Integration of gender into MEASURE Evaluation activities
Seven Steps to Use Routine Information to Improve HIV/AIDS Programs
The Seven Steps to Use Routine Information to Improve HIV/AIDS Programs offers concrete steps and illustrative examples to facilitate the use of routine health system information as a part of the decision-making processes guiding program design, management, and service provision. This guide was designed to help address barriers to using routinely-collected data. The MEASURE Evaluation gender team worked with the Guide’s authors to integrate gender into the tool as described below:
- An information box explains why gender is important to HIV/AIDS programming and monitoring to help users of the tool understand how gender influences HIV outcomes (page 10).
- Gender was incorporated into several of the guide’s illustrative examples of using routine information to ask and answer questions to improve HIV/AIDS programs by following along the seven steps outlined in the guide.
- The “HIV Counseling and Testing” case study (pages 31-40), focused on using routine information to investigate if clinics were serving youth adequately. Gender was accounted for by demonstrating how the results would look and be interpreted by when youth data was disaggregated by sex. Gender was added into the analytic steps and calculations needed to identify and transform the data into useable information to interpret and draw conclusions about whether or not the clinics were serving male and female youth equitably.
- This method of integrating gender into examples by highlighting possible questions regarding gender, obtaining necessary information, carrying out calculations, and interpreting results was repeated for the “Support and Care: People living with HIV/AIDS” case study (pages 60-65).