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Gender policy

The GAVI Alliance has a special commitment to helping everyone in the developing world gain equal access to vaccines and health care, whether they are women or men, girls or boys.

Women in the world’s poorest countries are often more susceptible to disease than men because, from an early age, they do not share equal access to basic health care - with far-reaching consequences for future generations.

As the primary child carer in developing countries, a mother’s health is inseparable from her child’s. Not only do healthy mothers give birth to healthy children; women are also the first to recognise and seek treatment for their sons’ and daughters’ illnesses.

Gender gap

Gender inequality in health care provision starts long before motherhood. According to GAVI-commissioned research, when national health services fail to focus on gender, more boys tend to be immunised than girls.

Significant gender gaps exist in Asia and Africa between the total percentage of boys and girls that have been immunised: 13.4 percent in India, 7.2 percent in Gabon and 4.3 percent in Ethiopia. In India, a 2004 study of 16 states showed that girls were five times less likely to be fully immunised than boys.

In some countries, there is an opposite trend. In Nigeria, for example, the proportion of boys immunised is 7.9 percent lower than the proportion of girls.

Millennium Development Goals

Approved by GAVI boards in June 2008, the GAVI Alliance Gender Policy recognises that guaranteeing equal access is a key factor in expanding immunisation coverage and reinforcing national health services. Drawing closely on the experiences and capacity of its partners, the Alliance is committed to:

  • Promoting a more coordinated effort, at country and global level, to fulfilling international commitments to gender equality in health
  • Raising awareness of the issue
  • Providing leadership

The policy results from GAVI partners working together through a Gender Advisory Committee. See partners’ gender policies.

GAVI’s commitment to gender equality was underlined when Julian Lob-Levyt became an MDG3 torchbearer committing himself to doing something extra in support of gender equality and women’s economic development.