 So welcome everyone to this session on gender and one health. I believe we are all looking forward to the discussions that we'll have today. Yesterday, in some of the discussions, I saw people were saying that gender was missing in the one health presentations that were done yesterday. And so today, we have that time where you can come interact with a group of experts on gender and one health. So we have lined up for you several discussions on one health. And we are looking forward to you. Hello. We can hear you OK, Salemi. All right. Yeah, so one of the things we note is that although the role of an intergender gender in one health research policy and practice has been recognized widely, there are still important gaps on how its principles are understood and applied routinely. Part of the challenge is that gender is a social construct that varies from one society to another and evolves over time. So to help us address some issues on gender, how we can mainstream gender and what is gender, we'll start off by a keynote presentation who will then give us a keynote address. And later, we will have a panel of experts also to have the discussions. But even as we start on the aspect of the keynote, the questions we ask ourselves is, are our interventions or is our research inclusive in a way that it includes everyone? Are we leaving some people behind? And how can we ensure that our research, our interventions, our policies are inclusive and includes everyone irrespective of who they are and what they stand for? So to take us through this, we'll have a keynote address. And we start off by inviting Helena Muguni, who is an associate professor in the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Tafts University, with a dual appointment at the Tafts University School of Medicine, Department of Public Health, and Community Medicine. She has technical expertise in infectious disease, gender, and one health. She is currently the risk reduction co-lead for the Tafts led, UCAID funded, Stop Spill Over One Health grant that focuses on supporting countries in Africa and Asia to stop spillover of infectious diseases from wildlife to humans, as well as reduce amplification and spread in the human population. She is also the principal investigator for an IDRC funded, Gender and Livestock Vaccines Innovations grant that focuses on women's empowerment and engagement in the livestock vaccine value chain in three countries in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. She works at the cutting edge of the One Health Initiative, which combines a multidisciplinary approach and animal, human, and environmental health knowledge for monitoring and prevention of current and emerging diseases, and integrates gender components into her work as part of her approach in strengthening collaboration and capacities of the sectors and actors involved in health service delivery. So join me together as we welcome Helen Amoguni. Helen, you have the floor. Thank you so much to you, Salome, and to Dr. Bates and to the Kenya One Health Conference for giving me this opportunity. It's very exciting to be speaking Kenya because I'm Kenyan, although I work at Tafts University. And I'm really excited to know that you have a session on gender in One Health because many times at many conferences, people forget the gender aspect of it. So it's a great opportunity for me to be able to discuss gender considerations in One Health, research, policy, and practice. We all know that One Health requires a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary approach where silos are removed. And many times I say it's not just about the traditional disciplines of human, animal, and environment. We have to look beyond those three and begin to look at what other disciplines can we bring in so that we have a complete approach in One Health. And so as I share today, this is going to be sort of my strategy. I'm going to talk about why do we need to have this discussion on gender? Where are we currently in this discussion on gender in One Health? And then what are some of the gaps in strategies for integration of gender into One Health? I will use examples of what I've been doing for the past 10 years or so. I have worked at the One Health interface, done many, many projects in One Health, and really integrated gender into those because I'm really passionate and excited about gender. I'm a veterinarian by training. I'm also an infectious disease specialist. But then I'm also a gender trained specialist. So it's been such a great opportunity for me to bring these aspects together, bring infectious disease, bring veterinary medicine, and then bring in One Health and bring gender and ensure that gender principles are being integrated, mainstreamed, and that the groups I work with are really responsive to gender issues as we work together. So I will be talking about that into some of the experiences we've had in the past few years. I decided that I'm going to start, first of all, by doing some definitions. I'm not going to assume that everyone understands what that means, what gender is and what sex is. And so just to look at the difference between sex and gender, many organisms of many species are specialized into male and female varieties, each known as sex. Sex refers to biologically defined differences between males and females. And sex is determined, according to physiology, most of the time, reproductive capability and is a biological category. This is many times assigned at birth. And it is important to note that sometimes a person's genetically assigned sex does not line up with their gender identity. Gender, on the other hand, is the categorization of people with characteristics pertaining to and differentiating between femininity and masculinity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex, sex-based social structures, such as gender roles or gender identities. In most of our cultures, mostly probably including Kenya, we look at gender from a binary perspective, male and female, you know? And sometimes in other cultures, these falls outside this group. So there's a non-binary view of gender and gender can cross a continuum. Some societies actually even have what they call third genders, like the hedgerows of South Asia and fourth genders as well. And so when we talk about gender, this refers to the culturally or socially-shaped group of attributes, behaviors, opportunities associated with being a male or a female in a given ethnic, tribe, country, society, religious setting. It is, like Salome said, a social construction. And many times based on economics, social, political, cultural attributes and roles and responsibilities attributed to people by others or themselves. And as I said before, gender is viewed along a continuum. And that is important to remember that it's viewed along a continuum and that gender intersects with other factors. It intersects with age, intersects with social economics, intersects with marginalization. So there are other issues that gender intersects with that we have to think about as well. Remember though that gender is not just about women alone, but about the relationship between men and women. Sometimes we use the words gender and women interchangeably, most of the time because we add special programs for women to compensate for historical and even current disadvantages compared to men. But if men are not involved, it's really not gender. So I want to be able to differentiate that when we talk about gender, it's not just about women alone. Men engage is really an important aspect. Many times, like I've said, we associate gender with women and girls only. And then we forget about men and boys. We cannot obtain gender equality and equity without men's engagement. Many times it's also gender bias against men. I know situations where there's been a lot of bias against men, but because there's usually a big focus on women, people forget to think about that. So as you think about gender, remember that you have to engage men in process and that you can really not achieve equality or equity without engaging men in this process. Men's engagement is actually a programmatic approach. So I would say that we also have to systematically think about engaging men, systemically into the structure as part of the programs that we do if we want to achieve gender equity or equality or even women's empowerment. We talk about equality and equity. I wanted to take an opportunity to differentiate those two. They're both very important terms and I like to think about it this way. Supposing you have a group of people and you want to give them shoes, all of them, you have 20 people in a room, you decide, hey, I want to give all these people shoes and you give them all a size 10 shoe, that to me is equality. You've given everyone a shoe in the room, but does the size 10 shoe fit someone who wears a size two or does it fit someone who wears a size 15? Now, if you give everyone the shoe that fits, then we are talking about equity in that sense. And I think many of you have seen this picture where you're talking about where you have people viewing a football game and the first one on the left looks at where one gets more than is needed. That's usually the reality while the other gets less and some get none. And then the one talking about equality is to give everyone an equal box. So you assume everyone benefits the same and everyone's need is the same. So you provide the same support. The third one is equity. You say, oh, who needs a little more? The person on the right is a bit shorter. They don't need two boxes as opposed to the person in the middle. The person on the left is tall enough to be able to see across. But the fourth one then is about justice where you remove the barrier now. Instead of having boxes and the fence and blocking people, you remove that barrier and then it allows everyone to be able to view what is happening on the other side. So basically removing the cause of the inequity. You address that many times this is systemic, removing the systemic barriers that cause inequity. And one more time I want to talk about is empowerment. We discussed this a lot when we were talking about women empowerment or empowering women within gender, lines of transformation, being able to transform women's lives or men's lives of whoever we are dealing with. And so empowerment is increasing the capacity of individuals and groups to make informed intentional choices and then transforming, they're able to then transform those choices into the desired actions and outcome. And so if we look at this with those definitions in mind, feel free to look this up and find more definitions. But I thought to many times, there's so many words we use interchangeably and defining them at the beginning might be helpful. So why do we need to have this discussion on gender? I think as we were talking about one health, we know that one health is multidisciplinary. People call it interdisciplinary. Some people call it trans-disciplinary. I'm not gonna go into the definition of those terms, but it's looking at multiple disciplines working together to achieve optimal health for humans, animals, plants and the environment. We can't just look at the three disciplines. Like I said, human health, animal health, environmental health. The first image shows all the different disciplines and it doesn't include all of them. Many, some are still left out, but examples of different disciplines that you have to think about as you think of one health. Social sciences and humanities you can see on my screen is a big part of that. Engineering, arts sciences, ecology. And I'll give you some examples of where these have really played a big role. So coming from an infectious disease background, many times I use examples related to infectious disease. And if we think about things that drive drivers of infectious disease, for example, the bottom picture, land use, climate change, economic development, globalization and what influences those? We think about culture, we think about economics, we think about the policy, the behavior. As you mentioned those, see how gender is so much intertwined with that. When you think about culture, you're thinking, what's the culture of this community? What do men and women do differently? Who has access to what? Who controls what within that culture? Economics as well. If you look at policies and behaviors, certain behaviors are attributed to females, certain are attributed to males just because of the roles that they play in society. So those are gender related. And so coming from that perspective, one of the things that we've always thought about or recognized is that gender is actually a one health co-competency. I've worked with Afro-Hoon Network the past 10 years and one of the things they recognized from the beginning is the importance of identifying gender as a core one health competency. As you think about other one health co-competence like leadership, management, collaboration and partnership, behavior change, gender is right there, included in those soft skill competencies. And you cannot do risk analysis or infectious disease management or even ecosystem health without thinking about gender issues. So being able to integrate them into your thinking, into our thinking as we discuss right from the beginning, as we begin to implement this one health approach. As we're saying, we're gonna be breaking silos, breaking the silos then thinking about gender as a core competency just the way you think about leadership, the way you think about collaboration and partnership, the way you think about risk analysis, allows you to be able to integrate that and mainstream it into your programs from the beginning. I like this chart graph, we call it our spillover ecosystem that we use in stock spillover. And one thing that we did is we sat down and thought about what are the drivers of spillover? What is it that if we wanted to stop spillover, what should we think about? We thought about behavioral factors, gender and cultural factors, virus ecology, food insecurity, they're all intertwined. So we don't want gender to be an addition. We want it to be a key part of one health even as we think through that. Many times we talk about the sustainable development goals. I'm sure you've discussed this and talked about them. And if you look at sustainable development goals, number five is gender equality. I personally call this one health goals because when I look at the sustainable development goals from one to 17, they're really very one health focus. You're talking about life on land, climate change, agriculture, industrialization and health for humans, for animals and for our ecosystem. So these are really interlinked together and they're important to think about it. So when we talk about gender right now, we're talking about it because we realize just what a big role it plays in the emergence of new epidemics, in antimicrobial resistance, in food insecurity as well, and other one health key components. Remember one health looks at complex issues. What are those complex issues like AMR that we need to be discussing? How do we approach? How do we create an approach to provide optimum health for humans, animals and the environment even as we're looking at AMR antimicrobial resistance? And then one important thing is that we have to recognize that different genders are differently affected and they're differently vulnerable to the risks due to either biological situations, economic, it could be social, political realities and that consequences differ for different genders. If you're a female, you don't have access to healthcare, maybe you can't go to seek medical help if you're sick because you're home caring for your children or you can't go to seek medical help because you're relying on your husband provide transport for you. Those are different situations right there. If you're a man and you're going out hunting into the forest and you're the one capturing the wildlife and everything your risks are very different from the woman who is at home. So thinking about that, that different genders are differently affected. And of course, one of the things we wanna do as we think about one health is create this effective equitable policies. We don't want to do one health and then end up perpetuating gender inequities. We want to be able to increase the number of one health practitioners in recycling policy and practice and gender analysis competencies. This is a really big one for me. So I'm gonna come back to that later. Of course, we are thinking about increasing community participation in implementation of one health, understanding those gender-based behavioral risks, various and how different people respond to it. And I already mentioned intersectionality, increase understanding that gender intersects with age, with economics, with social status. We do recognize that experiences from past outbreaks, for example, shows that integrating gender analysis into preparedness and response is really, really important. And I'll give you an example of that shortly. And so as we think about gender as a one health co-competence, I feel like that's the starting point. You have to think about gender as a one health co-competence. And as you think about your structure, implementing one health, if you're doing research, if you're doing policy implementation or if you are in the practice of one health, how do you then make sure that you're thinking about health, about gender? How do you become effective? How are you aware of gender dynamics? How do you apply those gender-sensitive and gender transformative approaches in your one health activities that you're doing? And so as I think about this, I feel like for the one health community, maybe some three key things that we need to recognize to do is one, are we able to recognize gender gaps and then identify resources to address those gaps? Are we able to analyze how gender impacts and is impacted by one health race? And then can we become transformative agents by promoting gender equality and equiting all aspects of our work? Where are we currently right now with gender? I think there's been a massive push to integrate gender into research, policy, and practice. We know that many funding organizations, USAIDFC, WHO, the European Commission, NIH, all of them require that you put in gender and sex in your intervention proposals or your research proposals. It's become a big thing. They will not reveal your proposal if there's no gender component included in it. So that in itself is something. In research, associations of scientific editors, for example, the European one, has formed a gender policy committee to improve sex and gender reporting practices across all scientific fields. We do have a global call to action issued for gender to be included in research impact assessment. As well, there's so many tools that are available to measure gender-related changes in different projects. We are currently talking about PREWARE. We're talking about WELEE. We are talking about other to the Care International, SAA. So there are all these tools that we can use to be able to integrate gender into different projects. And One Health is currently really well-placed to build on these systems that are already in place. And yet, gaps still exist. And I'm gonna give you an example of some practical gaps that exist. Currently, of course, with the coronavirus, COVID-19 pandemic. We've read so much about the inequities, the gender inequities, the gender imbalances, the disparities, gender-related disparities. Oh, I apologize for that in an open place. So the door just spanked. But the gender-based disparities that are seen with livelihoods, with food security, and paid care work as well in different places. Now, we're talking about antimicrobial resistance. But many times, as people are talking about anti-AMR stewardship, I've noticed there's a big focus on AMR, on medical practitioners, veterinarians, and farmers, as well as environmental issues. I've heard very few people talk about specifically women's roles in AMR. And if you just take a step back even in Kenya and think about that, who is it that administers antibiotics? When there's a sick person in their home? There's a very high chance that it's the female in that home. We do know from literature, we do know from statistics that most farmers, 75% maybe of livestock work in most homes are done by women. And so if they're not included in this discussion, they're the ones administering these antibiotics when their animals are sick. They're the ones administering antibiotics when their children are sick or other members of their family are sick. And they have to be a really big component of that. I will give you another example. I think yesterday, there were so many papers presented on rift valley fever. So rift valley fever is a big deal, and we know that it kills many animals. It kills cattle, it kills sheep and goats. There's lots of abortion that go with that. But correct me if I'm wrong, the current policy in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda is to vaccinate cattle. And many times they forget that the biggest animals that have the biggest impact when there's a rift valley fever are rift, are shots, sheep and goats. And these are honestly the animals that are most of most value to women in the community. And so if you go out and you vaccinate cattle because cattle seem really, really important, animals that died the most from rift valley fever are sheep and goats. And yet the policy really focuses on vaccinating cattle. And so as we think about these issues that arise unless you strategically and very proactively, specifically address gender issues, you will find yourself at the end trying to sort of bring in, add it in as an add-on. We talked about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa many times in other times. And one of the things that happened, we know in Liberia is within the first three months of the Ebola outbreak, 75% of the people who died were women. And that time I think until they brought in social scientists, they brought in anthropologists, they brought in gender specialists to sort of begin to analyze that and look at that. People were just working from, this is a public health emergency and we deal with this from a public health perspective. But if from the beginning they thought about like, this is not just a public health emergency. If it's a public health emergency, we have to consider it from a holistic perspective. Think of the social issues, think of gender related issues, think of cultural issues that affect that. Then it would have been easier to sort of avoid these ads that's going on. Same thing with the coronavirus. I think coronavirus, I'm just putting this up a little bit. We do know that there was a sex difference. In the beginning when that started in many countries, more men were dying. This is what this graph for every 10 females, 11 males were affected. But also for every 10 females who died, 14 men died. And so there was a sex, this was people are not sure if it's a sex difference or it's a gender-based difference. And this is still being discussed a lot in the world right now. We're thinking, is it because of biological related? Maybe men have a different system. What they're calling the cytokine storm? Or is it because of characteristics? That some say maybe men smoke a little more in the societies or they don't or men do this. And that's why they're exposed to maybe related to gender roles. I think people are still examining that and investigating. But just besides the effects or the people who are affected, the impacts and the consequences of the coronavirus. I think in the US, they called this the coronavirus resession, the she-session. There was a month between August and September where 865,000 women dropped out of the labor workforce. In the same time period, only 216,000 men exited the workforce. And meanwhile, one in four women are considering reducing work hours, moving to part-time roles, taking leave of absence from work or stepping away from the workforce altogether. We understood the increase in domestic violence, diverse genders, intersectionality. There was a month, I think it was March this year where 140,000 people lost their jobs and 100% of them were women. And so as we think about that, looking at, hey, what is the effect? And then what are the consequences? Just giving this example from the US is really important. So then what are some of the gaps and some of the strategies for integration of gender into one health? I'm using some of the experiences that we've had before working with Afro-Hoon in Africa for many, many years. I thought I would start with this. I don't know if people, a lot of people talk about like, hey, let's integrate gender and mainstream gender into our project into one health, but you can't do that if you don't have people to do it. So for me, I think the first one that I'm starting with is how do we ensure that you, the one health practitioners, are gender champions? And I don't mean to say you're a gender expert, you don't have to become a gender expert, but to really elevate gender is to build your capacity in whatever you're doing so that you are able to do gender analysis, whichever projects you are involved in at your level, you're able to actually begin to think through these gender analytical considerations. How can I be able, just even as a public health person, as a veterinarian, as an environmental scientist, as an engineer, how do I make sure that every time I'm doing what I'm doing, I'm bringing in gender considerations. So, and this increases the number of people who can effectively carry out gender analysis in research, advocate for gender policies in practice. And so that for me was one of the things that we learned over the last few years, just increasing the number of people who are gender aware and actually training them not to become gender experts, but to know how to do gender analysis, to know how to be able to engage, even if they're preparing a research proposal or they're in the field implementing a research project to ask that, what can we do? Are we living out something? Are we recognizing the gaps? Are we doing anything to ensure that we are including gender-specific indicators and assessment tools in what we are doing? So that for me is the number one issue that we can be able to do. And I just wanted to share this, we started this with Afro-Hoon, this created the first team of gender champions. And a lot of these are not, they don't have gender background, they're just like veterinarians, environmental scientists, economists, people from different backgrounds that we brought together and say, as part of our project, we are really going to take them and turn them into gender champions, give them gender analysis training, make sure that in every country, whatever project is going on, they are participating. Because there are very few, honestly we have to confess there are very few gender experts around the world and sometimes they're spread so thin. And many times scientists, core scientists, medical doctors, veterinarians, public health people, sort of look at them and say, oh, those social scientists over there, and it's really hard to bring them in. But if we take this team of one health practitioners and turn them into gender champions, then that's a really important thing to do. And so these are currently in the Afro-Hoon countries working on different, I can share that many of them have gone on to become gender champions. We have a few who are doing their PhDs in gender and that's not where we started. They were just interested in gender issues and just learning about them. I would say the second point, especially for one health, is one health is starting out and has built over the last five, 10 years. And one of the ways we've talked about integrating one health into anything is ensuring that people are trained. People are trained on one health leadership. People are trained on one health collaboration and partnership. People are trained on infectious disease management with a one health perspective. And so one of the other things that we did is made sure that we integrated gender into all this training, one health training modules. So Afro-Hoon developed 16 one health modules. Some of them are on risk analysis that you can use if you want to train people from a one health perspective on risk analysis. In that module, we integrated gender into it. We had this team of gender experts working to input sections on gender. So besides creating a standalone gender, one health and infectious disease module, we work to make sure that we are integrating this into all the other modules. And so when someone says, oh, I'm gonna train people, maybe government people on risk analysis. They take that module and they go and use it. Within that module, there's a section of gender so they cannot leave it out. So being able to integrate this was really, really an important part. And we think that's a more sustainable way. You have a standalone gender model. So if someone wants it, they can use it. But you make sure that every training that you do, you have integrated this gender into that. And then of course, we know this a lot that you can't just do gender sort of in the air. You have to develop a roadmap. Usually that's a strategy and a policy as well. So recognizing the gender capacities of different partners. You can't do this without doing that. Use a very simple tool. I usually use the gender equality continuum tool. If I have a group of people, just to sort of identify where do they stand? Where are they on the continuum? Are they gender transformative or what their organizations as well? So this allows us to then map out and understand who are your partners? What are the gender capacities of your different partners? Because one health is very multidisciplinary. You're gonna meet so many different partners from different sections. You want to sort of have that baseline, first of all, to understand where is each partner gender-wise? Are you dealing with a group of people who have a policy? They're very inclusive. They're gender transformative. Or are you dealing with a group of people who don't know they've not, maybe it's a pharmaceutical company or something like that. That's not their business. They don't talk about it. Then that allows you to think through how do you then approach that group to make sure they're integrating gender into it? So if you have a strategy, it allows you to also have an accountability framework. It allows you to develop gender indicators as well to be able to scale up best practices and then also funding to track special funding. We know many times that there isn't much funding for gender, you know? So this is the gender equality continuum that I was talking about that you can use very simply. But I was saying many times, we know that there isn't much funding for gender. One of the things that we did that I thought was very successful is we piggybacked on a lot of other activity. We had our team of gender champions who we are working with. If they were going to do any training, we know we don't have funds to run our own gender training. But hey, we're going to have an infectious disease management training, which I'm going to be leaving, which I did many times. I'm going to be training, for example, this one. I'm going to train, this is the Ethiopian One Health group. I'm going to be training the Ethiopian One Health team on risk analysis. As part of that risk analysis, I integrate gender. I know I don't have funds to do gender separately, but as part of this training, I include it. So really aggressively taking advantage of what you have in front of you. So what I would say for people who are dealing with gender, don't wait many times, of course, campaign for funds, but there's so many opportunities to be able to jump in and talk about gender and be able to use it. I can tell you that with Afro-Hoon, whenever I would walk into the room, everyone talked about gender because I was so aggressively championing it that it became like a common thing. And I'm like, yes, that's what I want you to do. I want everyone to be thinking about that because as you talk about it, then you begin to practice. That's first of all one of the sessions. Another key point is just building allies. It is really, really important to build a coalition of allies within research, within policy, in the practitioner world. And you might be surprised, your ally might just be a dean of a school or it might be a policymaker in the Ministry of Health or it might be a community organization. So being able to identify who your allies are and working with those ones, who is it that I can identify, who can advocate for this? For me, who can help me advocate for things? We must, when you're thinking about allies, you also have to understand what is it that drives those allies? You must understand their incentive and their drivers as well. And then have a clear plan to address their incentives, have a clear plan to address, because that's the only way someone, what will I benefit if I come and I'm able to work with you? How do I benefit from this? And then of course, this is an example of it. In Rwanda, we just trained a group of district level planners on how to do gender budgeting, taking advantage of systems already in place and building on top of those. So Rwanda had a gender training manual. They have this system in place where they're very excited about doing gender but implementation, moving it from implementation. There was no budget on it. They developed this beautiful gender modules that they could use for planners, but they'd never done it. We came in and said, you know what? We can work with you on that. We can provide funding to be able to train your planners on how to include gender in their budgets. And so they just went through, all the planners went through this training and they're just getting ready to go into a budgeting session. And we think that's a big thing if they can go to their district and they say, okay, we talked about gender. Now let's make sure we include gender into the budgeting and that's really, really important. And as I round up, we have to measure progress of course, embedding gender and cultural opportunities, measuring what we are doing. We've talked about different ways in which we can measure this. We can be able to measure one health platforms using the one health platforms as well. And so as we think through this and being able to measure this, being able to recognize that you have opportunities like rapid response teams, one health platforms in different countries, other formalized structures and embed gender and cultural opportunities into that. I want to say that women are their own best advocates. So many times we talk about women empowerment. Of course, we talk about this because when we talk about gender is that we have, we always have to like look at women and opportunities for empowerment because historically, economically, culturally, they've sort of been left behind. And so we want to sort of raise them to that level of men as well. And so using women as their own best advocates. And we have tools that we've applied in the field. We, one of the really cool tools that we use is what we call photo voice where we allow women to tell their own stories. We take those stories, we use them to make policy briefs and we share those. We use calendars so that women can be able to collect their own data. Hey, this is for an animal health project. Did my animal die today? They can put it on the calendar. Did I treat my animal today? They put it on a calendar. Did I go for a training? They put it on a calendar. So they become the data collectors themselves. And then we take those stories and we put them in a magazine and we share those with policy makers. We share them on Twitter. We share them on WhatsApp. And it's the woman telling her story. Of course, one of the key things is data. I left this for last because I know this is at the foremost in people's minds already today, talking about data and not just sex-disaggregated gender, gender-sensitive indicators, proactively considering gender and of course intersectionality. And then my final statement is communication, communicating and messaging, gender-responsive, gender-transformative messages. And this is just an example. Many times people will say policeman. And even if it's a woman, but if you say police officer, then that is so inclusive. People will argue, oh, when we say man, we're really, it's generic. It means both male and female. No, usually it translates to male. So trying our best to be able to, even as we communicate, as we talk about different messages, crafting all one health messages, recognizing that outcomes of our work will have different impacts for different genders. I want to suggest at the end that organizational learning is really, really important. If you are a community of one health actress as we are, how are we tracking what we're doing? How are we staying relevant with gender issues? How are we staying viable and effective? So being able to come back and review. So we had this conference, we talked about gender. What did we go and do? Can we do a survey? Can we do, find out what people are actually doing about it? And then just to conclude, concluding remarks, like I said before, integrate gender as a core competency. It's already a one health core competency. And so just taking advantage of it and doing it from the beginning, engaging both women and men together, M and E as well, aiming to transform systems and structural barriers, which is one health is about, it's breaking those silos and barriers as well. Gender training, especially gender analysis, as many people as possible. Don't just leave it for the gender experts. Train a team of people who can do gender analysis in their projects, in their work, with in whatever area there are. And of course, like I said, take advantage of every opportunity and piggyback on that, if you have an opportunity, even if you don't have funding sometimes, take the advantage of that and put it in your opportunity. And so I'm going to stop there. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Asante Sanna, I want to recognize Afro-Hoon, the project that we worked for a long time, as well as IDFC and of course, Tufts University and many other partners who we've been working together over the last 10 years to talk about gender and one health. And it is really exciting to know that this is becoming a key framework and a key part of what the Kenya One Health team of people are doing. Thank you, Salome. Thank you very much, Helen, for that very interesting and very informative presentation. And even as we can note on the chat, many people are quite happy and have benefited a lot from your presentation. Thank you. And so maybe just a question to start us off. You're a veterinary professional. How have you managed to incorporate or how have you managed to move from being okay, you're a vet, but how have you managed to integrate gender such that you're speaking like a gender expert, yet your professionalism is veterinary. So maybe just tell us so that others can also learn from what, how you journey through. So I can tell you that my, what the thing that drove me to gender, and I'll take a minute to tell you, is I worked in Taita of Kenya and I was a veterinarian going to the field all the time. And I would go to the field and a farmer would, the farmer would come for me from the office, you know. And so I would, the farmer who came for me was always the man. And then I would go to the home and I would find that most of the time, the person who knew about the disease, the infection and everything was the woman. And initially I did this three way. I would go to the farm and then because the man asked me to go, he'd be like, okay, what's wrong with your animal? And then he turns to the wife and asks her and then she tells him and then he tells me. So then one day I was like, why am I doing this? I could just talk to the woman directly because she's actually the one doing all the work. So I really started thinking about this. And I started seeing them applying in different issues like gender roles, the way they are in health as well and in animal health as well. And I deliberately, so I had an opportunity to deliberately choose to go and do a masters in gender. So I went and did a masters being a veterinarian. I still went and did a masters in gender and development. And then I started working, combining that information on veterinary medicine and in gender as well. And I remember then more probably 20, 30 years ago, I was one of the few people who had those two, like what I would say, like disciplines. Like I was able to combine like veterinary medicine and gender together. Like I was trained in both areas. And so that has given me an opportunity to be able to champion that throughout. But I'm saying that even though I'm a gender expert in the project that we currently have, I have an IDRC grant that focuses on the likes of vaccine innovation. And in this project, we're working with veterinarians. We're working with a lot of people who didn't have a gender background. And we brought them in and we did gender training for them. Because we're like, if I can take a veterinarian and I can be able to train that veterinarian to think from a gender perspective, whatever they're doing, they'll be able to do it. And so we've been able to actually do that, bring them in and do that. We are doing to get the same thing with the Stokes-Pillover project. Saying we have medical practitioners, we have economies, we have how do we take all these different people and really create champions out of them. So deliberately, we've created training that we are deliberately using. We follow up, we talk about it. And I can tell you I'm really passionate about it. So everyone knows Helen is so passionate about gender that we use it a lot, but just a little bit, yes. Thank you, Helen. There's a question on the chat. What is your advice if we identify gender inequity in our research areas, but the communities seem to be comfortable with their traditional roles? Example, sorry, I missed it. Yeah, example, women do not want to take certain decisions. So how do you handle a situation where you notice that there are some gender inequities in the community, in the community, because of the traditions they have grown up in, they do not want to change? How do you bring about this automatic change? So I would say that most of the time, it's always a cultural issue, isn't it? We work in a community where the culture has been this way and you go to a meeting, I'll just give you an example. You go to a meeting in Western Kenya or in Turkana and you call the meeting and the men sit at the front and the women sit at the back and they'll not say a word. You know, if not, they're so used to being that way. I think creating awareness. One of the things I've learned is many times if given the opportunity, people want to stand up. And this is really important because that's where a man engaged comes in, engaging men in the process. I give an example that I worked in Southern Sudan and when I was working in Southern Sudan, I was doing veterinary medicine and gender. It took me four months just meeting with men before they allowed me to meet their wives. And I was in there to do a gender project, but I went every time and we had discussions with the men and we talked about it. And then one day, I would ask, oh, what do you do? Who does this? And they'd be like, I control everything. And then I'm like, but who actually melts the cow? Let me be like, oh, my wife does that. And I'm like, oh, who actually takes care of the goat? And then one day they say, well, since we've been talking about this, my wife does one, two, three, four. Why don't you go talk to her? So I feel like many times people don't recognize, I had a colleague who said to her until she came into a group. Things were just normal. She never thought about this as a gender difference. It was just what she'd been brought up doing. That's just what she'd done ever since she was a kid. So exposure, talking about it, creating awareness about it really challenges people, both men and women to think about their roles and recognizing that sometimes some of these roles are really disempowering, you know? And we don't want people disempowered. We want to be able to empower people, yeah. I know that I may not be able to answer all the questions, but I am available. My email is available. So if anyone wants to be able to send me an email or have a longer discussion, I am available to do that. One last one, both one health and gender concepts. So a dichotomy arises. Is it mainstreaming gender to one health or mainstreaming one health in gender? So I'm going to approach this from what is one health? Okay, what one health is this, bringing multiple disciplines together to be able to optimize health for humans, animals and environment. How do we do that? What do we call this multiple disciplines? Like I mentioned at the beginning, these multiple disciplines are engineers, they're gender specialists, they're medical doctors, they're social scientists, they're all, they're, you know, all these anthropologists, all this group of people fitting in to implement the one health. Because one health is actually breaking silos. And so if you think about it from that, you cannot do one health without breaking the silos. Gender is one of those competencies. As with one of the things that when in the earlier days of one health, we came up with what they call one health core competencies. And if you read them, you have leadership as a one health core competency. How do you create one health leaders? Collaboration and partnership. How do we collaborate in a one health manner? You know, behavior change. How do we change the behaviors of people to begin to think from a one health perspective? Gender. How do we include gender for people to allow to reduce these inequities that cause this silos in one health? So I wouldn't approach it of, do we integrate one health into gender or gender into one health? I think gender is a one health competency core competency as much as the other competencies are. And if you intend to implement a successful one health program, you have to think about gender as you are thinking about the other competencies as well.