Enabling women to GROW

She began studying violence against women and girls, particularly when inflicted by husbands or intimate partners, more than 20 years ago. She has since spearheaded an initiative that connects a global network of like-minded scholars.

Global Research for Women (GROW) unites researchers from across Emory and across the globe with a three-pronged agenda—promote research on women’s and gender issues, support women scholars and practitioners to address the shortage of female leaders in global health, and use both to promote lasting social change. The initiative has grown to a network of individuals and institutions in countries across the globe.

“I started GROW in response to demand from students, faculty, and global partners for a community of scholars who were committed to social change,” says Yount, the Asa Griggs Candler Chair of Global Health and professor of global health and sociology. “The community has just taken off…it has its own momentum and continues to grow.”

GROW’s research spans three inter-connected areas: women’s global health, women’s and girls’ empowerment, and gender-based violence. Topics of recent research include child marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting, access to contraception, and cyber violence.

Global interest in these areas seems to be surging. For example, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, launched in 2015, for the first time included gender-based violence as a focus for goals.

“Demand for research in this area is reaching new heights among private foundations and international agencies,” says Yount. “We are moving as quickly as we can to respond to invitations for funding.”

Though demand for research about women’s and girls’ issues is high, women’s presence in global health leadership positions is lacking. Across 191 countries, only 51 have a female minister of health, according to the World Health Organization. Closer to home, at Emory University, 91 percent of undergraduates and 84 percent of master’s students in global health are women, yet 75 percent of full professors in the area are men.

To fill this gap, GROW affiliates are committed to training the next generation of female leaders. “GROW engages early career professionals in a way that advances their careers, connects them with peers, assists in their scholarship support, and builds mentorship into their training,” says Yount. “A training program for early career women also dovetails with our focus on women’s empowerment. Part of our training includes skill-building in negotiation, project management, and leadership.”

The initiative has a core research team of about 15 from across the university, and many more researchers participate on specific projects. Postdoctoral fellows, doctoral students, masters students, and undergraduates routinely collaborate on GROW projects, including traveling abroad to work with partners.

Yount and her team also have assembled a robust graduate curriculum around women’s issues, including courses in gender and global health, gender-based violence in a global perspective, maternal and child nutrition, Roger Rochat‘s Global Elimination of Maternal Mortality Abortion seminar, and a webinar and journal club. “I don’t know any other school of public health that has a curriculum as comprehensive as ours,” says Yount.

Building an evidence base and moving women into leadership positions count for naught if they don’t produce actual change on the ground. To that end, GROW sustains a social media presence that reaches more than 7,800 connections—researchers, practitioners, policy makers, activists—on a bimonthly basis. It sends out a quarterly newsletter to more than 2,000 people. Its researchers blog regularly and are quoted in national media. Here is a look at a few GROW projects:

Violence at home

About one in three women suffers physical, sexual, or emotional violence at the hands of their intimate partners, according to data from 81 countries published in Science. Cari Jo Clark, associate professor of global health, is hoping to change those statistics with the help of a radio drama and community engagement.

Clark is working with Equal Access International, an international nonprofit, in Nepal. The country is a patriarchal society in which women rank in the household hierarchy below men and older women, and where it is widely acceptable for men to use violence to maintain order in the household.

Equal Access has wrapped up a nine-month intervention in which a group of couples met each week to listen to a radio drama about a husband and wife navigating typical marital issues. The couples broke into discussion groups and then went home with assignments. Every few weeks, extended family members were invited to attend.

“Of course, we don’t expect a radio drama alone to change complex human behaviors,” says Clark. “But it can be an effective way to model different behaviors. We would modify the storyline based on the feedback we got during the discussion sessions to make them very lifelike and reflective of what the couples were dealing with.”

In the last three months of the intervention, the couples were taught and supported in how to be ambassadors of what they had learned. They hosted events and showed films in their communities, and just spread the word day by day.

Although Clark’s team is still evaluating the data, an MPH student looked at results at the halfway mark and found changes among participating couples in the use of alcohol, in communication in general and around sex (many men said they seek consent now, where they had not before), and in the distribution of household chores.

In the next phase of the study, Clark wants to see if the couples who went through the program were able to nudge the norms in their extended families and villages. “Did family members and neighbors pick up on how the couple’s interactions had changed? Did the husband reprimand his brother for smacking his wife? Did the wife feel she was able to voice concerns to her mother-in-law?” says Clark. “For this intervention to be sustainable, it must reach beyond the couples who participated into the wider community.”

Sowing seeds of empowerment

Some of Dr. Amy Webb Girard’s work revolves around empowering women through agriculture. “That’s because women do the bulk of agricultural work globally,” says Girard, assistant professor of global health and epidemiology. “They are often the food producers, food procurers, and food preparers. So, when you look at ways to empower women, to improve their ability to generate income, and to have more voice in decision making, you are often looking at agricultural interventions.”

Girard is involved in several agriculture-based projects in East Africa and India that aim to improve women’s empowerment and maternal and child nutrition. In Tanzania and Kenya, she works with partners to develop and evaluate dairy cooperatives, which bring dairy producing households together. The organizational structures of the co-ops are designed to give women more voice in running them, and training is included in an effort to make men more open to input from women. In addition, women receive education in matters of livestock management, finance, and resources.

In Ethiopia, Girard is working with other groups to form similar sweet potato farming cooperatives, again with the aim of giving women greater access to nutritious crops, income from those crops, and agency in how to use those crops for the household. “Men typically control how much land is allocated to crops to be sold and how much to crops for the household, as well as what is planted,” she says. “We develop strategies that engage husbands to think about the benefits of allowing women greater participation in agriculture decision-making. For example, women are likely to keep more and higher quality food for the household; they also are more likely to use their income on food and health care, which translates into better health and nutrition for their children.”

In Ethiopia, Girard worked with colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology and a local NGO, Stand for the Vulnerable, to establish women-run agricultural businesses. The businesses, which use low-technology duckweed algae ponds, allow women to grow a nutrient-rich material that can be converted into animal feed. Ethiopia has a huge shortage of high quality animal fodder, so demand for the product is strong.

Groups of about 20 women band together to establish and run the ponds and micro-businesses. They are also supported to develop small-scale poultry or fish pond businesses to complement this work. The curriculum, developed by Girard and partners, trains women in business plans, budgeting, financial literacy, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills. It also includes training in nutrition and health. As of May 2018, the team had reached about 2,400 households. Over the next five years they expect to scale up to 15,000 households.

“The whole curriculum is built around increasing women’s independence and empowerment,” says Girard. “It dovetails with GROW’s founding principal— women’s and girls’ empowerment is a pillar of sustainable development.”

For more information about GROW, visit growemory.org.