Gender Equity & Social Inclusion

Part of: RESOLVE

For Governments

You want to pay, promote, and empower your female health workers — because they deliver most of your care.

Women are 70% of your community health workforce — but many are unpaid volunteers. They have no leadership positions, no job security, and no voice. You want to change that. We give you the gender audit tools, leadership curriculum, and co-investment templates. You lead the transformation.

✅ You transition female health workers from volunteers to government payroll.

✅ You cut maternal mortality by 45% in program districts.

✅ Women hold 50% of decision-making committee seats.

  • What's holding you back: the invisible workforce

    Women deliver most of your community health services — often for free. They are excluded from training, leadership, and decision-making. And when they are paid, it's less than men for the same work.

    You've heard these stories:

    “I've been a community health worker for 10 years — I've never received a salary.”

    “The ministry meetings have no women at the table.”

    “We know we need to change — we don't know where to start.”

    We've helped ministries change. We provide the data, the curriculum, and the financing models — but you set the targets and lead the reforms.

    Your Plan — 3 steps you take with our tools

    1. Audit gender gaps

    We give you a gender assessment tool. You collect data on pay, roles, and leadership representation across your health system.

    2. Design your equity action plan

    You set targets (e.g., pay equalization, 30% leadership positions, etc.). We provide templates for budgeting and co-investment.

    3. Launch women's leadership academy and payroll transition

    We deliver a leadership training program (you can co-facilitate). We also help you model the fiscal impact of transitioning volunteers to payroll — so you can negotiate co-investment with the finance ministry.

For Donors

You want a health workforce that's actually paid and stable — not a program whose low costs depend on unpaid women's labor that eventually burns out.

It's not a cost problem — it's a hidden liability in every workforce-dependent program you fund.

Programs that rely on unpaid or underpaid female community health workers look efficient on a cost-per-outcome basis – until burnout and turnover erode the workforce actually delivering results. At that point, the program's real costs – retraining, disruption, lost continuity – show up anyway, just later and less predictably. Funding a program built on unpaid labor is also an increasingly visible reputational exposure, not a hidden efficiency.

Transitioning volunteers to payroll, with modeled fiscal impact and finance ministry co-investment, converts an invisible, unstable cost into a budgeted, sustainable one – protecting program continuity and your own reputation at the same time.

  • Your wins with Gender Equity & Social Inclusion, as a donor:

    ✅ Your program's workforce costs become visible and budgeted – not hidden in unpaid labor that eventually burns out and disrupts continuity when you least expect it.

    ✅ You see maternal mortality drop 45% in program districts – a direct outcome of a stabilized, motivated workforce, not a program running on unsustainable free labor.

    ✅ Women hold 50% of decision-making committee seats – a concrete equity outcome you can report, not just a workforce statistic buried in a footnote.

    “Within the payroll transition, your program's real workforce costs become visible and budgeted – not hidden in unpaid labor that eventually burns out and disrupts the continuity you were counting on.”

    This is the same co-investment discipline behind every BAROS-AFRICA engagement: government funding for workforce payroll escalates as the fiscal case is modeled and negotiated, so equity isn't a program you fund indirectly and indefinitely.

    [See our co-investment model]

For Partners

You want your leadership curriculum to drive an actual payroll and policy transition — not a training module delivered once with no connection to whether real structural change followed.

It's not a training-quality risk — it's a structural-follow-through gap.

Gender-focused training organizations often deliver a leadership curriculum that's well-received but disconnected from the harder structural changes – pay equalization, real leadership seats, budget line items – that determine whether anything actually changed for the women who went through it.

The leadership academy is explicitly paired with fiscal modeling and finance ministry co-investment negotiation, so your curriculum connects directly to the budget and policy changes that make the equity outcomes real and durable.

  • Your wins with Gender Equity & Social Inclusion, as a partner:

    ✅ Your leadership curriculum is directly connected to a fiscal transition plan – not a training module disconnected from whether pay and policy actually changed.

    ✅ You co-facilitate the training with government counterparts – meaning your expertise is visibly embedded in the reform, not brought in for a single module and then sidelined from the real negotiation.

    ✅ Your training's outcomes are tracked in concrete terms – 50% of committee seats, transitioned payroll status – not just training completion numbers.

    “Within the leadership academy's first cohort, your curriculum is tied directly to a fiscal co-investment negotiation with the finance ministry – not a training module with no connection to whether real structural change follows.”

    This runs on the same flexible model as every solution: your expertise is embedded in the actual reform, not delivered once and disconnected from whether it took hold.

    [See our full partnership model]