Intersectional Gender Integration & Equity-Driven Enablers

The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a global framework for ending poverty, protecting the planet, and reducing inequality by 2030. Ensure Impact helps mission-driven organizations embed gender equality into community engagement and co-design by translating SDG 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls into practical action.

The Challenge

Women and girls have long been underrepresented in health and social care planning, yet their participation is essential to ensuring programs reflect their distinct needs, priorities, and perspectives. Gender and equity considerations must be built into projects from the outset and not treated as end-stage checklist items. Effective lived-experience integration requires organizations to identify and address equity barriers such as gender norms, caregiving responsibilities, safety concerns, and gaps in digital access.

Without these considerations and supports, participation may remain unrepresentative, valuable insights may be missed, and organizations may struggle to meet applicable equity, gender, quality, and funding requirements.

What We Do

We help organizations move gender equality from checkbox to integration by applying an intersectional equity lens throughout lived-experience engagement, co-design, and implementation.

We examine how gender intersects with race, age, socioeconomic status, and other dimensions of identity to identify and address barriers that limit the representation and meaningful participation of women, girls, and other marginalized communities.

Through practical, gender-responsive approaches, we help organizations build more representative advisory groups, create safer and more inclusive spaces, close participation and gender gaps, and reduce inequities and discrimination in programs, services, and practices.

By embedding equity into engagement and implementation, we also help organizations align their practices with the requirements relevant to their context.

What You Walk Away With

• Equity-Driven Recruitment Frameworks: Structured outreach and recruitment channels designed to meaningfully include women, youth, gender-diverse, and other historically underrepresented communities.

• Gender-Responsive Design Tools: Practical supports embedded directly into project budgets, workflows, and engagement plans, including:

  • Safe transportation, childcare supports, and secure participation spaces

  • Project scorecards to track equity goals, participation, and progress

• Equity and Compliance Alignment Frameworks: Tailored frameworks that help organizations integrate gender and equity considerations into relevant health and social care, quality, and funding requirements, including Canadian Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+), U.S. CMS health equity criteria, and international donor standards such as USAID, PEPFAR, and the Global Fund.