Study design and setting: Moving Maternal Newborn and Child Health into Policy - A West Africa Project
This project began in November 2014 and ended in May 2021. It was implemented in six countries in West Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal). The project was implemented by the West African Health Organization (WAHO), the specialised health institution of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which acts as a health policy and research organization with support from the Canadian Initiative for Maternal and Child Health in Africa. The role of the policy body as defined under the initiative was to enable decision-makers take ownership of the research projects funded by the initiative, to support research teams and promote the sharing of experience within them, and finally to improve the environment for the transfer and use of research results to improve maternal and child health.
Thus, during implementation, several meetings were organized at country and regional levels with various stakeholders to inform, raise awareness, engage, validate the results and identify the interventions to be implemented, build capacity and promote dialogue between decision-makers and researchers. These meetings gathered several types of stakeholders such as health decision-makers from different levels of the health system, health professional associations, journalists, civil society organizations, non-governmental organizations, religious and traditional leaders, technical and financial partners and researchers. In inviting participants for the meetings, the profiles of the desired persons without gender distinction were defined by the representative of the beneficiary organizations. The meetings held at country and regional level for periods ranging from one day to one week.
Analysis
A gender analysis, defined as a process for understanding health systems research as to how gender power relations create inequalities in access to resources, work and role distribution, social norms and values, and decision-making (11), was conducted. It is recognized that this type of analysis allows one to look at the data by comparing men and women, and to analyze gender roles, powers, access to resources and gender relations, and how these all could explain gender conditions and differing experiences.
The data used was drawn from the attendance lists at the various meetings. The lists provided information on the identity of the participant, surname and first name, profession/position held and the State of origin. Also, in order to enable the purchase of plane tickets or to prepare the perdiem expenses each participant sent a copy of their passport or national identity document. Finally, the reports of the meetings provided information on the persons who led the work in plenary, in working groups and the rapporteurs. The gender, the profession/position held and the structure of origin and the role during the meeting of the participant was determined from these different documents. Based on function or occupation, the participants were classified into five different groups (decision makers, researchers, partners, consultants, WAHO team). A proportion comparison test was carried out to measure the difference in the profile of women and men according to the type of meetings. For this purpose, the statistical significance for the study was set at 0.05. Microsoft Excel software was used for the data analysis.