The present review focuses on gender issues as tackled by IFAD projects in eight countries of the Western and Central Africa region (PA) and described in IFAD evaluation reports produced during the past ten years1. The information used in the analysis has been extracted from 13 evaluations2 carried out by IFAD’s Office of Evaluation (OE)3. The ultimate objective of this stock-taking exercise is to gather a series of lessons learned with regard to the extent to which these projects have fulfilled IFAD’s overall goal with respect to gender, namely, an expansion in women’s access and control over fundamental assets (Part I), an expansion in women’s decision-making role in community affairs and representation in local institutions (Part II) and improvements in women’s well-being and an easing of women’s workloads by facilitating access to basic rural services and infrastructure (Part III). The fourth part of the review (IV) elaborates on the extent to which projects have sought to incorporate the priorities and needs of both men and women in project design through gender analysis and strategy. Part I: women’s access to assets Access to credit Of the 13 projects reviewed, all provided for access to credit for women, mainly for income-generating activities (IGAs)4. Results have been mixed. In seven projects, access to credit for women has been relatively good or very good, while, in five cases, it has been very limited. In the “successful” category, we find two projects in Ghana, the Smallholder Credit, Input Supply and Marketing Project (SCIMP) and the Upper-East Region Land Conservation and Smallholder Rehabilitation Project (LACOSREP), in which 60% and 70%, respectively, of the credit clients are women, and the Oasis projects in Mauritania and Kanem, Chad, in which 50% of the clients are women. In the Mauritania Oasis and Ghana LACOSREP, this was all the more important because poorer women had never previously had access to credit and had never been engaged in microenterprise activities. The other successful projects include the Smallholder Rehabilitation and Development Project (SRDP)5 in Ghana, in which women beneficiaries once again exceeded men beneficiaries and showed good recovery rates, and the Smallholder Development Project in the Forest Region in Guinea (Conakry), in which 40% of the shareholders were women. Also, the Smallholder Support Project in Gabon is considered successful in this sphere since women held as many shares as men and were given 45% of all loans. The reasons for these successes differ from context to context, but some common traits may be discerned. The first is the importance of adequate project and counterpart staffing. In the SRDP project in Ghana, for example, a woman production officer in the Women in Agricultural Development Unit of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture was seconded to the project to coordinate women’s group activities. In addition to this, six women supervisors were recruited to support rural women’s activities. In the Oasis project in Mauritania, women regional project staff were responsible for providing women with adequate guidelines about the credit scheme before it was initiated. Again, in Ghana, the SCIMP project forged a partnership with three non-governmental organizations (NGOs) oriented towards women, and a women’s group formation specialist was recruited in the project management unit. These examples serve to show that, in areas where women have not been accustomed to setting up certain activities, the presence of women staff members can be reassuring and can be an effective tool to guarantee adequate information flows towards women6. Adequate staffing must also be coupled with a good training programme in issues linked to group formation and credit management, so as to allow women to make the best of the loans received. In almost all the successful cases mentioned above, training was extensively carried out, although the quality of the training was not always the best. The third common factor which partly explains the “success stories” in terms of access to credit for women is the particular attention given to women’s specific needs during the design of the credit schemes. In the Ghana LACOSREP, for example, a gender specialist was hired for a short-term period to design a gender-oriented credit strategy, while in the SRDP project, a gender-sensitive needs assessment was carried out at the beginning of the project implementation and formed the basis of the project’s gender and development strategy. In Mauritania, a number of mechanisms were introduced to encourage poor women to participate in the credit scheme, given their reluctance to do so. Poor women applied for credit together as a group because, individually, they were too poor and could not afford the entire entrance fee; no men guarantors were required on the loan application, and short-term loans, as opposed to medium-term loans, did not require a shareholder to appear on the application. Conversely, the absence of a good gender needs assessment prior to project implementation seems to be a core reason for the limited access to credit for women in the other projects that are the subjects of this review. Four projects were not very successful in reaching women because of a weak understanding of gender issues in the field. In the Food Security Project in the Northern Guéra Region (PSANG) in Chad, for example, the “group approach” for the establishment of IGAs was not the most suitable, especially for young women, given their time constraints, while, in the Maghama Improved Flood Recession Farming Project in Mauritania, unsuitable types of activities seem to have been targeted on women, and, in Niger, the marketing groups did not flourish due to their limited access to markets. In all cases, a gender needs assessment prior to implementation could have led to a greater understanding of women’s needs and constraints in terms of access to credit and a subsequent greater distribution of credit among women. Other recurring factors behind the limited outreach to women of credit schemes include the amount and quality of training. This is valid for the Rural Enterprises Project (REP) in Ghana, in which the Interim Evaluation Report refers to a lack of training for women’s groups, or even in the “successful” LACOSREP project, in which the most suitable methodologies to target poorer, illiterate women were not always used, such as visual aids. It is also worth noting that the projects were not always able to target the poorest women. There is explicit evidence of this in four projects: Guinea, Chad (PSANG) and Ghana (LACOSREP and SCIMP). Additional information on why this occurred is missing, however, in the evaluation reports reviewed for this stock-taking exercise. Clearly, therefore, the provision of credit for women is a necessary but not sufficient step in the effort to reach out to women; it must be coupled with other assets, such as adequate training, and must derive from an understanding of poor women’s needs and the context in which they operate. Only these actions together will enable women to take the opportunity to make the best of the loans received. Access to knowledge Closely linked to the issue of access to credit is that of access to knowledge. In nine of the projects reviewed, women were given access to this asset in three forms: through functional literacy courses, technical and managerial courses, and training linked to health, nutrition and home economics. Women’s access to this asset has been limited except in a few noteworthy projects that will be described below. Functional literacy courses were implemented in five projects. They were introduced to increase women’s self-confidence both as an achievement per se and as a way to encourage them to join village associations and credit groups. Only in the Oasis project in Mauritania, however, did the functional literacy classes make a difference, especially among young women who had felt that they had missed their chance for education by not attending school earlier. In the other projects (such as the Aguié Rural Development Project in Niger, two projects in Chad, and the Smallholder Development Project in the Forest Region in Guinea) the number of women who took the literacy classes was well below expectations. In Niger, the wrong methodology was used for women, i.e. the classes were held in a training centre rather than in a private home where the women would have felt more comfortable, while, in the Kanem project in Chad, the trainers were not paid, and the training materials were either absent or in poor condition. However, in spite of these shortcomings, both in Chad and in Niger, women benefited from the training courses in terms of self-development and empowerment. In Niger, the women were happy to have been given the chance to “see other places and meet other women”, while, in Chad, having attended the courses and seen the benefits, the women became aware of the importance of sending their daughters to school. The performance of the technical and managerial courses has been mixed. Nevertheless, two very positive experiences should be highlighted so as to set an example for future projects. The first is the Oasis project in Mauritania. In setting up groups, well-trained women facilitators were used, and men were also involved in the training. This allowed the men to observe for themselves the positive impact of training on women’s abilities as entrepreneurs and accept this change more readily. As for training in nutrition, home economics and IGAs linked to food processing, a new method was used to overcome the problem of lack of public staff: Moroccan couples were invited to work in the Mauritanian oases as extension workers. Moroccan men and their wives settled down for weeks (or months in several cases) in the oasis, and the Mauritanian women interviewed after the training provided by the Moroccan women demonstrated, indeed, good accountancy skills, greater self-confidence and an eagerness to learn more about IGAs than other women living in the oasis served by the normal extension system. Another noteworthy innovation that has had “a significant impact on women’s access to information”, to quote the evaluation report, is the introduction of women extension volunteers in Ghana under the SRDP. These volunteers have been extremely useful in disseminating knowledge on a local level and have served as bridges between a predominantly male extension staff and village women. Albeit seemingly marginal, the introduction of courses for women
aimed at non-traditional activities for women needs to be highlighted
because of the strategic importance for women. One is the light
engineering sector in Ghana under the REP (blacksmiths for example) and
the training of 40 women hand-pump mechanics out of 96 people in the SRDP
project in Ghana. In Mauritania too, women opened butcher shops that had
been traditionally run by men. These examples serve to illustrate a significant
step towards a wider diversification of activities in which women
should be involved not only for practical reasons, as it expands the array
of IGAs open to women’s, but for strategic and gender equity reasons,
too, as it changes the traditional vision that women are involved solely
in activities linked to the household or to food processing and petty
trade. Generally speaking, access to technologies has also been limited among women. Seven projects mention an effort to make technology available for women, but only in one case is there any information on success, i.e. in the Oasis project in Mauritania. In this project, the purchase of mills and improved clay ovens has helped in the processing and storage of food, with positive effects on family nutrition and the sale of food. There is little information on why women had little access to technology, particularly whether this is due to a lack in the supply when technology is demanded, or because of a lack of demand on behalf of women. The second alternative seems the most plausible and is also confirmed by the fact that there seems to have been an insufficient understanding of women’s real needs in terms of technology. In SCIMP Ghana, for example, the introduction of transplanted rice on a pilot basis was not successful because no adequate baseline survey was carried out to assess the real needs of women clients: most women were traditional growers of a local rice variety that did not respond to modern technology during the design phase. Also, transplanted rice, which implies increased labour requirements, was not a priority among women, and women were not willing to dedicate much time to it. The same can be said for the equipment provided through the project: a palm oil mill and two corn mills. These IGAs were not successful since the corn mill never became operational and the palm oil mill worked below capacity. This was, in turn, linked to the fact that the technology was provided without a previous appraisal of the management capacity of the women and of the available marketing outlets. In the Kanem project in Chad, there was no demand from women for loans for mills, and this had not been expected at the project design stage. Once again, this shows a misunderstanding of women’s needs in the specific project context. In Burkina Faso, in a cultural context where women have unequal access to land and livestock with respect to men, no mechanisms were put in place to favour the introduction of soil conservation technologies on women’s private plots. Therefore, few of the women’s private plots benefited from the construction of stone bounds and planting pits. The women did not have access to credit, had difficulties in accessing compost (some women do not even have access to the waste of their own animals) and lacked the means to transport compost. Consequently, they were not able to intensify crop production on their own plots. Also, the fact that they were expected to help their husbands on the family plot and at home, leaving them very little time to work on their own private plots, was never taken into consideration during the project design. Access to land Women have had very limited access to land. In three projects (LACOSREP Ghana, Maghama Mauritania and the Smallholder Development Project in the Forest Region in Guinea), women were supposed to have had access to newly irrigated plots or improved land, but did not. Only in Ghana is there any evidence that women increased their access to irrigated land by obtaining usufruct rights, but their ownership of the land only increased by 1%. 1/ Evaluation reports of the Office of Evaluation are available only for Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea (Conakry), Mali, Mauritania and Niger. 3 / An important consideration is the unfortunate scarcity of gender disaggregated data in most OE reports and the consequent difficulty of obtaining a comprehensive set of data on gender issues. 4 / The thematic study on Burkina Faso looks at the impact of three main components: soil and water conservation measures (erosion control bounding), agroforestry and crop intensification (planting pits). The credit component was left out in the evaluation, which means that it is impossible to evaluate women’s access to credit. For this reason, the project in Burkina Faso was left out of this section on credit. 5 / The information concerning this project is taken from the Ghana Country Portfolio Evaluation. 6/ It is worth noting, however, that this
has not always been the case. In the Kidal Food and Income Security Programme
project in Mali, there was only one woman in the “women’s
promotion division”, but she was hardly ever in the field, while,
in Gabon, the women project agents did not have the professional profile
required to carry out women group formation. The issue of the background
and training of the trainers regardless of their gender therefore remains
of utmost importance. 
Table of Contents | Part II: Women’s Decision-Making Roles in Local Institutions |
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