RMNCAH, Nutrition and Immunization Historical Document Reviewer

The International Institute for Primary Health Care -Ethiopia (IPHC-E), which was inaugurated on February 1, 2016, is envisioned to be a world class hub that will disseminate Ethiopias experience using Primary Health Care (PHC) approaches to achieve dramatic improvements in health. The Institute also strives to provide a global perspectivehistorical and currentof PHC experience around the world. The mission of the Institute is to proactively engage and drive the advancement of local and global PHC policy and programming. The Institute provides need-based capacity building training in PHC for trainees from Ethiopia, Africa and the rest of the world. Through PHC implementation research, the Institute provides up-to-date information on the strengths and weaknesses of Ethiopias own PHC program and contributes to continually building an even stronger PHC program that ensures fidelity to standards of care and high levels of service coverage for the population. To realize these aspiration, the Institute focuses on four programmatic areas: global support, local support, PHC advocacy, knowledge management, and capacity building.

Globally women make up the majority of workers in the health sector, even though this is not reflected in roles of leadership in global health as women comprise 70 percent of healthcare workforce, and 90 percent of nursing and midwifery workforce but they hold only 25 percent of leadership roles. Women in global health face specific and unique challenges to reaching leadership roles including lack of mentorship, gender biases, harassment, and gendered networks, institutions, and processes. With the growing demography in low-and middle-income countries and thereby increasing need for health care, there is a need to generate more data and evidence on this topic.

Gender discrimination and stereotypes are preventing women from acquiring senior level, managerial or decision-making positions in health sector institutions and ministries. Moreover, within the hierarchy of health systems, human resources for health demonstrate systematic gender biases in most countries. Female health workers tend to be clustered in low-level, low-paying or unpaid frontline jobs, with the least autonomy and career growth while the higher level, more the professionally rewarding, lucrative, and influential health-sector jobs are male-dominated.

Ethiopia is among the most populated countries located in the horn of Africa. The proportion of women in a parliament sit is 41.5% because of the gender quotas given by the governments larger party, which might not indicate the real opportunities to influence decision making . Since 2018 Ethiopia has also led by a woman president, President Sahle-work Zewdie, being the first woman to hold the office. In addition, both the MOH and its RMNCAH directorate are also leading by women physician leaders.

In the past two decades, the country has registered improvement in strengthening the health system through developing transformation plans and executing in-collaboration with different stakeholders. Accordingly four HSDPs segmented in five-year period from 1997/98-2014/15, followed by HSTP I & II during 2015/16-2024/25, were used to create a resilient health system in general. Currently the RMNCAHNI office of MOH is also composed of reproductive health, family planning, adolescent and youth health service, maternal health, newborn and child health service, nutrition and immunization programs. This RMNCAHNI office is directly supported by multiple stakeholders from GO and NGOs.

Despite the good progress seen in bringing women leaders to the countrys top posts, investments in gender equality have been slowed by a lack of inclusion of womens perspectives, gender-specific expertise and prioritization within national health ministries and global health organizations. Engaging women in shaping investment at the national level brings a more nuanced understanding of the barriers women and girls face, makes women visible, and sets an example of the need to respect their perspectives.

So in order to generate more evidences on how women leaders are involved and contributed for RMNCAHNI policy in Ethiopia, this case study has planned to conduct in eight months from March to October 2024.

As part of the case study, the historical document review will also be conducted. So the reviewer will include 50 documents on RMNCAHNI starting from the 1993GC or the period where the first national health policy has been drafted until 2023GC.

In general, the objectives of the historical document review within the RMNCAHNI spaces are to:

The RMNCAHNI document reviewer will understand the objective of this review, will have a role of identifying potential health policy, guidelines and strategies, will screen relevant documents, extract the women leaders participation in the document, writing a report on the document review findings based on the standard template provided by the project.

Reports to:Project Lead/PI