Health workforce leaders may not be aware of the ways in which gender discrimination impedes efforts to develop, efficiently deploy, and fairly compensate their workforce. This can result in maldistribution, absenteeism, and a limited pool of motivated health workers, which can negatively impact the provision of health care. This advocacy tool helps users to understand how common forms of gender inequalities and discrimination can negatively affect the health workforce; assess whether health workers may be experiencing one or more forms of discrimination; and successfully advocate and take action through policy-making and improved management to reduce gender discrimination and build a more motivated and effective workforce to serve the population’s family planning, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and other primary health care needs.
CapacityPlus’s Bottlenecks and Best Buys Approach is designed to help educational institutions identify obstacles to increasing the production of competent and qualified health workers that can be overcome through limited yet strategic investments. This guide identifies the stakeholders who should be involved, the steps in conducting a bottlenecks assessment, and a method for using the results to identify and build consensus on the most effective and affordable actions (best buys) for overcoming bottlenecks. It also provides tools and examples for strategic steps in the approach, such as engaging stakeholders, conducting a situation analysis, defining the school’s scale-up goal, leading group interviews, analyzing the results, and presenting the final bottlenecks and best buys report to external stakeholders and potential investors. 
The Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit is designed to help countries determine what would motivate health workers to accept and remain in rural posts. It builds on the World Health Organization global policy recommendations for rural retention and is based on the discrete choice experiment (DCE), a powerful research method that identifies the trade-offs professionals are willing to make between specific job characteristics and determines their preferences for various incentive packages, including the probability of accepting a post in a rural facility. Employing a simplified version of the DCE methodology, the toolkit guides HR managers through the survey process to quickly assess health students’ and health workers’ motivational preferences to accept a position and continue working in underserved facilities. The results can be used to create evidence-based incentive packages that are appropriate within a country’s health labor market. 
