|
Article Excerpt
Participant Handout B.1: Definitions and Concepts
Gender: Gender is a social construct of the different roles, responsibilities, and benefits of males and females varying from place to place and over time. Hence gender differences are not biologically determined like sex, but are part of the cultures, values and practices of a given society.
Gender Issue: This is a statistical or social indicator of inequality between males and females arising from discrimination and/or marginalization within society.
Gender analysis: Examines the access and control that men and women have over resources. This includes analyzing the sexual division of labor and the control women and men have over the inputs required for their labor and the outputs (benefits) of their labor. It also refers to a systematic way of determining men and women's often differing development needs and preferences and the different impacts of development on women and men. It takes into account how class, race, ethnicity, or other factors interact with gender to produce discriminatory results.
Gender budgeting: Gender budgeting seeks to ensure that public resources are used to meet the different needs and interests of women and men, girls and boys equitably.
Gender dimensions of poverty: These are the differences in the ways that men and women experience poverty.
Gender- (or sex-) disaggregated data: Statistical information that differentiates between men and women; for example, "number of women and men in the labor force" instead of referring generally to the "number of people in the labor force. "This allows one to see where there are gender gaps. One could go further to also consider the kind of jobs men and women occupy in the labour force.
Gender division of labor: Refers to the allocation of different jobs or types of work to men and women, usually by tradition and custom.
Gender equality: An approach addressing the issues facing both men and women in sharing the benefits of development equally, which ensures against a disproportional burden of negative impacts. It permits women and men equal enjoyment of human rights, and socially and economically value their contributions, ensures more equal access to opportunities for realizing their full potential and access to development resources, and to the benefits from development results. The fact that gender categories change over time means that development programming can have an impact on gender inequality, either increasing or decreasing it.
Gender Equity: This is the process of being fair to women and men in all spheres of life. To ensure fairness, measures must be available to compensate for historical and social disadvantages that prevent wo/men from operating on a level playing field. Gender equity strategies are used to eventually attain gender equality. Equity is the means; equality is the result. For example the affirmative action measures like the 30% quotas for women representation in decision making.
Gender gap: The gap between men and women in such terms as to how they benefit from education, employment, and services for example.
Gender indicators: These measure gender-related changes in society over time. They provide "direct evidence of the status of women, relative to some agreed normative standard or explicit reference group"
Gender Integration: means taking into account both the differences and the inequalities between wo/men in program planning, implementation, and evaluation. The roles of women and men and their relative power affect who does what in carrying out an activity, and who benefits. Taking into account the inequalities and designing programs to reduce them should contribute not only to more effective development programs but also to greater social equity/equality.
Gender roles and gender identity. Gender is how an individual or society defines "female' or "male'. Gender roles are socially and culturally defined attitudes, behaviours, expectations, and responsibilities for females and males. Gender identity is the personal, private conviction each of us has about being female or male; it defines the degree to which each person identifies himself or herself as male, female, or some combination of the two.
Macroeconomic advocate: is used here to refer to the officials who campaign for gender mainstreaming into the design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of macroeconomic policies.
Practical gender needs: These relate to women's traditional gender roles and responsibilities and are derived from their concrete life experiences.
PRSP advocate: is used here to refer to the officials who campaign for gender mainstreaming into the design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of PRSPs.
Sex: means the biological characteristics (anatomical, physiological, and genetic) that make us male or female.
Strategic gender needs: These generally address issues of equity and empowerment of women. The focus is on systematic factors that discriminate against women. This includes measuring the access of women, as a group compared with men, to resources and benefits, including laws and policies.
Women's triple roles and responsibility: In most societies, low-income women have a triple role: reproductive, productive, and community-managing activities. These responsibilities include:
* Reproductive role, Childbearing and childrearing responsibilities and domestic tasks performed by women. These include not only biological reproduction but also the care and maintenance of the work force (male partner and working children) and the future work force (infants and school age children).
* Productive role. Work done by women and men for pay in cash or in kind. It includes market production with an exchange value and subsistence or home-based production with actual use value as well as potential exchange value.
* Community-managing role: Activities undertaken primarily by women at the community level, as an extension of their reproductive role, to ensure the provision and maintenance of scarce resources of collective consumption, such as water, health care, and education.
Output: refers to the deliverables, which are directly attributed to a particular government programme, such as the number of classrooms constructed or the number of trained personnel in government health facilities. Outputs can therefore usually be measured on an annual basis.
Outcome: refers to the results of the deliverables. Outcomes usually cannot be unambiguously linked to a single government programme. For example, if the levels of pupil enrolments increase in Uganda, this may be due to effective educational services, but could also be improved household incomes making it more affordable for parents to send all children to school. Outcomes cannot always be seen immediately and on an annual basis. They are nevertheless important to measure as they reflect the overall objective or reason why government undertakes particular activity.
What is a PRSP?
This handout is designed to guide those involved in poverty reduction strategies paper (PRSPs) formulation and review at the country level in identifying and implementing policies and programs that will benefit both men and women and maximize potential benefits for poor families. Men and women experience poverty differently. As a result of their different constraints, options, incentives, and needs, women and men frequently have different priorities and are affected differently by many kinds of development interventions.
A full understanding of the gender dimensions of poverty can significantly change the definition of priority policy and program interventions supported by the PRS. Evidence is growing that gender-sensitive development strategies contribute significantly to economic growth as well as to equity objectives by ensuring that all groups of the poor share in program benefits. Yet differences between men and women's needs are often not fully recognized in poverty analysis and participatory planning and are frequently not taken into consideration in the selection and design of PRSPs. It is essential, then, to integrate gender analysis into poverty diagnosis and to ensure that participatory consultation and planning processes are specifically designed to give voice to all sectors of society--women and men as well as different age, ethnic, and cultural groups.
The World Development Report 2000/2007: Attacking Poverty, Engendering Development, and the work of authors such as Sen (1993) identify four main dimensions of poverty:
* Opportunities: Lack of access to labor markets and employment opportunities and to productive resources, constraints on mobility, and, particularly in the case of women, time burdens resulting from the need to combine domestic duties, productive activities, and management of community resources.
* Capabilities: Lack of access to public services such as education and health.
* Security: Vulnerability to economic risks and to civil and domestic violence.
* Empowerment: Being without voice and without power at the household, community, and national levels.
A PRS involves the formulation of policies and program interventions to help the poor to overcome each of these dimensions.
Opportunities
Gender inequalities in access to credit and financial services are often exacerbated by women's limited ownership of land. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, women obtain land rights through marriage, and these rights are secure only as long as the marriage remains intact and where the woman gives birth to a male child. Recent household surveys from Ethiopia, and South Africa show that women have substantially fewer assets than men. As a result, they do not have the collateral necessary to secure loans. It is estimated that in Africa, where more women than men are farmers, women receive less than 10 percent of all credit going to small farmers and 1 percent of the total credit given to the agricultural sector. When female entrepreneurs do obtain credit, average loan sizes tend to be smaller than for males. Compared to men, women generally have limited social and business networks of the type that facilitate access to financial services. Similarly, there is evidence that female enterprises are undercapitalized and that there are high returns from directing credit toward those enterprises.
Capabilities
Differential access to essential public services such as education and health may be determined by gender differences. For example, both by being stereotyped in school curricula or development assistance projects and because of family and community socialization, girls and women from poor households run a higher risk of dropping out of school or being trained for tasks that yield lower returns, such as sewing or basket weaving. Women in Sub Sahara Africa have experienced the lowest average annual growth in total years of schooling between 1969 and 1990 of all regions, raising the average years of schooling of the adult female population over this period by a mere 1.2 years. Although women have different health needs and priorities than those of men, such as reproductive health or HIV/AIDS prevention needs, these services are not as accessible to them. This is seen as an enormous gender differential in Africa's sexual and reproductive burden of disease. Data for Uganda, for example, indicate that AIDS infection is six times greater among young girls aged 15-19 compared with boys of the same age.
Security
Insecurity is an integral part of the experience of poverty. Gender-related security risks include economic and social changes such as death, divorce, or desertion of a spouse that erode the household as a social unit; the consequences of community and domestic violence and conflict; physical and cultural isolation and marginalization; ambiguity in legal status and rights; impact of environmental degradation; and precarious access to water. Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs) point to female-headed households, especially those with children who are too young to work or care for themselves, as being particularly vulnerable. PPAs also show that women and men respond differently to social, political, and economic dislocations.
When men are no longer able to make an important economic contribution to the household budget, the stage is set for family conflict. Although domestic violence is a leading cause of injury and death to women worldwide, it is often ignored or even condoned by the state and society on the grounds that it is a private affair. Also women in many countries are treated as legal minors where ownership of land and property is concerned.
Empowerment
A sense of not having a voice and power is another key dimension of poverty. Poor persons, especially women, are frequently excluded from social and political processes that affect their lives.
These processes lack transparency, and the decision makers are not accountable to them. With few exceptions, poor women, even more than poor men, do not participate in decision making in matters that directly affect their lives, whether these relate to public institutions or to civil society organizations. This pattern is also repeated in the household. Gender inequity and powerlessness are learned from early childhood in households around the world.
What is a macroeconomic framework?
A macroeconomic framework explores the broad economic aggregates and seeks to improve the performance of the economy as a whole. Macroeconomic policy making has 5 main objectives namely:
1. Full employment of the labour force where none who wishes to work at the existing wage rate is unemployed.
2. Price stability where inflation is avoided or contained within "tolerable" levels.
3. Economic growth
4. Satisfactory balance of payments where export earnings exceed expenditures on imports
5. Balanced regional development
To achieve these objectives, macroeconomic frameworks use a number of instruments namely:
* Fiscal policy that deals with government domestic revenues (taxes) and expenditures. This instrument touches on many lives as taxation resembles a penalty on either individual income or consumption. On the other hand, how government spends public resources is an indicator of "what" and "who" it values.
* Monetary policy that controls the money supply or volume in circulation to contain inflation. In addition it deals with foreign exchange rate controls.
* Debt management that is concerned with the composition of a given volume of debt.
* Prices and income policy where the later promotes greater price stability and balance of payments equilibria. Usually changes in wages are linked to changes in prices or inflation rate.
* Financial policy that explores issues of interest rates as a determinant to accessing credit.
What are new aid modalities?
New Aid modalities are shifts from official development assistance to programmes and projects in poor countries to general budget support of government programmes. The donor support is aligned to poor country development priorities as identified either through the PRSP or national development plans. The implementation is harmonized through the sector wide approach with participation of governments, development partners and the people through civil society organisations. The new aid modalities were intended to result in harmonized procedures for the transmission of aid in order to minimize management costs and ensure that a bigger percentage of the aid reaches the intended beneficiaries, capacity building of in country structures to direct the process of development and management of aid for results--improving the quality of life for the poor and their capabilities.
What is advocacy?
Advocacy: This is the effort to change public perceptions, and influence policy decisions and funding priorities. Advocacy involves making a case in favour of a particular issue, using skillful persuasion and strategic action. Advocates educate about an issue and suggest a specific solution. Advocacy is geared towards change: change in personal behaviour and attitude, change in the political and public debate, institutional change and legal change.
Advocacy is about influencing those who make decisions. Advocacy is not restricted to those policy makers who work for the government. There are policy makers who work in the private sector, and who wield enormous influence over poor communities, it is important to keep in mind that policy makers are human beings, not institutions. Advocacy is used to influence the choices and actions of those who make laws and regulations, and those who distribute resources and make their decisions that affect the wellbeing of many people.
Advocacy is both a science and an art. From a scientific perspective, there is no universal formula for effective advocacy. Nevertheless, experience shows that advocacy campaigns are most effective when it is planned systematically. Advocacy networks frame their issue, set an advocacy goal and measurable objectives, identify sources of support and opposition, research the policy audience, develop compelling messages, and mobilize necessary funds, and at each step of the way, collect data and monitor their plan of action. Each of these steps requires distinct knowledge and skills to ensure effective implementation.
Advocacy is also an art. Successful advocates are able to articulate issues that inspire others and motivate them to take action. They have a keen sense of timing and are able to recognize and act as opportunities present themselves.
Successful advocates are skilled negotiators and consensus builders who look for opportunities to win modest but strategic policy gains while creating still other opportunities for larger victories. Artful advocates incorporate creativity, style, and even humor in their advocacy events in order to draw public and media attention to their cause. The art of advocacy cannot be taught through a training workshop; rather, advocacy training provides tools.
Many people have a preconception that advocacy is about "being confrontational" and "shouting at the government". Advocacy does not have to be confrontational. There is a wide range of advocacy approaches to choose from, e. a public vs. a private approach, engagement vs. confrontation, and working alone or in coalition with others.
There is also a misconception that to take up "advocacy" requires an entire shift of focus to lobbying and campaigning activities, away from other valuable work in which we may be engaged on a daily basis. Advocacy can be effectively combined with other types of service provision and analytical work, and the strategic significance of incorporating advocacy into our daily work and struggles should not be overlooked if we are to bring about meaningful change.
This advocacy kit is designed to help advocates develop the skills to advocate for mainstreaming gender into macroeconomic frameworks and PRSPs. It describes some of the steps in organizing campaigns and provides information on developing, implementing and evaluating a successful gender mainstreaming advocacy strategy.
Navigating Advocacy Spaces and Places
Advocacy can take place within your organization, at the local government, at the national government level, at a regional intergovernmental level, or at international venues/fora. When initiating an advocacy activity,
it is important to make strategic choices about where to direct your energies and to look for strategic entry points. In some cases, it is beneficial to participate in establishing agendas of institutions or decision--makers such as government--sponsored policy consultations, stakeholder meetings with financial institutions, and local council meetings. Effective advocacy in these "invited spaces" requires clear demands for change by skilled advocates. Advocacy activities in "created spaces', that is, in spaces opened up by advocates themselves with different and independent agendas, may require more resources but often offer stronger negotiating positions.
Given resource constraints and the urgency of our goals, we should develop criteria for engagement that help us determine where we will have the greatest impact in promoting gender mainstreaming into macroeconomic frameworks, PRSPs and new aid modalities; and where our efforts can have the desired effects. Important criteria include:
* Our strength in terms of capacity and resource levels to effect changes in policy
* The institutions at which the relevant decisions are made
* The risks associated with engaging in particular spaces
* How we can ensure that our agendas are being promoted at the national, regional and international levels.
Advocacy as a process
Advocacy is a deliberate process, involving intentional actions. Therefore, before implementing advocacy strategies it must be clear who you are trying to influence and what policy you wish to change. A successful gender mainstreaming advocacy campaign is based on the following components that will be elaborated upon in later sessions:
* Strategy
* Mobilization
Without strategy, people easily get disappointed because it is hard to measure progress if there is no formulated goal and plan to achieve that goal. Without participation of stakeholders an advocacy campaign can easily be isolated and ignored. Without mobilization and resulting public debate, the public and policy makers might put aside the advocacy agenda as being irrelevant.
Participant Handout B.2: Mainstreaming Gender into a PRSP
This handout describes the nine steps (figure 10.1) required to ensure that gender issues are fully integrated into the processes of poverty diagnostics, selection of priority interventions and monitoring and evaluation. This section describes steps 1-6 as details for M&E are in handout 13.8.
(a) Integrating Gender Analysis into Poverty Diagnosis
Step 1: Ensuring that gender is addressed across the four dimensions of poverty: opportunities, capabilities, security, and empowerment.
Step 2: For each of these dimensions, documenting the experiences of poverty.
Step 3: Undertaking gender analysis of the data gathered and integrating findings into the country's poverty diagnosis.
Step 1: Addressing different dimensions of gender and poverty
The gender and poverty diagnosis should be structured around the four dimensions of poverty (opportunities,. capabilities, security, and empowerment).This analysis will often require the use of different data collection methods to produce key indicators on the four dimensions of poverty. The indicators and data collection methods are described in table 1.
* Opportunities indicators reveal gender differences in access to the productive resources and opportunities needed to escape from poverty and to promote economic growth.
* Capabilities indicators can identify current gender gaps and monitor changes in the basic welfare indicators for women and men over time.
[FIGURE 10.1 OMITTED]
Some opportunities and capabilities indicators, such as employment and health and nutrition status, can change fairly rapidly and, therefore, can be used to measure the short-term impact of interventions such as improved access to schools/education or health facilities. Others, such as life expectancy, change much more slowly and are used to assess longer-term structural changes.
* Security indicators identify vulnerability to economic shocks, natural disasters, and violence.
* Empowerment indicators measure gender differences in participation and in access to decision making in the political process at the national and local levels and in control over resources within the community and the household.
Step 2: Documenting the gendered experiences of poverty
Special data collection issues for gender analysis
When gender issues are not addressed in, for example, poverty diagnostics, this is likely to be due as much to lack of awareness of the importance of gender as to the limitations of the data collection methods per se. Although, as indicated above, excellent studies of intrahousehold resource allocation have been based on household surveys, these surveys frequently have difficulties in analyzing how resources such as food, money, and productive resources are allocated and controlled within the household.
There are also many studies where the information is available to conduct gender analysis, but this was not done because gender was not considered an important issue by the researchers. A common example is the many cases in which sex-disaggregated data is available on, for example, school enrollment, labor force participation, and successful applications for loans.
There are other cases where gender-relevant questions are included in the survey, but the information is not collected from the right person or in the right way. In some cases, information about the needs, attitudes, time use, or consumption patterns of all household members is obtained from a single interview, usually with the so-called (usually male) household head. Finally, there are cases where the household survey is not appropriate for collecting gender-relevant...
|
