Gender Mainstreaming in Development Cooperation Ireland
Country Strategy Papers (CSP)
Rachel Waterhouse & Charlie Sever
1.
Introduction
Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI) is committed to promoting gender equality, as a
right and as integral to its overarching goal of poverty reduction and promoting equality
and inclusion. DCI’s Gender Equality Policy defines gender mainstreaming as its key
strategy to promote gender equality. It identifies the Country Strategy Paper planning
process as a critical entry point for gender mainstreaming.
Gender mainstreaming, however, is a complex process. It becomes even more
challenging in the current context, of an on-going shift from local level project and
programme management towards engagement in policy dialogue at macro level.
Increasingly, development assistance is channelled through the new ‘upstream’ aid
modalities of Sector Wide Approach programmes (SWAPs) and ‘country led’ national
development programmes - particularly Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) – funded
through block funding, pool funds and centralised support to national budgets as direct
budget support (DBS). The emergence of these new aid modalities poses specific risks
and challenges, as well as opening up new opportunities for the effectiveness of gender
mainstreaming.
Given that gender mainstreaming through new aid modalities is a relatively new and
evolving process, DCI has decided to document existing experience with the aim of
learning lessons and refining its guidelines to facilitate gender mainstreaming in the CSP
process. This report focuses on experience with the DCI-Ethiopia CSP, seen within DCI
as a positive experience that can offer lessons for good practice.
The report gives a brief introduction to the context and rationale for the current shift in
aid modalities and the implications of this shift for strategies to promote gender equality.
It takes a broad look at comparative experience with gender mainstreaming in upstream
aid modalities and at lessons learned. This background provides the context for a closer
look at the DCI Country Strategy Paper process and the specific experience of gender
mainstreaming in the DCI-Ethiopia CSP. The authors seek to draw lessons from this
experience and recommendations are made for future CSP exercises and for
strengthening the CSP guidelines.
2.
New aid modalities and the implications for gender equality
From micro projects to macro programmes
Over the past decade there has been a significant shift in the ways in which donor aid is
passed on to recipient countries. This has entailed a move away from donor funding of
isolated, individual projects towards programmatic approaches which tie donor funding
more closely to national government planning and expenditure frameworks.
1
This gradual transition responds to several concerns, including those around the high
transaction costs imposed on donors and recipient countries alike by funding a plethora
of discreet and often parallel or overlapping projects; the stress that this creates on
existing weak institutional capacity in many developing countries and the negative
implications for ensuring accountability. In this context, project approaches which were
formerly the mainstay of much development spending are increasingly seen as a nonstrategic and wasteful use of resources which create additional layers of bureaucracy
and may have little impact in the long term (Subrahmanian 2004b). Moreover, recipient
countries themselves are demanding greater control over resource allocation and
management. Partly in response to these issues, development cooperation is
increasingly channelled through upstream aid modalities including funding to Sector
Wide Approach (SWAp) programmes and direct support to the general state budget
(Direct Budget Support – DBS). Beyond increasing efficiency in resource allocation and
management, this process is held to increase transparency and accountability.
Alongside the shift in aid modalities, the role of donors increasingly involves policy
dialogue with recipient Governments, as common policy goals, performance indicators
and performance assessment frameworks are agreed. National Poverty Reduction
Strategy (PRS) processes, in particular, have become a central tool for policy dialogue
between developing country Governments and the IMF, WB and other major donors
including DCI. Developed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as
a means to link debt relief with poverty reduction outcomes, officially these strategies are
intended to be ‘country led’ and should involve a process of broad-based consultation
with local people, communities and organisations.
National autonomy is limited, however, by the fact that donors have generally tied direct
budget support to Government performance in designing and implementing a PRS,
measured against a commonly agreed matrix of poverty reduction indicators. This
provides considerable leverage for donors to enter into policy dialogue with the recipient
Government at sector and macro levels.
The original PRS emphasis on neo-liberal structural reform to the economy, involving
market liberalisation and retracting the role of the state, is gradually being superseded
by emerging concerns around ‘good governance’ and state responsibility to provide
safety nets for the poor and create an ‘enabling environment’ for economic growth. In
this context, greater importance is given to partnerships not only between government
and donors but also between these and other institutions, including private sector and
civil society organisations, both as service providers and as participants in decisionmaking around national policies and programmes. This has widened the scope for these
actors to participate in policy dialogue and influence.
Apart from the PRS process, the Millennium Development Goals1 (MDGs) and related
International Development Targets (IDTs) have served as a key focus for harmonising
donor support. As a prior statement of common goals between donors and developing
country governments, international commitment to the MDGs has facilitated the process
of increasing donor cohesion and pooling development assistance (Subrahmanian
2004b). Increasingly, PRS indicators are expected to show progress towards meeting
the MDGs.
1
The Millennium Development Goals are a set of eight commonly agreed goals with related targets and
indicators that member states signed up to at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000.
2
This evolving context - for development policy and for shaping the relationships between
donors and recipient countries - has significant implications for gender equality and for
the ways in which donors may promote, or undermine, progress towards this goal.
Background to gender mainstreaming
In recent years, ‘gender mainstreaming’ has become a key strategy for development
practitioners to promote gender equality. This concept came into widespread use
following the 1995 UN International Conference on Women and adoption of the ‘Beijing
Platform for Action’ for women’s advancement. It draws on lessons learnt from past
efforts to try and redress a gender-blind approach to development that has tended to
ignore and marginalise women. From an initial focus on targeting women to meet their
immediate needs, strategies to ensure that women benefit from development have
evolved to focus increasingly on addressing unequal power relations between women
and men (gender relations).
Gender mainstreaming has developed as a strategy that shifts the focus from
channelling assistance to women, as a target group, to promoting gender equality as a
development goal. It has been defined as:
“a commitment to ensure that women’s as well as men’s concerns and
experiences are integral to the design, implementation, monitoring and
evaluation of all legislation, policies and programmes so that women as well as
men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. Gender Mainstreaming is
integral to all development decisions; it concerns the staffing, procedures and
culture of development organisations as well as their programmes; and it is the
responsibility of all staff” (DFID 2002).
A Gender Mainstreaming strategy often incorporates a twin-track approach (as laid out,
for example, in the DCI Gender Equality Policy 2004). This combines a strategy for
institutional change with specific actions to promote women’s empowerment where this
is necessary to redress persistent inequalities. The mainstreaming approach recognises
that gender equality is critical to the achievement of other development goals including
poverty reduction.
To operationalise gender mainstreaming, a number of key factors or steps in the process
can be identified. These are illustrated graphically in Diagram One below. However,
practical tools to implement gender mainstreaming were initially conceived of and
developed within the context of a focus on individual projects. Increasingly, there is now
need to adapt this strategy to suit the emerging context of upstream aid modalities,
harmonised donor assistance and donor-developing country dialogue on policy,
programme implementation and outcomes.
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Diagram One: Key steps in gender mainstreaming
Gender mainstreaming
Sex disaggregated data / gender analytical information
Gender analysis
Strategies for change at
programme level



Programme
design
Implementation
Monitoring &
impact
assessment
Strategies for
institutional change
Transformation
Resistance



Institutional policy
Organisational
norms and
procedures
Resource allocation
(human & financial)
New opportunities for gender mainstreaming
Strategies for gender mainstreaming were largely conceptualised in the context of
discreet development projects. In the best case scenario, project level experience can
provide lessons on good practice for promoting gender equality more widely. In
Bangladesh, for example, CARE International has promoted gender mainstreaming in its
DFID-funded ‘Rural Development Programme’, promoting new ways to increase
women’s technical skills in agriculture and thereby their social status and income.
Inevitably, however, individual projects are situated within a wider political and
institutional environment, which affects and constrains the degree of change they can
achieve even at project level. Thus, to continue the example, women farmers involved in
the CARE-Bangladesh programme have improved their technical skills but still face
discrimination in the home and in the community. Whilst some women participants
reported an increased role in household decision-making since they learned new
technical skills, others did not share the same result and some were the victims of
domestic violence. More widely in Bangladesh, women continue to suffer from lower
nutritional levels than men, related to women’s generally lower social and economic
status (DFID-Bangladesh 2004).
By contrast, upstream aid modalities potentially offer tremendous opportunities for
promoting gender equality through sector wide and national level policies, programmes
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and implementation strategies. They provide Governments with a mechanism to build
broad consensus with partners around development goals and approaches. They give
donors the opportunity to work in partnership with recipient country governments and
other actors including private sector and civil society organisations at the level of policy
dialogue and national planning. They offer an opportunity to influence the policy and
institutional environment within which local (and project) level activities take place.
In the Bangladesh example, for instance, working through upstream aid modalities could
provide the opportunity for CARE and its local partners to bring evidence of the barriers
facing women’s exit from poverty to national level decision-making forums. This
evidence could be used to promote wider dialogue and advocacy with other actors
(including Government institutions, donors and the private sector), on the measures
needed to help women overcome these barriers and thus to promote more effective rural
development nationally.
Cooperation through upstream aid modalities is widening the space for dialogue
between the state and other actors as new, multi-stakeholder forums emerge for policy
making and planning. Through sector level and budget support, donors may influence
recipient governments to ensure that policy commitments – including commitments to
gender equality - are backed up through national plans and budgets and that
implementation and budget execution are monitored through jointly agreed assessment
frameworks, e.g. through PRS monitoring systems. These involve monitoring against a
set of key indicators, which may include indicators of gender equality.
Harmonised donor support to strengthening the institutional capacity of Governments,
including capacity for results-oriented planning and budgeting, can help to ensure that
policy statements – including those on gender equality - turn into practical policies on the
ground.
The MDGs offer another opportunity to promote dialogue around how best to achieve
gender equality. Increasingly, it is now recognised that gender equality will be key to
achievement not only of MDG3 (women’s empowerment) but broadly to wider
achievement of the MDGs including MDG1, poverty reduction (DFID 2005). The MDG
targets may be incorporated into national poverty monitoring systems, helping to ensure
accountability towards meeting these goals.
Imposing challenges
Despite significant opportunities for gender mainstreaming, the shift to new aid
modalities presents imposing challenges for the goal of gender equality. Whilst these
relate to difficulties with gender mainstreaming in general, the added complexity of
working through multi-stakeholder forums at sector and national levels means that
existing barriers are all the more difficult to overcome.
A number of recent evaluations 2 of gender mainstreaming policies and programmes
highlight the following critical challenges:
 mixed understanding across institutions of what ‘gender mainstreaming’ means
as a concept and of how it affects everyday work of the institution, can make the
strategy ineffective;
2
For instance, DFID Thematic Gender Evaluations (2005); Watkins 2004; Braithwaite et al (2003);
Mikkelsen et al (2002)
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





data systems which inform national policy making are rarely gender sensitive and
often do not even supply sex disaggregated data;
weak data and lack of capacity for gender analysis can create the feeling that
gender mainstreaming is a donor-imposed agenda, even where partners have
official policy commitments to gender equality;
there has been widespread ‘policy evaporation’, where good policies on gender
mainstreaming have been lost in translation to programme implementation;
knowledge gaps in understanding the factors that enable or disable gender
sensitive programming have made policy evaporation difficult to address;
‘invisibilization’ has occurred, whereby concrete positive outcomes of gender
mainstreaming are not captured in programme monitoring or evaluation (Moser
2004). This has meant it is harder to argue the case for gender mainstreaming,
especially when donors and partners are dealing with a cluttered agenda of
‘cross-cutting issues’ that are all supposed to be ‘mainstreamed’3;
difficulty in attributing evidence of change (impact) to a particular approach or
intervention, particularly in the context of multi-donor and macro level
programming, can make it hard to ensure accountability for gender
mainstreaming.
Such problems have led to recent charges that mainstreaming has become a
mechanical and technocratic process4. Mukhopadhyay, for instance, laments that the
gender equality agenda has been de-politicised, de-contextualised and turned into a
technical project that leaves existing unequal power relations intact (2004).
Even the MDGs have been seen as a risk for gender equality. Although these include
women’s empowerment, Governments and donors have tended to focus on the target
for MDG3, of closing the gender gap in education. Other indicators such as women’s
increased share of non-agricultural wage employment and political representation tend
to be ignored. Evidence also suggests that the focus on poverty reduction has led to an
increasingly instrumentalist approach to gender equality (Painter 2004).
In the context of SWAPs and DBS, an increasing distance between the ‘lived realities’ of
women and men and the national policy forums which donors support can entail the risk
that the grass-roots concerns, needs and interests of women as well as men become
marginalised 5 . Meanwhile, donor harmonisation and the need to achieve multistakeholder consensus around the national development agenda substantially increases
the challenge of influencing that agenda with new or radical ideas.
A plethora of ‘voices’ at the policy table can mean that softer voices are drowned out.
Indeed, certain civil society organisations (CSOs), including some specifically
representing women’s voices, are concerned that the shift in aid modalities will mean
3
DCI identifies four key cross-cutting issues including gender equality, HIV/AIDS, sustainable
environment and good governance. Rwanda’s PRSP, to cite another example, identifies no less than eight
cross cutting issues including gender.
4
IDS Bulletin No 35.4, 2004
5
For instance, whilst PRS processes are meant to involve a broad consultation with national stakeholders,
research shows that efforts to ensure women’s voices are reflected in the PRSP have often been
unsuccessful. Gender issues rarely appear in the core sections of PRSPs and although passing references
are made in particular sectors like health and education they rarely appear in sectors such as infrastructure
or governance (Bell 2003; Subrahmanian 2004a; 2004b; Whitehead 2003; Zuckerman and Garrett 2003).
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they are squeezed out from access to resources and decision-making. DCI and other
donors are attempting to address this, by reviewing their approach to working with civil
society and ensuring that support is channelled to CSO capacity building for advocacy
work. In the context of upstream aid flows, they have also recognised the critical role
donors can play in widening the space for dialogue between civil society and the state
(DCI-Mozambique 2004).
3.
Gender mainstreaming in new aid modalities: lessons from experience
The shift to upstream aid modalities is relatively recent, involving different development
actors including Governments, civil society, the private sector and donors, in new and
evolving types of relationship. Already, however, there are important lessons for gender
mainstreaming. This section presents a brief overview of some key lessons learnt.
Gender Analysis
Critically, effective gender mainstreaming depends on sound gender analysis, i.e.
context specific analysis of the social, economic and power relations between women
and men within the given historical, institutional and policy context. The starting point for
gender analysis is the availability of sex disaggregated data able to reveal differences in
the needs, interests, opportunities and vulnerabilities of different categories of women
and men.
For Governments and donors, working through upstream aid modalities offers the
opportunity to agree upon and resource measures to ensure that national data collection
systems (e.g. censuses and surveys) are gender sensitive and that this data is easily
accessible. Civil society and private sector organisations can complement this through
bringing comparative and qualitative information on specific issues (e.g. factors
determining women’s access to land, education or markets) to local and national level
planning and policy forums. These might include multi-stakeholder forums established
through SWAps, PRSP processes and decentralised local government planning.
In Mozambique, for example, the Gender Co-ordination Group (GCG) of donor and
Government representatives found that poverty analysis informing the country’s first
PRSP (the Plano de Reducção da Pobreza Absoluta - PARPA) was inaccurate with
regard to gender differences and did not reflect the specific vulnerability of certain
groups of women including widows, divorcees and single mothers. In response, the
GCG advocated for a gender-sensitive analysis of the latest national household survey
data, ahead of the planned revision of the PARPA. Donors in the group further offered
support for the Government to conduct qualitative research to explore intra-household
differences in access to resources and opportunities. These initiatives should contribute
to a more accurate, gendered analysis of poverty status to inform the new PARPA.
Women’s voice
In national policy development through SWAP programmes and PRSPs, much emphasis
has been placed on stakeholder consultation, including consultation with women and
with the so-called national women’s machineries 6 . In this process, civil society
organisations that represent women and their interests can cooperate with National
6
i.e. the national institutions specifically tasked with promoting women’s interests
7
Women’s Machineries to combine their independent voices with inside knowledge of the
political process.
Experience suggests, however, that consulting women is not enough to ensure that
either women’s specific concerns or gender analysis are reflected in policies and
programmes. For instance, revision of Mozambique’s agricultural sector SWAP,
PROAGRI, involved national consultation with different stakeholders including smallscale farmers most of whom are women. Yet, although research has shown that women
farmers face specific problems (e.g. relative lack of access to land, credit and markets),
no specific gender issues were identified through these consultations.
Such evidence suggests that the new policy and planning forums emerging through
upstream aid modalities provide an opportunity for CSOs and national machineries to
raise women’s voices. Yet, capacity building support is needed to help them analyse,
build up the evidence for and present the case for addressing gender inequalities. It
suggests that lobbying and advocacy as well as networking skills are needed.
For their part, donors can support to capacity building and promote a wider space for
state-civil society dialogue. They can support women’s NGOs and networks in
developing their lobbying and advocacy skills, as well as supporting their demands to
participate in policy dialogue and for sufficient time to organise good quality information
and analysis to back up their arguments.
Policy dialogue
Existing experience with gender mainstreaming suggests that policy dialogue – within
and between donor agencies, governments and other actors - is critical in shaping the
failure or success of efforts to promote gender equality. Tensions arise around different
views and understandings of what gender equality entails and how important it is.
In a project based approach to development, there is room for parallel or even opposing
views about gender to inform development initiatives going on at the same time. The
move to upstream aid modalities, however, provides new opportunities to promote
consensus between different actors around concepts and goals. It is important that this
search for a shared understanding should start within each organisation. In Rwanda, for
instance, six organisations including the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion, three
donors and two NGOs are to undertake a collaborative Gender Audit to build internal
and shared understanding of how best to promote gender equality.
Policy dialogue presents the opportunity to build shared understanding of gender
equality and why it is important to pursue this goal; but this endeavour is likely to meet
resistance. To use such forums effectively, there is need to collect, share and advocate
on the basis of evidence that reveals how gender inequality affects the achievement of
other development goals.
National economic policies, for instance, to date have been largely gender blind; yet the
new aid modalities are generating efforts to ensure that evidence around the gender
dimensions of economic growth can influence macro-economic policy. In Tanzania, for
instance, the Gender Budgeting Initiative championed by the Tanzania Gender
Networking Programme (TGNP) is helping to expose and stimulate public debate around
the links between gender inequality, vulnerability and economic growth (TGNP 2004). As
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another example, the Netherlands Government has funded a series of ‘Gender Aware
Country Economic Reports’ designed to inform economic policy debate7.
Donor support to gender mainstreaming has at times been seen as an imposed agenda,
provoking active and passive resistance. An alternative is to ensure that this strategy is
closely tied to national development agendas and is championed by local allies. National
Women’s Machineries and women’s civil society organisations can play a critical role
(Khan 2003). These bodies can use instruments such as CEDAW, the Beijing Platform
for Action and the MDGs to hold governments to account in policy terms for
commitments they have signed up to. Supporting research institutes in the developing
world, particular those that work on gender, can also help build national capacity for
gender analysis and advocacy.
DFID’s experience in Uganda may illustrate how donors can play a proactive role in
supporting gender sensitive policy analysis that then influences policy. During the
second revision of Uganda’s Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) - from 2003/4 - key
officials in the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MFPED) and
the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD) took the lead on
gender mainstreaming, mobilising colleagues in other ministries, from civil society and
amongst donors to form a PEAP Gender Team. DFID provided strategic support,
through:
 Active participation in the PEAP Gender Team
 Funding analytical work on gender and poverty and the impact of gender
inequalities on economic growth
 Discussion with Government officials and other donors to include gender
benchmarks in dialogue between the Government, the World Bank and other
donors engaged in Direct Budget Support (Van Diesen & Yates 2005).
The revised PEAP now addresses key gender issues, such as gender inequalities in
land ownership and in the health sector. In addition, DFID brought in technical
assistance to help draft ‘Gender and Equity Budget Guidelines’, thus linking gender
sensitivity in the policy development process directly with resource allocation (DFID
2005).
Capacity building and institutional change
As suggested above, effective gender mainstreaming through upstream aid modalities
calls for considerable capacity building efforts. Gender staff in national governments are
often placed in departments that give them little leverage or access to high level
decision-making. Capacity building for National Women’s Machineries is a significant
challenge. Growing emphasis on direct budgetary support further means that staff need
an understanding of macroeconomic policy as well as the PRS process, if they are to
have an influence in this sphere.
Non-gender staff in government and other implementing agencies and institutions
(including donors) also need gender training. This should be practical - not just
theoretical – and should respond to the interests and competence of the people being
trained. For instance, DCI-Mozambique has invested in training provincial planners in
‘Gender Aware Country Economic Reports’, University of Manchester; funded by the Royal Netherlands
Ministry of Foreign Affairs to support the DAC/WID Task Force for Gender Guidelines on Programme Aid
and other forms of Economic Policy Related Assistance
7
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basic concepts of gender analysis and in gender sensitive planning, based on an
analysis of the local context and previous provincial plans.
Building capacity for gender mainstreaming should not be reduced to gender training,
however: it involves building ‘mainstreaming competency’ (i.e. the skills and qualities
needed to implement a mainstreaming strategy)8 and a wider institutional transformation.
The appointment of gender advisors, the development of gender policies and the
establishment of focal points and working groups can help to embed gender in
institutional roles and processes and promote accountability. Integration of gender
equality goals and objectives into Memoranda of Understanding on sector-wide
cooperation and Codes of Conduct can be a valuable way of tracking accountability. Yet,
in the same way that capacity-building is not simply a case of doing occasional gender
training, so the inclusion of gender equality in documents such as TORs is not enough to
ensure implementation or sustained action to promote gender equality. Capacity building
is also required within donor agencies, to build mainstreaming competence and ensure
that they are able to make the best use of policy dialogue opportunities.
Ensuring that policy commitments effectively translate into programme implementation
means that strategies and incentives are needed to bring about institutional change. Coordinated donor support to public sector reform, a lynchpin of most DBS agreements,
offers opportunities to build incentives into the institutional framework of the State. In
Mozambique, for example, UNDP has provided Technical Support on gender
mainstreaming to the Public Sector Reform Unit and the Gender Co-ordination Group
(GCG) sponsored technical advice on gender mainstreaming during the Government –
donor Joint Review of the Public Sector Reform Programme (2004).
Monitoring and evaluation
Complex aid modalities involving a range of different implementing agencies and
stakeholders present challenges for effective monitoring and evaluation strategies. One
problem is that if planning documents set out gender equality aims and objectives but
are not informed by sex disaggregated information, it may be impossible to earmark or
track specific resources for promoting gender equality (Subrahmanian 2004a). M&E
should include both indicators to measure impact on gender equality and a gender
perspective throughout all other indicators. There is now a strategic need to develop new
gender-sensitive indicators appropriate to high level policy processes including national
macroeconomic policies (Painter 2002).
Assistance channelled through DBS is usually assessed against the PRSP and an
associated monitoring framework with poverty related indicators. There is enormous
potential to ensure that these include indicators for gender equality and are gender
sensitive. However, this means ensuring that indicators are not merely quantitative
measures – e.g. of how many girls have access to primary education – but include
qualitative indicators, for instance to show changes in the relative access of girls and
boys (i.e. the gender gap). Donors can play a role in influencing Government to
incorporate gender equality indicators in national plans and programmes, and these in
turn become a tool to hold Governments to account for promoting gender equality at
national level.
8
Gaynor C & Jennings M 2003, in DCI-Mozamibique 2004
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Accountability
Including gender sensitive indicators and specific gender equality indicators in local and
national monitoring and evaluation systems can be a powerful tool to promote
accountability: both of Governments with regard to implementing gender equality policies
and of donors in fulfilling their commitments to support them. For instance, if such
indicators are included in performance assessment frameworks for the PRSP and, or
SWAPs then instruments such as annual performance assessment exercises, public
expenditure tracking surveys and participatory service delivery surveys can be used to
promote accountability to gender equality goals.
Gender budget initiatives (GBIs) including gender sensitive beneficiary assessments can
also be used to track expenditure and to monitor whether gender equality commitments
are backed up by resources. For instance, TGNP – a civil society organisation in
Tanzania - used an analysis of the Public Expenditure Review to link policies to actual
spending commitments to women and the poor, linking gender analysis to the Medium
Term Expenditure Frameworks (MTEF) (Rusimbi and Mzinga 2003).
Initiatives which link gender analysis of national and sectoral budgets to donor budgets
have also been considered and could be a good way of mapping donor contribution and
impact. In the case of SWAPs it may be possible for donors to earmark funds for a
particular part of the sector programme which makes donor work on gender equality
easier to track (DAC Working Party on Gender Equality 2001).
This brief overview that a growing body of experience exists and can usefully be drawn
on to inform policy approaches and strategies for gender mainstreaming through
upstream aid modalities.
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Gender mainstreaming in DCI Country Strategy Papers: Experience of DCIEthiopia
4.1
Context and rationale
The Country Strategy Paper (CSP) is a critical policy and planning document that guides
DCI’s intervention through country programmes. It is, therefore, the key document that
defines the type(s) of aid modality through which DCI will deliver its development
assistance as well as the key strategies to achieve its development goals. A practical
commitment to gender equality through the strategy of gender mainstreaming should
therefore be enshrined in the CSP.
The CSP Guidelines define its purpose as:
“.. an instrument used by DCI to provide strategic direction to embassy and HQ
staff for the management and development of Ireland’s programme of
development co-operation in a specific country over a three year period…it
constitutes the reference point for all management decisions relating to the
programme within its time-frame... It provides the basis for outlining how DCI will
contribute to poverty-focused national development and for outlining the
performance targets in this respect”.
The ‘CSP Guidelines’ state that a specific set of principles should guide the CSP in each
country. It lays out a suggested process for CSP development and explain the roles of
different participants in the process.
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In the progressive development of CSPs it is intended that these should reflect
institutional changes within DCI as well as in the programming context internationally,
and within partner countries. According to the Guidelines, recent changes to consider
include:
“… a commitment to partnership and ensuring programmes are firmly situated
within government planning and expenditure frameworks; recognising that
increasing volumes of aid are disbursed in the form of programme aid;
responding to the need to manage for results; ensuring… harmonisation;
strengthening efforts to engage in joint analysis and use a common set of
indicators to monitor programme performance”.
In Ethiopia, the previous CSP period covering 2002 – 2004 was marked by major reform
and rapid decentralisation within Ethiopia and increasing emphasis in development
cooperation on governance issues and participatory development. The devolution of
governance to the Woreda (district) level had major implications for DCI’s hitherto
geographically specific programming, speeding a shift to new modalities of development
assistance.
Development of the new CSP for 2005-07 coincided with a radical shift in DCI-Ethiopia’s
own programme approach from project and area based assistance to increasing
engagement through SWAPs and general budget support. It was decided that the new
CSP would focus on the areas in which Ireland has expertise and comparative
advantage including health sector reform, decentralisation, public sector reform and
political governance. The CSP pays particular attention to the cross-cutting issues of
gender, HIV/AIDS and the environment.
4.2
Gender mainstreaming strategy
Prior to the CSP process, DCI-Ethiopia’s commitment to gender equality was reflected in
specific activities such as funding for women’s income generating projects and gender
awareness-raising, mainly through support to non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Yet, it was not mainstreamed into overall strategies and programmes. Attempts to take a
mainstreaming approach were limited by the fact that these came after sector policies
and plans had already been developed.
The need for a more strategic approach to promoting gender equality emerged through
internal developments within DCI as well as wider trends in Ethiopia. In 2004, DCI
commissioned an ‘Aid Modalities Review’ to inform the on-going shift in aid delivery from
area-based programming to sector programmes and direct budget support. Discussions
during the Review pointed to the advantages of gender mainstreaming as a strategy and
a recommendation that this should be undertaken throughout the Country Programme9.
At the same time, the launch of DCI’s global Gender Equality Policy confirmed gender
mainstreaming as its key strategy to promote gender equality.
DCI Ethiopia viewed development of its 2005-07 CSP as an ideal opportunity for gender
mainstreaming. This would ensure that concerns around gender equality were
addressed from the start of the planning period.
Gender mainstreaming was
coordinated by a gender core team located within the DCI-Ethiopia Governance Team
9
Interviews with DCI-Ethiopia staff. These discussions, however, were not reflected in the final report.
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and with technical support from Dublin. Their strategy was based on building
competence and capacity for gender mainstreaming of the DCI Country Programme
Team.
As a first step, the Programme Executive from the Governance Team with specific
responsibility for gender, as well as the Gender Advisor from Dublin, held individual
meetings with all Programme Advisors. Through these meetings, they helped
Programme Advisors to identify gender issues in their specific areas as well as
opportunities and entry points to address these. Individual meetings were followed by a
workshop with the whole programme team that drew the findings together and situated
the gender issues identified within the overall context of the DCI programme.
The workshop reviewed the concepts of gender mainstreaming and mainstreaming
competence as well as looking at entry points and key opportunities for DCI to promote
gender mainstreaming in the current policy and institutional context in Ethiopia. As a
result of the workshop, DCI Ethiopia produced a report and broad guidelines for
mainstreaming gender in upstream policy processes.
These outputs helped with revision of the thematic papers that each programme advisor
had to produce for the CSP. Consultation with DCI partners further made a tremendous
contribution in capturing their views and perspectives in the pre-CSP thematic papers.
The thematic papers include an analysis of the current policy environment, and propose
strategic directions for the next CSP period. Support from the Gender Advisors helped to
ensure that gender was considered in these papers. This means that issues around
existing gender inequality are considered within the contextual analysis that forms a
basis for developing the CSP.
As well as sector thematic papers, DCI-Ethiopia produced a specific paper on
Mainstreaming Gender, in collaboration with the Royal Netherlands Embassy (RNE).
This paper outlines the following strategy:
“DCI will use the CSP process as an initial step towards implementing its gender
mainstreaming strategy. All sectors are to do gender analysis and identification of
possible entry points in the respective sectors. This will enable DCI to prioritize
possible gender mainstreaming activities for all it programme areas. The 2005 2007 CSP document will include a monitoring and evaluation framework where
DCI will evaluate its performance at the end of the CSP period... [including]
indicators that try to measure whether DCI has achieved its objective of
mainstreaming gender in its programmes”.
This strategy was reflected in the CSP ‘roadmap’, drawn up to give overall guidance to
development of the CSP. Gender mainstreaming was one of the key principles reflected
in the roadmap. Overall the CSP was developed around four programme pillars
addressed by specific programme teams namely:
 Improved human development – Social Sectors Team
 Vulnerability, Social protection and economic development – Relief to
Development Team
 Governance and improved public sector institutional performance – Governance
Team
13
 Macro-economic support at local / regional and federal levels – Tigray Team,
Economics and Aid Modalities Adviser.
At the time of developing its new CSP, DCI-Ethiopia was dealing with the shift in
programme focus and aid modalities as well as a move to integrate emergency
programming into longer term development work. Furthermore, the programme intended
to mainstream concern with three cross-cutting issues: gender, HIV/AIDS and
environment. Given that this presented a heavy agenda of new conceptual and
operational issues, a strategic decision was taken to focus on gender mainstreaming in
the Governance sector. This decision helped to provide leadership and to pilot
experience that other programme teams could learn from.
Prior gender analysis and commitment to gender equality as a key principle guiding the
CSP served as reference points to check that Goals, Strategic Objectives and
monitoring indicators are both gender sensitive and actively promote gender equality.
Furthermore, in supporting Programme Advisors to develop their individual work plans,
the Gender Advisors tried to ensure that gender sensitivity across the programme would
be complemented by specific activities to redress gender inequality. In the health sector,
for example, DCI makes an explicit commitment to mainstream gender and HIV/AIDS
and to focus particular support on reproductive health services including family planning.
4.3
Outcomes: gender visibility in the CSP
Gender mainstreaming in the CSP process has resulted in an explicit commitment to
promoting gender equality. This section looks briefly at how well this commitment is
reflected throughout the document and at where there are aspects that could be
strengthened.
Critically, an explicit concern with gender equality is evident in the goal, objectives and
principles guiding the CSP. The Goal, to “reduce poverty and promote sustainable
development for women and men in Ethiopia…” is clear in according distinct and equal
status to women and men. The six strategic objectives of the programme specifically
include: “to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women in order to redress
the imbalance between Government policy and practice”. Furthermore, the other
objectives including “reduction of poverty, inequality and exclusion” and “participatory
development (for both women and men)” are gender sensitive and contribute to a
favourable programme environment for promoting gender equality.
Gender sensitivity is clearly articulated in the key principles guiding development of the
CSP, stating that:
“DCI will seek to systematically assess the impact of our programmes from a
gender perspective, and will invest time and resources in the application of
gender criteria to our development assistance”.
The CSP further commits DCI to: sustainability and empowerment; and to the promotion
of peace, human rights and good governance including promoting citizens’ access to
resources and Government responsiveness to the voices of women and men. These
principles create a conducive environment for gender mainstreaming.
14
In the Background section of the CSP under ‘Social Development Context’, the
document notes that Ethiopia is near the bottom of the UN index for gender related
development. Specific barriers to gender equality are detailed in the same section.
The CSP explains the sectoral focus of the programme around four programme pillars.
The intention to ensure gender mainstreaming is specifically mentioned in relation to the
social sectors/ improved human development ‘pillar’ and in relation to the governance
programme, which aims to promote equal empowerment of Ethiopian men and women.
The ‘Vulnerability, Social Protection and Economic Development’ pillar and ‘Macroeconomic support’ do not directly mention or address gender in this part of the
document.
One particularly notable strength of the DCI-Ethiopia CSP is its monitoring and
evaluation (M&E) framework, which details strategic objectives, actions to be taken by
the programme and ‘DCI attributable indicators’. This framework, focused on practical
actions and attributing responsibility to DCI, is likely to enhance incentives and
accountability for performance against the goals and objectives laid out in the CSP.
Critically, the M&E framework includes both gender specific and gender sensitive
indicators. Thus there are specific indicators to track progress towards meeting
Objective Four: ‘Promote gender equality and the empowerment of women’; whilst
indicators of progress towards certain other objectives are gender sensitive. For
instance, Strategic Objective One - the Reduction of Poverty, Inequality and Exclusion –
includes the Strategic Actions:
 DCI promotes gender-responsive poverty analysis at macro and sectoral
level ( in order to influence plans, M &E systems, budgetary allocations etc)
and engages government, donors and civil society on issues emerging from
the analysis [emphasis added].
The related ‘DCI attributable indicators’ is gender sensitive:
 Technical inputs provided by DCI on gender and HIV/AIDS sensitive
poverty trend analysis in areas of health, education, food
security/vulnerability through the APR and donor / government sector for a
[emphasis added].
Similarly, the indicators for progress towards ‘participatory development and
accountability’ include:
 DCI support for the promotion of the gender equality agenda in political
governance fora.
This framework should prove a strong tool for ensuring institutional accountability for
gender mainstreaming.
Importantly, under management arrangements for the programme, clear responsibility
for oversight of the ‘mainstreaming agenda’ has been assigned.
The Ethiopia CSP thus demonstrates a strong commitment to gender mainstreaming,
addressed in a way that seems likely to enhance gender sensitive implementation of the
programme and its contribution to gender equality. Nonetheless, there are some aspects
of the document that could be strengthened.
The Background section could present a stronger argument for gender mainstreaming
by ensuring that relevant gender issues are noted throughout, instead of being confined
15
to specific paragraphs on gender. This would bring out the gender dimensions of other
development challenges and avoid the risk of preaching to the converted. For instance,
women’s responsibility for food production but relative lack of access to assets and
resources could be noted in relation to food security and rural economic development:
these goals will only be achieved when the specific constraints facing women, as well as
men, are addressed.
The programme approach could be strengthened by more attention to gender
mainstreaming in areas where this is scarcely visible as yet, particularly in relation to
private sector development, rural economy development, food security, safety nets and
social protection. Even where gender mainstreaming is signalled as a strategy in the
social sectors such as health and education, the document would benefit considerably
by making the gender related problems to be addressed and the intended outcomes
more explicit.
The M&E matrix of ‘DCI attributable actions and support’ include a number of gender
sensitive indicators. However, this is not wholly consistent. Indicators for Objective 2,
‘commitment to harmonisation’, for instance, could include an indicator on consensus
with other partners regarding DCI’s key principles (which include gender equality).
Indicators for Objective 3, on promoting participatory development, could note that
community based approaches to service delivery should be gender aware. This is
particularly important, given the wealth of evidence that devolving service delivery from
the state to local communities has often increased the burden of time and care on
women, in particular. Indicators for Objective 5, reducing HIV/AIDS, could also explicitly
recognise the critical links between gender inequality and the spread of HIV/AIDS. For
instance, DCI supported studies to improve understanding of the linkages between
HIV/AIDS and poverty reduction could also aim to investigate the linkages with social
exclusion and gender inequality. With regard to Objective 4, ‘promote gender equality
and women’s empowerment’, relatively vague indicators such as ‘capacity for gender’
and ‘evidence of gender issues being addressed’, could be replaced with more explicit
ones that emphasise the goal of gender equality, e.g. ‘evidence of efforts to address
gender inequalities’.
Whilst the M&E matrix for DCI attributable actions and support does include gender
sensitive indicators, sector level indicators adopted from the SDPRP Monitoring Matrix
are generally not gender sensitive. This begs a question as the appropriateness of
limiting PRSP and sector level indicators to Government indicators currently captured
through the SDPRP Monitoring Matrix. These do include a specific indicator related to
the objective of ‘Women’s Empowerment’, namely that a ‘National Action Plan on
Gender is drawn’. However, there is no indicator relating to the quality of this plan or its
impact on women’s lives.
4.4
Enabling factors for effective gender mainstreaming
DCI-Ethiopia offers one of the best experiences to date of gender mainstreaming in the
CSP. Interviews with DCI staff (see Sources, below) suggest that the following factors
were key to enable effective gender mainstreaming:

Strong leadership and clear guidelines: At country programme level, the
management showed keen interest and support and this was backed up by a
strong steer from Dublin. Furthermore, development of the CSP coincided with
16
the launch of DCI’s new Gender Equality Policy which generated enthusiasm and
offers clear practical guidelines on gender mainstreaming through policy
dialogue, general budget support, SWAPs and in area based programmes.

Clear framework: The strategy for gender mainstreaming was incorporated in the
overall vision for development of the CSP (through the roadmap), in other words
at the start of the CSP process.

Gender analysis: The preliminary contextual analysis which informed
development of the CSP included gender analysis and a specific focus on
addressing gender inequalities. The fact that these issues were signalled at the
analysis stage made it easier to ensure that concern with promoting gender
equality would be reflected in the principles, strategic objectives and monitoring
framework for the programme.

Capacity building: The Gender Advisors (DCI Ethiopia and Dublin) provided
technical support to the programme team to conduct gender analysis themselves
and to build mainstreaming competence.

Ownership and accountability: The capacity building approach and practical
focus on identifying gender issues in each programme area helped to build staff
ownership of the gender equality agenda. Furthermore, gender related objectives
and indicators were included in individual work plans, in the monitoring and
evaluation framework and in staff performance agreements including peer
reviews. This has strengthened the structures for ensuring accountability against
gender equality goals.

Dedicated resources: Apart from ensuring that gender sensitivity and specific
activities to promote gender equality are covered by the budget for each
programme area, the Gender Core Team at DCI Ethiopia has access to a
process fund. This can be used to sponsor research to support gender
mainstreaming, as well as capacity building activities.

Favourable policy climate: In some respects, the external policy climate in
Ethiopia was favourable to gender mainstreaming. The GoE is officially
committed to gender equality at a policy level and has signed up to key
international conventions and agreements to this effect including the MDGs.

Collaboration with other donors: A number of other donors based in Addis Ababa
have shared DCI’s concern with promoting gender equality. The Royal
Netherlands Embassy, in particular, has helped provide leadership on this issue.
Moreover, under the umbrella of the Donor Assistance Group (DAG), which
coordinates donor responses to the PRSP, there is an active Gender Group
where donors meet together monthly and meet every two months with
Government counterparts. This serves as a vehicle to promote gender
mainstreaming in the PRSP.
17
4.5
Constraints and challenges
Interviews with DCI staff suggest that the following key constraints and challenges were
encountered:

Limited capacity for gender analysis: not all staff had prior training in gender
analysis, whilst gender sensitive information was not always readily available to
assist them (see ‘information and knowledge gaps’ below). In practice, DCI
Advisors found it easier in some sectors than others to identify opportunities for
promoting gender equality. According to people interviewed, this was easiest in
health and education as well as in the governance sector where a rights-based
approach helped to identify issues around women’s rights. The biggest
challenges were posed in relation to:
 Private sector development
 Rural economy development
 Safety nets programme
where little has been done by DCI or its partners to identify gender related
constraints and where there appears to be most resistance to addressing these
issues.

Resistance to new concepts and ways of working: Within DCI, there were some
initial problems with staff not seeing gender mainstreaming as their responsibility
or feeling that introducing gender detracts from the main programme. All staff
(not just those responsible for gender) had to go through a learning process
where they grappled with the new issues and had to start to think in very different
ways: particularly, in understanding how gender (in)equality relates to the
achievement of overall programme goals including poverty reduction.

Belated timing: Although gender analysis was incorporated in the CSP thematic
papers, this perspective was often introduced after Advisors had conducted the
initial contextual analysis of their respective programme area. Arguably, this
constrained the extent to which Advisors were willing or able to take gender
analysis on board.

Information and knowledge gaps: Efforts to promote gender equality have been
constrained by lack of adequate information and analysis in several programme
areas. Sex disaggregated data is often not available at sector level and in many
sectors (especially outside the social sectors) there has been little prior gender
analysis that DCI could draw on, for example in the agricultural sector. At macroeconomic level, development policy and planning is largely gender blind and this
makes it more difficult for DCI Advisors to identify and address the challenges
relating to gender inequality.

Limited experience: Gender mainstreaming in upstream aid modalities is a newly
emerging experience that still needs to be built upon. Initially, DCI Ethiopia had
planned to contract a team of local gender consultants to guide gender
mainstreaming in the CSP. In practice, however, these consultants had little
experience either of DCI processes or of working in the context of new aid
modalities. Their project-focused experience was found to have limited relevance
for the CSP and the contract with these consultants was cancelled. This
highlights the need to ensure that new approaches to gender mainstreaming in
18
upstream aid modalities are consistently documented, disseminated and used as
a learning tool.

Competing priorities: In developing its CSP, DCI Ethiopia aimed to address
several cross-cutting themes; yet, these were often perceived as competing for
time and prioritisation. This was addressed in a pragmatic way through giving
priority to HIV/AIDS and gender and by introducing gender mainstreaming as a
pilot in the governance team –allowing advisers time for capacity building and
training.

Non-conducive environment in some policy areas: Whilst the GoE and other
partners have recognised the importance of addressing gender inequality for the
overall success of programmes in some sectors – such as health and education,
for example, where gender equality is clearly linked to achieving the MDGs – in
other areas there is little gender sensitivity. Particularly with regards to macroeconomic policy and planning, rural economic development and a new
programme of social protection and safety nets, DCI found it difficult to identify
allies and persuade others to join them in challenging models and practices likely
to perpetuate or increase gender inequalities. Indeed, they were sometimes
accused of distorting the agenda when they tried to raise these issues.
Such resistance, compounded by knowledge gaps and lack of gender analysis to
expose the relationship between programme goals and gender (in)equality (e.g.
the relationship between gender equality and economic growth) makes it
particularly difficult to mainstream gender, whilst trying to harmonise donor
cooperation through upstream aid modalities.

5
Relatively weak national allies and resources: The CSP explicitly sets out to
support the GoE in attaining its own development priorities. Despite official
political commitment to gender equality, however, in practice the government
institutions responsible to promote this outcome are generally weak with poor
resources and capacity. The existence of the Women’s Affairs Office (WAO), for
example, is often used to demonstrate commitment to gender equality, yet in
most ministries there is no budget for gender mainstreaming whilst the WAO
itself is marginalised. In some sectors, gender equality is not seen as a national
priority but as a donor-imposed agenda. The Ministry of Finance, for instance,
responsible for developing the PRSP, largely sees gender mainstreaming as a
‘donor agenda’. In the absence of strong national allies, this makes it more
difficult for DCI to promote gender equality.
Lessons learned for gender mainstreaming from the DCI-Ethiopia CSP
The DCI-Ethiopia experience of concerted efforts to mainstream gender in the CSP
provides a number of useful lessons for the future. These are outlined below:
Gender issues must be linked to programme goals including poverty reduction. In
the shift to upstream aid modalities and as PRS processes take centre stage, there is
increasing need to ensure that DCI programmes both appreciate and are able to
facilitate increased understanding of the links between gender inequality, poverty
reduction and economic growth.
19
International and national policy commitments provide a steer. Where
Governments and their key development partners have made national and international
level policy commitments to gender equality these can provide an important focus for
building consensus around gender mainstreaming. The MDGs, for instance, have
provided a focus that helps to build consensus around specific gender issues such as
achieving gender parity in education and focusing more resources on reproductive
health. However, donors should ensure that the focus remains broadly on gender
equality (including economic equality) and is not reduced to a narrow emphasis merely
on meeting targets, such as increased numbers of girls going to school.
Good leadership and open dialogue and debate are key to raising the profile of
gender issues and demonstrating their importance for attaining overall programme
goals. In this case, the launch of DCI’s Gender Equality Policy was important in
providing guidelines for gender mainstreaming, but also to generate energy around the
issues. Strong leadership, however, is not sufficient of itself and needs to be backed up
by gender analytical skills, local ownership and dedicated resources for gender
mainstreaming.
Well-informed gender analysis is critical to developing a gender sensitive programme
that actively promotes gender equality. Ideally, gender analysis should be incorporated
in initial contextual analysis of the overall programme and specific programme areas
and, or sectors. Where adequate information is not currently available, DCI could plan
ahead to identify critical information gaps ahead of the CSP planning process.
Building the mainstreaming competence of staff is critical to ensure that, even if they
are not always in a position to conduct gender analysis themselves, they will at least be
aware of where there are gaps in knowledge and when and where DCI may need to
support gender sensitive data collection and analysis.
Capacity building contributes to staff ownership of the ‘gender agenda’ and has
been central to successful gender mainstreaming in specific sectors. Ownership also
suggests that there will be less danger of policy evaporation at the implementation
stage.
A multi-pronged approach to capacity building with partners may be needed where
national capacity for gender analysis is weak; for example, through support both to the
technical skills and management capacity of national gender machineries as well as
building capacity for gender analysis in national statistics institutions, national and local
level planning and budgeting departments and non-state institutions including civil
society organisations.
Policies must be backed up with resources: not just money but allocated staff time,
reflected in performance assessment criteria. Otherwise gender is likely to be lost
amongst other competing priorities that people feel they are more likely to be judged on.
Working with allies is increasingly important In the context of harmonisation. This
includes allies both within the Government (e.g. national women’s machinery), as well as
within civil society (e.g. NGOs representing or promoting women’s interests) and with
other donors.
20
Building on existing relationships and using key entry points: For DCI-Ethiopia,
gender mainstreaming has been easier to take on board where the GoE has a strong
strategic direction and operational plans, where there is a positive history of
collaboration with donors (e.g. where well developed SWAp programmes exist) and
where DCI itself has existing experience and contacts, as in health and education.
Conscious strategies are needed to deal with resistance. Other stakeholders
including donors are not always sympathetic to gender mainstreaming and may be
resistant in active or passive ways. One strategy to address this is to promote and
disseminate the use of sex disaggregated data and gender analysis in relation to the
policy and programme areas in question, e.g. in relation to rural development and
economic growth.
Documenting, disseminating and learning from experience with gender
mainstreaming in upstream aid modalities is particularly important, given that this is a
relatively new phenomenon and experience is accordingly recent.
6.
Recommendations for the CSP Guidelines
The ‘Country Strategy Planning Guidelines’ provide direction for DCI staff on how to
develop a CSP. These guidelines can therefore play a key role to facilitate gender
mainstreaming in the CSP. Drawing on lessons learned from the experience in Ethiopia,
in this section the authors make a number of recommendations as to how the Guidelines
could do this.
Principles should include adherence to internationally agreed values including
gender equality. The Guidelines suggest a set of principles to guide the CSP in each
country. Amongst others, these include harmonising DCI programmes and projects
around developing country government priorities expressed particularly through the
PRSP. However, there is need to recognise areas of development - such as gender
equality - where partner Governments have made national and international
commitments but these are not clearly reflected in the PRSP. This may be due to
knowledge, information and capacity gaps around the gender dimensions of poverty and
how to address them.
Key issues in deciding resource allocation could include willingness to address
and build capacity for addressing gender inequality. The Guidelines lay out a
number of key issues to be considered in deciding the resource envelope and relative
allocation of resources across the country programme. Amongst others, these include
poverty indicators, the quality of the PRSP, the standard of governance and the policy
environment. They could also point out the importance of addressing causes of
inequality and exclusion. Factors to consider, for instance, could include evidence of
political will to address gender inequality (and other cross-cutting issues) as well as
evidence that partners are willing to invest in and build their own capacity to address
these issues.
DCI should commission specialised gendered analysis where this is not available.
When undertaking analytical work, the fact that sex disaggregated data and gender
analysis will probably not be available through, for example, Sector Programme Reviews
21
or other government mechanisms must be taken into account. There may be need to
commission specialised gender analysis well in advance of the CSP preparation.
In preparing the CSP, responsibility for gender mainstreaming should be clearly
assigned. A group of people responsible for gender mainstreaming in the CSP must be
drawn together including the team leader, the gender desk at head office and gender
specialists within the embassy. Where necessary, this team could be supported by
gender expertise from outside the programme, but familiar with DCI processes.
The need to enhance DCI staff capacity should be clearly recognised and
addressed. The Guidelines note the importance of consolidating the DCI programme in
areas of existing competence and comparative advantage. However, the importance of
enhancing programme quality and effectiveness– e.g. through building staff competence
for gender mainstreaming – should not be neglected.
Technical support and evaluation should include gender expertise. The suggested
process for developing and reviewing the DCI programme and new CSP should include
technical support from Gender Advisors / experts in mainstreaming cross-cutting issues.
Gender expertise should be included on all evaluation teams.
22
Sources
Interviews
DCI - Ethiopia
 Kevin Kelly, Head of Department with responsibility for leading the CSP Process
 Nuala O’Brien, Development Specialist with responsibility for Vulnerability, Social
Protection, Rural Economic Development and the Tigray Programme as well as
Budget Support Programme and Relief for Development portfolios and gender
and HIV/AIDS;
 Haimanot Mirtneh, Programme Executive with a direct responsibility for genderspecific programming, based in the governance team where the gender
programme is located.
DCI - Dublin
 Fionnuala Gilsenan, Development Specialist with specific responsibility for Gender
and Civil Society
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