2023 PRB Annual Report

Promoting community-led social and policy change in partnership with youth and radio stations in Malawi

Project: PROPEL Health 

Funder: United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 

Under the PROPEL Health project, we worked with partner radio stations and community youth in nine districts across Malawi to raise awareness of social challenges around topics concerning nutrition, education, and health services; and harmful cultural norms like child marriage. We supported these local actors in their efforts to make context-specific, change-oriented information on these topics available in their communities and get people talking about them.

And they’ve made an impact.

Local radio programs in Malawi are now using their platform to hold leaders accountable for enforcing the child marriage law, and they are educating communities on how to respond to and prevent gender-based violence.

In the process of spurring these positive changes—and many more like them—the young people involved in this work learned valuable skills that help provide them with more academic and professional opportunities.

Amplifying research and data to raise awareness of the Black maternal health crisis in the United States

Project: Center for Public Information on Population Research 

Funder: Eunice Kenney Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

Black women in the United States face a high risk of death from pregnancy-related complications. Most of these deaths are preventable, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We need new models of care before, during, and after birth to address these inequities,” says Marie Thoma, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist and population health scientist at the University of Maryland.

Sharing learning that can improve health outcomes for small and sick newborns

Project: MOMENTUM Knowledge Accelerator 

Funder: USAID

How can local learning drive global solutions? This question is one we ask daily on the MOMENTUM Knowledge Accelerator project, which is part of USAID’s larger MOMENTUM program that seeks to improve the health and well-being of women, children, and families in more than 38 countries. Part of the project’s role is to identify and share best practices that can be applied across the different settings where MOMENTUM works.

Facilitating high-level policy dialogue in Senegal about women’s unpaid care work

Project: Counting Women’s Work 

Funder: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 

Resources—and financial burdens—flow from one generation to another. Understanding how it happens is key for governments focused on fostering sustainable development, and data from national transfer accounts (NTA) can provide key insights.

In 2023, PRB and the Regional Consortium for Research on Generational Economy (CREG) hosted a shared space in Senegal to make complicated topics like the value of women’s unpaid labor easy to understand so decisionmakers could assess needs and accountability. The 3rd National Transfer Account–Africa Conference in La Somone-Senegal, held in partnership with CREG, PRB, the United Nations Population Fund, and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, brought together more than 130 participants from 19 African countries, including parliamentarians and decisionmakers from various ministries.

Calling for a new approach to climate adaptation driven by local solutions

We developed a three-part climate blog series in English and French to advance a new approach to investments in climate adaptation that integrate population, gender, health, and the environment. The series lays the foundation of a people-centered framework for building resilience to climate change centered on agency, equity, and the power of local solutions.

Reporting the evidence on family experiences of care in California during the COVID pandemic

Project: KidsData 

Funder: Lucille Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, California Department of Public Health, Blue Shield Foundation of California, donations from data users

The year 2023 marked the official end of the COVID-19 state of emergency. Yet the disease continued to spread, and many people continued to feel its effects. Decisionmakers need evidence of these impacts so they can effectively plan for their communities.

PRB’s KidsData program released data and findings from the Family Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic survey that highlighted ongoing challenges. The survey checked in with parents and caregivers four times to track the pandemic’s evolving impact on families. The results released in 2023 showed persistent challenges for California families despite suggestions that life had returned to normal.

Advancing gender equality to improve family planning and reproductive health outcomes

Project: PROPEL Health 

Funder: USAID 

How can gender-transformative approaches and programming help improve outcomes for family planning and reproductive health? How can we address the gender inequities that global health workers experience? What are the links between sexual and reproductive health and technology-facilitated gender-based violence? What intersectional approaches are being applied to gender-transformative programming? How can comprehensive sexuality education help strengthen gender-based violence prevention and response efforts and vice versa?

If you are among the more than 2,600 members of the Interagency Gender Working Group (IGWG), you may already know the answers to these questions.

For 13 years, PRB managed the IGWG, a community of practice founded nearly 30 years ago to promote gender-sensitive considerations as a critical factor in improving family planning and reproductive health outcomes and advancing sustainable development.

Under our management, the IGWG highlighted best practices, challenges, and opportunities for promoting gender equality through global health programming, showcased the work of gender experts and advocates around the world, and led discussions on cutting-edge topics on and approaches to gender-transformative health programming.

In late 2023, we transitioned management of the IGWG to the PROPEL Youth and Gender project. During its time with PRB, the IGWG served as a reputable resource for gender experts, advocates, and program implementers working in global health and other sectors. It centered and elevated the voices of gender experts, advocates, and researchers, with special attention to locally led efforts, and the community of practice made notable contributions to the field with products that captured a wealth of knowledge and actionable recommendations for practitioners, advocates, researchers, and donors.

Both seasoned experts and those just beginning to integrate a gender-sensitive lens into their activities rely on materials like the IGWG’s newsletter and signature Gender Integration Continuum, a valuable tool for program implementers that measures whether and how interventions incorporate gender equity to improve development outcomes.

Explore some of our work with the IGWG:

• Recommendations to address the gender inequities facing global health workers (plenary brief).
• Links between comprehensive sexuality education and gender-based violence prevention and response efforts (blog).
• Links between technology-facilitated gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health (blog).
• Intersectional approaches in gender-transformative programming (event).
• Gender-transformative approaches in global health (research brief).
• Key concepts around gender and health for a range of audiences (training materials).
• Key takeaways from events and recommendations (synthesis products).

We look forward to watching the IGWG’s continued growth and success.

Strengthening policies that benefit communities’ health by collaborating locally in Kenya

Project: Stawisha Pwani 

Funder: USAID

As part of our activities on the Stawisha Pwani project, we collaborated with county officials, youth, and others in four coastal counties in Kenya as they sought to create and strengthen policies concerning the health of people in their communities.

We worked with officials in Mombasa County’s Department of Health to bring together youth representatives, county officials, and other stakeholders in the private sector and at nongovernmental organizations to develop the Mombasa County Adolescent and Young People Strategy on Health for 2024-2029. In our role of helping to facilitate dialogue, we drafted a template for the strategy and a plan for communicating its benefits to decisionmakers, and then formed a youth technical working group to draft, review, and revise the policy before it was shared with stakeholder groups for their feedback.

SHARING THE EVIDENCE

PRB produced articles, blogs, reports, webinars, and other materials in 2023 on a range of topics such as climate adaptation, gender equality, population aging, unpaid care work, and the U.S. labor shortage. Explore some of these works here.

SUPPORTERS, PARTNERS, AND CONTRIBUTORS

The generous support we receive from organizations and individuals helps make our work possible. Thank you.

FINANCIALS

Fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2023

2023 PRB Financials