‘Accelerating Action’ towards gender-just health responses

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day of “Accelerate Action” highlights the urgency which is needed to tackle the increasingly complex threats to progress on women’s rights and gender equality. Across the world, women and girls' rights are sliding back in a myriad of ways. Whether it’s access to safe abortions or disastrous consequences of violence in Gaza and Sudan, hand in hand with news of funding changes within public health and humanitarian response, and recent backlash towards diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives globally, real world consequences for women and girls are being felt everywhere. The health and social impacts of infectious disease outbreaks continue to fall heavily on women, as discussed in a recent Rapid Gender Analysis Mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The scale of the problem is vast and those with the capacity to make a difference must step up and contribute to meaningful change.
 
To push forward the crucial agenda on women and girls’ rights in relation to health, we must focus on systemic change, with an emphasis on shifting power to women and girls across the health system. The UK Public Health Rapid Support Team (UK-PHRST) is building partnerships with organisations who work at the intersections of gender equity and health, and undertaking capacity strengthening projects that ensure the ownership of technical expertise is handed over to our partners. In light of this, I am delighted to co-write this blog with a key collaborator– Stellah Bosire – CEO  of the Africa Centre for Health Systems and Gender Justice (ACHSGJ). Stellah’s commitment to grassroots feminist organising and movement-building for health equity and gender justice serves as an exemplary model for ensuring that women are recognised as the leaders they already are.
 
To mark International Women's Day, we’re reflecting on a Training of Trainers in Citizen Ethnography pilot co-delivered between UK-PHRST and ACHSGJ in Dar es Salaam in February 2025. Participants included women’s rights organisations (WROs) alongside UNICEF Tanzania and the Tanzania Red Cross National Society who specialise in gender justice at the community level. The aim of this training was to enhance existing qualitative data collection skills through applied social science theory. These skills can be deployed in health emergencies to collect high quality community feedback data that enables effective advocacy and intervention design. Weaving a gender justice lens throughout the training was central to the project to ensure data collection captures the needs and capacities of all genders and debunks a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
 
In this blog, we consider three key lessons from the training that will guide our future activities as a partnership and act as foundational principles to accelerate action in women and girls’ rights in health moving forward.
 
1. Social science to support gender justice
 
The Citizen Ethnography Training is designed to integrate community level data into intervention design in outbreak response which pays attention to the needs of men, women, boys and girls. A key critique of the biomedical model of outbreak response is its narrow focus on disease and physical symptoms, often overlooking the complex interplay of social, psychological, and environmental factors that shape an individual’s health and well-being.
 
A significant aspect often ignored is the role of gender dynamics. Gender dynamics play a significant role in how people respond to disease outbreaks including exposure and response to disease, access to critical health information and services, to societal responsibilities and sense of self. Furthermore, the intersection of gender with other social aspects like socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age further amplifies existing health inequities. Taken together, these factors create disparities in disease risk and healthcare access across communities, leading to preventable deaths and worsening health outcomes if not addressed.
 
To demonstrate the gender dynamics of leadership in communities, a key exercise undertaken in the training involved power mapping men and women’s leaders in participants’ respective communities. It is often assumed that men are the power holders and gate keepers within communities, but actively challenging that assumption allowed participants to see that engaging with those who hold non-traditional leadership roles will enhance their research and subsequent findings.
 
2. Centering community-based organisations in response
 
Bringing together ten incredible WROs and two key response partners reinforced the critical role of community members — especially women — in outbreak response. These organisations work with vulnerable and ostracised women and girls every day and are the experts in both building women’s capacity to take ownership over their health, as well advocating on their behalf when traditional power holders write them off.
 
In our mapping and prioritisation exercises, we found the WROs responses are targeted, effective and centred on ensuring the most vulnerable have access to the services they desperately need. In addition, their networks mean social science activities could be more rapid and streamlined within a response.

Health response actors must prioritise empowering and strengthening their work, as their local knowledge, trust within communities, and ability to drive grassroots action are essential for creating sustainable, impactful change. If we are committed to accelerating action for women and girls in a resource restricted era, we need community-based organisations more than they need us.
 
3. Training Trainers – shifting knowledge and ownership
 
Using a gender justice and participatory approach, the workshop was designed to acknowledge and combat long-standing colonial legacies that have historically slowed down social science knowledge in the Global South. At the core of this intervention was our commitment to a 'train-the-trainer model, intentionally shifting our approach to place skills and knowledge  in the hands of women-led organisations and national civil society partners.
 
This approach strengthens local agency, ensuring that participants are not passive recipients but custodians of knowledge who drive their own inquiry. By doing so, we affirm the expertise already present within communities and equip future citizen ethnographers to generate rapid, context-specific insights, free from reliance on outside experts. This model is not only practical but a feminist imperative, challenging knowledge hierarchies, centering the lived experiences of women, and amplifying organisations that already lead training, share skills and cultivate collective power.
 
Accelerating action now and in the future
 
As we mark this year’s International Women’s Day, our workshop makes evident that solutions to health crises already exist within communities, driven by the knowledge and leadership of grassroots WROs. Going forward, we must continue to prioritise community-based solutions, ensuring that those who know their communities best are empowered to lead the way in shaping health responses.
 
To that end, the UK-PHRST is committed to handing over the finalised Citizen Ethnography Training Of Train materials and facilitation guide to the participants, in turn enabling them to boost the capacity for citizen ethnography within their organisations. In addition, we will continue to partner with the Africa Centre for Health Systems & Gender Justice, whose networks are best placed to embed this training regionally across multiple grass roots level organisations.
 
Working in partnership enables us to combine our strengths and achieve shared goals of accelerating action for women and girls in a time where collaboration is essential for overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges. Our role is not only to acknowledge these realities but to actively shift power, invest in local expertise, and champion gender-just approaches that make outbreak responses more equitable and effective. True empowerment means ensuring that women and girls are not just beneficiaries of health systems, but architects of their transformation.
 
Read more about the Africa Centre for Health Systems and Gender Justice here. 
 

Reply