities that impede a person’s ability to live their healthiest life.
Equity is the backbone of resilient, effective public health systems. Without it, public health simply fails to deliver. That’s why Vital Strategies is committed to promoting and integrating gender equity into our programs and practices. We strengthen data systems to improve inclusivity and count people of all genders. Our road safety and overdose prevention programs explore injury prevention from a variety of angles, so all people are safe and protected. And we disrupt the tactics of harmful industries, such as alcohol, tobacco and ultra-processed foods, that use gender-focused marketing to encourage unhealthy behaviors.
Read on to learn how Vital Strategies prioritizes gender equity in our work.
Gender equity starts with data
Significant data gaps exist in global health. That’s why we work to improve inclusivity and count people of all genders in health data and equip governments with the tools to make evidence-based decisions that promote gender equity.
One in three women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes. Beyond this statistic lies women’s stories and experiences that are often ignored, and data that is not collected or used. Policies that protect people from violence, primarily women and girls, must start with the collection, analysis and dissemination of accurate data. For example, to estimate the burden of gender-based violence in Brazil, Vital Strategies Brazil developed an analytic method integrating multiple data sources—from primary care providers, hospitals and police—to enable data-driven decision-making. Only by unraveling this data can we understand the magnitude of the gender-based violencecrisis and inform solutions.
Vital’s Cancer Registry program has partnered with a growing list of countries to shine a light on the importance of building population-based cancer registries that assess the burden of cancer, identify who it’s affecting, and monitor progress made by treatment and prevention programs. For example, until this year, Chad did not have a cancer registry, which is critical for cancer control and prevention. Vital supported the training of public health officials in cancer registry and supported the establishment of Chad’s first-ever cancer registry, which found that cervical cancer was the top cause of cancer among females. This data is publicly available on the Global Cancer Observatory, the cancer surveillance statistics platform developed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Stopping Injuries Before They Happen
Public health interventions must be inclusive of all genders because women, men, transgender, non-binary people and children face varying levels of risk when it comes to injury.
Everyone deserves safe streets. Yet, road crashes are the leading cause of death for young men and children. Vital Strategies works with the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety to protect communities in 15 countries and 27 cities around the world to strengthen road crash surveillance systems, use data to inform policy and action, coordinate international partners and local governments, and create mass media campaigns to change road user behavior. For example, “It Didn’t Have to Happen,” a campaign in Guayaquil, Ecuador, focused on to reduce speeding among motorcyclists and shows the damaging consequences of speeding both to riders and their loved ones.
Our Overdose Prevention Program operates in the United States and partners with governments, providers and communities to implement health-centered solutions. Our work seeks to reduce the stigma that prevents help-seeking behaviors, and to maintaining families, including supporting caretakers at risk of losing custody of their children with caring mobile services that literally meet beneficiaries where they are. Other efforts that focus on guaranteed income payments for new parents with substance use create a safety net to provide stability that supports the overall health and well-being of the family.
Disrupting Gender-Driven Commercial Determinants of Health
Commercial industries, particularly tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy foods, often target people already experiencing inequities, especially women and girls, to promote harmful products. Our programs, in collaboration with a range of partners, expose these exploitative marketing tactics and address their threat to public health.
Alcohol consumption, a leading driver of global mortality, affects women, men and children differently. The gendered dimensions of alcohol-related deaths and their underlying causes are often overlooked. The RESET Alcohol program supports countries to implement cost-effective gender-mainstreamed policies to cut harms and reduce consumption among all genders.
Women are a growth market for the tobacco industry. Our team works to expose tobacco industry behavior that specifically targets women with the goal of getting them to initiate smoking or other tobacco products. Through media, work with policymakers and storytelling, STOP highlights and pushes back on the strategies the tobacco industry uses to target women and other groups, including LGBTQ and indigenous populations. STOP’s goal is to uncover tobacco industry behavior that undermines public health policies designed to reduce tobacco use across all populations.
Achieving gender equity must be foundational and integrated into all dimensions of public health practice and population health improvement. For more information on Vital Strategies’ work to promote gender equity, visit: https://www.vitalstrategies.org/gender-equity/