Framework for Engaging Men in Reproductive Health

Illustrations by Ken Morrison, 2007

Men as Agents of Change

Men as Clients

Engaging Men in a Gender Framework

Men as Supportive Partners

Men as Clients

• Men are encouraged to use different reproductive health (RH) services as a way to lessen the burden of RH complications for their partners and improve their own RH.

• Many programs seek to encourage men to use RH services, including family planning (FP), voluntary counseling and testing (VCT), and sexually transmitted infections (STI) services.

•Focus on the positive influence that men can have on women’s reproductive health.• Recognize that men play a major role in decisionmaking, planning, and resource allocation at the household level.• Engage men as supportive partners in maternal health, family planning, neonatal care, and HIV/AIDS.• View men as allies and resources in improving RH.• Take into account the gender inequities that constrain health and explicitly implement activities to address them.

Men as Supportive

Partners

• Implement transformative programs that explicitly address gender norms that put women and men at risk. 

• Ask men to examine gender norms that negatively affect their lives and those of their partners and families.  Ask men to develop healthier alternatives. 

• This approach implicitly assumes that more progressive norms around masculinities and gender will translate into improved reproductive health outcomes. 

Men as Agents of Change

(continued) •These programs are often the most intensive and difficult to carry out because they ask men to make individual changes in an unsupportive environment. 

• A few programs using this approach now are asking men to actively engage other men in their communities in promoting gender equity, including in relation to RH.

Men as Agents of Change

More Resources for Working with Men

Barker G., C. Ricardo, and M. Nascimento. 2007. Engaging Men and Boys in Changing Gender-Based Inequity in Health: Evidence from Programme Interventions. Geneva: World Health Organization.

Available at: http://www.who.int/gender/documents/Engaging_men_boys.pdf

Population Reference Bureau. 2004. SysteMALEtizing Resources for Engaging Men in Sexual and Reproductive Health. Washington: PRB for the IGWG. Available at: http://www.igwg.org/Publications/Systemaletizing.aspx.