GADN News
Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 13:14 Please see the working group pages for updates from the groups and recent publications.
GADN Members Meeting in November
Where do we stand? How can the development community navigate current pressures to deliver development for women?
On the 3 November, GADN and the DSA held a joint meeting to bring together members of the GADN and DSA to look at the issues facing development at a time of multiple changes, especially around the issues of women and girls, and to explore how well different players –academics, researchers, consultants and development agency staff – were responding to the pressures and opportunities these changes provide. The meeting had three broad aims, to:
- look critically at dominant approaches to gender equality and women’s rights in the current aid environment
- better understand how these approaches fit – or clash – with realities for women on the ground and what impacts they are having on the practice of women’s organisations in the global south
- share frustrations, pressures and constraints to working on gender and reflect on how to pursue a more critical approach in our work on gender, to respond to the concerns of women’s rights NGOs and to work more effectively in partnership with them.
For a full report of the meeting and copies of the presentations, please see the home page. Please note the report includes some of the points raised at the meeting and does not necessarily represent the views of the organisers.
Girl Hub Review
In early November, GADN members were invited to contribute to a review of the Girl Hub (a joint venture between DFID and the Nike Foundation) conducted by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), an independent body responsible for the scrutiny of UK aid. ICAI are examining how the partnership between the Nike Foundation and DFID was conceived, how it has delivered to date and how it plans to deliver in the future its stated aim of gender-based development. GADN members were invited to a meeting in order for ICAI to obtain the views of UK-based gender NGOs about the aims, activities and outcomes of the Girl Hub.
GADN members welcomed this opportunity to input into the review and ICAI fed back that they found the meeting very useful and were very pleased with the level of interest. ICAI will ensure that its recommendations lead to change by providing evidence-based feedback into Government decision-making, and GADN members hope the evidence they provided will form a strong basis for these recommendations.
Launch of the World Development Report 2012
On 23 November, The World Bank and Chatham House hosted the UK launch of The World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. Rachel Moussié, Women’s Rights Advisor, ActionAid International and Chair of GADN’s Economic Empowerment Working Group, was part of the panel for a discussion on recommendations for fast-tracking progress. On behalf of GADN, Rachel raised the following points:
The WDR is a good first step and lays out some of the big issues, but the report falls short of taking the questions raised to their logical conclusion.
For instance the report acknowledges women's unpaid care work and highlights the impact this has on women's access to basic services and employment. It emphasises women's control over land as a source of not only income, but status, and more importantly a right. Most importantly the report acknowledges that there are "sticky" issues that no amount of GDP growth will necessarily solve. These 'sticky' issues include female mortality and access to economic opportunities - issues that the women's rights movement are fighting for. The term 'sticky' does not do justice to the importance of these issues. The two sticky issues are absolutely fundamental to gender equality, and they suggest that fairly significant reform is needed.
Many of the limitations of the report stem from the fact that it does not reflect on the costs to women and girls of certain economic policies, and how these depend on and further reinforce gender inequality. For instance women are paid lower wages than men to work in export oriented manufacturing. This plays on women's roles as secondary breadwinners and gender stereotypes. The question then is whether export promotion policies require that women earn less than men and are less likely to unionise. Similarly, the Bank's analysis of the financial crisis ignores the differential impact this has on women and girls as they take on more unpaid care work when services and goods become unaffordable.
Yet another example is around control over natural resources. Women's land ownership is a key recommendation of the report, yet the increased competition for water, land, forests and seeds women will find it even more difficult to access natural resources. The Bank does not sufficiently refer to this reality and the challenges this then poses for women's land ownership - a key recommendation of the report. A more holistic approach that considers women's land rights, sustainable agriculture and reviews the impact of current agricultural policies on women is needed.
If we don't follow up on these critical questions we will not come much closer to achieving gender equality. Indeed the threats of climate change, food crises and the financial crisis may make gender equality more difficult to achieve.
Rachel’s comments in the Guardian in September can be seen here.
GADN Members Meeting in October
In October, GADN hosted a meeting with Womankind and the UK Consortium on AIDS and International Development on ‘Successes and challenges in reducing women’s susceptibility to HIV: Ghana a case study’. Participants looked at how organisations can mainstream gender sensitive approaches to tackling HIV, how women’s empowerment leads to better outcomes in HIV prevention and looked at the links between violence against women and HIV.
We welcomed Margaret Brew-Ward from the Gender Centre (the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre) in Ghana, which works with both women’s groups and mainstream organisations, providing support and training in areas such as gender mainstreaming, project planning and advocacy. In Ghana the Gender Centre conducted a national study that clearly established the link between violence and gender norms to women’s infection rate. They discussed how they put this research into practice.
We also heard from Mahmood Yaya from Amasachina Self-Help Association, an NGO formed from a grass roots network of community development associations. It has been working on HIV and AIDS activities for the last 10 years particularly in relation to establishing community based volunteers operating to provide education, school based HIV prevention clubs and skills training for women and girls.
Amandine Bollinger from the Salamander Trust chaired the meeting. The Salamander Trust, chaired by Dr Alice Welbourn, promotes sexual and reproductive health with HIV prevention, care and support, within a holistic, gender-based rights framework. Its Stepping Stones programme, a community-based intervention on gender, HIV and communication is renowned worldwide and implemented by major global NGOs.
In a separate discussion, GADN members also heard from Dierdre Healy from Kimmage Open & Distance Education, Dublin. KODE offers a range of professional development courses through a distance learning model to development workers particularly those working on community projects. Earlier this year KODE launched a new course 'Understanding & Addressing Gender Based Violence in Development Contexts'. Please do visit the website for more information www.kodeonline.com or contact Deirdre Healy on deirdre.healy@kimmagedsc.i
Beyond Women and Girls' Vulnerability: a debate on gender, climate change and disaster risk reduction
At the start of July, GADN, together with BRIDGE, Oxfam and Plan UK, hosted an event to promote recent and upcoming publications on gender and climate change from BRIDGE, Plan International and Oxfam. ‘Beyond Women and Girls’ Vulnerability’ aimed to generate discussion around key questions relating to gender, climate change and disasters informed by perspectives from our three speakers and considered ways in which we can move forwards collectively and as individual organisations to address the issues and concerns raised in concrete, strategic ways.
GADN was delighted to welcome expert speakers Lorena Aguilar (Global Senior Gender Adviser, IUCN) Ulrike Röhr (co-founder of GenderCC - Women for Climate Justice and Head of genanet) and Irene Dankelman (Lecturer, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands and Consultant).
The speakers highlighted the need to go beyond the obvious dualisms, from ‘women as victims’ to ‘women as agents’, and to look at intersectionality. The notion of vulnerability is meant to show that not everyone experiences or contributes to climate change in exactly the same way, yet conceptual carelessness has created ‘vulnerable groups’. The speakers also stressed that perspectives were on a spectrum; can feminist perspectives find entry points in mainstream perspectives? A third dichotomy revolves around working together. Does not working together mean working apart? There is value in diversity. We need to accept there may be a continuum of strategies and we need to find the ones that contain women’s rights as the bottom line. We also need to look at women’s constituencies at the national level.
Moving forward, our speakers advised us to look at trajectories and processes throughout history to understand where change happens and where the obstacles have been. We need to look at life stories and allow women to tell their own story. We should think outside the box and challenge questions, seeking out another perspective on these issues. We need to create a common language to enable people to work together across these divides and we should learn to share knowledge and strategies; online, face-to-face, and by building networks.