Benchmarking: Text on Gender

Keith Mellnick asked me to write some brief text for the new IREX website about gender and our programs. To start, I decided to look at a couple of our peer organizations to see how they describe their approach to gender programming. Their text is below.

FYI,
Randal

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AED: True social progress leaves no one behind. Gender bias robs communities of their full potential. But as girls and women thrive, so does society. From education to health to social, economic and political empowerment, AED works to improve the lives of girls and women around the world.

CHF International: In approaching all phases of the project cycle, CHF International seeks to remove gender-related barriers to social and economic development through active community level engagement with men, women, and youth. CHF’s approach to gender and development has five major components:

  • Identifying and addressing particular needs, including disparities between men and women;
  • Ensuring that gender considerations are a key element of dialogue with stakeholders;
  • Ensuring appropriate representation of women and men in programming;
  • Evaluating programs and creating feedback loops to assess gender dynamics that affect successful program implementation; and
  • Increasing staff capacity to design and implement gender programming strategies.

Our programming seeks to empower women and men through reducing inequalities and addressing the particular needs of men and women equitably. This is facilitated through understanding and recognizing gender-based roles, responsibilities, relations and the interaction of these factors with the development process.

Equal participation of women in the political, economic and social spheres of society is a key ingredient to their empowerment. Our approach to gender programming takes into account the particular circumstances of each community or household that we work with, recognizing differences in culture, economic circumstances, age, and resources. As a result, CHF’s programs have made it possible for women to contribute substantively to program design and implementation, and for men and women to collaborate more effectively towards building prosperous and peaceful societies locally, regionally, and ultimately, worldwide.

For more information about CHF projects with a gender focus please see the Gender Factsheet.

Counterpart International adheres to a gender and development approach that emphasizes gender mainstreaming and equity in all program activities, including staff hiring practices, partner selection and grantee selection.

Counterpart International's (Counterpart) approach seeks to create a balance between resources allocated for women and men. Counterpart's purpose is to demonstrate that empowerment of women is not achieved at the expense of men, but rather to their benefit. In Afghanistan, Counterpart catalyzed a Gender Budgeting process by bringing together key government ministries and CSOs. The result of this effort was a commitment to gender-sensitive budgeting, and a $5 million earmark for women's programs in the 2009 parliamentary budget.

Children and youth make up over 40 percent of Counterpart's community-based project beneficiaries, and Counterpart works with a range of organizations to address youth needs, such as orphanages, parent-teachers' associations and ministries of education.

EDC: Gender and Equity: Educating girls can produce profound improvements in society: well educated women make better health decisions, have fewer children, and experience less poverty than uneducated women. Still, in too many countries, girls' enrollment rates are low and dropout rates are high. Of the104 million children ages 6-11 who are not enrolled in school, 60 million are girls. Girls’ enrollment is hampered by high fees and other school costs, inaccessibility of schools, and safety and hygiene concerns at school. In addition, many school practices—in and out of the classroom—alienate girls.

IDD works to make education more accessible to girls by reaching out to rural and isolated populations, establishing gender equitable education, and promoting girls' enrollment and retention. IDD asks teachers and their instructors to analyze their teaching habits and provides clear, concrete steps teachers can take to ensure that children of both genders are engaged and learning.

Ultimately, these learner-centered educational practices benefit both boys and girls. As IDD works with donors, governments, and communities to deliver quality education, we also strive to assure that quality is delivered to all learners.

Internews: Issues of vital concern to women worldwide— gender-based violence, child marriages, the trafficking of women— are often ignored or covered only superficially by local media. Across the globe, women journalists and media professionals work, many times under difficult circumstances, to bring light to the issues that affect all women. Internews media projects aim not only to open eyes to gender issues, but also to give voice to women so that they can change their lives and communities for the better.

Training Women Media Professionals: Internews is one of the world’s leading trainers of female media professionals, training more than 25,000 women in media skills since 2003 alone. Internews helps women get on the air and in the newsrooms in societies where their participation has been marginalized, allowing for reporting on all issuesnot just women’s issues—to be done through the voices of women in that society.

Mainstreaming Women’s Issues: To ensure that the media meet the needs of all audiences, Internews works to foster women’s leadership in the media industry so that issues of vital concern to women are “mainstreamed,” integrated across all programming and not relegated to a niche market. In communities where specific gender issues are underreported, such as gender-based violence or women’s health, Internews has developed special programs produced by and for women.