One Year Later: How Endorsers are Implementing the #GenderStandards

Asia Foundation staff in Bangladesh participate in an interactive session during a three-day gender training. The training aims to build staff capacity and organizational culture to advance gender equality in its programs.

More than a year after the Gender Practitioners’ Collaborative launched the minimum standards for mainstreaming gender equality, 29 organizations are now official endorsers. In order to learn more about how endorsing organizations are mainstreaming gender equality and advancing their organizations’ commitment to the minimum standards, we asked them a series of questions. A few selected answers are below.

1. What was the process for creating your organization’s Gender Equality Policy (or equivalent) and how did you build buy-in?

Helen Keller International developed a global policy for gender equality and social inclusion. An internal working group, comprising members from both programs and operations teams across each region (Asia-Pacific, Africa and US), was set up to draft the Policy. Following review and inputs from Directors, it is now pending Board Approval prior to being made official.

2. How does your organization build gender mainstreaming culture and capacity? What does it do at headquarters and the project level?

IREX created a Gender Focal Point (GFP) program in 2017 to diffuse expertise on gender integration throughout all practice areas and business units. Interested staff from HQ and field offices were invited to apply for an 8-month program of training, mentoring and applied learning opportunities. The GFP Program builds a knowledge base of foundational gender concepts that is reinforced with special attention to IREX’s technical areas. At the same time, IREX has continued to offer less formal opportunities to build skills and knowledge through monthly Gender Salons, featuring staff, partners and other external experts on gender-related topics voted upon by staff through a biannual poll.

The Asia Foundation has a Gender Smart Initiative, which works to advance gender equality both institutionally and programmatically. Through the initiative, The Asia Foundation designed an interactive training curriculum for our staff, which includes an introduction to gender, an exploration of the relationship between gender and development, and concrete steps to promote gender equality in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of programs. Through small group discussions and hands-on practice in applying a variety of gender analysis tools, the highly participatory training builds staff capacity to understand and respond to gender issues and norms and to take steps to improve project outcomes. To-date, more than 250 staff have participated in the training.

3. What is your organization’s approach to doing gender analyses? How does it use gender analysis to help inform project design and implementation?

International Executive Service Corps (IESC) has made a commitment to conduct a gender analysis for every proposal they submit, regardless of donor requirement. They customized a USAID gender analysis template to help them determine how women, men, boys, and girls are affected differently by project activities and design interventions that will result in positive outcomes for both women and men. The process of conducting a gender analysis at the proposal stage results in gender integration throughout project implementation and a commitment to allocate project resources for both women and men beneficiaries. Since 2017 IESC has conducted a gender analysis for 100% of proposals submitted to USAID.

MEDA conducts gender analysis in three phases of the project lifecycle. The first phase is during the initial scoping of potential projects. They conduct gender aware desk research and interview local constituents, which feeds into our planning and development of interventions. The second phase is a full gender analysis, which is conducted during our inception period. Here, we build off the initial scoping gender analysis by meeting with potential clients to understand their needs and barriers, and meet with local women’s organizations and public and private sector partners to ensure that they are committed to gender equality. From the full gender analysis, we develop our gender strategy for the project, which identifies gender-based constraints of our potential clients and their enabling environment.  The third phase of gender analysis is during any project assessment. We either try to mainstream gender into existing assessments or conduct gender-specific assessments to gauge how the project’s interventions are impacting relations and structures of our clients. From this information, we can pivot and introduce new activities to mitigate the challenges facing our male and female clients in our project.

4. What is your organization’s approach to developing, collecting, analyzing and reporting on gender equality measures or indicators?

Pact tracks indicators that go beyond just sex disaggregation, but that also measure gender equality and social inclusion. Nearly every project includes this type of measure. Having explicit metrics to track our work toward gender equality and social inclusion ensures our work does not lose sight of this goal and that all activities and outputs contribute to this outcome. We also place gender equality and social inclusion learning questions into project learning agendas that guide research and M&E under the program. Nearly all planned studies have a gender equality and social inclusion line of inquiry integrated into research and learning plans. Data from these studies are used to inform our programs so that we are able to adapt and improve our performance.

5. What is your organization’s approach to intersectionality, or to addressing both issues of gender equality AND social inclusion?

Equilo takes a comprehensive view to provide data analysis exploring intersectionality. Through our customized gender analysis framework, we apply a gender lens across population types at micro and meso levels. Our database and algorithms address gender-based violence, male engagement, disability status, age, LGBTQI status, ethnic and religious minorities, HIV status, orphan status, working and migratory status, poverty, and vulnerable populations.

6. What systems of gender equality accountability does your organization have in place?

Palladium has developed a Diversity and Inclusion Strategy to hold ourselves accountable to our diversity commitments and our organizational vision. Our progress on the implementation of the Diversity and Inclusion strategy and associated initiatives is shared with our employees on a quarterly basis and directly to the Board of Directors. Our approach and commitment to diversity and inclusion is driven by our CEO, corporate leadership team, strategic leadership team, and a Community of Practice with over 800 employees.  We hold all our people responsible for helping to create a diverse and inclusive working environment.

Thank you to all the endorsing organizations who contributed to this post! If you have a story to share about how your organization is implementing the #GenderStandards, please reach out to us on Twitter @GenderPC or via email info@genderstandards.org. This blog was compiled by  Elizabeth Romanoff Silva, Elise Young, and Lindsey Jones-Renaud. 

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