Community-Based Health Agents certified in Madagascar.
© N’Aina Zo Zatovonirina
During the Healthy Families, Healthy Forests project, CI worked with our partners and target communities to improve the effectiveness of our biodiversity conservation initiatives. Through our work, we tried to incorporating gender into our PHE project strategies.
Paying attention to gender is not the same as promoting “women’s issues.” Gender is the economic, social, political, and cultural attributes and opportunities associated with being male or female. Gender relates to the socially constructed differences and relations between men and women within a given context.
Based on our research and on-the-ground field project experiences, we acknowledge that women and men have gender-defined roles and responsibilities that affect their ability to engage in conservation activities and how the benefits and costs of conservation interventions are distributed. Therefore, we believe that gender analysis of the constraints and opportunities is a critical step in building broad-based strategies to achieve health and conservation outcomes.
IN DEPTH: Incorporating Gender into PHE Strategies: Experiences from CI (PDF - 385 KB)