Mongolia Compact Gender Summary Report: Best Practices And Lessons LearnedTrack and monitor the progress of the implementation of the GIPIdentify issues to be shared with the MCC-SGA team in order to seek further adviceContinued accountability through reporting and highlighting any issues or progress to the MCA andthe MCC has helped maintain focus and accountability.Introducing issues that are new and unfamiliar to implementing entities or contractors requirescontinued follow-up, support and monitoring to ensure implementation. The Road project is anexample of this. The project‟s SGA interventions focused with its contracting companies on workingconditions, with a specific focus on sexual harassment and a safe working environment, women‟semployment in construction, and preventing TIP. On sexual harassment, an amendment was made inthe organizational internal regulation which contains provisions on awareness raising actions to allemployees and employers‟ duties and obligations to take appropriate measures to enhance employees‟knowledge and understanding and prevention of gender issues, gender based violence and issues ofsexual harassment at work. On TIP, the workforces were trained on this issue, as were the surroundingsoums nearby the road. And yet, for the contractors and the contractors‟ personnel this is an issue theyhad not dealt with in the past. In follow-up meetings it was discovered that the implementing entitiesand contractors as well as their personnel were still not completely clear as to what TIP entails, andhow to deal with it. Continued training, discussion, information sharing and follow up on thesepreviously unfamiliar issues are needed, as well as presenting the content and information in a veryeasy to understand way. The aim is adequate understanding of what TIP means for constructioncontractors who have not dealt with such requirements in the past and who had not establishedsystems and procedures for dealing with them.The MCA-Mongolia Compact is a clear example that gender is not just about women, but mustinclude both women and men and should give attention to specific groups such as the disabled.The Health Project is a good example of where a lack of focus on male health challenges resulted ininsufficient attention to the need for specific targeting of males. This project also late in theimplementation stage added an activity to ensure that disabled people would benefit from the NCDscreenings. The lesson learned was that gender analysis does not only reveal the ways in whichwomen are, or are not, affected, it equally indicates that particular measures may be necessary toenhance the participation and access of males or vulnerable groups. Delivering of female and maletargeted interventions by the Health Project is now carried out nationwide.Efforts to sex-disaggregate data through regular monitoring are welcome, but it is not alwayspossible to make substantive program changes if the data show inequalities or issues. Longerterm impact evaluations should explicitly require gender analysis, using both quantitative andqualitative methods. All quantitative data collection, to the extent possible, should be sexdisaggregatedto allow us to see and understand gender-differential impacts. Data collection andanalysis should be used to help inform and change project implementation, if needed. This hashappened in Mongolia to some extent. A positive example of how Indicator Tracking Table (ITT)data was used mid-course is the Peri-Urban Rangeland Project where changes to the project expansionsites were made following the analysis of monitoring data that showed gender disparities concerningaccess of female-headed households. In the case of TVET, however, even though gender disparity inearnings of TVET graduates was identified, it was no longer possible to redesign the project in such away that it would comprehensively assist girls in undertaking studies leading to higher paying sectors,though media activities were carried out to encourage girls to pursue non-traditional careers.Impact evaluations cover another area requiring explicit engagement of the SGA group to ensuremeaningful information is obtained. Even when MCC and MCA-Mongolia asked impact evaluationcontractors for sex-disaggregated data collection, their baseline report did not as a matter of courseanalyze data in more detail, as became apparent when additional requests were made by the SGAteam members. This indicates the need to clearly highlight the gender analysis requirements in asmuch detail as possible in the ToRs for survey contractors. In most cases, MCA-Mongolia‟sevaluations consisted of quantitative but not qualitative data collection and analysis, even thoughqualitative data gathering is important and useful for social science research. Good gender analysis14Page 14 of 80
Mongolia Compact Gender Summary Report: Best Practices And Lessons Learnedusually includes a combination of these methods. In the case of Mongolia we have been able tosupplement this work through our additional surveys on gender and land, and on gender and periurban.To the extent possible, all evaluations to date incorporate gender analysis and separate sectionswith in depth analyses of the results from a social and gender perspective. This information, oncepublished, has the potential to add substantially to the body of knowledge on gender issues inMongolia.M&E’s rigorous methodology and approach do not always further SGA’s equity objectivesunless provisions are made for stratifying the applicant individuals/households according tospecific identifications, such as poverty, single headed households and disadvantaged groupslike people with disabilities. For instance, under PURP, regardless of advantages given to anapplicant to participate in herder group initial selection on the basis of vulnerability procedure, thesegroups still did not end up benefitting in higher numbers due to the randomization approach or lotteryadopted by M&E for choosing project participants. A key lesson from this is that in order to ensurehigher participation for such groups, a stratified approach of pre-selecting such household and onlythen applying the lottery to the rest would have resulted in higher shares of female-headed as well asvulnerable households.Ideally, plans for ensuring sustainability of a gender and social equality approach should bebuilt into initial project design. But this does not always happen. An alternative is to startconversations with potential successor agencies and organizations as early as possible to help ensuresustainability of gender efforts. Many gender efforts die with the end of a donor‟s support. MCAMongolia has been pursuing such conversations over the last year of the Compact. The final pages ofthis report include entry points for ensuring sustainability of MCA-Mongolia‟s efforts on social andgender issues, which were discussed and agreed to with national organizations, government entitiesand successor agencies, as appropriate.Page 15 of 8015
Change language