Global Health 50/50: Equality Works rating of GAIN

GAIN has improved its performance on gender equality in 2019 Global Health 50/50: Equality Works report.

The 2019 Global Health 50/50 report – Equality Works was launched on 7 March 2019, appropriately a day before International Women’s Day, by President Sahle-Work Zewde of Ethiopia and the UN Economic Commission of Africa, Chief Vera Songwe in Addis Ababa. Published by Global Health 50/50, an independent initiative to advance action and accountability for gender equality in global health and contribute to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, this year’s report focuses on equality in the workplace looking into gender-related policies and practices of almost 200 organisation that seek to influence global health.

Two Indian women look proudly at the camera and smile. © GAIN

“We are pleased to be making improvement in our performance on this critical indicator” said Lawrence Haddad, GAIN Executive Director “but today, International Women’s Day, is a reminder of how much more we all have to do to advance gender equality. There is no room for complacency”.

Following a positive score in the 2018 report with room for improvement, GAIN has actively engaged in the strengthening its commitment to gender equality, by making its workplace gender policy publicly available and balancing board parity including the appointment of Catherine Bertini as the new Board Chair. Thanks to internal efforts, these indicators marked green on the 2019 edition and today, GAIN proudly sits among the 17 high performing organisations on gender equality.

We are pleased to be making improvement in our performance on this critical indicator.

Lawrence Haddad, Executive Director, GAIN

GAIN is pleased at the report’s positive assessment of our commitment to gender equality, demonstrated through the definition of gender we rely on, our programmatic gender strategy, our commitment to sex disaggregation of monitoring and evaluation data, and the availability of our sexual harassment and parental leave policy. Going forward we will maintain these standards, working to address areas where there is still room to do better such as balancing the presence of men and women in our senior management.

Furthermore, GAIN is currently updating its internal workplace policy as well as the programmatic gender strategy for them to be aligned and gender-transformative. All of the above has been accomplished by the joint efforts of all GAIN staff, who will continue to monitor and strive to improve our performance.