Participatory women's groups: ready for prime time?

摘要

Women's groups are politically correct. They are bottom-up approaches to address poverty and gender inequity, two fundamental social determinants of health. As such, audiences who strongly promote the rights of women and children will receive the results of the meta-analyses with enthusiasm. These international agencies and funders will act promptly to scale up participatory women's groups by contracting grassroots non-governmental organisations at country level. Yet, based on past experience, one can predict that they will fail to evaluate the scale-up activities properly, and therefore miss the opportunity to learn much about how the approach works in real life. More traditional, biomedically oriented international^ agencies and funders will convene groups of academic experts to assess the new findings, who will tear apart the evidence and demand more randomised efficacy trials before recommending large-scale implementation.