Gender equality toolbox

This guide aims to provide useful context on gender equality as a priority of Danish development assistance. It offers strategic directions and presents good examples of how gender programming can achieve results on the ground. Divided into six sections, it provides a quick introduction to gender mainstreaming, an overview of lessons learnt, challenges and opportunities. It also looks at how gender equality can be addressed in connection with harmonisation and alignment with national policies in a country.

It is highlighted that recent assessments of donor agencies, the UN and the World Bank conclude that progress towards more equality between women and men is insufficient. However, there are important opportunities to promote gender equality in the development aid agenda. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), the Millennium Development Goals (2000), and the new aid modalities and instruments provide useful vehicles for addressing gender equality. Past experience points to the importance of using clear definitions when referring to mainstreaming gender equality and women’s empowerment. But even more so, the lessons learnt emphasise that gender equality issues differ from one social context to the other. Some of the key lessons highlighted include:

• gender equality mainstreaming is a process, not an end in itself - it involves considering both men’s and women’s needs and experience in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies
• sex-disaggregated data are critical - a necessity for the promotion of gender equality is the availability of sex-disaggregated data for every statistic, which involves counts of people
  
• need for gender analyses - a prerequisite for mainstreaming gender equality is to understand how and why gender inequalities are relevant to the work at hand.

The guide includes an overview of principles as well as suggests actions for development partners with mainstreaming of gender equality in policy dialogue and in the new aid modalities. Some of these include:

• raise gender equality issues for example in high level consultations, negotiation of agreements with governments, formulation and implementation of PRSPs, sector programmes, and sector-wide approach coordination groups
  
• support gender activists to raise gender equality issues in public debates on policy
  
• promote and support a country gender analysis and wide circulation of the results - this includes analysis of the different impact of public spending on men and women and recommendations on how to align public spending priorities to reduce constraints and opportunities of poor men and women.