Collecting water, washing clothes, watering livestock: the tasks that expose women and girls to Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS) are socially assigned. FGS symptoms resemble those of a sexually transmitted infection, so they often go unreported and misdiagnosed when they are. And because the same water bodies serve households and herds, exposure sits across water, agriculture and health mandates, and within none of them. No link in this chain is purely biological, and none of them is what a gender-blind One Health approach is built to see.
Integrating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) strengthens One Health implementation: it improves both equity and overall effectiveness. Drawing on a grey literature review and consultations with twelve experts, mostly from FGS-endemic countries, this new policy brief uses FGS as a case study to argue that DEI, including gender, is not peripheral to One Health but constitutive of its operationalisation.
Recommendations follow the four Cs of the One Health High-Level Expert Panel’s definition (Collaboration, Communication, Coordination, Capacity building). These are not four silos: community input shapes which evidence is needed, evidence justifies mandates, and mandates require a resourced workforce that in turn sustains community-led work.
This policy brief is a joint effort by several experts led by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit(GIZ) GmbH and its Global Programme “Pandemic Resilience, One Health”, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in cooperation with the Women for One Health (WfOH) network. Launched at the 9th World One Health Congress in Lisbon and is available open access here: 260827_GIZ_PolicyBrief-FGS_en