What Works for Women and Girls

not intended to be an exhaustive review of all HIV/AIDS programming. Instead, the reviewfocuses on interventions that have an impact on HIV outcomes for women and girls.This document is also not meant to be a set of guidelines for gender-sensitive programming,as it does not cover what should be done; it merely documents practices for which thereis evidence of successful approaches. This document is best used with the range of guidelinesfor programming and it highlights some of those guidelines. Ideally, this document willserve to spur more programmers to evaluate their successful approaches and add them to thelexicon of “what works,” as well as to encourage researchers to set research agendas based onareas that are clear and critical gaps for women and girls.Scaling Up of Effective Interventions for Women andGirls Is NeededThe interventions highlighted in this compendium are, for the most part, implemented on asmall scale. Scant information is available on the costs of the interventions. It will be importantto scale up the interventions to reach a broad range of relevant women and girls. In determiningthe feasibility of scaling up, it is important to assess the geographic coverage of theintervention, how gender was integrated and how well the intervention linked to a broaderprogram strategy. How many countries were included? What populations/contexts withincountries were included? Are any data regional, national or cross-national in scale? How wellwas gender integrated from conceptualization through implementation to evaluation? Was agender analysis conducted to guide development of the program? Can the evidence be linkedto a program strategy? It is also important to assess whether:Political support and buy-in for broad-scale implementation can be secured;Wider standards could be developed from the pilot or smaller-scale intervention;The intervention could be integrated into the public health system;Gender analysis in the broader program context is conducted and the intervention can beimplemented given existing gender and epidemiology contexts;The intervention would have wide acceptability;Strategies can be devised to ensure acceptability;Information is available on the costs of the interventions.Interventions identified as “what works,” will need to be adapted to local contexts and needs.Implementation of successful interventions for women and girls must also always respecttheir human rights.WHAT WORKS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS31