Today and every day, we must speak up to end violence against women and girls everywhere. To mark the #16days of activism and show solidarity with survivors of gender-based violence, the Accelerator invited two experts to talk to the team about integrating gender into health systems research, policy, and planning.
On December 8, 2021, Dr. Jean-Paul Dossou, director of the Centre de Recherche en Reproduction Humaine et en Démographie (CERRHUD), and Dr. Manuel Contreras-Urbina, senior social development specialist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank, shared their perspectives on how we begin to make progress on gender equality through our work.
The Accelerator promotes gender equality in its interventions to better address the health needs of women, men, girls, and boys. The program and its partners develop program infrastructure and operational processes to support successful program implementation in participating countries and adapt our approaches as needed to ensure more equitable participation, access, and agency for all.
Panelist Bios
Jean-Paul Dossou is a medical doctor, and public health scientist from Benin. Jean-Paul Dossou is currently leading the Centre de Recherche en Reproduction Humaine et en Démographie (CERRHUD), that is an active partner of WHO and UNFPA on various Sexual and Reproductive Health Research and intervention issues. He is experienced in applying qualitative and mixed methods, system thinking principles, and complexity sensitive research and evaluation approaches. He is currently active in developing and implementing national and international interventions and research programs to support countries in their processes toward health-related SDGs in sub-Saharan Africa. He strongly believes that applying decoloniality lens, gender-transformative approaches and promoting effective context-sensitive knowledge production and use at all stages of policies and interventions developments, both in the global south and in the global north, will accelerate progresses towards SDGs everywhere.
Manuel Contreras-Urbina works at the World Bank as a Senior Social Development Specialist for the Latin America and Caribbean on gender-based violence (GBV). He has 25 years of experience in gender and GBV research and programs. Before joining the Bank, he served as the Director of Research of the Global Women’s Institute at the George Washington University, as the Programme Officer at UN Women in Mexico and Central America and as the coordinator of the Gender, Violence and Rights portfolio at the International Center for Research on Women. Manuel earned a PhD in Population and Gender Studies from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a Masters in Demography from El Colegio de México and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Actuarial Science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.