Advancing Gender and Equity in AMR research: Insights from an ICARS workshop in Bangkok
From November 4th to 8th, 2024, ICARS hosted a Workshop on AMR, Gender, and Equity in Bangkok, Thailand, bringing together 23 attendees. Participants included 14 individuals from ICARS-funded projects from a diverse range of countries in Africa and Asia, including Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Ghana. The selected projects spanned the human and animal sectors, emphasising the importance of a One Health lens in addressing AMR. The workshop also included representatives from ICARS, IDRC, subject matter experts, and observers from FAO.
This workshop brought together participants from different countries, sectors, and technical backgrounds to collaborate and share their work under a common theme of gender and equity. Over the week, the workshop adopted a practical, hands-on approach that covered several different objectives so that participants could directly apply the concepts to their ongoing AMR research projects, such as:
- Understanding gender and equity, and how they can impact AMR outcomes and public health.
- Learning how to conduct a comprehensive gender and equity analysis.
- Exploring feasible research methods that can be integrated into the existing projects to make them more responsive to gender and equity factors.
- Understanding how to assess project success, including practical indicators that can be integrated into research projects.
By the end of the workshop, attendees had developed context-specific work plans to integrate gender and equity approaches into each project, which they will implement within their existing projects.
To develop these project plans, the workshop followed a step-by-step process where participants envisioned and developed their own project plans, with the support of ICARS facilitators, subject matter experts, and their fellow researchers. This allowed the group to understand and apply specific methodologies such as gender and equity analysis to be able to look at concepts of equity and gender in a systematic approach.
The workshop also encouraged knowledge-sharing among team members from several backgrounds including public health, sociology, economics, anthropology, veterinary sciences, and pharmacy, amongst other disciplines. The diverse expertise of participants resulted in a rich learning environment in which they could contribute and learn from each other’s work and bring forward new perspectives. This ultimately developed a network among the projects that will continue to learn together.
The learning process for ICARS was both engaging and valuable, and we thank all attendees for their dedication throughout this workshop. We look forward to the realisation of equitable project outcomes in the future.