Memorandum submitted by the UK Gender
and Development Network
1. The UK Gender and Development Network
(GADN) has been active in advocacy and awareness raising on gender
and development since its foundation in 1985. The GADN represents
128 UK development organisations, academics, and individuals committed
to promoting gender equality and gender mainstreaming in international
development. The network would like to draw the attention of the
International Development Committee to the lessons emerging from
its recent work on gender in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
(PRSPs), on which it has been communicating with the Department
for International Development and the IFIs in Washington. This
memorandum is based on a report by Ann Whitehead[78]
for the GADN and Christian Aid, "Failing Women, sustaining
poverty: Gender in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers"[79].
2. The UK's Department for International
Development (DFID) has been broadly supportive of the need to
make gender analysis central to PRSPs. However, lines of responsibility
on this issue within DFID are still not clear, which means there
is a real danger that gender in PRSPs will fall between departments
and receive less attention than it requires. GADN calls on the
UK DFID to:
— Take the lead among bilateral donors
in making gender a high priority in its work on PRSPs;
— Designate clear lines of responsibility
for ensuring that gender is fully integrated throughout its work
on PRSPs;
— Discuss with its developing country
partners the critical importance of gender analysis to be central
to poverty reduction policy;
— Use its influence with the World
Bank and the IMF to ensure that these institutions make gender
a fundamental pillar of their work on PRSPs.
3. The GADN has found in its study of PRSPs
in Tanzania, Bolivia, Malawi and Yemen that poverty has not been
analysed as a gendered phenomenon, and that gender considerations
have not been integrated into poverty policies nor accompanying
spending plans. It has become clear through this research that
the "participatory" processes of PRSP formulation have
not been gender balanced and that the voices of poor women have
rarely even been sought. This is clearly disastrous for poverty
reduction efforts, as without a solid understanding of who is
poor and why, and who holds the power to make required changes,
poverty will not be reduced.
4. These problems have been partly due to
the contradictory structural context of the PRSP approach. The
twin requirements of broad-based participation in PRSP formulation
and endorsement by the Boards of the World Bank and IMF have produced
major contradictions for the content, as well as the processes,
of PRSPs. In many cases governments have conducted dialogues on
poverty policy not out of a genuine commitment to participation
in policy-making, but simply to fulfil this condition of the Heavily
Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative and to access debt relief
funds. This has meant that criticisms by participating civil society
groups of the link between policies which they see as damaging
and the objective of poverty reduction have often not been allowed
to surface within the PRSP process.
5. Poverty analysis in the four PRSPs studied
is limited, with barely any mention of its gender dimensions.
Impoverished groups are simply described and little analysis is
made of why they are poor, so gender relations is not identified
as an explanation for women's poverty. Data is not sufficiently
disaggregated by sex, so it is not easy to assess the relative
levels of poverty for men and women, boys and girls. Specifically,
women's incomes, livelihoods and resource constraints are poorly
captured, which are clearly critical to a full understanding of
a gendered and, therefore full, analysis of poverty. Although
attention is paid to the qualitative dimensions of poverty (vulnerability,
"voicelessness" and powerlessness) these are poorly
integrated with the rest of the poverty analysis.
6. Gender issues appear in a fragmented
and arbitrary way in the body of the PRSPs dealing with policy
priorities and budget commitments. Women are only really acknowledged
in relation to health and education needs, and their role in production
and the economy is not recognised. The PRSPs pay very limited
attention to women's material well being, and there is no recognition
that macroeconomic policy and national budgets can be gendered.
Gender analysis is clearly not mainstreamed and only two out of
the four documents reviewed have included a separate chapter on
gender[80].
7. Governments' efforts to listen to and
consult women during the PRSP formulation stage were unsatisfactory
at all levels. At the popular level, the choice of who to consult
and the way those consultations were carried out usually meant
that few or no women's voices were sought. In the cases where
participatory processes were used, gender issues were given greater
attention. However, this gendered analysis was not then used to
inform the policy priorities and spending plans. Consultations
with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in general were flawed,
and civil society representatives had to work very hard to gain
access to any space in this process. Men's and women's
voices were stifled in the contested space between government
and CSOs, but this was exacerbated in the case of women and women's
organisations. Women citizens were hardly consulted at all and
gender advocates within national CSOs had little success in influencing
strategies. Women's voices have hardly been sought during these
PRSP processes and have definitely not been heard.
8. National governments and the international
financial institutions (IFIs) have played the biggest role in
determining PRSP content. Their understanding of the scope of
gender issues and the causes of women's poverty are thus extremely
important. Within the IFIs, comprehension of gender issues is
very uneven. Within national governments, understanding of gender
issues is generally poor, particularly in the finance and planning
ministries that are responsible for developing PRSPs. National
bodies that represent women's interests, government ministries
and civil society groups are often weak, lacking in influence
and have limited capacity for gendered poverty analysis.
9. Within national civil society organisations
as a whole, the commitment to and understanding of gender issues
is at best variable and often weak. Gender advocates in national
women's organisations and in a limited number of donor organisations,
among them DFID, and international NGOs are being left with the
responsibility for promoting the importance of gender issues and
advancing the understanding of women's poverty. In these case
studies, international donors and NGOs played a bigger role than
national actors in getting gender onto the agenda. The influence
and legitimacy of women' advocacy organisations affects their
dialogue with other groups and some have been de-legitimised as
they work within a hostile environment. In some cases, this is
true of their relationships with other CSOs, but more often true
of their relationships with governments, which are often very
tense.
10. Effective advocacy from groups who have
adopted such perspectives will depend on much greater receptiveness
within governments, the IFIs, some donors and national and international
CSOs. It remains to be seen whether an increased capacity for
gendered poverty analysis and the understanding of national economies
from a gender perspective will increase this receptiveness, or
whether it will be blocked by a lack of political will.
11. The Gender and Development Network of
the UK makes the following recommendations to the various actors
involved in PRSP processes, including the UK Government.
Gendered analysis:
— The analysis on which a PRSP is based
must fully demonstrate the gender dimensions of poverty—highlighting
the embedded gender biases in macroeconomics and structural policies;
gender inequality as a cause of poverty; the different experiences
of poverty for women and men; and the different effects of policy
and budgetary decisions on women and men.
— PRSPs should be based on a multidimensional
view of poverty, integrating the non-economic dimensions of poverty
(vulnerability, powerlessness, voicelessness and male-biased governance
systems) with the economic dimensions, and giving space to the
views held by poor men and women about their own poverty.
PRSP processes:
— National governments should make
gender-sensitive participatory methodologies central to poverty
assessments, and the design and implementation of poverty-reduction
strategies. All actors need a better understanding of how to make
participatory poverty assessments gender sensitive. Particular
support should be provided to the poorest and most marginalised
people, the majority of whom are women. They tend to find it most
difficult to participate, but are central to the success of a
PRSP.
— All stakeholders within the PRSP
process need to ensure that gender is mainstreamed within their
own institutions and that gender inequalities are addressed. The
PRSP assessment processes of the IFIs, including Joint Staff Assessments
and IFI board discussions, should fully mainstream gender. They
should consider whether a PRSP treats poverty as a gendered phenomenon
and seeks to tackle the gender dimensions of poverty, as well
as the quality of participation by women and other traditionally
marginalised groups.
Policies for poor women and men:
— In order to have a long-term and
sustainable impact on poverty levels, PRSPs must place measures
to tackle women's poverty at their centre, because so many poor
people in most countries are women. PRSP policies and associated
spending plans should be firmly linked to gendered poverty analysis
and gender equity.
October 2003
78 Ann Whitehead is a senior lecturer in gender and
development at the University of Sussex, and undertook this assignment
as an independent consultant during 2003. Back
79
Available at http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/indepth/0306gad/failing_women.pdf. Back
80
The World Bank's PRSP Source Book recommends that in order for
gender to be adequately covered, a separate chapter should be
included as well as broader mainstreaming. Back
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