IFAD’s Strategy for an Equitable Development for Women and Men in the Near East and North Africa Region

Regional Context

1. For the past decade, the Near East and North Africa (NENA) region has been undergoing structural changes. These have included liberalization of the economy, decentralization of government administration, streamlining of the legal system, and community self-organization into associations and natural resource management users' groups.

2. Changes have affected community well-being and cohesion. Although development indicators vary among NENA countries, as indicated in the IFAD Strategy for Rural Poverty Reduction in Near East and North Africa, all countries in the region experience similar urban-rural disparities. High rural poverty is placing new strains on households and changing well-established divisions of roles, responsibilities and resources between women and men. In particular, both women and men are now income earners; the number of men and women on the job market is increasing; education is seen as a way to arm girls for the future; women are taking up studies and jobs where men once predominated (in Syria, approximately 50% of students in the faculty of agriculture are women); and women are assuming added responsibilities to fill the labour gap created by the migration of men in search of better wages.

3. Various factors have prompted many national institutions and line ministries to develop strategies for the social and economic development of women: new social dynamics in the rural areas; increased awareness of the need to analyse and address the roles, needs and resources of women and men; and the ratification/adoption by many governments in the region of conventions/declaration in favour of women's rights (such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action). In the rural and agricultural sectors, these strategies have been developed with multilateral and bilateral assistance from, for example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Dutch Cooperation. Consequently, several countries in the region (Egypt, Morocco, The Sudan, Tunisia and Yemen) have strategies and plans of action that aim at facilitating the development of women and men farmers as economic producers and active participants in decision-making and in community development.

4. Given women's relatively disadvantaged position in rural areas, strategies have focused on improving their living conditions and social status, and have included:

• sensitization of decision-makers and field implementers on gender issues relevant to agricultural and rural development;
• research and extension to identify and respond to the needs of women farmers;
• promotion of on- and off-farm income-generating opportunities, including financial and marketing support;
• advocacy in relation to girls' education, women's literacy, and women's access to land and land titles; and
• strengthening of women's organizations and their integration into the various phases of decision-making.

5. The main actors in implementing these strategies have been the women development directorates that either constitute separate entities or form part of the extension or research and planning departments in the ministries of agriculture. Ministries have also allocated specific budgets for the implementation and evaluation of the strategies.

IFAD’s Strategy for an Equitable Development for Women and Men

6. IFAD’s strategy for an equitable development for women and men is strongly linked to the Fund’s strategic framework for enabling the poor to overcome their poverty. IFAD’s goal is to create the conditions in which the rural poor – women and men – can increase their productivity and incomes, and work their way out of poverty. Since women often have fewer opportunities than men do and less possibility to articulate the opportunities they seek, extra efforts are called for to discover and address their needs. Measures are being designed and implemented to strengthen women's roles in crop, livestock, fishery and microenterprise development, and to create channels and organizations enabling women to voice their opinions and to play an active role in community management. These measures go hand in hand with raising awareness of the skewed distribution of labour, resources and benefits between women and men, and the consequences on household well-being. Underlying IFAD’s strategy for an equitable development for women and men is the firm belief that the social, economic and political advancement of rural women is essential for poverty reduction and household food security.

7. IFAD implements specific measures in the NENA region to enhance the role of women in development and to work towards an equitable and sustainable development for rural women and men. These measures aim at providing women with information, skills and services to:

• reduce their workloads through, for example, accessible potable water points and energy-efficient stoves;
• increase household income and food security through, among others, credit services to women and small businesses run by women; and
• organize into local associations that respond to their own needs and can advocate for their interests through women’s training centres, local committees, cooperatives and support to literacy courses.

8. These measures are consistent with three of IFAD’s strategic objectives for the NENA region:

• enhancing the role of women in rural development by allocating additional resources to women to address their needs in an integrated manner;
• empowering the poor by assisting them to organize into local associations that take proactive actions in favour of their constituents, women and men; and
• diversifying the income base of poor women and men.

9. IFAD seeks to ensure the equitable development of women and men by:

• designing separate and specific women’s development components or sub-components in projects. Although the most common set-up in the NENA portfolio, separate components or sub-components have limitations in terms of sustainability and meaningful impact on target communities, as documented in a paper presented by the Rural Development Project for Taourirt - Taforalt in Morocco;
• integrating women as beneficiaries and community organizers in all project activities. In this case, instead of establishing separate women’s development components, projects seek to ensure that both men and women have equal opportunities to participate in activities that respond to their interests and priorities. Two ongoing projects in The Sudan, the North Kordofan Rural Development Project and the South Kordofan Rural Development Programme, have adopted this approach;
• designing a sector-based project where the main actors in and beneficiaries of the sector are women;
• tailoring the provision of services to render them more accessible and useful to women. For example, IFAD projects have helped some agricultural banks to change their procedures so that they now can disburse small loans based on creditworthiness rather than on the value of collateral;
• providing additional women extension staff and the required logistical support to enable better outreach and sustained technical follow-up with women beneficiaries;
• training extension staff (women and men) on communication and participatory assessment methods so that they can encourage women to express their needs, and men to discuss these needs constructively; and
• providing women with training in leadership and communication skills so that they can articulate the needs of their constituents and advocate for interventions in their favour.

Challenges in the Implementation of Gender-Equity Measures

10. IFAD’s experience in the design and implementation of projects in the NENA region has shown that projects may not be effectively improving the productivity of women producers and enabling them to participate meaningfully in the management of local development efforts. Factors that impede reaching out and working with women include:

• Tradition and culture. Although this is the most commonly cited impeding factor, it should be clear that culture is not static. Social change happens with or without the project.
• Women’s limited mobility and high levels of illiteracy. Reaching poor women is a challenge requiring not only a long-term investment in relationships with community leaders and local associations, but also investments to ensure the mobility of project staff (vehicles, lodging in isolated villages, fringe benefits for hardships incurred, etc.). These operational costs are crucial to extension or community development work, but they are costs that national implementing agencies are generally unwilling to bear in light of government budget austerity measures. Projects have resorted to reallocating funds so that financing from IFAD or cofinanciers covers operational costs, albeit only partially. Other measures have included the contracting of NGOs to conduct community and women’s outreach and social mobilization. Another solution has been to revise project appraisal targets to make them consistent with the flow of available financing from government and cofinanciers.
• Insufficient financial resources. The resources allocated for the provision of information, services and resources to women often cannot support separate women’s development components. These resources constitute only a fraction of the total project budget and are too limited to meet women’s demand to improve their livelihoods. Hence women’s roles, needs and resources should be analysed at the design stage, and a gender balance achieved in all relevant project activities.
• Ill-equipped local agricultural institutions. Agricultural institutions are not set up to meet the challenges of reaching out and working with rural women. Indeed, agricultural institutions remain focused on ‘agricultural production’ despite clear evidence that addressing women’s needs requires multidisciplinary interventions that cannot be ensured through the implementing agency alone. Agricultural agencies realize that working with women involves additional tasks and a different quality of performance. In particular, it involves expanding the boundaries of ‘agricultural production’ to include the supply of inputs, labour-saving technologies and marketing support; and networking with other agencies responsible for the provision of potable water, health, education, etc. This would mean investing in human resources development, in recruitment of younger staff, in a new management structure, and in new financial procedures that would give more autonomy and resources to the field staff. This is a significant shift from the current hierarchical, centralized and underfinanced structure of many agricultural institutions in NENA. New IFAD projects in The Sudan and Tunisia are squarely addressing the capacity of government institutions to decentralize and are allocating the required resources to guide the process.
• Unsuitable administrative and financial procedures within the implementing agency. The implementing agency’s procedures are generally not adapted to the requirements of working with rural women and to a timely response to their needs. For one, the implementing agency (usually a government agency) generally has no special budget line item for women-related activities, and usually computes expenses under the extension category. Expenses will go in priority to extension, i.e. production activities that target men. Disbursement for women’s activities is usually slow: it takes time to kick-start women-related activities, as they require negotiations within the institution, with local leaders, and with men and women. By the time initial activities are agreed upon, the resources originally allocated have been spent on other priority activities. As a result, women’s development activities are piecemeal and underfinanced. Where a more integrated approach has been adopted, this has been principally due to: (i) management’s awareness of the importance of women’s development and empowerment for rural poverty reduction; (ii) dissemination of financial information to operational units, including the women’s development team; (iii) high financial management capabilities of gender advisor or women’s development team leader; and (iv) the existence of a women’s development or gender-mainstreaming policy in the agricultural/rural sector with earmarked resources and a separate budget line.
• Lack of specific focus on women’s development in extension agents’ job descriptions. The job descriptions of extension agents generally do not support working with women and facilitating women’s awareness of their own potential, ability to voice and negotiate their own needs, and capacity to access and manage new resources. Extension agents (whether men or women) have multi-purpose jobs, making it impossible for them to dedicate themselves fully to being community development facilitators – a role they are increasingly called on to perform within the community-based development approach that IFAD adopts.
• Insufficient understanding of development and gender. There is a need to strengthen the understanding of development and gender, and the communication, planning and monitoring skills not only of the field agents working with women, but also of the management staff supervising and advising these field officers. However, preference is usually given to technical training that yields visible results in terms of productivity increases. All training related to development concepts, approaches and tools is generally given low priority; and even when it is implemented, it is generally not provided adequate follow-up. It is therefore suggested that the training of managers and project staff in development and gender-related issues be clearly identified in the future annual work plans and budgets (AWP/Bs) of all projects.
• Undervaluing of women’s contribution to development. Activities targeted at women are often assimilated with domestic activities and their added value undermined, thus leading to an underestimation of women’s potential contribution to development. As a result, women extension agents do not have priority to vehicles, to additional budgetary resources or to new positions. Significant efforts are needed in the valuations of women’s labour: this could be achieved by including such valuations in extension and credit programmes together with gender-relations orientation.

11. Addressing the specific needs of women and men equitably is thus not just a matter of ‘cultural change’ or ‘additional investments’. It is largely a question of ‘institutional change and reorganization’. This, in turn, generates a large demand at all levels (IFAD staff, project staff, counterpart agencies, cooperating institutions and consultants) for capacity-building on methods to integrate women as beneficiaries and active participants in community management, and to reach out to and work with women and men in a meaningful and equitable way. In response to the demand for capacity-building of this sort, the NENA division has developed a five-year technical assistance programme, entitled Programme of Action to Reach Rural Women in NENA Region, which is co-financed by IFAD and Italian and Japanese Supplementary Funds. The programme will work in close coordination with projects, IFAD and cooperating institutions. It will create a series of interventions that will help existing IFAD-supported projects to meet their objectives of poverty reduction more effectively and equitably.

Targeting for outreach to poor rural women