Director of Gender and Empowerment, CARE

Biography

Photo of Doris  Bartel

Doris Bartel is a reproductive health and gender specialist with over 25 years of programming, clinical, research and management experience.  Doris has a specific focus on applying a rights framework to reproductive health and development outcomes in international contexts. She works with teams around the world to apply innovation and best practice for more targeted gender-transformative strategies in addressing root causes of poverty and injustice and overcoming discrimination and marginalization. She has designed and led innovative community-based programming strategies to address gender discrimination and violence, and has supported rigorous evaluations for gender-integrated programs for both adolescents and adults in both development and humanitarian settings. She has led qualitative and participatory action research to explore sensitive topics such as intimate partner violence, expression of sexuality, and child marriage as well as issues affecting children and their families at the end of life. 

In 2010, she launched and directed CARE USA’s first Gender and Empowerment unit, leading CARE USA's strategic planning process for achieving and monitoring progress of gender equality in CARE's programs. She was named one of the most influential gender experts globally, in a report by the Graduate Institute of Geneva in 2016.

In her current role as Senior Research Fellow at CARE, she is leads CARE’s research agenda on the role of non-governmental organizations in supporting autonomous progressive social movements. This work includes analysis of solidarity and mutual support among community-based groups and the strategies and tactics for building collective voice and collective action, grounded in the principles of listening to, learning from and amplifying the voice of activists.

Prior to CARE, Doris worked as a women’s health clinician, trainer and researcher in health services research, improving clinical practice and health systems in Africa, Eastern Europe and in resource-poor settings in the US.  Doris is a certified Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner.