Programme support for policy analysis, advocacy and networking to address gender inequalities and the vulnerability of women

Introduction

Despite women’s essential productive and reproductive roles, women still have significantly less access than men to resources, assets, knowledge and community management and decision-making. IFAD’s Strategy for Rural Poverty Reduction in Asia and the Pacific, 2002 calls for the enhancement of women’s agency to promote gender equality and poverty reduction mainly through the improvement of women’s access to productive natural resources and financial services. The priority areas for this strategic change include the creation of an enabling environment to augment rural women’s agency through the enhancement of their capabilities and their effective access to land and other resources, as well as by ensuring the substantial participation of women in community management and local governance.

The first phase of the Gender Mainstreaming in IFAD Projects in Asia and the Pacific Region programme was launched in 1999. It aimed to:

• reinforce gender policies conceptually and operationally through support for IFAD project staff in the definition of relevant strategies and action plans;
• strengthen the initiatives undertaken through IFAD projects to transform gender relations in the project areas in positive, more equal directions and
• draw lessons from the initiatives and the methods of analysis in order to develop methodologies for gender analysis and support IFAD’s project design and implementation capabilities in the mainstreaming of gender issues.

During the earlier two phases (1999-2002), the programme conducted 11 gender impact analyses and studies in IFAD projects in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam and provided recommendations on gender mainstreaming for follow-up by projects. It produced the Strategic Gender Impact Manual and conducted gender training workshops. It also supported three indigenous women’s resource centres that had been established in China and India during the first phase. The programme enabled Asia and the Pacific Division to evolve a common understanding of gender analysis and to use this approach in project design and implementation. Suggestions made by the gender analyses were taken up in implementation.

With the recognition of the need for the continued presence of the programme and for building on the lessons learned during earlier phases, the current third phase of the programme was started in early 2004.

The major goals of the current phase are to address gender inequalities and the vulnerability of women so as to enable them to overcome their poverty and social marginalization, enable their greater and more active participation in community management and local governance, and ensure their control and ownership of economic resources.

The programme will have the following specific objectives:

• to promote women as agents of change, given that they are currently marginalized in the effort to build capabilities for poverty reduction and good governance;
• to suggest policy changes in gender relations so as to reduce women’s vulnerability to trafficking and HIV/AIDS;
• to redesign gender-responsive rural development projects with special attention to women’s roles in agricultural production;
• to promote women’s ownership rights over land, trees and other productive and financial resources; and
• to increase the democratic space for gender-responsive participatory governance in post-conflict situations.

The activities during this phase of the programme will build on various lessons learned during the earlier two phases. Specifically: (1) The Gender and Poverty Reduction Strategy Manual, completed in the earlier phase, will be published and distributed. The suggested analysis in this manual will also be used to inform project formulation and Mid-Term Review missions. (2) Support for ongoing IFAD projects will build on the recommendations made in the 11 gender strategy and impact studies conducted in earlier phases, for instance, the impact on self-help groups, on women’s agency, in the manner in which production for export can be developed through a women’s domestic handicraft base, and the extension of women’s agency into community planning and management. (3) Gender indicators formulated in the earlier phase will be tested in various projects.

The gender sensitization of IFAD staff and IFAD-funded project staff will be extended through concentration on work in IFAD-supervised projects, while the help of IFAD country programme managers is sought in the extension of regular support to the supervision missions of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS). For this purpose, gender analysis workshops will be conducted for portfolio management officers of UNOPS, as was done for IFAD country programme managers during the earlier phase. These workshops will also be opened to consultants who work with IFAD and UNOPS.

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