OECD / MLC Event: Marketplace on Innovation for Gender Equality

MLC Event | January 26th 2022

Blog post written by Parnika Jhunjhunwala (OECD Innovation for Development Facility) and Benjamin Kumpf (OECD Innovation for Development Facility)

Innovation for gender equality and women’s empowerment is paramount to help accelerate progress and development outcomes across the Sustainable Development Goals, and to combat conservative roll-backs. Key to development effectiveness is scaling up what works, thus maximising the impact of innovation.

The challenges of scaling innovations are context-dependent and different for each stakeholder involved. Lessons on diverse scaling pathways and the challenges of scaling from funder’s perspectives as well as the innovator’s perspective offer guidance to development cooperation providers to navigate the complex process of scaling innovations and built the required internal capabilities to drive scaling.

To facilitate discussions on innovations for gender equality, scaling innovations, and to encourage collaborative investments among development providers of the i30 group; the OECD Innovation for Development Facility along with the Million Lives Collective (MLC) and Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Team, Secretariat of the OECD Gendernet conducted the first virtual ‘i30 Marketplace’ event, themed “Innovation for Gender Equality”.

Lorin Kavanaugh-Ulku, Team Lead at USAID and MLC Co-chair, kicked off the event with welcome remarks, sharing the genesis and the journey of MLC, which was formed in 2019 to celebrate and support innovators who are creating impact at scale. Linda Baltuonis-Buaquina, Deputy Director at Global Affairs Canada and Chair of OECD Gendernet provided opening remarks emphasising the “urgent need to revisit our business as usual approaches to achieve greater impact” and “integrate and activate innovation as a driver for effective development”.

“Our global health systems are still operating in a very traditional, non-agile manner”

— Dr. Asher Hasan

Our first presenter, Dr. Asher Hasan, a serial entrepreneur in areas of digital health and financial inclusion and co-founder of doctHers, an MLC Member and social enterprise in Pakistan, laid out the value created by their operations, especially for women. With 300,000 female healthcare practitioners not participating in the global health workforce due to socio-cultural barriers, workplace harassment, or rigid healthcare systems that have not evolved to meet the needs of contemporary women, Asher explained how doctHers aims to address this complex problem. doctHERs is a digital health platform that matches the underutilised capacity of female doctors (who are otherwise excluded from the workforce) to the unmet need of underserved health consumers via nurse-assisted technology. They recruit, equip and train female frontline workers (nurses, midwives, lady health workers) and deploy them in factories, corporate offices, clinics and ambulances. These trusted intermediaries are trained to perform sophisticated diagnostic and interventional procedures through AI enabled telemedicine in real-time under the clinical supervision of remotely located female doctors.

This model, referred to as the “Guddi Baji” model (affectionate term for good elder sister in Pakistan), is currently in its phase of scale-up. Through a public-private partnership with the provincial and federal government of Pakistan, they aim to integrate their model within the National Lady Health Worker program operating in Pakistan since 1994. Having achieved impressive impact, doctHers has recorded 32.1% increase in the monthly household income of the female health workers, 67.8% increase in reproductive health seeking behaviour of women, among positive outcomes on several other indicators. They are actively seeking grant/investment opportunities to expand their female healthcare delivery network.

If you are interested in collaborating with them, please reach out directly to asher@docthers.com.

Our second presenter, Emily Esplen, lead at the Ending Violence Team in the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), manages their flagship “What Works to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) Programme”. Globally, 1 in 3 women have been subjected to intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. The ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence against women has intensified, with every 1 in 2 women reporting that they, or a woman they know, have experienced violence since the pandemic. These findings add evidence to the widespread human rights abuse and public health emergency created by VAWG.

“At the heart of much of these [programs] is the question of how to scale promising approaches without diluting impact, sustainability or ethics. We want to understand better how can we maintain intensity at scale?”

— Emily Esplen

With a strong evidence-base of effective small scale interventions that work to prevent VAWG gathered during phase 1, Phase 2: Impact at Scale, is the first global effort to systematically test the scale-up of proven pilots to prevent VAWG. With half the pilots achieving reductions in violence of around 50% within programme timeframes, the second phase is now focused on translating proof-of concept evidence into robust, large-scale strategies backed by evidence-led practice, research and evaluation. To do so, they will be launching a Violence Prevention Fund for scale-up and Innovation grants. Scale-up grants aim to adapt and expand proven models and deepen impact by layering proven interventions in original/new contexts; while innovation grants will design and test new theory-driven solutions to reduce VAWG. The What Works: Phase 2 program is not only actively looking for co-financing to expand its scale and innovation grants but is also keen to share evidence from Phase 1 and engage in deepening knowledge and learning exchanges on scaling-up.

If you would be interested in learning more about the program and/or scope out collaboration opportunities, please reach out directly to Emily.Esplen@FCDO.gov.uk.

We were also joined by Dr. Aparna Hegde, the founder of India-based NGO and MLC Member ARMMAN (Advancing Reduction in Mortality and Morbidity of Mother, Children and Neonates), representing the program mMitra. mMitra is one of the only five scaled maternal messaging programs in the world and has reached 2.6 million women and children till date.

ARMMAN addresses the problems of i) lack of access to preventive care information and services during pregnancy and infancy, and ii) inadequately trained health workers through its unique “tech plus touch” model which leverages India’s deep mobile penetration with the existing health worker and infrastructure network of the government and NGO partners, thereby ensuring non-linear growth of programs.

“mMitra comes from my experience during residency where in Mumbai I clearly saw how a majority of maternal and child deaths and morbidity were completely preventable. We had extremely overcrowded antenatal clinics with 200-300 patients waiting outside and we had only a minute, and we never had time to counsel them and then they came back dying in labour.”

— Dr. Aparna Hegde

mMitra provides free weekly voice call services that sends timed and targeted preventive care information through automated calls directly to the phones of pregnant women and mothers with infant children, in their chosen language and timeslot. Women are enrolled by health workers, stationed at government hospitals and clinics, and by community health workers in urban slums.

Highly evidence-based, mMitra’s Randomised Cluster Trial records evidence of a 20.3% increase in women seeking regular health check-ups along with improved health outcomes for their children on several indicators, including a 22.5% increase in infants who tripled their birth-weight at end of 12 months. mMitra is currently being used as a sandbox to pilot innovations for potential scale up via Kilkari, the largest mobile-based maternal messaging program in the world being implemented in partnership with the Government of India. Innovations using AI/predictive analytics to prevent women from dropping out of the mMitra program, and testing two way communication/multimedia content via WhatsApp are underway and showing positive indicative trends.

They are also actively on the lookout for co-financing opportunities to continue to gather evidence on pilot programs and speed up their scaling efforts. If you would be interested in learning more about the program and/or scope out collaboration opportunities, please reach out directly to aparnahegde@armman.org.

This event was designed with the three-fold objective to celebrate innovations working to advance gender equality; facilitate discussions on scaling, and spur collaborative investment opportunities in innovations that work. In the words of former Executive Director for UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, “We need an earthquake that will tilt the system altogether, because little and incremental steps will not give us the world that we want.”

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