Change towards gender equality has not been deep enough, nor has it been irreversible.
While discussing some of the factors that hold gender equality
back, Laeticia noted the attitudinal barriers on the part of men - the
main implementers of the gender mainstreaming strategy; the tendency to
conflate “gender” with “women” and to ignore the“men”part of the gender
equation; misconception and limited understanding over what feminism and
feminists are about and the way many organisations structure gender for
organisational inequality and position staff members at the coal face
of pro-equality policy implementation for ineffectiveness.
In this column she concludes last week’s discussion on how “gender”
is treated and women rendered invisible in many development projects
thus leading to gender disadvantage and posing serious challenges to
gender equality.
The tendency to ignore women as part of the stakeholders often
leads to the design of projects that fail to promote gender equality.
The participation of all stakeholders is crucial because it
promotes ownership, contributes to the monitoring and sustainability of
projects and is a means to development effectiveness.
Participation provides a strategic vehicle through which both
women and men can address issues relevant to their needs and interests.
However, many times, evidence of issues raised by women and how these
have shaped the project concept and approach are not manifest.
Standard references are usually made of consultations with
“stakeholders” without reference to the genders/sexes of the persons
involved. The word “stakeholder” does not necessarily connote automatic
inclusion of women’s views and interests.
In any event it would still hold even if the persons consulted are
only men or only women.The so called stakeholders may, in some cases, be
urban based NGOs and CSOs who may not necessarily represent the
interests of rural women or men in the project area.
And this brings us to the choice of concepts or language used in
project design. In the name of gender mainstreaming, some project
documents are simply peppered with the words “men and women”,
“engendered” or “gender” without substantive gender analysis or gender
strategies.
There is also a tendency to frame the language in generic or
non-specific gender categories with projects purportedly designed to
address “the poor”, “the household” “the farmers”, “the communities”
“the consumers” or “the beneficiaries” without describing gender/sex.
The underlying assumption is that when men are central to the project
it will, ipso facto, benefit women and children or that the lives of
women and children will not be adversely affected when the design of a
project does not explicitly address them. The use of generic categories
conceals the different realities of men and women's lives and
invisibilises the different roles, needs, skills, bodies of practical
knowledge, and access to information and to power and decision making
processes.
Without gender analysis, baseline gender disaggregated data and
when women’s views are not represented among the perspectives of the
stakeholders, it becomes difficult to coin a strategy or specific
actions to promote gender equality during project implementation.
When there is no gender disaggregation of the stakeholders, many
project documents demonstrate limited recognition of gender relations,
time and work-load dimensions of women and men as constituting potential
constraints to the realisation of project objectives.Equally when
projects ignore to specify a budget or indicate the cost implications of
actions geared to promote gender equality, efforts to promote gender
equality are undermined.
It has been said that programmed actions without money attached
amounts to inaction. Gender sensitive budgetary allocation is the means
by which development projects can concretely address and respond to the
differentiated needs of the diverse groups of men and women as well as
boys and girls.
Finally, projects often overlook to put in place gender sensitive
result oriented indicators against which the project’s impact can be
assessed. A gender sensitive indicator is defined asa number, a fact or a
perception that point to how far and in what way a development project
is meeting its gender objectives and achieving results related to gender
equality.
Such indicators include economic power entailing reduced
inequalities between women and men in access to, ownership and control
over resources and benefits of development; political power or equal
participation of women with men as decision makers in shaping the
development direction of their societies; and social power or the right
of women and girls, men and boys to be more able to realize their full
human rights.
Thus gender blindness in the design of many development projects is
a factor, among others, why inequality persists. For emphasis, when
gender differentials are not recognised, baseline information not
gathered and women stakeholders ignored, planning for human development
is often based on assumptions or stereotypes and not on real experiences
of women and men. Gender is context based.
Thus development projects, as is the case of the state as we shall
see next week are bearers of gender. They are vehicles through which
unequal gender relations are recreated, reinforced and sustained. Many
projects have created situations in which the lives of women are made
worse off than before the introduction of projects. Women have been put
at a disadvantage in several ways:
First, some development projects have increased women's workload
and resulted in longer working days for women. These have consequences
for women’s health and well-being. Irrigation projects are cases in
point. Such projects increase women’s farming hours and unpaid work
entailing activities such as planting, weeding, harvesting and storing
with no compensation for increased labour, no new or improved
technology, no child care facilities and no guarantee of benefits.
Secondly, some projects erode women's traditional power over
control of resources such as income, land or even bargaining power. This
includes commercialisation of food crops such as maize, rice and milk.
Due to power imbalances in the family, men use their power, including
violence, to usurp activities traditionally reserved for women leading
to intensification in women’s and household poverty.
Thirdly, discriminatory practices have been reinforced. Promoting
the adoption of user fees in education and cost recovery in health
provision affects the educational and health status of girls and women
due to already existing norms that discriminate against them. Another
example is retrenchment as part of structural adjustment programmes
which had a disproportionate negative effect on women as they were the
first to be fired and the last to be hired.
Fourthly, some development projects exacerbate power differentials
between women and men. This often result from designing projects that
only take men’s needs into account such as the introduction of tractors
to increase farm acreage or the use collateral based methods for
on-lending that exclude many women who have no immovable assets.
And fifthly, when projects increase women’s unpaid work, they
deprive them of time to engage in productive activities that are
important for reducing their income poverty.
Next week, I will examine the state and its laws and policies as a force for or as posing a challenge to gender equality.
Laeticia Mukurasi is a Gender Specialist who gained recognition as
the first woman to fight and win the first labour case against
discrimination in Tanzania. From 1993 to 1998 she worked as Assistant
Resident Representative in charge of Gender/Women issues in UNDP
Tanzania Country Office. She attended the Beijing Conference and later
joined the African Development Bank from 1998-2010 where she attained
the position of Chief Gender Specialist. She is now retired but actively
working with the women’s movement in Tanzania and recently sponsored
two meetings to discuss the future of gender mainstreaming.
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