Tool kit for Gender and Agriculture - Economic Commission for Africa

22
Improving Agriculture through Gender Analysis
Sources: J. Murphy, 1994, Gender Issues in World Bank Lending, World Bank, Operations
Evaluation Department, Washington, D.C.; World Bank, 1994, Enhancing Women’s Participation
in Economic Development: A World Bank Policy Paper, Washington, D.C.
Adopting a participatory approach can promote a sense of ownership among
various stakeholders toward a proposed project. In the context of Bank-supported activities,
stakeholders are those affected by the outcome⎯negatively or positively⎯or
those who can affect the outcome of a proposed intervention. They may include government
and directly and indirectly affected groups. Getting the right stakeholders is
essential to producing good results; however, because of existing gender-based differences
in roles, needs, and constraints, women cannot be assumed to automatically
benefit from efforts to involve local communities. In fact, experience shows that specific
steps must be taken to ensure that women participate and benefit; otherwise, they
usually do not. Consulting women stakeholders directly yields rich and detailed information
about their perceptions, priorities, and constraints and helps understand their
situation (see Box 5).
Box 5: Consulting Women Directly: Participatory Approaches to Information
Collection
Participatory approaches are valuable in the information-gathering phase or when
strategies are being identified. They also enable communities to identify and express
their interests in the design, management, and expected outcome of the project. Under
participatory rural assessment, multidisciplinary teams of insiders and outsiders, men
and women, learn from a small sample size of local people through observation, interviews,
discussions, and diagrams. They use semistructured techniques (including the
village-level methods listed in Table 5 to gather qualitative descriptions. The discussions
are wide ranging. Little statistical analysis is done or conclusions drawn in the
village; however, it is often difficult to obtain women’s opinions without the (possibly
constraining) presence of male elders. Several strategies can be used to increase participation
by rural women:
• Negotiate early with male village elders to obtain their support.
• Hold separate meetings. For example, in preparing the Egypt: Matruh Resource
Management Project (Cr. 2504) a woman consultant and a woman Bedouin veterinarian
held meetings with women in parallel with all-male meetings. The final project
design included a rural credit component based on the needs identified by
women in the participatory rural assessment. A similar process is being used in the
preparation of the Philippines Natural Resources Management Project.
• Identify a village woman to act as a spokesperson for the other women in a public
meeting.
• Employ women enumerators to gather data. For example, in developing the Women
on Development Sector Strategy in Morocco, local women from ministries and
NGOs were trained to carry out participatory rural assessment. They were always