Monthly Corner
Laura Hughston - Blog
Arnoux Mouafo Nopi & Dimitri Tsona Zapzi - Article
Prof. Wangari Mwai and Prof. Catherine Ndungo - BOOK
- Understanding Gender and Identity Through The Gender Dictionary
Publisher: Bleeding Ink Scribes
RAI SENGUPTA - gender-transformative evaluation tools
This synthesis draws on evidence from 17 humanitarian evaluations across diverse crisis settings. It identifies key feminist evaluation innovations across four domains - design, methods, analysis, and ethics - illustrating how feminist principles can be embedded throughout the evaluation process. It also surfaces broader shifts required at policy, institutional, and practice levels to realise the transformative potential of feminist approaches in humanitarian contexts.
The toolkit translates these insights into applied guidance for evaluators and organisations. It provides step-by-step support across the full evaluation cycle, including planning, design, methods, analysis, ethics, and dissemination. Drawing on global feminist evaluation practice, humanitarian guidance, and gender evaluation standards, it includes adaptable tools, participatory and arts-based methods, guiding questions, and templates for field application.
Ritu Dewan & Swat Raju - Article
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In Promises & Reality 2026 Citizen’s Review of Year 2 of the NDA-III Government. Coordinated by Wada Na Todo Abhiyan, June 20, 2026. pp 94-100.
UTTHAN - Research Report
Traversing the path with women farmers in their fields and in our reflections/writings, a stark observation was the sheer lack of localized and regional vocabulary and terminology to adequately capture and communicate the understanding of climate change and mitigation strategies, informed by the unique experiences and needs of small and marginal women farmers. This is what propelled our research - to examine how women farmers perceive, express, experience, and respond to climate variability across
Our Research Report centres the lived experiences, generational knowledge, and resilience strategies of small and marginal women farmers from the coastal (Bhavnagar) and hilly (Dahod & Panchmahal) regions i.e two contrasting agro-climatic zones of Gujarat. Through their voices, the study reveals exactly how climate change intersects with gender, land rights, labour burdens, and food security.
Events
Vacancies
About the job
At Includovate, we are expanding our Pacific Research & Evaluation Talent Pool and inviting researchers, evaluators, consultants, and development practitioners to join a growing network of professionals committed to creating meaningful social impact.
As a feminist research incubator and certified social enterprise, Includovate works with partners including UNICEF, UNFPA, the ILO, governments, and development organisations across 23+ countries. Our work spans gender equality, social inclusion, health, disability, youth, climate, WASH, market systems, and other development priorities.
We are particularly keen to connect with experts from:
📍 Papua New Guinea
📍 Solomon Islands
📍 Vanuatu
📍 Timor-Leste
📍 Fiji
📍 Samoa
📍 Tonga
📍 Indonesia
📍 Australia
and across the wider Pacific region.
We welcome expertise in:
✓ Research, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning
✓ Gender Equality & Social Inclusion
✓ Health & SRHR
✓ Disability Inclusion
✓ Youth Development
✓ Climate & Environment
✓ WASH
✓ Market Systems Development
✓ Governance & Community Development
Whether your expertise lies in data collection, research, evaluation, technical advisory, facilitation, or team leadership, we would love to hear from you.
By joining our Talent Pool, you become part of a trusted network of professionals who may be considered for future research, evaluation, advisory, and consulting opportunities across the Pacific region and beyond.
🔗 Register here: https://lnkd.in/eyF66S7H
Co-Creating Health Systems and Policies with Older Africans for a Healthy Ageing Future
Every health system reform aimed at Africa's ageing population tends to start the same way: experts count the elderly, tally their diseases, and propose a fix. Train more geriatricians. Build more clinics. Strengthen the data systems. All necessary but all built on an assumption worth questioning: that we already know what older people actually need.
We don't, not really. And the fastest way to find out isn't another top-down needs assessment. It's co-production: sitting down with older adults themselves and designing services alongside them, not for them.
Why the usual approach keeps missing the mark
Recent hospital data from rural Ghana showed that people aged 60 and above make up more than a third of outpatient visits, driven largely by joint pain, hypertension, and respiratory illness. That tells us what older adults are being treated for. It tells us almost nothing about why they waited until they were sick to come in, what stopped them from seeking care earlier, what a "good" visit looks like from their side of the consultation, or what would actually make them trust and use preventive services.
Those are not clinical questions. They're lived-experience questions, and older adults are the only people who can answer them with any authority. Yet across Africa, health policy for ageing populations is still written almost entirely by people who are not old, using data collected without ever asking older patients what they think a well-designed service should look like.
What co-production actually means
Co-production isn't a focus group bolted onto the end of a study, and it isn't a token "patient representative" on a committee. It's a genuine shift in who holds the pen:
- Older adults help define the research questions, not just answer them. What do they consider the most pressing gap: mobility, medication costs, dignity in how they're treated, transport to the clinic, being seen quickly?
- They help design the service model, from clinic hours and queue systems to how conditions like hypertension or joint pain are explained and managed at home.
- They help interpret the findings. Data on "poor uptake of preventive screening" means something different once older adults explain, in their own words, why they didn't come in: cost, distance, fear of diagnosis, or simply never being told it mattered.
- They stay involved through implementation, testing whether the redesigned service actually works for people like them before it's scaled.
The case is practical, not just ethical
There's a moral argument for including older people in decisions about their own care, but there's also a hard-nosed operational one. Services designed without user input tend to fail quietly: low uptake, poor adherence, wasted investment. A geriatric clinic built on assumptions about what older patients want can sit half-empty while the real barriers a two-hour walk, an intimidating registration process, a fear of being talked down to go completely unaddressed. Co-production surfaces those barriers before the money is spent, not after.
It also directly strengthens the areas where African health systems are weakest on ageing readiness leadership and governance, and service delivery design. Both improve when the people the system is meant to serve are structurally embedded in the decisions, rather than consulted once and thanked for their time.
What this could look like in practice
- Community advisory panels of older adults attached to district or regional health facilities, with a genuine mandate, not just an advisory title, over how geriatric services are designed and reviewed.
- Participatory research methods: photovoice, community mapping, structured storytelling sessions that let older adults, including those with low literacy, contribute findings in their own terms.
- Older adults as co-researchers, trained and paid to help collect and interpret data from their peers, who will often speak more openly to someone their own age than to a clinician or outside researcher.
- Feedback loops that close, where older participants see, concretely, how their input changed a service, not just a report that cites their comments and moves on.
The bottom line
Africa's health systems are already scrambling to catch up with a fast-growing, chronically ill older population. The temptation is to move fast and fix things from the top down. But the people who understand what "readiness" actually means, for them, are the older adults themselves. Building the next generation of geriatric services around their voices, not just their vital signs, is the difference between a system that looks reformed on paper and one that people actually trust and use.
Building on: Anaba, C.L. & Kumah, E. "Realigning and Improving Health Systems for Healthy Ageing: A Strategy to Improve Health Service Utilization Among the Ageing Population in Rural Ghana."
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