Power, pleasure, pain, and shame: Assimilating gender and sexuality into community-centred reproductive health and HIV prevention programmes in India

Abstract

Inspired by the vision of the Millennium Declaration, CARE and ICRW (International Centre for Research on Women) partnered with the Inner Spaces, Outer Faces Initiative (ISOFI) to learn how to more effectively integrate gender and sexuality into CARE's sexual and reproductive health programmes. Drawing from lessons learned from gender mainstreaming, ISOFI focuses initially on fostering personal change among staff, helping them to explore their own gender and sexuality ‘baggage’ and supporting transformation of their ‘inner space’. ISOFI then gradually integrates mechanisms to promote organizational change, and finally extends to community development practice, the ‘outer face’. As a system promoting change in organizational culture and practice, ISOFI features structured iterative loops of reflection and learning, action and experimentation, and analysis and assimilation. This article describes the ISOFI Innovation System, and reports on ISOFI-generated learning and innovation in sex positive HIV prevention programming for truckers and reproductive health interventions for women in India.

Keywords:

• Gender
• sexuality
• truckers
• women
• reproductive health
• HIV/AIDS
• India

The authors sincerely thank CARE India staff along with the NGO partners and community members who participated in this project. The authors also thank the Ford Foundation for its generous support to CARE and ICRW for the Inner Spaces, Outer Faces Initiative. Finally, the authors acknowledge the special contributions of Mona Byrkit, Jesse Rattan, and Sandy Won in improving this manuscript. Any errors or omissions remain the sole responsibility of the authors.