SHOPS Plus brings a private health sector lens to the movement for gender equality

From June 3-6, 2019, SHOPS Plus joined 8,000 world leaders, advocates, and academics in Vancouver for the Women Deliver conference on gender equality. The project released a new brief, showcased a digital poster, and launched updated versions of two data visualization tools.

In April, the SHOPS Plus team in Nigeria hosted a satellite event in advance of the conference titled "Women: Our Grassroots Experience." Speakers addressed gender issues and how they affect family planning and reproductive health service delivery in Nigeria. 

• “Saving Children through Increased Access to Care: The Transformational Power of Data” earned a place at the Solutions Gallery. Authored by Tess Shiras, Sarah Bradley, and Lauren Rosapep, the digital poster showed how countries are using data to advocate for improved health programs.

• Empowering Women Health Providers through Social Franchising: Stories from Kenya and Uganda, a recently published brief resonated with many at the conference. It found that the increased opportunities social franchising provides—such as training and access to finance—improves the ability of women franchisees to provide high quality health services, mentor younger women, make household spending decisions, and expand their businesses. 

• Private Sector Counts, the online tool for donors and program implementers, showed visitors at the booth the role of the private and public sectors in child health and family planning. Newly updated with family planning data, the tool empowers decision makers and program implementers by showing where women go for contraceptive methods by age, socioeconomic status, residence (urban/rural) and more.

• Family Planning Market Analyzer, the innovative, easy-to-use tool that combines data from Demographic and Health Surveys and FP2020’s projections of modern contraceptive prevalence, debuted an updated version with a new policy scenario generator. This improved version allows users to explore potential scenarios for a total market approach.

At the end of the conference, participants were asked "How will you use your power?" Watch the highlight video with photos, posts, and a series of videos showing how some of our staff plan to use their power.