Call for Abstracts/Manuscripts - Response, Recovery, and Resilience: Mainstreaming Gender Responsive Programming Within Immunization Systems in Low-and Middle-income Countries. Examples from the Covid-19 Pandemic and Beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights how gender, along with other complex, intersecting power differentials, remains a persistent barrier to immunization uptake across the life course, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Gender-related barriers to vaccine uptake operate at multiple levels across individual, interpersonal, community, health system, and policy and occur on both the demand and supply side. Gender mainstreaming in immunization, or the integration of gender throughout immunization programs and policies, can occur from the phases of assessment and implementation to evaluation and dissemination. Successful mainstreaming in immunization (including gathering disaggregated data, conducting gender analyses, and implementing gender-responsive actions and budgets) can lead to increasing immunization coverage, accessing hard-to-reach populations, improving health outcomes, and empowering women and girls. Gender mainstreaming should be part of the COVID-19 pandemic response, as well as planning and preparing for increased resiliency to future public health emergencies.

Gender mainstreaming efforts, although long established in other health sectors (e.g., maternal child health, sexual reproductive health, HIV), have not been widely implemented in global immunization programming. However, attention to gender equity in immunization is growing. The focus of this call is to generate evidence to inform WHY and HOW best to move forward with mainstreaming gender in immunization. Through application of methods, measures, and principles from the burgeoning fields of implementation science (i.e., efforts to increase adoption of evidence-based interventions in routine practice) and infodemic management (i.e., efforts to understand and address an overabundance of information in digital and physical environments which can impact immunization behaviors), the development, adaptation, implementation, and scale-up of gender mainstreaming efforts in global immunization is possible.

We welcome empirical quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research, and programmatic reports/notes from the field, as well as reviews, commentaries, and study protocols, with a particular interest in interventional and implementation research, on efforts for gender mainstreaming in immunization within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges to routine immunization systems in LMIC. Papers may include application of theories and frameworks (e.g., life course, social ecological, intersectionality) that report on caregiver, health worker, and/or health system perspectives. As experiences and voices of researchers and practitioners in LMIC will be critical to informing this debate, we are most interested in submissions that include a first and/or last author based in a LMIC, with the setting of data sources being 1) in a LMIC, or 2) within a low-resource setting or among a historically marginalized population within a HIC, as appropriate.

Abstract Submission Deadline 16 January 2023

Manuscript Submission Deadline 16 May 2023