How Equimundo — an Organization Focused on Engaging Men and Boys — is Working to Eliminate Cervical Cancer

When the Global HPV Consortium launched a year ago in Kuala Lumpur, one of its key goals was to form a transdisciplinary alliance of stakeholders that broke through traditional silos in an effort to accelerate the global effort to eliminate cervical cancer.

One such non-traditional partner in the Consortium is Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice.  As a thought leader and applied research organization, Equimundo aims to advance gender equality and social justice by transforming intergenerational patterns of harm and fostering patterns of care, empathy, and accountability among boys and men throughout their lives.

“We promote gender equality by transforming what it means to be a man,” explains Giovanna Lauro, Equimundo’s Deputy Chief Executive Officer.

Lauro explains that being part of the Consortium is a natural step in Equimundo’s journey to involve men in improving sexual and reproductive health and rights outcomes, which can bring benefits to women, children, and men themselves. “It allows the group to shed light on the ways men and boys can be part of the solution towards achieving the global prevention, screening, and treatment goals of the Consortium,” she says. “We believe that gender equality is key to overcoming the social barriers to HPV immunization, so the Consortium opens up opportunities for meaningful dialogue and collective action in this area.”

Global impact: expanding gender-equality initiatives

Equimundo (formerly Promundo-US) grew out of Instituto Promundo in Brazil. Based on
community work and evidence generated from Instituto Promundo to engage men and boys in gender equality with a focus on Brazil and Latin America, Equimundo works with partners globally, moving from its community-based roots to an institution that builds the capacity of others to work with men and boys in communities, conduct research, and use research to inform narrative-shift campaigns, advocacy initiatives, and policy change.

Along the way, Equimundo co-created and became known for their International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), now considered the largest dataset of perspectives on men, masculinities, and gender equality with some 45,000 responses. Its evidence-based gender-transformative group education approaches — such as Program H (to engage young men) and Program P (to engage fathers)  — have been implemented with community partners in over 40 countries.

One flagship initiative for Equimundo is the MenCare campaign, which is a global fatherhood campaign that now involves more than 100 organizations in over 60 countries that are committed to engaging men as gender-equitable caregivers, playing an active role in the unpaid care work that so often is seen as the primary responsibility of women and girls. With open-source education and resource materials, Equimundo allows any partner to adopt these strategies for change.

Promoting healthy boyhoods through the Global Boyhood Initiative

Another flagship for Equimundo is the Global Boyhood Initiative, which focuses on promoting healthy boyhoods by supporting the adults in boys’ lives. “There is a large body of evidence and of programmatic action for older boys, much less is being done about younger boys. And yet we know that a lot of the harmful norms and attitudes around gender equality start to be formed at a very early age,” says Lauro.

Altogether, a conservative estimate of the number of men and boys touched by Equimundo and its partners over the years runs in the tens of thousands.

“An important part of our work is to get men to care about their own health and to get them to support the health of the women in their families,” says Lauro. “In the case of eliminating cervical cancer, for instance, we see this within the context of promoting men’s engagement in sexual reproductive health and rights from a gender equality lens — not only increasing awareness around the issue but also encouraging men to support women’s and girls’ access to immunization.”

Making connections through the Global HPV Consortium

Equimundo’s synergies with Consortium come from “amplifying each other and each other’s

communication activities, because we are both committed to health equity for human rights.”

There’s never been a more important time, says Lauro. “Looking at patterns of how the data has evolved over the years in our IMAGES survey, we looked at the major trends that we could identify across several regions and continents. One of the most relevant trends for the work that we do today, is that as we know progress around gender equality has stalled, with younger men rarely having more gender equitable views than older men.”

Per Lauro, younger men’s restrictive gender attitudes seem consistent during an era of backlash against the progress of women’s movements and amid the rise of anti-feminist political leaders, a push back against the women’s rights agenda and women’s access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. In this context, working across silos in public health is “very valuable,” she says.

“Having the opportunity to access partners in the HPV Consortium broadens our opportunities. We’re looking at how we can complement the great work that is being done with women and girls by working with men and boys to really strengthen the impact that we can have across multiple areas of gender equality, including health.”

Learn more about the Global HPV Consortium.