Gender Transformative Approaches

A gender-transformative approach means that promoting gender equality—the shared control of resources and decision-making—and women’s empowerment are central to an intervention. In the context of family planning and reproductive health, a gender-transformative approach entails not only improving women’s access to key services and contraceptive methods but also helping communities understand and challenge the social norms that perpetuate inequalities between men and women. It also involves engaging men and boys in ways that address their reproductive health needs and that support women’s and girls’ family planning and reproductive health decision-making.

While programming that embodies a gender-transformative approach has grown over the past two decades, most of these programs remain small in scale. To foster scale up of these initiatives, the Evidence Project is examining how and why these programs have achieved positive outcomes related to family planning, reproductive health, and gender dynamics. The project also works with programs to incorporate evidence from gender-transformative approaches into broader programmatic strategies.