A Delegation Perspective on Implementing the GAP

One year into the EU’s second Gender Action Plan (GAP), which stepped up ambitions to make all the EU’s external action gender-sensitive, what is happening on the ground? Capacity4dev spoke to gender focal points in EU Delegations to Afghanistan, Lesotho, Cape Verde and the Democratic Republic of Congo about the challenges they face, the priorities selected, and the lessons learned so far.

So how are EU Delegations moving from policy, adopted by the European Council in October 2015, to practice?

Gender Analysis

The first step across the Delegations was to conduct a fresh gender analysis – a detailed study of the differences in conditions, needs, participation rates, access to resources, control of assets and decision-making powers between men and women. This helps identify areas most in need of investment, and becomes a baseline from which to track progress.

Data collection is often a challenge, as commissioning new studies such as household surveys is expensive and lengthy. Some Delegations were able to compile relevant statistics from existing reports, or to share the task with EU Member States and partner organisations with the same priorities under the Sustainable Development Goals.

At the time of writing, 42 out of some 90 supported Delegations had submitted their Gender Analysis. 36% of Delegations conducted the analysis in-house, while 64% hired consultants or used external resources.

Time and resources were the main factors in the decision. “At the beginning I thought of doing it myself, but as we have low capacity, only six people in the Cooperation section of our Delegation, we normally contract consultants,” said Anna Topliyski, Gender Focal Point for Cape Verde, who also works on civil society, human rights, communication and visibility. “The first thing was to come together with Member States, as it’s a binding collaborative action plan, to discuss the possibilities of doing Terms of Reference and contracting consultants [to do the gender analysis]. We wanted a local consultant – and we contracted one who had participated already in drafting Cape Verde’s national gender plan, so she was already familiar with the national gender issues and the different partners.”

In other countries, collaboration with Member States was more challenging. Not all the Embassies had taken on board their role. “The problem with the GAP is that some Member States see it as a reporting exercise, a bureaucratic process,” said the Human Rights and Gender Focal Point in the EU Delegation to Afghanistan. “Some Member States have not responded yet. We will report about it, which have cooperated well, which not, and we’ll see how we can deal with it in next year’s progress report.”

A further challenge to sharing the workload of analysis, and later, monitoring, is that different organisations use different indicators to measure progress. While the GAP is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, “some partners don’t work with the SDGs at all, like the larger implementers – for example the World Bank has their own framework,” he said. “There’s no real harmonisation; you have two systems in parallel, plus low capacity of the government. It’s something we should try to address.”

Despite this, the Delegation in Afghanistan has managed to get some traction with the GAP. “Our gender analysis is in place, and we’ve launched a large scale research project in cooperation with USAID, which also paid for it – and they have reviewed over 600 gender reports in the last five years,” he said. “This is for everyone to use, they can pick up the report and know instantly what issues to address. The Afghanistan Gender Country Profile provides an annotated bibliography which categorizes these gender studies by sector.”

Getting to this point required good coordination. “The first thing with the GAP was to involve the hierarchy, meeting with the Head of Cooperation and the Head of Sections,” he said. “They agreed to install gender focal points in individual sections, and to have a counterpart in the political office, the EU Special Representative office. We communicated the need to look at reporting with Member States. We included it in our six month work plan and coordination meeting, and agreed to establish a working group. Then there were informal meetings with Member States and other donors, also to cover other coordination issues. I used that to convey the message and bring people on board. Then we launched the gender analysis through USAID which had similar needs and an overview of the available data and the issues. This was performed by a research team they had set up. They mapped out the state of play on gender issues.”

Looking ahead, the Delegation plans to work with UN Women to create a gender knowledge hub, tracking funding on a map, and making research and information available to all parties to avoid any duplication of research in the future.

Choosing objectives

Once the gender analysis had been performed, the next stage was selecting the areas of focus - at least one objective for each of the four thematic areas, depending on the country context and the partner government’s goals.

Some of the gender focal points needed to persuade colleagues who saw the exercise as creating extra work. “It was a bit of a challenge as when you identify those objectives, later they will have to report on them, and they think it will be too much for them,” said Mokome Marorisang Mafethe, from the EU Delegation to Lesotho. “But it’s already within the work you are doing. Gender mainstreaming doesn’t necessarily mean more resources or extra work, it’s just being creative with what you already have to make sure minorities benefit.”

Another issue some colleagues found was identifying the gender aspect in some sectors. “It can be easy to identify the gender dimension in the framework of health or justice programs, but there are some other sectors where the gender mainstreaming and the focus on vulnerable groups are particularly challenging, for instance the infrastructure sector,” said Ilaria Betti, gender focal point in the Delegation to DRC. “It is thus very important to have a good and deep analysis at the very first phase of the identification and formulation of projects.”

 

How do these goals translate into in a country context?

Physical & psychological integrity

In DRC, one of the goals under the first thematic priority, physical and psychological integrity, is to fight sexual violence in the context of the ongoing military conflict. “The health and justice programmes we have financed so far focused, among other things, on assistance to the victims of sexual violence,” said Betti. “Medical support has been given to them in different health centers in Eastern DRC, where the conflict is going on.”

Credit: Will (Charles) Boase, European Commission. Democratic Republic of Congo.

In addition to the assistance provided to the victims of gender-based violence, the social and cultural roots of gender inequality need to be eradicated: “There are also very deep cultural reasons for gender inequality in DRC,” said Betti. “We finance a gender program at national level, implemented by UNICEF and GIZ. The particularity of this programme is its prevention approach, focusing on the social attitudes and behaviors generating inequalities.”

Social & economic rights & empowerment

In Lesotho, a goal under the second theme is improving girls’ access to education through investing in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in schools. “In essence when girls are on their periods they do not go to school, as the bathrooms there are not user friendly and they will not be able to clean up after changing, and at times they are using sanitary methods which are not proper,” said Mafethe. “With WASH, it’s improving the attendance rate of girls - the days missed during the month are reduced.”

The impact can be life-long. “Missing school means always being behind on their studies, so this intervention will improve their studies and ultimately reflect on the girls meeting their career goals or passing at school, which wouldn’t otherwise be possible.”

Strengthening voice & participation

In Afghanistan, one of the key goals under the third theme is increasing women’s participation in parliament and the civil service. “We are trying to get as many women parliamentarians as possible in place, and other donors are actually providing capacity-building support to the women in parliament,” he said.

Once women have the jobs, there are still challenges related to institutional culture. “The civil service introduced a new salary scale which linked salaries to conditions – the standard things you’d ask, like university education, experience in field, in the policy sector. Leading female staff were not meeting those conditions. We are working with colleagues to see if these women could receive training,” he said.

Another Afghan institution low on women is the police force, for reasons both cultural and practical. “The standard operating procedures for the police force require them to have driving licenses to go on patrol, and most women don’t have licenses,” said the Human Rights and Gender Focal Point in the EU Delegation to Afghanistan. “These kinds of things we will look into in more detail to really turn women police officers into valuable personnel.”

Training women police officers is part of a large-scale project the EU runs through UNDP to enhance the police force’s capacity to do civilian policing. “You can significantly increase security with female police officers. In Afghanistan it’s not within the culture’s remit to search houses where women are present with male police officers; you can only search houses with female officers in some circumstances,” he said. “Also body searches get facilitated with female officers. You can uncover female insurgents this way.”

Institutional culture shift

According to some of the interviewees, the prerequisite for all the above happening is commitment and understanding within Delegations, partner governments and implementing organisations; as well as political pressure from leaders, time and resources.

“The EU is known for its rights-based approach, and we must follow through,” said Topliyski. “For that we need more training, more sensitisation within the Delegations, more collaboration, and more exchange. We have a big challenge to really combine EEAS [the European External Action Service] and DEVCO [the European Commission’s Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development], and we have to work more together. We also need more capacity on the ground. I should be working 60% of the time on gender issues, but I work max 5-10%. We need people on the ground who are experts, and it’s not enough to contract external experts - we need the capacity inside the Delegations. We also need more contact with Headquarters - it has to be a common effort.”

Topliyski also pointed to the importance of sensitisation at partner governments and organisations. In Cape Verde, “95% of EU funding goes directly to the budget of the state. The country has the capacity to manage the funds directly, based on their national strategy and their objectives,” said Topliyski. “We plan to establish a thematic group, meeting regularly with national and international partners, civil society and the private sector, to discuss gender issues and measure the advancements made.”

The EU’s budget support in Cape Verde includes institutional support, “to strengthen the institutions which will use the money and implement the different policies, and which are developing sex-disaggregated data,” said Topliyski. “There’s a big lag on data. We know for instance that there is gender-based violence, but we have no actual data to measure what the country is doing.”

The EU’s support includes investing in the National Statistics Institute and an Observatory on Gender. It also involves providing training. “We have a thematic programme for civil society and local authorities. We were seeing that even associations which were working with women still understood gender equality as a matter of parity – as in, we have five women and five men involved. So we are working to explain there is more to it, a rights-based approach.”

Positive impact

Credit: EU Delegation, Lesotho

One year into the GAP, the foundations for inclusive development policy are being laid, and the exercise has raised awareness of a global issue which has yet to be fully addressed across all sectors.

“The preparation of the GAP is quite challenging, but also useful to push me and my colleagues to reflect on our main objectives, our shared activities, indicators and future initiatives,” said Betti. “This work is not easy and depends on the sensitivity and collaboration of all the colleagues involved. But in general all of them try to collaborate and think with a gender perspective.”

According to Mafethe, “The effort and investment the EU is putting into its own staff to train us on gender mainstreaming [means] the development work we are doing is going to be more inclusive, and will respond to needs to most marginalised.”

“One thing we learnt was to refrain from using the words ‘for all’, as it means the minorities who are already forgotten will stay out,” said Mafethe. “It’s better to disaggregate data by sex, and if we see fewer men or women are benefitting it will trigger in our minds to see what we can do better to make sure women and men, persons with disabilities and other vulnerable groups are benefiting from our development work. That’s where I see us contributing a lot.”

Further reading

• How does gender play a role in healthcare systems? See our Q&A with experts Sally Theobold and Sarah Hawkes 
• Q&A on the GAP with Blerina Vila
• James McNulty's blog on Gender Analysis
• Council Conclusions on the GAP (October 2015)

Image credits: Will (Charles) Boase, European Commission - 'Supporting the National Plan for Health of the Democratic Republic of Congo and developing the maternal and infant health sector'; EU Delegation to Lesotho, sustainable farming practices