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Pre-planning the project
The goals of development cooperation is to reduce inequalities Development cooperation projects, whether big or small, generally aim at eliminating poverty and reducing inequality. Inequality means gender inequality as well as social and political inequality. The pre-planning stage of a project is the stage when you and your partner organisation start to draw up ideas for a project based on some particular theme. It is most important then to keep in mind the greater goal towards which you are working. Although the reduction of inequality may seem to be a far-off goal, and perhaps something impossible for an individual smaller project to help to achieve, you must never forget that it is the final goal guiding your activities. Even small things that reduce gender inequalities contribute to the greater goal. Define the stakeholder groups involved: for whom and with whom will the project be carried out? When you are sketching out the project study carefully to see which people and organisations it will affect. Which stakeholder groups will be involved? By stakeholder groups is meant:
Mapping out all these stakeholder groups is the first step in pre-planning the project. At this stage, too, it is useful to start to find out the views and feelings of these different groups as to the local problems and major issues so that you can also improve your understanding of their needs and expectations. You can do this by, for example, arranging group meetings, interviewing people and groups, or by means of participatory methods. There are many ways of doing this and you can find more information in the section on tools. It is important to listen to all stakeholder groups To obtain a gender perspective it is essential that the points of view women and men, girls and boys, are all taken into consideration. Women and men nevertheless differ from each other. All women and all men also belong to other groups, on the basis of age, profession, ethnic origin, or some other characteristic. In order that the personal opinions and feelings of as many people as possible are heard, you should make sure that both women and men are able express themselves in meetings, seminars, workshops, discussions, interviews, and other occasions for collecting or exchanging information. It may sometimes be necessary to arrange separate meetings for women and for men if there is a possibility that the cultural gender role of the women makes them keep quiet when men are present. The same can also apply to different age groups. For example, young women and girls do not always express themselves in the presence of older women. Young men, too, do not necessarily say what they want in the company of older men. Women and men often also have different possibilities to spend time participating wholeheartedly in such things as planning meetings and workshops. Women and men have different tasks in their families and in the community, so they use their time in different ways. Often a woman works full-time looking after her home and family and has very little other time to spare. When you arrange meetings or workshops you must make sure that they take place at the most suitable time (and season) and that, for example, child care is arranged. Gender analysis: Whose needs and expectations do we take as our starting-point? Gender analysis is used to analyse the contents and impacts of a project from the point of view of women and from the point of view of men – from the gender perspective. With the help of gender analysis you can increase your understanding of what the gender roles of a community entail and what problems women and men meet in their everyday life and in the division of work. You can use gender analysis to find out what women and men think it would be important to change in their lives and what they think it would be important to retain. Gender analysis gives you and others who are involved in planning development cooperation projects answers to the questions of how it would be best to carry out a project and which goals should be set for it to ensure it really promotes gender equality. Gender analysis is thus an important way of recognising gender-based inequalities. It provides information that can be used to good effect in reducing gender inequality. Gender analysis is a key part of programme planning, because amongst other benefits:
Collecting background information for the gender analysis Gender analysis is always based on gender-disaggregated information about the community. This information may be already available from your project area. In that case you can make a gender analysis yourself using a report where the data is gathered together. Nevertheless in most cases NGOs are probably faced with a situation in which there is inadequate or non-existing background information. Then you and your partner have to gather the information from the future beneficiaries of the project. The process of collecting information is also very important as a process because it helps you learn about the culture and how to interact with it. Information is usually obtained at community level in meetings, workshops, discussions, interviews and similar situations. You can see more about the gender-analysis tools that have been created for collecting and analysing data in the section about tools. It is not always possible for you to gather the information yourself, especially if your organisation does not have the necessary resources. Sometime “ready-made” material can be found in the project area because some other party has already collected it. So it is worthwhile asking NGOs working in the area, as well as local organisations, UN organisations and other project teams. Note that gender analysis must not be based on assumptions. You cannot assume that because a corresponding project has progressed in a certain way in a neighbouring village you, too, can work in the same way. It is important that the different groups in the community take part in the analysis by contributing their unique knowledge about their own lives. Gender analysis based on real knowledge is the only kind that helps you to shape a forthcoming project so that it responds to real needs and expectations. Gender analysis: Four steps to start with Gender analysis does not necessarily involve a large-scale or complicated process that has to be carried out according to strict rules. If you feel that your own organisation does not have the resources to use ready-made tools for gender analysis, you can carry out a smaller-scale analysis when planning your project. The four following steps will help you start: First step in gender analysis: Disaggregating information about people according to their gender Collect information about the people in your project’s target area. Break the collected information down (disaggregate it) according to gender. For example, if your project is going to be carried out amongst farmers, find out how many of them are men and how many are women. What is the division of tasks between men and women at different stages of the cultivation cycle? Who owns the farmland? Who is allowed to be an owner? If, to take another example, your project concentrates on improving the position of small entrepreneuers, it is important to know whether the people involved are men or women. Men and women may have different problems and needs. If, as yet another example, your project aims at educating schoolchildren about HIV/AIDS, you should first of all find out whether the children are girls or boys. It may sometimes be necessary to arrange lessons for girls and boys separately and with different approaches. Gender disaggregation of information about project target groups helps you to understand how the project’s aims, operations and results can be directed to the right groups. It also helps you to initially identify the activities and kinds of activity that will be best suited to reducing gender inequality. If most of the farmers are men, for example, it is worthwhile studying new farming techniques with them – and considering what part women play in farming. If most farming is done by women, however, training should be concentrated on them and not the men, even though the men might well be the family decision-makers Second step in gender analysis: Clarifying gender roles When the data about various stakeholder groups has been disaggregated according to gender, the actual clarification of gender roles can be undertaken by asking the questions such as: Who does what, where and when? In other words, what do women do and what do men do? What productive, family and household, and community activities are undertaken by women, on the one hand, and by men, on the other? How do they divide their time between the different tasks? For example, in some communities the women who have families fetch household water from a well every day so the time spent on family and household work in this respect, including the journey to the well and back, is two hours a day, every day. Who has the right to use resources and who has the right to control them? For example, in some communities the men earn the household income and give their wives part of it for food expenses. The men decide how the family’s resources (wage earnings) are used and the amount they give to their wives is intended only for buying the family’s food. Thus the wives are not allowed to decide how the resources given to them are to be used. The wives therefore only have the right of use, not the right of control. Who gains and who loses? For example, in some communities raising the women’s traditionally low status, perhaps through projects to improve their education and participation in decision-making, can make the men afraid that they will lose their power. By involving the men in the planning of projects of this type that are directed towards women you can find out the different groups’ real needs and expectations and the possible conflicts between them. In mapping out gender roles you are not just examining the roles of women and men at the community level but also within the households. One of the problems of development cooperation projects has in fact been that households have been seen as units and the different roles, resources and needs of women and men within the homes have not been analysed. Studies have shown that there can be clear differences within the households themselves, for example regarding poverty. Third step in gender analysis: Clarification of gender-related needs When you have obtained gender-disaggregated information about the people in the sphere of the project and have an adequate understanding of the gender roles in the community, you can find out what the gender-related needs are in the community and its households. It is always worthwhile asking the following questions:
Fourth step in gender analysis: Advance assessment of the project’s impact on different groups. After you have mapped out the gender roles and gender-related needs, the time has come for you to think about how you can put the information you have obtained to good use in planning the project. At the heart of the matter lies the question of the impacts of the various project operations on the lives of women, on the one hand, and on men, on the other. Try now to find out and make it clear for yourself in advance how the steps to be taken in the project, and the effects those steps will have, may seem and feel from the points of view of the different groups in the community. Who will benefit from the project? Who will lose if the results of the project are realised? For example, changes in the traditionally subordinate status of women in a community – perhaps through education and activities dealing with matters outside the home – can give rise to men of the community becoming afraid of losing power and so mistrusting the project. If the likelihood of this threat materialising is examined before the project starts up and the men are involved in the project this mistrust can certainly be reduced. Gender analysis when pre-planning or when planning? Sometimes work with a cooperation partner starts with such a tight schedule that the pre-planning stage is very short and you have to start concretely planning the project itself even though you have only limited background knowledge. You can still carry out a gender analysis in connection with the actual project planning if there is not enough time at the pre-planning stage. It is very important, however, to do the analysis in good time so that the information it provides can be taken up as a fundamental part of the project planning and implementation. If the analysis is made at too late a stage of the planning there is a risk that many aspects of the project will have already been finally settled, so the new input from the analysis remains just an isolated and unrelated appendage of the finished plan. Remember, too, that you can always recheck the project plan at all stages of the project cycle. So you can well make a gender analysis when a project is under way as well. It is never a waste of time to check the gender impacts of a project at any stage of the project cycle because the knowledge gained can always be used – when you are thinking of the next steps, if not before. Gender analysis is a fundamental part of planning sustainable high-quality projects.
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