Engaging Men to Advance Global Care Equality

Summary

In 2024, Equimundo committed to improving men’s contribution to unpaid care work and reducing men’s use of violence through the implementing and scaling the Bandebereho program in Rwanda and the Paternar program in Colombia. In partnership with local implementation partners, Equimundo will educate and promote behavior change to change gender dynamics across families and communities, reaching 62,000 parents – mostly men – by 2026. After sharing the evidence and lessons learned from initial implementation, Equimundo will leverage its global MenCare advocacy platform to replicate each program in one additional country of the region and inspire organizations and government departments in Africa and Latin America to further scale.

Approach

Equimundo will support the implementation of two evidence-based interventions aimed at improving men’s caregiving in Rwanda and Colombia, while also leveraging the global MenCare advocacy platform to inspire organizations and government departments in Africa and Latin America to adopt the same interventions. Inspired by Program P – Equimundo’s flagship methodology to engage men as caregivers – Bandebereho and Paternar are group education interventions to improve men’s contribution to unpaid care work and reduce men’s use of violence in Rwanda and Colombia respectively. In Rwanda, Equimundo will support the scale-up of Bandebereho, reaching 60,000 parents across three districts, and documentation of Bandebereho by offering technical support to local partners and collaborating on advocacy with the Rwandan Ministry of Gender Equality and Promotion of Families to mainstream the program. Bandebereho has shown positive outcomes with rigorous testing over 6 years of a randomized control trial. In Colombia, Equimundo will draw on evaluation and program development expertise to offer new training and technical support to local partners, including the International Center of Education and Human Development (CINDE) , to implement and test Paternar, a hybrid application combining in-person and virtual education, reaching 2,000 men. Using the reach and visibility of the MenCare Global Campaign (co-founded and coordinated by Equimundo) , and Equimundo’s own advocacy platform, Equimundo will then work with the regional coordinators of MenCare to share the successes and lessons from implementation in the two countries through the MenCare campaign networks in Africa and in Latin America, to inspire uptake and replication of the interventions in at least one other country per region.

As part of the work to improve men’s caregiving, Equimundo intends to launch an international Global Mencare Summit, planned for early 2026. The Summit is intended as a space for learning and exchange, and to spur further momentum in this movement. It will serve as a platform to spotlight learnings and insights from Bandebereho and Paternar that can inform future efforts across countries and contexts.

Action Plan

The first phase of the commitment will be from late 2024 to early 2025, and focus on technical support and implementation.

Phase 1:
Q4 2024: Identify existing needs from partners in Rwanda and Colombia for the scale up effort to be successful in each country.
Note: In Rwanda, partners will implement the intervention in three districts, reaching 60 000 parents. In Colombia the intervention will be implemented in one site, reaching 2000 fathers, conditional on identifying the best partner organization, and confirming funding.

Q1 2025: Provide technical support to each country team, and support the design of the advocacy strategy to be implemented by partners in the country for government departments to support each program.

Phase 2:
Q3-Q4 2025: Share successes from each country’s work.

Q4 2025: Curate communication resources to be able to tell the success stories coming out of the two countries to international funders, civil society, financial institutions and other governments as a way to inspire their own efforts drawing from the evidence learned and research produced.

Q1-Q2 2026: Equimundo and the partners involved will socialize the work with policy makers and others in the field during the first convening of the Global MenCare Summit.

Background

Care equality is central to completing the journey to achieve gender equality. Globally women and girls still do on average three times more of the care work globally. But change is happening. Data from the latest State of the World’s Fathers report (2023) and other research affirms that men are doing more care work, are increasingly ready to advocate for it in elections and in their workplaces, and find tremendous joy and life purpose in it. Equimundo’s programmatic track record also shows that with rigorously tested interventions, it is possible to engage men to embrace care equality.

Engaging men as fathers and caregivers of all kinds, though, is more than just a conversation with and about individual men. It requires a fundamental overhaul of power structures, policies, and social norms around paid and unpaid care work and the value of caregiving. It requires the buy in and support of allies in governmental, multilateral, and private sector institutions. To give an example of one policy gap, globally, the percentage of countries that offer any paid leave to fathers increased from 25% in 1995 to 63% in 2022. In spite of that increase in countries offering leave, mothers on average have 192.3 days of paid leave compared to 22.5 days for fathers. Only 22 countries provide 14 weeks or more paid leave for both parents.

This is an example of a change that decision makers in governments can make, in support of better workplaces, and matching personal change. This commitment therefore focuses on achieving individual behavior change through evidence based programmes, and calling in government allies with the power to achieve change, to improve institutional support for services that lead to increased men’s caregiving within a gender equality framework.

Progress Update

Partnership Opportunities

Equimundo seeks introduction and support for engagement with decision makers in the government and private sectors in Colombia and Rwanda, and in the two new countries to be identified., Equimundo offers topic expertise on evidence-based programming, policies, and practices that cultivate men’s contribution to caregiving, and workplace cultures of equal care.