Integrating Gender into Social and Behavior Change Communication

You have now completed the steps necessary for integrating gender into your existing SBCC strategy or marketing plan. Along the way, you undertook activities to help you:

• Set a Gender Transformative Vision
• Gather Gender-Specific Information on Your Current Situation
• Create a Gender-Focused Understanding of Your Audience
• Address Gender with a Behavior Change Theory
• Define Gender Tranformative Communication Objectives
• Select Strategic Approaches and Channels
• Integrate Gender into Program Positioning and Message Strategy
• Add Gender Indicators to a Monitoring and Evaluation Plan

You are now prepared to incorporate this important new information about gender into an existing program. You can also use it when developing a new SBCC strategy or marketing plan.

Program staff should be prepared to address gender issues throughout the implementation of a program. Although some of these issues may be unexpected or unforeseen, it is possible to develop a plan that will help to identify and/or mitigate the issues as they arise. An implementation plan should consider how to secure the active participation of men and women in the rollout of the strategy.

Successfully integrating gender into your program requires scrutinizing how the implementation of program activities uphold the gender elements synthesized throughout the previous steps.