Section 10: Primary health care and strengthening of health systems
Equal rights and opportunities mean better health for women and girls: how is WHO contributing?
The 2008 World Health Report on Primary health care recognizes that health outcomes are shaped by inequalities in availability, access, affordability and quality of services, and by linguistic, cultural and gender-based barriers. As a follow-up to this report, the WHO Department of Gender, Women and Health (GWH), in collaboration with partners, is developing a scoping report on gender and primary health care to tease out contemporary critiques, challenges and ways forward in an era of renewed commitment to primary health care to ensure that women and girls are not left behind.
In an effort to harmonize health systems strengthening efforts to address the right to health and gender-based health inequities, WHO's Departments of Ethics, Equity, Trade and Human Rights (Health and Human Rights team) and Gender, Women and Health (GWH) have been working with the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) and several WHO programmes to develop a tool to assess health sector strategies for their policy coherence on human rights, gender equality and health.
The tool has been piloted in two African and one Mediterranean country and will be released in 2010. A follow-up process to determine implementation gaps between policy and practice with respect to equal rights, equal opportunities and health is under discussion with the German bilateral development agency Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ).