African Regional Community of Practice for Gender and Health

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Team Members

*indicates student or postdoctoral fellow

Asha George
Lwazi Manzi
Johanna Riha
Woldekidan Amde
*Tima Zgambo

The African Regional Community of Practice (CoP) for Gender and Health in Africa was formed to facilitate a space in which the African community can engage in greater discussions and share ideas on matters of Gender and Health, especially after the Covid-19 global pandemic. It aims to advance African initiatives that facilitate regional understanding, collaboration, and policy-relevant knowledge production and practice on gender and health.

Project Summary

Various African organisations focus on advancing gender equality in health through designing policies, implementing programmes, teaching, research and advocacy. However, stakeholders across different constituencies, geographies and language groups, are not well connected. There also appears to be limited documentation on what works best (for Africa) in integrating gender perspectives into government health programmes as well as the transformative element of gender and health programming. Thus, the main objectives of the CoP are;

To advance collective learning and action on gender and health from an African regional perspective
To advance the decolonisation of global health, and of gender and health, in particular, and support Africanized initiatives that facilitate regional understanding, collaboration and policy-relevant knowledge production

Community members will include programme implementers, policymakers, advocacy groups, international and local organisations, academicians, researchers and students. The community will engage in collaborative learning and action across various online spaces to advance the above agenda across the continent.

The benefit of this CoP is that it will provide a platform for information sharing, dialogue, and relationship building to advance collective learning and action on gender and health across the African continent.

The launch of the community of practice was on 8 June, 2023 at 08:00 SAST.

Co-founders

The African Union Commission on COVID-19 Gender and Stigmatisation Working Group
United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) – Gender and Health Hub- https://iigh.unu.edu/about/unu-iigh/pillar-two/gender-health-hub
School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape – https://soph.uwc.ac.za/