Myanmar

Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP) Meta-Review of Evaluations

This report presents the findings of a review of the evaluations of seven programs funded by DFAT through the ANCP and implemented by CARE (Australia and respective country partners).
The purpose is to identify and summarise lessons learned, areas for development and examples of good practice that will inform CARE Australia’s implementation of its new theory of change. The review is intended for both internal and external audiences, including DFAT. Read More...

Rapid Gender Analysis on Power & Participation (RGA-P) Women Lead in Emergencies Mawlamyine, Mon State, Myanmar

This is the first Rapid Gender Analysis on Power and Participation (RGA-P) report completed in Mawlamyine, Mon State, Myanmar. An RGA-P assesses the impact of crisis on gender, power relations and women’s participation and leadership.
Key findings
• Social norms severely limit women’s rights, voice and access to decision making and leadership roles in the community.
• Formal and informal decision-making spaces are still largely dominated by men.
• There are limited all female community groups active in the targeted communities.
• When women are participating in formal governance positions or community groups, they are relegated to support roles and have no opportunities to influence decision making within those spaces.
• Social and economic insecurity as a result of the military coup and resulting violence, COVID and other issues have increased security concerns across Myanmar and contribute to the barriers faced by women in relation to participation and leadership in their community. Read More...

Rapid Gender Analysis on Power and Participation: Women Lead in Emergencies Northern Shan State, Myanmar

As of December 2022, there are 1.4 million internally displaced people (IDP) in Myanmar.4 Over 40,000 people remain in neighboring countries like Bangladesh, Thailand, and India since the takeover. More than 18,058 civilian properties, including houses, churches, monasteries, and schools are estimated to have been destroyed during hostilities, although figures are difficult to verify. The level of destruction of civilian properties, particularly homes, combined with the seemingly never-ending fighting will very likely prolong the displacement of the IDPs and would further deteriorate their already fragile living conditions. The current volatile security situation and its associated restrictions, such as bureaucratic processes, systematic blocks on access approvals, continue to hamper humanitarian access and delay the delivery of assistance.

The purpose of this Rapid Gender Analysis on Power & Participation (RGA-P) is to build a better understanding as to whether and how women are able to participate in the community and in decision making spaces in the Northern Shan State of Myanmar and what changes may have occurred as a result of the conflict and women’s participation and leadership. The research was conducted through primary and secondary data collection in July 2022 in three villages in the Lashio Township of the Northern Shan State, Myanmar.
Summary of the findings
The main factors that were found to restrict women’s access and opportunity to participate in public decision making and leadership roles were related to
➢ Social norms and expectations of the role women are expected to play/hold in society and the views that female characteristics are not fit for leadership roles.
➢ The expectation that women are responsible for all of the household chores, childcare and care for elderly.
➢ Restrictions on women’s movement (controlled by husbands and elder family members) also impedes women’s rights to engage in spaces outside of the home.
➢ In addition, barriers such a slow literacy rates in Myanmar language (the language used is most formal meetings/decision making spaces) Read More...

Aung Myin Hmu Project (Industry Solutions for Safe Employment)

Despite the benefits of migration for rural households, the process is difficult for migrating family members. One of the main drivers of trafficking is the need for women to travel to look for better employment opportunities, making them vulnerable to unscrupulous brokers. Enhancing job opportunities for women and improving access to educational and vocational facilities are key to combating trafficking and creating a successful migration. The Aung Myin Hmu journey began in 2017 with a recognition that female migrant workers were not receiving the skills necessary to produce quality work and improve their earnings, due to a lack of quality driven training provision for the industry. Once in-factory, reports from CARE International showed that 1 in 2 women workers in garment factories in South-East Asia have experienced some form of sexual harassment.
Aung Myin Hmu (AMH) a project of CARE International in Myanmar, worked in partnership with Legal Clinic Myanmar and Business Kind Myanmar (BKM) and in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population (MoLIP) to improve the quality and safety of employment for urban migrant women. AMH established a Garment Skills Training Centre (TC), supported the establishment of accredited training lines in factories and trained factories in policy for safe and respectful workplaces (prevention of sexual harassment) in garment factories facilitated essential legal and social support to female garment workers. Working with private sector, legal, social and service providers to improve workplace and community protection systems against Gender Based Violence (GBV), AMH ensured that migrant women were able to have easy access to appropriate services.
The project period saw the growth of the industry from around 400,000 workers in 2017 to 700,000 at the start of 2020. COVID 19 had a huge impact on the industry with a 25% of workers losing their jobs or being furloughed, and then in February the military coup impacted the industry further as Brands were uncertain, they would continue working in Myanmar and factories lost orders.
AMH’s two-month courses were designed to train modern sewing methodology on semi-automatic machines, labour law and rights at work though the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Better Rights at Work Programme (BRAW) and basic skills, including communication, problem-solving skills, nutrition and personal finance management. Sexual harassment (SH) and environmental awareness training completed the curriculum. Factories have told us that AMH workers are more systematic, progress faster, can use many machines and change styles more easily.
The project promoted the residence of workers as AMH trainees had a higher rate of productivity and earned higher salaries than informally trained workers, enabling them to support their families and make healthier food choices. Trainees gave feedback that the training enabled them to be more discerning in their choice of factory, choosing those with better working conditions and which product they preferred.
A higher productivity rate also increased the factories’ profits and resilience to shocks though it is noted that those factories who placed value in training, were also likely to be those who placed value in workers and therefore could achieve a higher productivity.
During the project period, 5428 trainees graduated from AMH training centres, AMH supported government venue and factory training line of AMH partner garment factories. More than 1400 garment workers graduated from AMH garment training centre.
AMH continued to advocate for the approval of 11 drafted National Occupational Competency Standards (NOCS). Significant challenges, including political sensitivities among stakeholders about the inclusion of industrial relations content contributed to the delays in approval. However, AMH delivered the highest number of test candidates out of all assessment centres in Myanmar and made a major contribution to the overall testing numbers, convincing factories of the relevance of NOCS for the garment sector.
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Impact, Influence, and Innovation: Reflecting on 10 Years of the CARE-GSK Frontline Health Worker Initiative

In recognition of their critical role in health linkages and systems strengthening, CARE and GSK established a decade long strategic investment in frontline health workers (FHW) and community health workers (CHW) in 2011 called the Frontline Health Worker Initiative. Following 10 years of partnership and programming, this report explores the resulting impacts, influence, and innovation. It synthesizes reach and impact data from 13 programmes across the 9 countries included in the Frontline Health Worker Initiative between 2011 and 2021. The countries included in this initiative are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, and Togo.
The data presented here is specific to the communities in which CARE delivered sexual and reproductive health, maternal and child health, nutrition, and sanitation programming with GSK’s support. The analysis is designed to identify the changes in overall health outcomes that occurred at a population level. While these findings do not necessarily imply causation, CARE’s efforts have likely reasonably contributed towards these changes within the specific communities.
The Frontline Health Worker initiative has achieved these results across multiple development and humanitarian contexts – including slow-onset and sudden shocks, conflict, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these results were only made possible through the long-term investment from GSK and scalable actions that were implemented across all nine countries. Critically, the Frontline Health Worker Initiative established platforms, networks and health service capacity-building that served as a catalyst for CARE to pivot towards the response to the COVID-19 pandemic quickly in the communities where these projects exist.
Learnings from this programme will serve to strengthen CARE’s private sector partnership models for future programmes to build resilience and achieve health impact in communities. Read More...

End of the Project Evaluation | Strengthening Approaches for Improved Maternal, Neonatal and Reproductive Health in Myanmar: Lashio Township, Northern Shan State, Myanmar

GSK and CARE Myanmar have been working together in the country since 2012 to provide better health services. The project was expanded from 45 villages to 60 villages in northern Shan State, based on successes and lessons learned in 2012-2015. The project goal is to contribute to the reduction of maternal and neonatal mortality through increased access to, and quality of, sexual and reproductive health, and maternal and child health services. Read More...

End-line Survey Report for Scaling-up Sustainable Agriculture (SSA) Project: Lashio – Northern Shan

CARE Myanmar is working closely with the vulnerable communities in conflict-affected areas across Myanmar to achieve sustainable and inclusive community development. With the specific objective to improve agricultural yield, income, food and nutrition security of smallholder farmers and women-headed households through promoting sustainable agriculture technologies and nutrition and hygiene practices, a resilient livelihood project, namely Scaling Up Sustainable Agriculture (SSA), funded by Latter-day Saints (LDS) Charities, was implemented in Lashio between 2019 and 2020. Read More...

Migrant Women Mini-survey on Sexual Harassment Aung Myin Hmu Project: Industry Solutions for Safe Employment

Introduction
This AMH project aims to provide safe work opportunities for migrant women by working with the private sector and the government to provide in demand vocational training and job matching while ensuring that women can access appropriate social and protection services.
Objectives
The study follows up with the project measurement framework to simplify and better visualize the below project indicators.
1) HLO2.2 % of migrant women who report experiencing discrimination and abuse in public and/or at the workplace
2) HLO 2.4 % of women who report feeling safer due to SH awareness activities and existence of complaint mechanism
3) IO 2.2.3 % of women report experiencing sexual harassment at their workplace
Read More...

Enhancing Women’s Voice to STOP Sexual Harassment Final Evaluation – Myanmar

The Enhancing Women’s Voice to Stop Sexual Harassment project (STOP), an initiative of CARE Australia, has been working since 2017 to prevent and address the under-reported problem of sexual harassment (SH) in mainland Southeast Asia’s garment sector.
At the time of writing, STOP is the only initiative that addresses this issue on a multi-country scale within the sub-region. Operating across a pool of garment factories in four Mekong countries—Cambodia, Lao PDR1, Myanmar and Vietnam—STOP aims to enhance women’s voice and economic rights at both the national and factory levels. Based on a socio-ecological model of violence prevention, CARE Country Offices (COs) are working with participating factories to create workplaces where female workers feel safe and experience less SH through the implementation of standardised SH reporting mechanisms and rigorous training programs. Supported by CARE Regional staff, each CARE CO engages with relevant country, regional and international stakeholders to strengthen the national regulatory environment to promote laws, policies and mechanisms to address SH in the workplace.
In 2018, CARE Australia commissioned a consortium of researchers from UNSW Sydney and UNSW Canberra to undertake an independent evaluation the STOP project and provide a separate Social Impact Assessment (SIA) focused on Cambodia STOP as the particular case study. It is important to note that the SIA is intended to complement the findings of the Final Evaluation (FE) of the STOP, as implemented in the other three project sites. In this way, the SIA and the Final Evaluation should be read as two parts of a single whole.
The STOP project is evidence-based. This strength of evidence is reflected in the rapid review of evidence first published by CARE (Campbell and Chinnery 2018) in November 2018, which provides a comprehensive discussion of how to prevent and respond to SH in the workplace. The continued inclusion of evidence into the project cycle ensures that the STOP project is built on current best practice.
This report provides an overview of Final Evaluation findings of the full STOP project and evaluation findings relating to the STOP project in Myanmar. Read More...

GENDER AND COVID-19 VACCINES Listening to women-focused organizations in Asia and the Pacific

More than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed across at least 176 countries, with over 1.7 billion doses administered worldwide. Combating the pandemic requires equitable distribution of safe and effective vaccines, however, women and girls are impacted by gaps both in the supply side and the demand side that hamper equitable distribution of the vaccine. Evidence reveals that 75 per cent of all vaccines have gone to just 10 countries, and only 0.3 per cent of doses have been administered in low-income countries. Very few of COVID-19 vaccines are going to those most vulnerable. The vaccine rollout in Asia and the Pacific has been relatively slow and staggered amid secondary waves of the virus. India, despite being the largest vaccine developer, has only vaccinated 3 per cent of the population and continues to battle a variant outbreak that, at its peak, was responsible for more than half of the world’s daily COVID-19 cases and set a record-breaking pace of about 400,000 cases per day.5However, the small Pacific nation of Nauru, reported a world record administering the first dose to 7,392 people, 108 per cent of the adult population within four weeks. Bhutan also set an example by vaccinating 93 per cent of its eligible population in less than two weeks. That success could be at risk, given the situation in India and the suspended export of vaccines. Read More...

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