IFAD uses the term ‘targeting’ to mean the process of identifying the main/end beneficiaries of project activities by strata, sex, occupation, area, age, or any other variable(s). ‘Direct targeting’ means taking concrete operational measures to reach the main beneficiaries (target group). ‘Indirect targeting’ relates to measures aimed at indirectly reaching those who may benefit from project activities but do not fall within the main beneficiary group.

1. Given the recurrence of problems arising from a combination of poverty and gender inequality, targeting project activities to reach poor rural women constitutes a common challenge in all areas of IFAD operations. However, in every region, targeting strategies must be tailored to local conditions in terms of women’s assets, their role in the rural economy, socio-cultural norms concerning gender roles and institutional capacities. This is also true of the Near East North Africa (NENA) region, where the question of women having access to assets for development raises different targeting problems in each community. To the extent that recurrent issues can be identified, these suggest that more consistent efforts should be made to target poor rural women as directly as possible. However, even when direct targeting is not feasible or appropriate, project activities and resources can still be used to improve indirect outreach. This paper reviews a number of recurrent targeting issues and solutions in relation to different types of interventions, focusing respectively on infrastructure, increased farming productivity, income-generating activities (IGAs), finance and institution-building.

Infrastructure Interventions

2. Main targeting issues. This type of project often assumes that women will automatically benefit from interventions that increase the availability of assets such as clean water and roads. However, the fact that women are typically responsible for fetching water or fuelwood does not necessarily mean that interventions relating to such assets will benefit them. Women’s knowledge of these assets and the ways they are used is rarely sought by projects as the basis for determining locations or arrangements for using water points, irrigation schemes, etc. As a result, women may not be appropriately integrated into new patterns of resource use or for maintaining new infrastructure. In some cases, changes in infrastructure may even have a negative impact on the balance between women’s domestic and economic roles, and poor men and women may be excluded from using common resources by the introduction of cash users’ fees. Finally, when asked to set their priorities, poor rural women tend to focus on types of infrastructure and services such as health care, child care and education, which reduce their burden in terms of limited mobility, responsibility for child care and time constraints. However, these benefits do not always accrue under typical infrastructure interventions offered by projects.

3. Possible solutions for the main targeting problems in infrastructure interventions:

• Women should participate fully in identifying needs and solutions and in the management and validation of infrastructure. The simplest way to do this is through mixed-gender meetings to share knowledge about patterns of resource use. Although women’s participation in such meetings may be hindered by limited mobility or cultural norms, these obstacles can be overcome by adapting participatory methodologies to local preferences (e.g. separate groups for women or meetings in private homes) and by first approaching local (male) authorities.
• Awareness-raising campaigns on the use of infrastructure should target all users, both men and women.
• Users’ fees, maintenance agreements and other changes in arrangements should be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of those who have no assets, the ‘assetless’, a category to which poor women often belong. As local communities generally have their own way of dealing with the needs of people who cannot afford to pay user fees, such arrangements should be assessed when modifying the situation of a community in terms of assets distribution. In particular, projects should stimulate discussions and awareness at the community level as to the validity and social sustainability of existing communal arrangements to support the poor.
• Expanding infrastructure interventions to include social, rather than just physical or economic, infrastructure may have a considerable impact on poor women inasmuch as they facilitate their participation in project activities by increasing their mobility and time available. Some projects make special provisions to finance schemes that are especially beneficial to women (e.g. women’s centres, kindergartens, etc.), based on needs expressed at the community level.
• Efficient allocation of resources can be facilitated by turning gender-disaggregated project targeting matrixes into tools for assessing the impact of each activity on different groups. An example of such a matrix is provided below its current form (Table 1). This matrix could be adapted to accommodate more data that would justify the choice between assured access, possible access and no access, and to set out how different activities are likely to affect women’s daily schedules, livelihoods and well-being.
• To assess the impact of infrastructure interventions, projects should develop gender-sensitive indicators that are both qualitative (e.g. women’s sense of greater security as a result of using a new road) and quantitative (e.g. labour time saved, based on typical daily schedules). Such indicators are more likely to be relevant if developed in consultation with men and women from different poverty groups in the community, a process that may also facilitate the targeting of adjustments to ensure outreach to the most disadvantaged and assetless.
  

X = assured access to activity.
* = possible access to activity.

Enhancing Farming Productivity

4. Main targeting issues. A second main type of intervention focuses on enhancing productivity in certain sectors, typically crops and livestock production. Men farmers or herders, whether individually or in groups, are usually the main targets of these interventions. Conversely, women and the assetless are often involved only marginally, if not de facto excluded as direct beneficiaries. With regard to women, this type of intervention first poses the question of how to target activities and resources to reflect women’s productive role, even when they do not own the type of assets (land, livestock) that projects use as a basis for selecting beneficiaries. Secondly, women tend to be insufficiently reached by extension services, even for inputs or technology relevant to their activities, since they rarely work as independent farmers/herders with full rights to productive assets. Thirdly, limited attention to women’s tasks in farm work translates into little effort to develop extension packages specifically tailored to these tasks. This problem is aggravated by limited research on inputs and technology suited to the needs of small farmers and herders.

5. Possible solutions for the main targeting problems relating to enhancing farming productivity:

• Projects may try to ensure that resources are divided fairly between men and women by setting quotas for participation and extension services based on gender. Although they present targeting difficulties of their own, under certain conditions, quotas may be helpful.
• Projects should use analysis of women’s economic contribution and of local support networks to determine which group of women (or individual women) are eligible to take part in the quotas. Candidates should be the persons most likely to benefit (or at least significantly more likely) only if given direct access to project resources. These might include women who own land, heads of households, wives of migrants and so forth.
• Initiatives to address women’s illiteracy, limited mobility and time constraints may render targeting by quotas more effective, both quantitatively (e.g. participation rates) and qualitatively (e.g. improving women’s understanding and use of technology and services, as well as more ‘democratic’ participation in project institutions). Optimal quotas need to be accompanied by action to enable women both to access project resources and to benefit from such access (i.e. to put resources to effective use).
• Beyond quotas, effective strategies for outreach to women in productivity-enhancing interventions should include hiring and training women extension agents (particularly from within the community itself, or at least from among women who are permanently posted there).
• Development packages suited to women’s needs and activities where they feature prominently should be developed and implemented more systematically.
• Home economics could be turned into a relatively easy point of access for women engaged in farming activities. For instance, training sessions in food processing could be complemented by extension services on food production, use of fertilizer, etc.

Women’s Income-Generating Activities

6. Main targeting issues. When IGAs are designed specifically for women, targeting issues arise on three main levels. First, it is often a challenging task to select activities in such a way as to ensure that women’s involvement is sustainable and has a real impact on their income levels. Secondly, reliance on self-targeting may appear to be a good alternative to dictating choices of activities from outside. However, this may be counterproductive from the economic standpoint as women may choose to carry on with traditional activities that have little potential in terms of reducing poverty. Thirdly, projects may find it difficult to have a clear sense of women's situation vis-à-vis a range of assets that are indirectly relevant to their IGAs (e.g. literacy, access to inputs, market access) and may require adjustments in the targeting and allocation of resources.

7. Possible solutions to the main targeting problems in women’s IGAs are:

• Investment for women’s IGAs should focus on high-impact areas, i.e. where women have a comparative advantage in terms of skills, routine time investment, market potential, interest and access to necessary assets. Project identified income-earning activities for women, such as handicrafts may not be the ones for many poor women, such IGAs include small livestock activities, or perhaps marketable handicrafts and aromatic/medicinal herbs.
• Projects should pay attention to the assets, skills and interests of poor women and to the market potential of different activities, rather than concentrating on one or the other element alone. In particular, it is more effective to help women identify and respond to market demand than to attempt to create markets for what they already produce.
• Targeting poor women requires operating on a range of related fronts that are indirectly relevant to their participation in IGAs. This may be done by accompanying technical training with financial services, market training, group formation and the establishment of marketing networks or outlets. Projects deliver all these services in an integrated and coherent manner seem to be more successful in strengthening women’s economic role.
• Setting up women’s business centres may be one way of providing IGA opportunities accompanied by a range of complementary services. A successful example of this approach concerns projects undertaken by IFAD in cooperation with the Italian non-governmental organization (NGO), Associazione Italiana Donne per lo Sviluppo (AIDOS) (Italian Association for Women in Development), in Gaza and the West Bank. These centres provide services ranging from training in production, management and financing, to quality control, assessment of market demand and access to marketing outlets and networks. However, it may also be possible to expand and diversify services based on how the needs of women microentrepreneurs evolve, both on the business front and in other realms of their lives.
• Paying attention to integration of different IGA support services calls for recognizing poverty stratifications and the possibility that very poor women may have little or no access to productive assets other than their own labour. Targeting for outreach to this group may be achieved, for instance, by scaling up IGAs into group enterprises that assetless women can participate in on a wage basis. Their participation could be negotiated on the basis of their personal schedules and local preferences concerning women’s wage work.

Financial Schemes

8. Main targeting issues. Formal financial institutions in the NENA region tend to have a built-in preference for non-poor male clients because land is generally required as collateral for loans. This situation poses a problem in terms of outreach to poor women (and the landless in general) in projects that have credit lines linked to formal institutions. Even after becoming involved in projects, in fact, these institutions often continue to offer products unsuited to women’s needs and to maintain operating procedures that de facto exclude the poor. When independent, semi-formal financial institutions are set up, outreach to poor women may still be limited because the really poor rarely participate and inappropriate restrictive loan policies are implemented.

9. Possible solutions to the main targeting problems in financial schemes include:

• In some cases, projects have managed to persuade banks to replace collateral requirements with the signature of one or two men guarantors with steady incomes. Another valid alternative is to strengthen existing woman-friendly informal institutions that can act as ‘group guarantors’ between the poor and the banks.
• To address problems of participation and loan use in such institutions, services should not merely mirror those offered by banks but rather be tailored to poor women’s needs and capacity. In particular, offering savings and insurance rather than credit alone tends to ensure greater outreach to poor women.
• Informal, savings-based group mechanisms often help poor women overcome their reluctance to seek formal (or even project-owned) financial services owing to their lack of familiarity with such mechanisms and their aversion to risk. Such mechanisms may also help to overcome their problems in dealing with capital, since group-based finance often involves training and monitoring of loan use. In group lending, women are helped to gain productive skills and to monitor each other in loan use and repayment, thereby limiting the risk of loan diversion.
• Poor women tend to have a greater need for consumption in proportion to investment. That being the case, reaching these poor women calls for flexible loan-use provisions that facilitate a mix of consumption and investment uses. Moreover, loan sizes should be small enough to make products appealing to poor women by virtue of the fact that repayments would not be too heavy. A compromise solution may be to establish revolving funds, where loan sizes increase over successive borrowing and saving cycles.
• Multi-repayment schedules should reflect a realistic assessment of investment cycles and the various uses of loans among the poor. Efficient time management policies should be encouraged, thus reducing the time lag between the submission of applications and their processing.

Institution-Building

10. Main targeting issues. Projects often include institution-building and support to local governments, line agencies, village councils and community associations. Such initiatives are difficult to target to poor women because they are rarely represented, either locally or nationally. Therefore, the challenge is not only to build up the capacity of a range of institutions, but to make them more inclusive and responsive to the rural poor in general and to poor women in particular.

11. Possible solutions to the main targeting issues in institution-building:

• Poor women may be targeted by cultivating institutions and choosing partners that include women members and/or people who are sensitive to their needs. This might involve making appropriate provision (such as commitment to enabling actions) in loan agreements, or basing relations with implementing agencies on a policy of rewarding efforts to serve poor women.
• To enhance women’s participation in institutions, projects might encourage allocating quotas for women members and support women’s inclusion in decision-making through specific provisions in institutions’ mandates. More generally, projects might encourage institutions to include gender-awareness and responsiveness to women’s needs. An obvious starting point here would be institutions set up directly by projects.
• Projects may opt for women-only organizations to promote women participation and organizational capacity, especially in sectors where women are particularly active, such as food processing, saving and credit groups, self-help groups, water collection, energy saving technology, child care, family health, etc… These organizations – which could be registered as community-based association, civil company, or cooperative - provide women with the opportunity to develop leadership, managerial and communication capacity. To grow, women only organizations should be closely linked to providers of information, production inputs, whole or retail-salers. They should also establish relations with persons who can champion their work with the local administration and keep them updated of various support programmes.
• Unfair distribution of human and social assets, which prevents women from participating effectively, should be addressed both by projects, and the authorities and/or local parties such as NGOs. Projects should invest in enhancing women’s capacities in terms of literacy, communication, self-awareness and leadership, either directly or by supporting institutions that operate on these fronts. Gender-awareness should be raised among community members so as to improve women’s participation in decision-making.
• To the extent possible, projects should support reforms in government and financial institutions to make them more responsive to poor women and more committed to enhancing women’s capacities as economic agents and full members of their communities.