Office on Women’s Health Coalition for a Healthier Community Initiative: Evaluating gender-aware public health systems approaches to gender disparities

Background/significance:  The Office on Women’s Health funded 10 coalitions in urban and rural communities to integrate gender analyses into policies and programs that provide equitable services to improve women and girls’ health.

Objective/purpose: This paper reports on the national evaluation plans for the Initiative, including the logic model, systems-level outcome indicators, and strategies to evaluate coalition functioning and cost effectiveness.

Methods:  Participatory evaluation methods were used to engage OWH staff and grantees in developing the logic model and evaluation plans.  To select indicators for system-level outcomes, the national evaluation team conducted a systematic literature review. To assess the evaluability of the Initiative in terms of these outcomes, the team conducted site visits to grantee communities, engaged gender experts in review of progress and evaluation reports, and conducted OWH staff briefings. 

Results:  Key system-level indicators were finalized for the national evaluation. Site visits and document reviews indicated that grantees have varying levels of evaluation capacity. Webinars and in-person grantee trainings have been used to facilitate a more resource efficient national evaluation. Gender experts identified areas in which integration of gender analyses (which grantees conducted during a planning phase) could be strengthened. Indicators have been identified to assess the extent of gender integration as well as coalition functioning and the cost effectiveness of these approaches to improving women and girls’ health.

Discussion/Conclusions:  Gender-aware public health systems approaches pose several challenges to implementation and evaluation.  Providing evaluation capacity building as part of the national evaluation can strengthen the evaluability of such systems-level interventions.