Episodes
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
A Magical Example of Adolescent Girls Leading
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
It's not easy or obvious to not only work with adolescent girls in crisis settings, but also to let them lead. But it is possible. AMAL currently operates in Syria, Nigeria, and Somalia, addressing the unique vulnerabilities of adolescent girls in crisis settings, such as early marriages and adolescent pregnancy. The program includes components like a Young Mother's Club, Community Dialogues, and a health provider curriculum to improve sexual and reproductive health service uptake and enhance participants' life skills. Our guest speaker, Pari Chowdhary, highlights the importance of relationship investments, continuous quality improvement mechanisms, and including adolescent girls in program design and evaluation. The final hope is for the program to be owned and run locally by the adolescent mothers themselves.
Wednesday Oct 25, 2023
The New Usual: Supporting Frontline Healthworkers as a goal, not a tool
Wednesday Oct 25, 2023
Wednesday Oct 25, 2023
Frontline health workers play a critical role in delivering health services globally, especially to the hardest to reach populations. Despite their importance to health systems and universal health coverage goals, this majority female workforce faces diverse and ongoing barriers affecting their working conditions and capacity. Pari Chowdhary talks about how at CARE, we aim to bring support and work with and for FLHWs to achieve healthy outcomes across our programming countries, but also, we aim to bridge key gaps like equipping and training FLHWs.
Thursday Aug 03, 2023
Reigniting Empowerment: Redesigning staff diversity training to prevent harm
Thursday Aug 03, 2023
Thursday Aug 03, 2023
Aqsa Khan and Diana Wu talk about the journey to re-imagine and redesign CARE's Reflections on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (REDI) training after getting feedback that the previous version was harming staff with marginalized identities. Even with the best intentions, diversity trainings can do more harm than good. So we had to redesign ours. Change only happens when you commit to doing the work. Staff have to reflect, to change, and commit to grow. Some of the other key lessons they shared: senior leadership commitment is critical, we need to focus more on accountability, not just awareness, and budgets and resources are crucial to getting things done.
This is work none of us do alone. We had a lot to learn from people who are doing this work. Here are some of the key resources CARE drew inspiration from for the REDI training.
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Life Happens: Balancing Rigor and Lived Truth
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Anne Sprinkel talks about trying to implement, translate, and apply learnings from a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) in the middle of a pandemic. "Communities are not laboratories, and they deserve so much more." She talks about how to combine qualitative data and triangulate different perspectives in an RCT, and all of the learning around it. "Simply taking one person at their word...that is truth." Anne first joined the podcast in 2019, talking about Square Pegs and Round Holes and fitting research to community needs. Nearly four years later, she's talking about what their RCT told them, social norms findings, and balancing people's lived truth with "rigorous" research findings.
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Why Resilience Beats Sustainability
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Sustainability fails because it assumes progress is a straight line, and things will always be getting better. Gloria Steele talks about why our thinking about how COVID, climate change, and conflict show us that we need resilience, the ability of people and systems to bounce back. Sustainability is continuing to do what others define as progress. Resilience is being able to choose the path that works for you. What's an example of resilience? Refusing to allow gender norms to define who has capacity, and what capacities they have. Another tip she has is "we are only as good as we are able to learn."
Tuesday Jan 10, 2023
Perception is Everything
Tuesday Jan 10, 2023
Tuesday Jan 10, 2023
When you're leading a change to have more equity in your staffing practices, people who hold privilege will feel that they are losing power, no matter what the data says. You also don't usually get to such a profound organizational change unless you REALLY have a problem. Listen to Esther Watts talk about how CARE Ethiopia had to change it's policies and practices so the staff was no longer 26% women--the worst equity rate of any office in the CARE federation, and what they had to do to get there. Diversity makes a difference, and you have to have a lot of courage to get there. Esther's advice? "go go go. Stand by the courage of your convictions."
Wednesday Nov 16, 2022
The Data Belongs to Them
Wednesday Nov 16, 2022
Wednesday Nov 16, 2022
In part 2 of her podcast, Kalkidan Yihun talks about how to make sure that data transforms into action--and especially that women and girls who contribute data get that data back in ways they can use themselves. Instead of extractive processes that feed into a black box that communities never see, think about how to format and share data so women can act. Who needs to see it? Who will take action? What ways make sharing that data safe for people who provided it? Kal coordinates the Women Respond project, and offers tips and lessons about what doesn't work (and does) in putting women's voices first.
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
We should not be a burden
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
Kalkidan Yihun talks about how to redesign data collection so it centers what people--especially women--want and need, instead of being a burden on their time and lives because of what's easiest for the data collectors and researchers. Kal coordinates the Women Respond project, and offers tips and lessons about what doesn't work (and does) in putting women's voices first.
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Always Have a Plan B: How to Assess Risk within Partnerships
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
What do you do when your pursuit of a necessary program partner falls through? Don’t waste time on pushing a failed strategy, and don’t be afraid to move on. How do you guarantee commitment from partners early on? Assess interest from partners to ensure equal buy-in on both sides. Naureen Chaudhry identifies two challenges and the resulting lessons experienced by the CARE Pakistan team while working with female entrepreneurs through the CARE Ignite Program.
Wednesday Oct 05, 2022
What we think we know: why cash didn’t work without addressing GBV
Wednesday Oct 05, 2022
Wednesday Oct 05, 2022
Cash transfers designed to help women re-enter markets after COVID-19 lockdowns lifted worked really well, AFTER we added programming to address GBV. Partway through the project, gender dialogues showed that women were facing so much violence that even cash was not enough to get back into the market. So the project re-designed their work to include social norms and addressing GBV, and helped more than 1,400 vendors get back on track. Media Matyanga talks about what the team learned, how they learned it, and what they did next.
Monday Jul 25, 2022
Innovation is not enough: Gender, Technology, and Water in Kenya
Monday Jul 25, 2022
Monday Jul 25, 2022
Solar water pumps were a great business opportunity for women in northern Kenya--so great that as soon as businesses were profitable, men took over and shut women out of both the business, and sometimes access to water. Dorothy Aseyo from CARE Kenya talks about what she learned about how to pick technologies, pick partners, and make sure that when your goal is women having successful businesses, you don't set up systems for failure. Keeping track of who leads and adapting quickly are some of her key lessons
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
It’s not a choice: Connecting Cash and GBV
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
Fe Kagahastian from CashCap’s Syria response and Reem Khamis from UNFPA talk about the importance of getting Cash practitioners and experts in supporting GBV survivors. Doing it wrong sets off all kinds of alarm bells, because if we do it wrong, we can hurt the people we’re trying to support. We need to speak “not necessarily the same language, but at least an understandable language.”
This podcast is produced in partnership with the Women's Refugee Commission and with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
Friday Feb 11, 2022
Friday Feb 11, 2022
Madj Sawan from Ihsan for Relief and Development Organization and Ola Batta from the Shafak Organization talk about the challenges they see while working on cash responses to protect women and girls and support survivors of Gender-based Violence in Syria. Some of their recommendations are to speed up the cash process so survivors can get services fast, to make sure there is a referral system in place, and to prioritize survivors and take action to support them. This podcast is produced in partnership with the Women's Refugee Commission and with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
This is a translation of the original Arabic podcast here: https://careinternational.podbean.com/e/move-faster-finding-ways-to-support-gbv-survivors-with-cash-services/
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
Move faster: Finding ways to support GBV Survivors with Cash Services (Arabic)
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
ARABIC Podcast. Madj Sawan from Ihsan for Relief and Development Organization and Ola Batta from the Shafak Organization talk about the challenges they see while working on cash responses to protect women and girls and support survivors of Gender-based Violence in Syria. Some of their recommendations are to speed up the cash process so survivors can get services fast, to make sure there is a referral system in place, and to prioritize survivors and take action to support them. This podcast is produced in partnership with the Women's Refugee Commission and with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
Stay tuned for the English version of this podcast, coming soon.
Tuesday Jan 04, 2022
Gender Equality in Savings Groups: Women Cannot Do It Alone
Tuesday Jan 04, 2022
Tuesday Jan 04, 2022
Theophile Twahirwa from CARE Rwanda talks about what the team has learned in more than a decade of programming on Women's Economic Empowerment and savings groups. What did they find out? Savings is not enough; economic empowerment is not enough; investing in women is not enough. The team learned that true change comes from investing in equality--working with women, and also with the men in their lives and the systems of power they all face and replicate. Looking over a decade of learning, including the Indashyikirwa project, the team sees transformational change, and talks about where to go next.