|
Improving health outcomes, as a basic right and entitlement, require not only technical solutions, but also the empowerment of individuals and communities. There is increasing recognition that the profound inequity in peoples' health is socially determined and that strategies to reach the very poor and socially excluded - within and beyond the health sectors - are required.
A social development perspective brings together the health, social protection and poverty reduction agendas and reveals factors that constrain demand for, access to, and supply of affordable health services. It is essential for understanding who benefits - and who does not - from policies, programmes and public health expenditure.
Options is committed to social justice, empowerment and participation, and works with national government and civil society partners to strengthen and build inclusive, equitable health systems. We have an outstanding track record in using social and poverty analysis to strengthen the evidence base on who is vulnerable, who uses services and who doesn't, and why. In Nepal, we are developing participatory research methods and community monitoring to capture the voices of socially excluded women, and work with civil society to channel these voices through district management systems and into policy dialogue. At the national policy level, we bring a strong equity lens to health SWAps and sector budget support programmes.
Social protection policies and interventions such as output based aid, cash transfers and health equity funds, show promise in promoting health-seeking behaviours, and preventing ill-health pushing people deeper into poverty. Options is part of a global effort to bridge the divide between health and social policy. In Cambodia, we are providing technical guidance to the Ministry of Health's roll-out of health equity funds, designed to protect poor women from the catastrophic costs of institutional deliveries and other reproductive health services. In 2006, Options' Social Development Technical Coordinator, on secondment to DFID, produced a briefing paper on using social transfers to improve human development outcomes.
We believe that service delivery institutions should be accountable to poor people, and responsive to the demands of citizens and social capital networks. To this end, Options produced a policy briefing note (2007) for DFID that synthesises global experience with citizen voice and provider accountability in the education and health sectors.
We work with partners to understand the social contexts that shape poor people's reproductive and sexual behaviours. Informed by these realities, we support partners such as Society for Family Health in Nigeria to design more appropriate and effective behaviour change communication and social marketing strategies. Using social analysis to tackle underlying social and gender norms and stigma and discrimination, is particularly important for the global HIV and AIDS response. In 2007, Options prepared a background paper to inform DFID's new AIDS Strategy on the financing and institutional implications of pursuing socially transformative approaches to HIV prevention.
Our Social Development Team's core competencies include pro-poor policy and planning, integrating equity into health SWAps and sector budget support, social, poverty and gender analysis, tools of accountability and citizen voice, rights-based approaches, participatory monitoring, evaluation and research, stakeholder analysis, advocacy design, behaviour change communication, social policy analysis and social impact analysis.
|
