Organizational Results

During our most recent program year (July 2020 to June 2021), EngenderHealth—in collaboration with our government and nongovernmental organization partners—supported the provision of high-quality, comprehensive contraceptive care as part of SRHR services through 13 of our 26 projects, located in eight countries. Through EngenderHealth-supported services, we helped approximately 2,919,000 individuals access contraceptive care and generated an estimated 8,331,400 couple years of protection. Our work also helped avert an estimated 3,821,700 unintended pregnancies, 74,200 child deaths, 5,000 maternal deaths, and 918,600 unsafe abortions. In addition, we contributed to direct healthcare cost savings of approximately $326.9 million.

EngenderHealth strives to help shape supportive national policy environments for SRHR, which facilitate positive results across the socioecological model. During our most recent program year, EngenderHealth collaborated with partner organizations to support 19 policy changes in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, and Tanzania. Of these policy changes, 13 focused on promoting gender equity and advancing SRHR; 4 supported ensuring access to safe, high-quality abortion care and postabortion contraception; and 2 focused on promoting the availability of and access to SRHR services for young people ages 10 to 24. For example, in Ethiopia, EngenderHealth contributed to the third edition of the National Gender Mainstreaming Manual for Health and we assisted the Ethiopia Ministry of Health staff in effectively integrating a gender perspective into all aspects of strategic and programs planning and ensuring the needs of adolescents and young people were fully addressed in the new version.

Ensuring that health systems provide high-quality, gender-equitable SRHR services is fundamental to ensuring positive change at all levels. This year, we worked with and through governments to achieve sustainable and equitable health impacts. In addition to broader cross-cutting initiatives, our core activities included supporting the integration of gender-transformative and inclusive programming throughout health systems; transitioning health facility oversight to governments; strengthening the capacity of healthcare staff, government officials, and influential leaders in the community; and fostering client satisfaction with SRHR services.

EngenderHealth supported skills development for a range of healthcare staff, training more than 14,600 clinical staff (doctors, nurses, midwives, and others) and community health workers across 15 projects. Two-thirds of these trainees were female. EngenderHealth also trained thousands of influential community members—including peer educators, young people, religious and community leaders, and police—in sexual and gender-based violence prevention; gender, youth, and social inclusion; contraceptive counseling; and community engagement.

Survey findings from EngenderHealth-supported facilities in multiple countries indicated high levels of client satisfaction and receipt of high-quality SRHR services. For example, under the Postabortion Care Family Planning (PAC-FP) project in Tanzania, PAC clients’ satisfaction with the quality of information and counseling on postabortion care increased from 15% at baseline in 2016 to 95% at endline in 2020. Together, our efforts strengthened service quality and delivery across health systems.

Our work also engages with communities to share gender-inclusive and youth-friendly SRHR messaging and programming to ensure they have the knowledge and resources they need to access services. This year, EngenderHealth directly reached over 297,000 people with SRHR messaging, including messaging on abortion, contraception, fistula, sexual and gender-based violence, and other elements of SRHR, including SRHR in the context of COVID-19. For example, in India, the KARMA project’s Broadening Accountability of Men campaign communicated the benefits of contraception. It encouraged the adoption of positive attitudes toward contraception among 36,800 men in two states through community-based initiatives, such as street plays, mobile roadshows, interactive discussions, and call centers. We also indirectly reached millions of people with SRHR messaging through mass media activities, such as television and SMS.

Individuals, and their ability to fully realize their SRHR, are at the heart of what we do. This year, EngenderHealth supported approximately 2.9 million clients to adopt a contraceptive method of their choice. Of these estimated clients, 618,000 (21%) were young people under age 25. In addition, our projects supported the provision of an estimated 64,800 high-quality, comprehensive abortion care services and 790 fistula repair surgeries. Across countries, EngenderHealth also supported services for about 72,500 survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, of whom 80% were female clients. Overall, 30% of male and 23% of female survivors receiving services were under 20.

Our impact across the socioecological model is facilitated by our use of evidence-based best practices, our technical expertise and leadership, and our collaborative partnerships all working toward shared goals. In addition, we share what we learn internally and with the broader community through blogs and social media, conference participation, journal articles, technical briefs, webinars, and more. Between July 2020 and July 2021:

• We participated in numerous international conferences and events, including Global Health Science and Practice Technical Exchange Conference; International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) #NotWithoutFP Forum; Virtual 32nd International Confederation of Midwives Triennial Congress; and Women and Girls Summit.
• We published 12 journal articles on critical SRHR topics and 27 policy, technical, and research briefs.
• We made a significant contribution to the global health community with our GYSI Analysis Framework and Toolkit.
• We shared approximately 1,400 messages across our social media, which garnered 2,100 mentions and shares.
• We continued to engage in different partnership models, including developing a unique youth-adult partnership with CHOICE for Youth and Sexuality, a global youth-led SRHR organization.
• For the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign, our West and Central Africa team leveraged partnerships with influential activists, social media experts, youth-led organizations, and community members across Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali to celebrate their activism journeys and amplify their work.

Organizational effectiveness underpins all our strategic plan results. EngenderHealth has continued to strengthen our position as an effective, gender-equitable organization through several different initiatives in the past program year.

As part of our commitment to gender, equity, diversity, and inclusion, EngenderHealth conducted our second internal gender pay-gap analysis with data from September 2020. This time, we added data on our US-based and global staff’s race and ethnicity to the pay gap analysis. We also finalized our gender, equity, diversity, and inclusion policy and worked to ensure that we apply a Do No Harm Framework across all projects. In addition, we implemented our GYSI Analysis and Toolkit quarterly, enabling us to monitor and internally reflect on the systematic gender, youth, and social inclusion approaches in our projects.

EngenderHealth’s strong operational foundation, commitment to continuous quality improvement, and value-based culture support the achievement of all of our results and are in service of our commitment to strengthen and improve gender-equitable and high-quality services through strengthening communities, systems, and policies.