UN Women and PATH to work together for gender equality and health equity

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) and PATH, a Washington non-profit corporation, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to advance gender equality and health equity in Latin America and the Caribbean.  

UN Women is a subsidiary body of the United Nations, whose mandate is to achieve gender equality and women's empowerment. PATH, a global non-profit organization whose mission is to improve public health, recognizes that to fulfil its mission of global health equity, it must renew and explicitly state its commitment to gender equality. 

The MOU aims to bring together the expertise of both organizations to support UN Women's mandate and PATH's mission. With this partnership, PATH commits to confirm and communicate that gender equality is central to its mission, to create an organizational policy that supports its commitment to gender equality, and to provide guidance on implementing its commitment to gender equality in its programming. 

"Partnerships like this are essential to the work that UN Women does in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially concerning women's access to health services and products, an area where, despite some progress, there are still challenges we need to work on and will be able to continue working on thanks to partnerships like this one," said Maria Noel Vaeza, UN Women Regional Director for the Americas and the Caribbean.  

PATH supports UN Women's mandate and advances gender equality in health through synergies in program delivery, evidence-building, advocacy, and health technology innovations that promote positive change in gender norms, increase access to inclusive and gender-sensitive health services and products, and elevate diverse voices and priorities for health.  

“We know that gender equity in health is a critical prerequisite for resilient health systems and universal health coverage, and we also know that no one organization or entity can achieve this alone. This partnership is an essential and encouraging step forward in our shared effort to eliminate and mitigate gender-related barriers to health—among the most consistent and persistent underlying key determinants to the major public health challenges we face today,” says Carla Costa Sandine, PATH’s Chief of External Affairs. 

The collaboration will focus on addressing gender inequalities for effective primary health care programs, advocating for gender equality in public health policy, creating health innovations, promoting empowerment through equitable access to knowledge and resources, and providing gender-based violence services on a large scale in challenging environments. 

The MOU aims to promote gender-sensitive self-care health solutions that consider the gendered social context in which they are designed, tested and launched. This will address the needs of women and people of all gender identities and expressions.  

The collaboration will also create knowledge resources that help women optimize their health using gender-responsive and transformative programmatic approaches. In addition, the agreement will aim to share experiences in strengthening gender-based violence services, prevention initiatives, and health system responses to survivors of gender-based violence to assess opportunities for collaboration.