A Delegation Perspective on the New Gender Action Plan - James McNulty

Ever turned up at a party in jeans and your third-best t-shirt only to find it was supposed to be strictly formal dress? That feeling of blood draining from your body as you stand on your host's front step, emptying your pockets and attempting to somehow manufacture a silk Hermès tie out of some coins, an old tram receipt and the uneaten half of a melted Snickers bar?

Great! Then you understand exactly the kind of scenario that the new EU Gender Action Plan (GAP) is trying to lay to rest. Sort of. I mean  the scenario when a project officer, emaciated and hollow-eyed after weeks of working on a project proposal for a large new intervention, is casually reminded – two hours before the submission deadline – that the project officer naturally should not forget to attach the ten-page Assessment of Cross-Cutting Issues. Darkness crashes down.

So, at the dawn of the new GAP, have we put behind us those moments of horror when we realise that we didn't sufficiently think about how our shiny new project might involve or impact on different groups such as women or men or children or the disabled? That we didn't think incorporating gender analysis was part of the 'real work'? Is that nightmare over?

We'll find out soon enough!  Over the next few hectic months, as our Delegations and dozens more submit their proposals to Brussels for scrutiny, we will see the first indications of whether, and to what extent, the new GAP is really influencing the content of new EDF proposals.

A Delegation perspective

Let's be honest; like loads of other aid agencies, it takes time for a push on gender to translate into a fully automatic reflex to make it part of how business is done. In Zambia, we can already point to a few ongoing and new developments:

• All of our new project proposals – including energy, regional trade facilitation and aviation –submitted to Brussels in March 2016 placed gender equality as a 'significant objective', or 'G1' (this is OECD's methodology for 'marking' projects in terms of gender equality). Whether we have sufficiently done our homework on this remains to be seen, but we are trying our best.
• The fight against gender-based violence is one of the European Union's priorities in terms of political partnership and development partnership. Six grants related to the rights of women and girls were allocated in 2015 via a call for proposal on media and justice. And later this year, we will soon start work on designing a larger GBV project.
• Through its MDGI Programme with UNICEF, WHO and UNFPA, we are tackling maternal health, teenage pregnancy and child marriage both at community and policy level. Through its Programme for Improved Access to Equitable Quality Basic Education in Community Schools in Zambia, we're helping girls to finish school and encouraging pregnant girls to come back to school after their pregnancy.
• More of our communications, including case studies (like this one) and social media posts, are focused on the gender equality dimensions of our work.
• The Delegation is supporting us to access great training from the European Commission's Gender Equality unit to help make sure we have the right concepts and the right messages at the right time.

The harsh lessons from the recent evaluation on EU support for gender equality are still ringing in our ears, so a large dose of humility will be the order of the day for a while to come. And because it takes time for capacity and skills to build, there are still going to be times when we feel conceptually, financially, politically or organisationally a bit under-dressed on gender, particularly when 'doing more with less'. But I can honestly say that this International Women's Day finds the Delegation to Zambia and COMESA in better shape with respect to gender equality than we have ever been.

Raising our game on gender

What does the EU's new Gender Action Plan mean for us? First of all, our Head of Delegation made it clear soon after taking up his appointment that he expected all new projects to be rated at least G1. And after visiting a UK-funded STOP Gender Based Violence Centre in Lusaka – he became convinced that gender-based violence was one of the big challenges in Zambia that EU could help address.

For those of us at our Delegation who work on gender issues, this was music to our ears. We know from the experience of others that having a leadership that takes gender equality issues seriously is probably the single best predictor of whether we will succeed or fail to make gender equality a permanent feature of our work. It's not sufficient, but it's a huge first step.

As for the potential impact? Zambia was ranked 132 out of 154 in the 2014 Gender Inequality Index: economically, socially and politically, women face so many obstacles to equality in Zambia. If we can use the GAP to help target our support and mobilise others, the European Union together with government and other development partners can make a huge long-term difference.

Our biggest challenge?

If you look at the history of our support in Zambia over the previous ten years or so, you can see some over-arching themes for our support: roads, budget support and agriculture.

What's changed? Since 2014, we have moved to more of a project approach. Some of the sectors have changed, but the focus is still on making large and catalytic interventions, particularly in the productive sectors. But a big change from the past is that we now know these strategic priorities need to be seen through a lens of inclusion. This is why our National Indicative Programme (NIP), and almost all of our new action documents, begin with the recognition that while Zambia has enjoyed a lot of economic growth, it hasn't sufficiently included the poor, or women. We also have the Sustainable Development Goals, which challenge us to think widely and deeply about inclusion.

So, one of the biggest challenges for us is to understand precisely what are practical, effective and sustainable steps we can take in these large interventions – particularly in the energy sector, for which Zambia has one of the largest NIP allocations in the world – to sustainably and systemically narrow (not widen!) narrow inequality. This is a challenge not just because of the social and economic complexities, but also because historically energy and trade have tended to be rather inclusion-blind areas of policy in Zambia. It's a bit of a vicious circle because it means there isn't a strong pool of evidence and analysis on which to anchor our proposals in these sectors to inclusion or poverty reduction outcomes. It's a continuing challenge for us to ensure we think about this stuff EARLY and DEEPLY enough to be able to integrate them properly in our new proposals.

That implies a cascade of additional challenges:

•  Short-term: Capacity for in-house analysis. Like many development agencies, we face the risk of over-relying on consultants as a response to staff constraints. Finding the time to fully understand the gender dynamics within our sectors can feel like a luxury – time to read and understand what works and what doesn't. To understand what has been written, and what remains unknown. The challenge is not to become gender equality analysts overnight – the challenge is to ensure we become better and more informed commissioners and users of gender analysis so we can raise our game on quality.
•  Medium-term: Engaging with a community of practice. I suppose you could call this knowledge management, but really this is about learning. How can we accelerate our learning from other Delegations, Member States and partners? How can we access good practice, lessons, templates, examples, high-quality experts, etc, so that we don't waste time reinventing the wheel or worse?
• Long-term: Professionalisation. The Gender Action Plan indicators include measures on the expertise of Gender Focal Points, and on the number of senior gender champions, and on staff perceptions of performance on gender. This is the bit of the EU Gender Action Plan that talks about 'shifting the institutional culture', and it's there because you can't get better outcomes for women and girls without building operational capacity and commitment to reach those outcomes – it's not rocket science. Like most Delegations, we are fighting to change the way we work to respond to this. If you want some field-level reactions from a variety of Delegations on how institutional culture has an impact on gender equality, check out our piece on the Gender Focal Point Survey in 2015: this survey was an important bit of evidence underpinning the new GAP.

What does it mean to me?

Gender mainstreaming and inclusion challenges our assumptions and makes us return to first principles concerning what we really want to achieve. For me, that is definitely one of the more fun parts of working in development. And 2016 is going to be a great opportunity to get into that more deeply with alongside technical colleagues and with our Gender Focal Point. I'm also very proud to have participated as a Task Force member in the writing of the GAP 2016-2020 and hope to be able to continue engaging with it even after I finish my Seconded National Expert contract here in Zambia. 

James McNulty is Results Adviser at the EU Delegation to Zambia and COMESA (SNE seconded from DFID).

Further reading on Voices & Views: Bridging the GAP for Gender Equality in Development