Gender and Development

Gender and Development

Gender Equality and Equity

Poverty reduction and sustainable development require the engagement and participation of both women and men. Moreover, this must be on the basis of a fair and equal partnership. In every one of Uniterra’s actions and projects, we make a point of integrating a gender sensitive perspective. We also favour the emergence of initiatives that foster the full potential of women and their organizations.

Equal rights for individuals of both sexes, this a universal, indeed inescapable, crosscutting issue.  Our gender equality strategy enables us to promote human rights even as we take into account questions specific to the status of women and the cultural contexts of each country.

Our actions are articulated around two main priorities:

• Contributing to increasing women’s access to and control over resources and services, and
• Promoting women’s rights, in particular by broadening the knowledge, appropriation and dissemination of egalitarian values in every sector and constituency.

From design to implementation, our cooperation projects include gender-sensitive indicators on improvements in the condition and status of persons. This is in addition to indicators on progress re human rights such as the right to education, to health, to a decent income, to democratic participation and to recognition of one’s economic and social contribution, to name but the principal rights.

Organizations and volunteers motivated by the issue of equality

The Uniterra Program favours the horizontal transfer of knowledge and approaches developed by the partners themselves. To accompany this dynamic of exchange Uniterra also mandates expert volunteers and partners to support the integration of measures favouring gender equity and equality. These persons are paired with partners or national women’s organizations where they work to integrate gender issues into their programming.

Concrete measures for promoting gender equality

In support of our strategy, we’ve developed a number of methodologies applicable to the different stages in partnership development and cooperation projects. For example:

• When analysing sectoral issues, whether it’s in agriculture or health, education, etc., we take into account the differing impacts on women and men, women’s status and position in said subsectors and the obstacles to their full participation.
• Partner selection takes into account the sensitivity and commitment of potential partners to gender issues.
• Our sectoral action plans attack bottlenecks impeding women’s progress and identify expected results linked to improvements in their status.
• Sectoral coordination integrates women’s organizations and groups that devote particular attention to the questions of inclusion, equity and equality.
• Experts in Gender and Development count among the volunteers from the North and the South.
• A Uniterra GAD network has been set up to favour the exchange of ideas, coordination and mutual support among actors and partners from three continents.

A constant concern

• In Bolivia, actions to reduce infant mortality from waterborne diseases entail the strong participation of women in public education on improved resource management and prevention measures.
• In Botswana, the struggle to stop the spread of HIV-AIDS necessitates our constant integration of gender issues when dealing with any health-related issues.
• In Burkina Faso, our actions in favour of greater food security aim to improve the living conditions of populations, especially women.
• In Ghana, education for young girls, especially in rural areas, is one of our top priorities.
• In Guatemala, we accord great importance to increasing women’s participation in fair trade networks, and in the management of handicrafts projects and community development.
• In Guinea, the shea butter subsector offers women great opportunities to get involved in economic projects with a future.
• In Malawi, a country hard hit by HIV-AIDS, our actions are aimed at developing access to health services and to setting up community health services.
• In Mali, our priority is to contribute to women’s access to health care and to increase their participation in the management of health care centres.
• In Nepal, there can be no progress on priorities such as literacy training, the development of health care services and nutrition without the contribution made by women.
• In Niger and Senegal, we promote equal access to literacy programs for women and men and also work to improve the quality of non-formal education.
• In Vietnam, the priority programming areas are access to education for ethnic minorities—especially girls—and the training of education trainers and managers.