Directions and initiatives for the future

Because women have always been an extremely important target group in IFAD-funded projects, IFAD is more well placed than most international financial institutions to make its development agenda more accountable in terms of gender concerns. The steps that the IFAD Asia and the Pacific Division plans to take to reinforce this goal include the following:

Transformational role with respect to gender inequality

A transformation in gender relations must be established among project goals so that it becomes incorporated in all aspects of project design. The following measures may further this goal:

• Support projects that address gender inequalities more concretely through advocacy, lobbying, research and local mobilization.
• Display a firmer commitment to the inclusion of gender criteria in the funding of programmes and in the assessment of the effectiveness of the performance of Asia Division’s country portfolio managers.
• Identify local, regional and international partners to address the problem of gender subordination in various sociocultural systems by challenging ‘cultural sensitivity’ in terms of gender inequality.
• Pay more attention in project assessments to the impact on gender relations.
• Assist staff and project personnel through training to identify those strategic interventions enable positive changes in gender relations; accomplish this by supplementing participatory rural appraisals and the existing COSTAB with tools for gender analysis.
• Identify, implement and monitor gender-specific interventions. In the absence of this, establish gender-segregated targets, for example in training.

Treating women as farmers

Given IFAD’s mandate to assist the rural poor, the Fund must acknowledge conceptually that women are farmers and managers of land, livestock and forest resources. This conceptual step needs then to lead to the articulation of the following activities for the benefit of women:

• ownership of land and related production resources;
• access to new technologies, extension services and training in technologies and management;
• extension of the presence of women into new and innovative areas of production;
• promotion of domestic labour-saving devices/technologies as women’s employment and income-generating opportunities arise;
• encouragement of the sharing of housework, including childcare; and
• promotion of women’s (and girl’s) equal access to health care and education.

Women’s role in community decision-making

When the objective of economic development and poverty alleviation is changed from enhancing ‘well-being’ (which is itself a broader term than ‘standard of living’) to that of enhancing the capability achievement of individuals, then the effort has to be assessed in terms of the success of the individuals in pursuing goals in the many areas of activity that they may have reason to undertake. The evaluation must thus focus on ‘agency achievement’, which includes well-being but also factors such as participation in community decision-making and participation in political and public life.

IFAD projects should promote the equal participation of women in community decision-making and in other areas of contact with the wider world. Microfinancing projects have contributed significantly to empowering women to organize themselves and to meet with people outside the home. IFAD should capitalize on this newly gained confidence of women and encourage them to play a greater role in decision-making in the home, but also in the community.

Subregional gender analysis

A subregional analysis should be carried out to identify key issues in gender relations, as well as the strategic interventions that would have the widest impact on women’s status and on gender relations.

A preliminary list of strategic gender issues in Asia might include the following:

South Asia

• economic rights: the ownership of homesteads, land and other production assets;
• women’s access to markets and to employment opportunities;
• literacy and numeracy among women; and
• access to new technologies, training and formal credit institutions.

East and South-East Asia

• reversing processes involving the exclusion of women from traditional ownership rights to land;
• women’s equal participation in community decision-making;
• access to new technologies, training and formal credit institutions; and
• reduction of women’s productive and reproductive work.

Indigenous Asia

• job creation to increase income-earning opportunities among women;
• women’s rights to own land and other productive assets; and
• women’s equal participation in community affairs.

The Asia and the Pacific Division and the UNOPS Asia Office m et in Kuala Lumpur on 17-18 November 1999 to draw up the annual monitoring and supervision plan for 2000. The meeting identified the goals of the division in gender mainstreaming that are shown in the logical framework in Table 2.

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