Tuesday Afternoon: SDC Case studies

SDC Case studies

Highlights of the afternoon

Learning together, sharing perspectives, joining expertise in technical/gender issues and becoming more precise in our analysis it is what we need.

To integrate gender, it is very important to target women and men and transform changes according to the analysis!

Critical soft factors to be considered (among many others) are:

Time and work-burden! Women have multiple roles in agricultural societies (mother, household manager, gardener, farmers, … ). It will be about how to integrate all this roles together
Mobility: to empower women they need access to mobility

Gender sensitivity must be integrated at project level: if it is not built in project design/ hypothesis, it will never work

Inclusive project design is a key, a solid analysis is crucial, and it should not be compromised by time constraints

African Brief and Videos

Today the new African Brief on Gender Equality was presented together with two videos from Tanzania and Burkina Faso.

Gender Africa Brief

The five pillars of successful gender mainstreaming

Maya Rüegg from the Employment and Income (E&I) network, Helvetas

Start gender mainstreaming from the very start of the programme. It has to be built into the core of the intervention.
Background research: a good and thorough context analysis is necessary to understand how things work, households dynamics, as well as existing policies.
Make a business case. Projects are not forever: in the long run, local actors have to be convinced and understand how they will benefit from it.
Train the staff and partners in order to promote gender equality: “we have to be stubborn.”
Ensure scale potential, by taking the dialogue up to the national level.

During her intervention, Maja referred to the publication Mainstreaming Women’s Economic Empowerment In Market-Systems Development, which can be downloaded under the following link:

http://public-sdc-employment-income.webarchive.ch/en/Home/Making_Markets_Work_for_the_Poor/document.php?itemID=10947&langID=1

The participants may be interested to find further documents on the topic of gender in market systems development on SDC’s e+i shareweb page: http://public-sdc-employment-income.webarchive.ch/en/Home/Making_Markets_Work_for_the_Poor/Transversal_Themes_in_M4P#gender