“But how do I actually do this?” a development practitioner asked one day, referring to a mandate to mainstream gender in a project. The roots of gender mainstreaming go back more than three decades, to the 1985 Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya. Today, gender mainstreaming is a highly valued endeavor in which people in development assess the implications of interventions for women, as well as men, across the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of a program. That said, although development practitioners commonly want to integrate gender into a project, they are often perplexed because they do not know how to do it.
Plan International USA (Plan) has assessed the challenges that project designers and implementing staff face in their efforts to mainstream gender either during the initial project development period or at one or more points during implementation. To support this critical work in any type of project, Plan has developed a simple package for integrating gender into programming that individuals such as designers, managers, and community-based volunteers can use. This package can be applied to projects in any sector—from health, to WASH, to education and protection. It lays out a process that requires relatively little training, but yields high rewards regarding the achievement of gender equality.
To place this in context, gender mainstreaming is multi-faceted. A project document should include gender-transformative outcomes and indicators, with gender data disaggregated by sex and age. A gender analysis should inform project design, and there should be activities that focus on individuals, families, communities, and institutions. Project resources should include the services of gender equality specialists and a budget for gender assessment, if gender analysis has not already been done. There should be gender equality monitoring and on-going gender equality capacity building that supports continuous examination of and learning about gender.
Plan’s gender mainstreaming package focuses on integrating gender in programming. It encompasses the following:
- First, it is critical to ensure that individuals understand fundamental gender concepts. A training package that includes detailed agendas, lesson plans, handouts, exercises, case studies, inter-active materials, a tool box of gendering interventions, and assessment protocols has proved both appealing and motivating for a diverse range of participants. Key components include the idea that beliefs about gender are learned and can therefore be unlearned or relearned; that a culture’s socialization process perpetuates gender norms by validating gender stereotypes; and that gender stereotypes negatively impact individuals, families, and communities. Project developers and implementers should also be familiar with a gender equality program criteria framework,* to understand what distinguishes each criterion from the others. This is important because gender equality program criteria make it clear that project activities can exhibit different levels of gender sensitivity according to how practitioners design and/or implement those activities.
- Second, project designers and implementers must be familiar with the project in which they want to mainstream gender. This includes understanding its scope and objectives, the characteristics of its participants and/or beneficiaries, the results that it is to achieve, and the targets that must be reached.
- Third, designers and implementers need to know how to use Plan’s Gender Mainstreaming Tool,** which helps guide critical thinking about how to integrate gender into any activity. Use of a compilation of examples of ways others have mainstreamed gender can help jump-start and infuse the gender mainstreaming process with successful tools, tips, and techniques.**Plan’s Gender Mainstreaming Tool is currently being tested in a variety of contexts and will be available at a later date.
- Last, gendered activities should become part of work plans that are developed periodically. For this, a project’s monitoring, evaluation, and learning team must ensure that indicators and targets related to new gender-related work are adapted or developed to reflect anticipated results. The implementing agency can share the resulting set of indicators and targets with project donor(s), or use this new framework only internally to track the enhanced results that stakeholders expect from this exercise.
This gender mainstreaming package builds the capacity of those in headquarters offices and in the field. It offers the promise that those integrating gender not only learn how to do this work, but “own” what they design. This can increase commitment to gender promotion because designers and practitioners can see, first hand, how such considerations matter. Including gendered activities in work plans increases the accountability of implementers to get the job done. This materially enhances the likelihood that gender-related actions that have emerged from mainstreaming will be implemented, despite any budget challenges or the finite capacity of staff or volunteers.
*Many organizations have created their own gender equality program criteria frameworks. Some of these can be found through a simple Google search.
