About DCP Gender

As the world shifts toward a more holistic vision of health in the era of the Sustainable Development Goals, it is time to expand the focus of the women’s health community to address the full range of disease burden they experience. Having looked comprehensively at an uncommonly broad set of topics through the 9 volumes in Disease Control Priorities, third edition, DCPN is uniquely positioned to contribute to this evolution. Multiple DCP3 chapters include reviews of often under-appreciated women’s health issues in LMICs, including cervical cancer, breast cancer, depression, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory diseases caused by indoor air pollution, among others. DCP3 has also considered policy and structural approaches beyond the health sector, and these intersectoral interventions have the potential to support an enabling environment for women at local and national levels.

The DCP-Gender project ambitiously examined how the implementation of the essential packages of services and policies defined by DCP3 can improve the health and well-being of women and girls living in low- and middle-income countries.

The goal of the project was to assess the ways in which implementation of Universal Health Coverage, as defined in the DCP3 essential packages, can improve health and well-being of women and girls or disadvantage them. Using a life-course perspective we focused on analyses of Universal Health Coverage across two initial objectives:

  1. Lowering mortality and disability for conditions that are exclusive to or much more highly prevalent in women and girls.
  2. Lowering mortality and disability in women and girls overall (across all conditions).

 

DCP-Gender Core Team

The Disease Control Priorities team is grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the funding provided to make the DCP-Gender project possible. We are also grateful to all those who donated their time, scholarship and efforts to this project.