Gender, Women & Girls

FACT is promoting Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) for women and girls particularly within marginalized populations thus female prisoners, female sex workers and economically disadvantaged women and girls. We have managed to set up friends for purpose clubs for Adolescent girls and young women, within 9 – 25 age bracket, these clubs are a means to disseminate accurate SRHR and life skills to AGYWs through a peer to peer approach.

We aim to promote the engagement and inclusion of women in all local governance structures (District TB Forums, District Health Management Committees, Village Health Committees and Village Development Committees) and ensure equitable presentation of women in public health strategies and policy development processes and implementation oversight. We are working with the Parliamentary Women Caucus on policy and legislative reviews on ending violence against women and girls (EVAWG), we are also achieving EVAWG through building community systems that are gender responsive. We have managed to work with the Women refugees and migrants in Dowa and Mwanza. On the other hand we are supporting civil society organizations in Malawi to establish a better understanding of impact of gender and human rights in health care delivery to accelerate progress towards achievement of the SDGs in Malawi. We are rolling out this initiative through implementation of gender assessments across the care cascade and in access to public services, then, making necessary dissemination of the results of the assessments.

Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) is a critical area for FACT. We have mainstreamed our advocacy interventions within partners “mother clubs” in Salima, Ntchisi, Dowa, Ntcheu and Balaka districts. Our efforts are aimed at empowering women with information and knowledge to ably engage their local authorities and documenting issues that impeded access to quality care on MNCH within their districts as part of evidence generation for advocacy and social mobilization.

Women and Girls are disproportionately impacted with economic challenges in Malawi. Poverty ratios are significantly higher among women especially in female-headed household, their potential for poverty graduation is minimal. Our focus has been empowering women economically and provide means to access to economic development opportunities, we have implemented successful interventions among rural poor smallholder farmers in Salima and Nkhotakota by providing agriculture training and mentoring and small startup funds to grow their agricultural output to sustain the needs of their households, a result has been seen in the decrease in dropout cases among their children, this approach has demonstrated the potential to holistic interventions towards the attainment of the SDGs in Malawi among women and girls and their households.