TIP Gender Sensitivity Sessions

From our experience, holding a session on gender sensitivity prior to planning your evaluation helps the team members establish a common ground in understanding gender issues.

Gender sensitivity workshops can be customised to suit the needs of an organisation. A session can last for a day or half a day where participants get an overview on the basic concepts of gender, gender equality, women’s empowerment and the interrelations between gender, social transformation and ICT. Experience also shows that while most are able to grasp the issues of gender and ICT separately, analysing the relationship between these two issues is new terrain.

The workshop is a preparatory step found most useful in a gender evaluation of telecentres because these initiatives are usually based in grassroots communities where traditional values and beliefs on gender roles and relations are more deeply rooted. All of the evaluation teams that

conducted studies on telecentres using GEM found that setting in place gender sensitivity strategies promote reflection and open up opportunities for dialogues, thus, minimising or avoiding antagonistic confrontations.

For example, a GEM evaluator working with two communities in Ecuador was told that the community (i.e., male decision-makers) will refuse to hold workshops on “feminism” because of previous problems with women’s groups that “put women against men.” The indigenous groups in the communities perceived racial discrimination as a paramount problem rather than gender relations. Thus, the priority aim of the evaluation was to overcome racial discrimination and work in favour of cultural and racial diversity. The GEM evaluator repackaged the gender sensitivity workshop by using the concept of “equity” in a broad sense to include racial, gender, age, cultural and social discrimination.

Situation Analysis refers to the initial review of the situation in the area of interest to the project plan, particularly the various problem situations that may need to be addressed. The situation analysis should include a description of relevant gender issues. Lack of identification of gender issues at this preliminary stage is therefore an important evaluation finding. An example particularly in developing countries as the most pervasive problem in the ICT field is lack of connectivity. Most of the available information that describes connectivity are not sex-disaggregated; nor are they analysed in terms of the different ways women and men use ICT and their roles as decision-makers.

Policy Imperatives refer to aspects of a policy environment that are relevant in deciding actions on a given situation. If the planning and implementation of a project are guided by a clear gender policy, one should expect that the policy’s principles and goals are achieved in the project’s intent in recognising and addressing gender issues. For example, in 2000, the South Korean government developed a policy to educate Korean women in using ICT as part of its “national informatisation program” to bridge the gender digital divide in the country. To implement this policy, South Korea launched a nationwide campaign providing internet use to one million housewives in a span of 18 months. In Seoul and nearby cities, nearly 70 percent of private computer institutes joined the government’s program which provided 20 hours of internet courses per month for just US$27, a rate much lower than the market rate of US$90. While the project recognised the need to equalise women’s use of ICT in relation to men, it failed to address the underlying gender issue or how women and men use ICT differently. As such, the project came out with a gender neutral policy.

Problem Identification in the context of formal planning usually refers to a problem perceived when certain policy principles dictate that specific aspects of a situation are unacceptable. These unacceptable aspects become the rationale for taking action. Outside of this formal logic, many problems are identified as ‘obvious.’ However, in the area of gender, even the ‘obvious’ aspects of problem identification tend to be notably missing. Whereas many ordinary problems are ‘obvious’ without recourse to looking at policies, gender issues tend to get overlooked along with the gender policy itself. For example, in telecommunications policies and programmes, a field that is often seen as “purely technological or technical”; gender issues are almost completely ignored.

Intervention Strategies. The logic from goal to intervention strategy comes from the idea that the intervention, to be effective, must tackle one or more of the underlying causes of a given problem. But with poor planning, the intervention is merely considered to be a ‘good thing to do’ without establishing any causal connection with the problem. In the case of gender issues, intervention strategies are effective only when they address the underlying causes of the gender issue, and are feasible in terms of previous experiences insofar as these steps anticipate, counter or bypass patriarchal opposition.

Information, communication and mobilisation strategies can never be good or effective strategies ‘in themselves’. These strategies must achieve goals and address underlying causes and problems, for example – Is lack of information actually a root cause of the problem being addressed?

Or is it merely a symptom of a larger underlying problem. From a gender orientation perspective, strategies need to contribute to the process of women’s empowerment and act as means of addressing gender issues. As such, women should not be passive recipients of information disseminated by an information centre.

Implementation Strategies. From a gender perspective, it is often useful to distinguish between implementation strategies that address broader, more encompassing and strategic issues from those that answer specific and more tangible problems. There may be many alternative strategies for implementing any given intervention strategy. For example, the goal of increasing women’s access to agricultural information may be achieved by an intervention strategy of providing better access to the internet. This may be achieved through various alternative implementation strategies such as making computers available to women’s NGOs and community-based organisations by providing computer training, or by having a trained computer expert act for farmers in a resource centre, and so on. Again, coming from a gender orientation perspective, the appropriateness of an information strategy needs to be assessed by its effective means of distributing information as well as by its potent impact in promoting the wide-ranging advocacy of women’s empowerment and gender equality.

Objectives are the expression of the more specific and detailed intentions of an implementation process, particularly in terms of activities and intended outcomes. Very often, an implementation strategy is not properly identified, but may be deduced because it is implicit within a list of objectives. Project objectives usually tend to be “gender blind”, with no implicit or explicit expression on how gender issues are to be addressed. When asked about this, project planners usually respond with statements like “our project is genderoriented”, “all our staff is gender-aware” or “our implementation is gender sensitive”.

A gender-oriented objective may be an outcome objective concerned with closing gender gaps or ending a discriminatory practice. Alternatively, a gender-oriented objective may be a process objective concerned with the activities and social process by which the outcome is to be achieved. The process of women’s empowerment is just as important as the resulting outcomes in closing gender gaps. For instance, even if women’s collective community activities, engagements or campaigns fail to make much progress in closing a gender gap, women will have learnt much from their experiences through the entire process of rallying around gender issues. In some cases, their experiences may be more valuable (or transformative) than the material results of their activities. Empowerment, after all, is a cumulative process.

Outcomes are the results of a project intervention in terms of an increase in the number of women using the internet, increased networking between women’s groups, actions taken to address gender issues and evidence of closing gender gaps. It is however, always impossible to prove that a particular outcome is the result of a project’s intervention. From an evaluation point of view, it is pointless to look for an outcome addressing a gender issue if there were no project goals or interventions directed for this purpose. If the project had no genderoriented goal, then, that in itself is an important evaluation finding. In which case, the results of the evaluation would be to modify the project to incorporate the required gender goal and its appropriate method of intervention.

Name of Initiative: Rural Women’s Information Unit

Objectives of the Project

To enable women leaders to have access to information to enhance their ability to empower women in their communities

To give women leaders a central space to meet, exchange ideas and share experiences

To instil a culture of reading amongst women

Expected Outcomes

That the targeted group will have an opportunity to access relevant information for empowerment

That women leaders will be able to form networks with women in other parts of the country and internationally

That women leaders will be able to lobby for policies and decision-makers to address discriminatory laws and policies

That women in the community will be aware and able to demand for their rights (for instance, in cases of domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, the girl-child, etc.)

Project Components and Activities

Accessing information (via provision of a space for reading)

Drama

Video shows

Sensitisation meetings/seminars

Marketing products made by women

Intended Users

Women leaders in the community

Project implementers

Intended Use

To document best practices of women leaders in using ICTs

To identify areas for strengthening the capability of women leaders through the use of ICTs

Gender and ICT issues to be addressed in the evaluation

Availability and accessibility of ICTs to women leaders

Usefulness of the available ICTs to women’s day-to-day activities

Ability and capacity of women leaders to utilise ICTs

Name of Initiative

Objectives of the project

Expected outcomes

Project components and activities

Intended users

Intended use

Gender and ICT issues to be addressed in the evaluation