Gender Mainstreaming in Development Cooperation Ireland

Country Strategy Papers (CSP)

Rachel Waterhouse & Charlie Sever

1.Introduction

Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI) is committed to promoting gender equality, as a right and as integral to its overarching goal of poverty reduction and promoting equality and inclusion. DCI’s Gender Equality Policy defines gender mainstreaming as its key strategy to promote gender equality. It identifies the Country Strategy Paper planning process as a critical entry point for gender mainstreaming.

Gender mainstreaming, however, is a complex process. It becomes even more challenging in the current context, of an on-going shift from local level project and programme management towards engagement in policy dialogue at macro level. Increasingly, development assistance is channelled through the new ‘upstream’ aid modalities of Sector Wide Approach programmes (SWAPs) and ‘country led’ national development programmes - particularly Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) – funded through block funding, pool funds and centralised support to national budgets as direct budget support (DBS). The emergence of these new aid modalities poses specific risks and challenges, as well as opening up new opportunities for the effectiveness of gender mainstreaming.

Given that gender mainstreaming through new aid modalities is a relatively new and evolving process, DCI has decided to document existing experience with the aim of learning lessons and refining its guidelines to facilitate gender mainstreaming in the CSP process. This report focuses on experience with the DCI-Ethiopia CSP, seen within DCI as a positive experience that can offer lessons for good practice.

The report gives a brief introduction to the context and rationale for the current shift in aid modalities and the implications of this shift for strategies to promote gender equality. It takes a broad look at comparative experience with gender mainstreaming in upstream aid modalities and at lessons learned. This background provides the context for a closer look at the DCI Country Strategy Paper process and the specific experience of gender mainstreaming in the DCI-Ethiopia CSP. The authors seek to draw lessons from this experience and recommendations are made for future CSP exercises and for strengthening the CSP guidelines.

  1. New aid modalities and the implications for gender equality

From micro projects to macro programmes

Over the past decade there has been a significant shift in the ways in which donor aid is passed on to recipient countries. This has entailed a move away from donor funding of isolated, individual projects towards programmatic approaches which tie donor funding more closely to national government planning and expenditure frameworks.

This gradual transition responds to several concerns, including those around the high transaction costs imposed on donors and recipient countries alike by funding a plethora of discreet and often parallel or overlapping projects; the stress that this creates on existing weak institutional capacity in many developing countries and the negative implications for ensuring accountability. In this context, project approaches which were formerly the mainstay of much development spending are increasingly seen as a non-strategic and wasteful use of resources which create additional layers of bureaucracy and may have little impact in the long term (Subrahmanian 2004b). Moreover, recipient countries themselves are demanding greater control over resource allocation and management. Partly in response to these issues, development cooperation is increasingly channelled through upstream aid modalities including funding to Sector Wide Approach (SWAp) programmes and direct support to the general state budget (Direct Budget Support – DBS). Beyond increasing efficiency in resource allocation and management, this process is held to increase transparency and accountability.

Alongside the shift in aid modalities, the role of donors increasingly involves policy dialogue with recipient Governments, as common policy goals, performance indicators and performance assessment frameworks are agreed. National Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) processes, in particular, have become a central tool for policy dialogue between developing country Governments and the IMF, WB and other major donors including DCI. Developed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a means to link debt relief with poverty reduction outcomes, officially these strategies are intended to be ‘country led’ and should involve a process of broad-based consultation with local people, communities and organisations.

National autonomy is limited, however, by the fact that donors have generally tied direct budget support to Government performance in designing and implementing a PRS, measured against a commonly agreed matrix of poverty reduction indicators. This provides considerable leverage for donors to enter into policy dialogue with the recipient Government at sector and macro levels.

The original PRS emphasis on neo-liberal structural reform to the economy, involving market liberalisation and retracting the role of the state, is gradually being superseded by emerging concerns around ‘good governance’ and state responsibility to provide safety nets for the poor and create an ‘enabling environment’ for economic growth. In this context, greater importance is given to partnerships not only between government and donors but also between these and other institutions, including private sector and civil society organisations, both as service providers and as participants in decision-making around national policies and programmes. This has widened the scope for these actors to participate in policy dialogue and influence.

Apart from the PRS process, the Millennium Development Goals[1] (MDGs) and related International Development Targets (IDTs) have served as a key focus for harmonising donor support. As a prior statement of common goals between donors and developing country governments, international commitment to the MDGs has facilitated the process of increasing donor cohesion and pooling development assistance (Subrahmanian 2004b). Increasingly, PRS indicators are expected to show progress towards meeting the MDGs.

This evolving context - for development policy and for shaping the relationships between donors and recipient countries - has significant implications for gender equality and for the ways in which donors may promote, or undermine, progress towards this goal.

Background to gender mainstreaming

In recent years, ‘gender mainstreaming’ has become a key strategy for development practitioners to promote gender equality. This concept came into widespread use following the 1995 UN International Conference on Women and adoption of the ‘Beijing Platform for Action’ for women’s advancement. It draws on lessons learnt from past efforts to try and redress a gender-blind approach to development that has tended to ignore and marginalise women. From an initial focus on targeting women to meet their immediate needs, strategies to ensure that women benefit from development have evolved to focus increasingly on addressing unequal power relations between women and men (gender relations).

Gender mainstreaming has developed as a strategy that shifts the focus from channelling assistance to women, as a target group, to promoting gender equality as a development goal. It has been defined as:

“a commitment to ensure that women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences are integral to the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of all legislation, policies and programmes so that women as well as men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. Gender Mainstreaming is integral to all development decisions; it concerns the staffing, procedures and culture of development organisations as well as their programmes; and it is the responsibility of all staff” (DFID 2002).

A Gender Mainstreaming strategy often incorporates a twin-track approach (as laid out, for example, in the DCI Gender Equality Policy 2004). This combines a strategy for institutional change with specific actions to promote women’s empowerment where this is necessary to redress persistent inequalities. The mainstreaming approach recognises that gender equality is critical to the achievement of other development goals including poverty reduction.

To operationalise gender mainstreaming, a number of key factors or steps in the process can be identified. These are illustrated graphically in Diagram One below. However, practical tools to implement gender mainstreaming were initially conceived of and developed within the context of a focus on individual projects. Increasingly, there is now need to adapt this strategy to suit the emerging context of upstream aid modalities, harmonised donor assistance and donor-developing country dialogue on policy, programme implementation and outcomes.

Diagram One: Key steps in gender mainstreaming

New opportunities for gender mainstreaming

Strategies for gender mainstreaming were largely conceptualised in the context of discreet development projects. In the best case scenario, project level experience can provide lessons on good practice for promoting gender equality more widely. In Bangladesh, for example, CARE International has promoted gender mainstreaming in its DFID-funded ‘Rural Development Programme’, promoting new ways to increase women’s technical skills in agriculture and thereby their social status and income.

Inevitably, however, individual projects are situated within a wider political and institutional environment, which affects and constrains the degree of change they can achieve even at project level. Thus, to continue the example, women farmers involved in the CARE-Bangladesh programme have improved their technical skills but still face discrimination in the home and in the community. Whilst some women participants reported an increased role in household decision-making since they learned new technical skills, others did not share the same result and some were the victims of domestic violence. More widely in Bangladesh, women continue to suffer from lower nutritional levels than men, related to women’s generally lower social and economic status (DFID-Bangladesh 2004).

By contrast, upstream aid modalities potentially offer tremendous opportunities for promoting gender equality through sector wide and national level policies, programmes and implementation strategies. They provide Governments with a mechanism to build broad consensus with partners around development goals and approaches. They give donors the opportunity to work in partnership with recipient country governments and other actors including private sector and civil society organisations at the level of policy dialogue and national planning. They offer an opportunity to influence the policy and institutional environment within which local (and project) level activities take place.

In the Bangladesh example, for instance, working through upstream aid modalities could provide the opportunity for CARE and its local partners to bring evidence of the barriers facing women’s exit from poverty to national level decision-making forums. This evidence could be used to promote wider dialogue and advocacy with other actors (including Government institutions, donors and the private sector), on the measures needed to help women overcome these barriers and thus to promote more effective rural development nationally.

Cooperation through upstream aid modalities is widening the space for dialogue between the state and other actors as new, multi-stakeholder forums emerge for policy making and planning. Through sector level and budget support, donors may influence recipient governments to ensure that policy commitments – including commitments to gender equality - are backed up through national plans and budgets and that implementation and budget execution are monitored through jointly agreed assessment frameworks, e.g. through PRS monitoring systems. These involve monitoring against a set of key indicators, which may include indicators of gender equality.

Harmonised donor support to strengthening the institutional capacity of Governments, including capacity for results-oriented planning and budgeting, can help to ensure that policy statements – including those on gender equality - turn into practical policies on the ground.

The MDGs offer another opportunity to promote dialogue around how best to achieve gender equality. Increasingly, it is now recognised that gender equality will be key to achievement not only of MDG3 (women’s empowerment) but broadly to wider achievement of the MDGs including MDG1, poverty reduction (DFID 2005). The MDG targets may be incorporated into national poverty monitoring systems, helping to ensure accountability towards meeting these goals.

Imposing challenges

Despite significant opportunities for gender mainstreaming, the shift to new aid modalities presents imposing challenges for the goal of gender equality. Whilst these relate to difficulties with gender mainstreaming in general, the added complexity of working through multi-stakeholder forums at sector and national levels means that existing barriers are all the more difficult to overcome.

A number of recent evaluations[2] of gender mainstreaming policies and programmes highlight the following critical challenges:

  • mixed understanding across institutions of what ‘gender mainstreaming’ means as a concept and of how it affects everyday work of the institution, can make the strategy ineffective;
  • data systems which inform national policy making are rarely gender sensitive and often do not even supply sex disaggregated data;
  • weak data and lack of capacity for gender analysis can create the feeling that gender mainstreaming is a donor-imposed agenda, even where partners have official policy commitments to gender equality;
  • there has been widespread ‘policy evaporation’, where good policies on gender mainstreaming have been lost in translation to programme implementation;
  • knowledge gaps in understanding the factors that enable or disable gender sensitive programming have made policy evaporation difficult to address;
  • ‘invisibilization’ has occurred, whereby concrete positive outcomes of gender mainstreaming are not captured in programme monitoring or evaluation (Moser 2004). This has meant it is harder to argue the case for gender mainstreaming, especially when donors and partners are dealing with a cluttered agenda of ‘cross-cutting issues’ that are all supposed to be ‘mainstreamed’[3];
  • difficulty in attributing evidence of change (impact) to a particular approach or intervention, particularly in the context of multi-donor and macro level programming, can make it hard to ensure accountability for gender mainstreaming.

Such problems have led to recent charges that mainstreaming has become a mechanical and technocratic process[4]. Mukhopadhyay, for instance, laments that the gender equality agenda has been de-politicised, de-contextualised and turned into a technical project that leaves existing unequal power relations intact (2004).

Even the MDGs have been seen as a risk for gender equality. Although these include women’s empowerment, Governments and donors have tended to focus on the target for MDG3, of closing the gender gap in education. Other indicators such as women’s increased share of non-agricultural wage employment and political representation tend to be ignored. Evidence also suggests that the focus on poverty reduction has led to an increasingly instrumentalist approach to gender equality (Painter 2004).

In the context of SWAPs and DBS, an increasing distance between the ‘lived realities’ of women and menand the national policy forums which donors support can entail the risk that the grass-roots concerns, needs and interests of women as well as men become marginalised[5]. Meanwhile, donor harmonisation and the need to achieve multi-stakeholder consensus around the national development agenda substantially increases the challenge of influencing that agenda with new or radical ideas.

A plethora of ‘voices’ at the policy table can mean that softer voices are drowned out. Indeed, certain civil society organisations (CSOs), including some specifically representing women’s voices, are concerned that the shift in aid modalities will mean they are squeezed out from access to resources and decision-making. DCI and other donors are attempting to address this, by reviewing their approach to working with civil society and ensuring that support is channelled to CSO capacity building for advocacy work. In the context of upstream aid flows, they have also recognised the critical role donors can play in widening the space for dialogue between civil society and the state (DCI-Mozambique 2004).

  1. Gender mainstreaming in new aid modalities: lessons from experience

The shift to upstream aid modalities is relatively recent, involving different development actors including Governments, civil society, the private sector and donors, in new and evolving types of relationship. Already, however, there are important lessons for gender mainstreaming. This section presents a brief overview of some key lessons learnt.

Gender Analysis

Critically, effective gender mainstreaming depends on sound gender analysis, i.e. context specific analysis of the social, economic and power relations between women and men within the given historical, institutional and policy context. The starting point for gender analysis is the availability of sex disaggregated data able to reveal differences in the needs, interests, opportunities and vulnerabilities of different categories of women and men.