Gender considerations crucial in program design

By Elizabeth Kulume

Globally, gender-related discussions and its immense effects on social, economic and political aspects of life have continued to gain a platform both at international and national levels.

In Uganda, women face a wide range of challenges including discrimination, low social status, lack of economic self-sufficiency and greater risk for HIV/AIDS infection among other gender issues observed.

For many women, this reduces their power to act independently, become less educated, reduce poverty levels and escape reliance on their male counterparts some of whom are very abusive and cause domestic violence in the family setting.

Despite the fact that Uganda has overtime implemented a gender policy that was enacted in 2007, there are a number of gender issues to be addressed.  Research has indicated that the major focus for gender discrimination occurs for instance, in Land distribution and ownership; most women attain land through marital status but also on condition that the spouse and clan are willing to allow it. This has resulted into disempowerment of women from engaging in the economic activities and hence affected their decision making.

Government therefore needs to strengthen women’s leadership capacity role using participatory strategies by providing skills training to empower women on their decision making capacity. Participatory planning and monitoring processes is another strategy to enable them work together or gain support and confidence from each other to make independent decisions.

 In a global setting, some programmes strengthening women’s leadership capacity has enhanced community efforts to reduce poverty for example, in India; SIDA support for the empowerment of women focuses much on training and preparing women to become effective participants and decision makers in Local Governments. Similarly, USAID funds a programme in Nepal which aims at empowering women by providing literacy and legal rights training and credit; which has improved and contributed to their economic status as well.

 Government should therefore increase the chances of women to benefit from development activities by adopting best practices from other parts of the world to promote gender equality in development programming. In this case, there is need for Government to discuss gender related aspects with development partner countries when developing country assistance strategies, and also at activity level during design and implementation.

 Therefore, successful partnership should be based on; i) developing a shared vision and explicit consensus on gender equality objectives relevant to the country strategy on development activity; ii) Involve stakeholders from the Civil Society working on gender aspects in the dialogue on objectives to be achieved and activities to be implemented on specific programmes; iii) Making long-term commitments to partners essential for sustainable progress towards gender equality at both macro and micro levels; and iv) independent assessment and eventual strengthening of partner capacity for gender responsiveness, and participatory planning and implementation. There is need for a call of action on National mechanism for women, local women’s rights organizations; NGOs and other advocates for women’s rights should play a key role in setting directions for the country strategies and in activity design.

Different feminists however still argue that, the question on gender remains: what about the men? Men are equally victimized especially in conflict situations and the argument pointed out is that, we need to move away from the stereotyped image of ‘men’ as the aggressor and ‘women’ as the victim.

Equally, emphasis must remain on gender as a subject; gender must be defined inclusively so that it is not synonymous to women.

The writer is a student intern at Uganda Debt Network