Message 6: Gina's Contribution

Gina Castillo writes that for development projects and programmes that have a rights based focus, participation is key, and this cannot be ensured without addressing the issues that may inhibit women’s contributions. Also programmes need to understand that users are both men and women, and they each have different concerns as well as needs and requirements. Distribution of the benefits of effective water management also needs to be done more effectively if poverty reduction is a desired outcome from a particular project. The issues that make the process of gender mainstreaming harder are: exclusion from institutions; the idea that gender can be tackled after addressing the broader needs of the community; the idea of gender being about women only; and also the other forms of social differentiatation that intersect with gender and produce disadvantage in a particular context.

My name and institutional affiliation are below. I am afraid I can't address all the questions due to a lack of time. I would, however, like to start by focusing on the Whys proposed even though I strongly believe that there is a general consensus in the development community about the importance of gender mainstreaming.

Having said that, the Why's

For an organisation such as Oxfam-Novib that works from a rights-based perspective, mainstreaming gender is important because we believe that men and women have the right to participate in development. In 1986, the right to Development was made explicit in the UN Declaration on the Right to Development. Article 1 states that every human person are entitled to participate in, contribute to and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.
Users and water managers are men and women. Hence, policy and practices must acknowledge these users and plan appropriately.
From a poverty reduction angle, if water can play an important role in decreasing poverty, then we have to understand how the benefits can be equally distributed.

Real issues:

1) What we see is that it takes time to mainstream gender. This is a challenge because the larger development discourse is about seeing quick "wins" and "results". Gender systems are institutionalised through education, political and economic systems, culture, and traditions. Whilst these systems are dynamic and changing, they are vested interests to uphold and reproduce gendered practices which are to the detriment of women. It takes time to see changes. Often at meetings that I have attended I hear women who do not identify as "farmers" even though they spend most of the time managing the fields and making decisions about water. It takes time to convince them that they are farmers and water managers and have the right to participate in public decision-making and policymaking bodies.

2) Another challenge that we often see is that organisations will often say what we need to focus first is just on improving the "community" or "farmers" income then we will do the gender. Hence, the discussion is often about improving the agricultural productivity in a very homogenous way. The discussion gets focused on cash crops, men usually are identified as the ones who will receive the training, etc. There is a tendency to think that gender can be added on at a later stage and that it does not have to be addressed from the very beginning. We believe, however, that it must be done from the very beginning.

3)Another issue is that there is a lot of misunderstanding of what gender is and one still needs to work through this. What we see in our work is that still a lot of people think gender is just about working with women. Some have yet to understand that gender refers to both women and men and the relations between them.

4) Another real issue that challenges the integration of gender concerns is that it interacts with other variables such as class, race, age, etc. One therefore needs to look at systems of exclusion; how marginalisation is produced and reproduced. In the highlands of Peru, well to do mestizo women because of their access to strategic networks they will add their names to irrigator’s lists in the highlands of Peru even though the law states that only men can be on the irrigators’ lists. Poor women would not be able to do this.

Gina E. Castillo, Ph.D.

Liveilhoods Advisor,

Oxfam-Novib