Introduction

Prologue 1 Prologue 2 Prologue 3 Guide to using the manual on How to Prepare a Gender Strategy for a Country Office

i1P2P3P4PT

Published by: United Nations Development Programme San Salvador, 2004 Funded by: Bureau for Development Policy United Nations Development Programme Prepared by: Raquel Lagunas and Neus Bernabeu Gender Unit UNDP - El Salvador Assisted by: Claudia Patricia Zaldaa A rmando Carballido Edited by: A rmando Carballido Design and Layout by: Paola Lorenzana and Celina Hernndez Printed by: Co Grafic Impresores

Prologue 1.

Development is not neutral, nor are organizations. Since the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing 1995), the United Nations System has recognized that gender mainstreaming is the strategy to be followed if we are to achieve the aim of gender equity and advancement of women all over the world. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has also undertaken this commitment. Since then, the goal has been to ensure that all our activities contribute to narrowing the remaining human development gaps between men and women, both within and beyond our own offices. However, very few issues involving our commitment to human development display the differences in discourse, policy and practice that we see in gender equity. Despite the efforts made to apply policies, our organization continues to confront socio-institutional and methodological difficulties. For gender mainstreaming to be significant and credible, each UNDP office must demonstrate that vulnerable, disadvantaged women benefit through reducing poverty and HIV/AIDS, increasing democratic governance and environmental sustainability, and preventing and recovering from conflicts. However, in addition to supporting national efforts, each office must put into practice recruiting policies that will ensure male-female equity at all levels so that our values and our image are coherent with our development proposals. And this must also be reflected by a commitment to human and financial resource allocation for gender issues. The last Regional Meeting on Gender Mainstreaming for Latin America and the Caribbean (Mexico City, September 2003) was attended by 12 countries and identified various constraints involving the mainstreaming strategy that most UNDP field offices in Latin America share. That meeting also underscored the key need for tools to plan systematic, coherent interventions. Such tools would have to be prepared on the basis of a reflection exercise in the offices, eliciting the commitment of every member of the organization, at all levels. This Manual responds to this need. Geared primarily toward Gender Focal Points or other staff responsible for mainstreaming gender, the Manual guides the development of a Gender Strategy for UNDP country offices. We have left the instructional approach open, so that each office can find the best way to carry out and/or reinforce its own gender mainstreaming process.

The Manual also shows how possibilities for change and transformation must necessarily be framed within the social fabric of the organization and must be in line with both the political commitment and the collective learning capacity of our country offices. This Manual also contributes to systematizing our best practices, since it has been prepared in the field on the basis of lessons learned in the El Salvador office. Finally, this endeavor is intended for everyone who is committed to gender justice and human rights, creativity, andat the end of the daytransforming relations among women and men in our organization and elsewhere.

ASTER ZOUDE Gender Adviser, UNDP

Prologue 2.

At the beginning of the new century, Heads of States and Governments of 189 (191) UN member states met at the Millennium Summit and adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Goal 3 Promote gender equality and empowerment of women is one of the most significant results. The high priority for UNDP accorded to Goal 3 represents a global affirmation of womens human rights and gender equity as core values of development Despite the improvement of womens conditions in the last time, especially regarding the institutional and legal sector, and the recognition of womens role in life is not questioned, there are still several barriers to break. This situation indicates that gender inequalities require a general view and a bigger effort to transform gender discrimination against women. However, the effort carried out by the UNDP country offices in order to advance in the equity between men and women agenda, is a field full of advances and backward movements. In this sense the office from El Salvador wants to share with others UNDP country offices the model developed by our CO, because we believe that it is an innovative methodological proposal to obtain benefits. The manual in your hands is just a sample, a practical experience about how to achieve mainstreaming gender issues in a CO. This experience not only affects gender units or gender focal points but also concerns all programmes and, in short, the whole staff of UNDP offices. That means the effort to advance into the gender equity within UNDP must be integral and affect all the levels of the organization. I would like to finish by inviting all the CO to declare the conviction that attempting to achieve the MDG until 2015 without promoting gender equality will decrease the likelihood of achieving the other goals, nor to reach a real human development.

BEAT ROHR
Resident Representant El Salvador United Nation Development Programme

Prologue 3.
You have in your hands the outcome of our fascinating task, of an intensely re-examining UNDPs experience in El Salvador and making the effortwe hope usefullyto extract general elements from our experience with the process of gender mainstreaming as a reference for all UNDP country offices in Latin America and the Caribbean. How did this task come about? It originated in 2002, when our office identified the need to go beyond good intentions and carry out an in-depth, integrated intervention to comply with the mandate for gender mainstreaming. We faced many questions: Where to start? What to do? How to do it? The pathway lying ahead of us was full of uncertainties, but several things were quite clear to us. First of all, to put gender mainstreaming into practice, it would be crucial to work through a process of reflection and sensitization within our own office and to jointly create a way to address this great challenge. We started with the conviction that we could not generate any structural change without pursuing an inclusive process involving everyone in the organization. We also felt that our work had to be grounded in an evident philosophical and methodological framework: moving from the inside outwards and from the personal to the collective level. Without this internal coherence, it would be hard to make any sustainable headway in our external actions. Furtherin order to avoid being swamped by the immensity of this ambitious undertaking we would have to carry out a sound planning exercise. This led us to prepare three tools: a participatory UNDP-El Salvador Institutional Gender Assessment that shed light on our current status as well as getting the process under way; a UNDP-El Salvador 2003-2006 Gender Strategy, and its corresponding Multi-Year Operating Plan and Annual Plan for 2003. It took five months to prepare these three toolsfive months of contradictory sensations and thoughts. We kept wondering: Will this get us anywhere? Will it be good for anything? Are we doing it right? We would be lying if we said that we had found answers to all our concerns or the concerns of others, or that we always knew which way to go. Continual adaptation of the process itself was one of its main features. Fortunately, by the end of this period, we had a satisfactory response from our office. The three documents were approved, and the Gender Unit was created to implement the Gender Strategy. However, there was no way we could rest on our laurels at that point: our adventure had only just begun. Since then, we have been immersed in the vast challenge of making this planning exercise into a rich, fruitful, living reality. Along the way, we have discovered that our work truly is directly influenced by the flow of life, making it is somewhat difficult to take snapshots or share recipes. Working for equity between women and men means approaching a collective horizon that is constantly changing and remains beyond our full control and understanding.

07

Now that we are rounding out the second year of implementing our strategy, the BDP has provided us with the opportunity of reviewing our experience and preparing the material that you have in your hands. This Manual does not encompass a systematization of our experience in El Salvador, but it does attempt, on the basis of lessons learned during this time by our Gender Unit, to provide orientation and guidance for any UNDP Office that intends to begin a gender mainstreaming process. Let us clarify that these pages contain no single universal remedy, but only a sort of a varied menu, so that you can produce your own recipes. This has been the main difficulty in preparing this Manual. We have tried to create something useful, widely applicable and, flexible, which will provide human and technical support for the long, uncertain process of gender mainstreaming. We would like to thank many people for their contributions and support in preparing this Manual, especially Aster Zaoude, UNDP Gender Adviser; Mara Luca Lloreda, Focal Point of the Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean (RBLAC); and Ana Mara Luey, BDP Program Assistant; as well as our friends in the Gender Unit in UNDP El Salvador. We hope that you enjoy reading and using this Manual as much as we have enjoyed preparing it. Above all, we hope that it will encourage you to embark on the great voyage toward gender equity in your own office or organization.

RAQUEL LAGUNAS and NEUS BERNABEU Gender Area UNDP El Salvador

08

Guide

to using the manual on

How to Prepare a Gender Strategy for a Country Office

What is the purpose of this Manual?
This Manuals aim is to provide a useful, easy-to-handle guide for preparing and implementing a Gender Strategy by a UNDP country office. We hope that using it will strengthen the institutionalization processes for gender mainstreaming in our offices.

Who is the Manual for?

From the outset, we have attempted to keep the Manual flexible, so that each country office can pursue its own process, depending on its particular goals, interests and possibilities. Consequently, in order to offer different entry points and ways to proceed, we have tried to address as many aspects as possible that could be incorporated in a gender mainstreaming strategy. The manual is for: Gender Focal Points (GFPs) in the Country Offices Other staff directly involved in gender mainstreaming (GM) in UNDP Other development organizations committed to gender equity

What can we find in the Manual?

To choose gender mainstreaming and truly put it into practice in an organizations day-to-day work is a long voyage with a number of difficulties and complications. First, you need to address three essential questions: What do I need before starting? Where are we now? Where do we want to go? The answers to these questions will determine the pathway that we choose, our means of transport, how we are going to undertake this voyage, and even whether we will travel alone or as a group. To answer these questions sequentially, this Manual has been organized into three main parts, followed by a tool chest.

09

What do we need before starting? Prerequisites:

Like any other trip, there are a series of conditions and factors that constitute from the outset the foundations and boundaries of our route and even the luggage that we will take. Accordingly, this block contains the elements that will comprise the identifying seal of this voyage and make the process possible. First, we offer a basic conceptual framework for the gender mainstreaming strategy, defining gender and other relevant terms and outlining the differences between equality and equity. Second, we set out a philosophical framework, outlining the elements that we feel are crucial in a gender mainstreaming process. Third, we offer basic information on UNDP as an organization, on our country offices and on the Gender Focal Points. Fourth, we show a set of tactics extracted from our experiences in our own offices, which will be very useful in paving the way for performing an institutional Gender Assessment and drafting a Gender Strategy. This part is complemented by a set of tools located at the end of the Manual to support us in preparing for our voyage.

Where are we now? How to conduct an Institutional Gender Assessment

Knowing where we are starting from and how we stand at present will largely determine the direction of our voyage. Preparing a Participatory Institutional Gender Assessment (PIGA) is the tool that will enable us to get to know the gender mainstreaming situation in all areas and all levels of an offices work; that is, to what degree this process has penetrated the organizations different levels and actions. This assessment mode will help us to collectively identify the fundamental problems and challenges that our organization faces in terms of gender. The assessment is part of a broader, shared process and becomes an indispensable first step in realistically planning our voyage together. In this block, you will find: A first section explaining why an assessment is an important prior to any intervention regarding the gender mainstreaming process. We show different types of assessments: an overall office map, an assessment targeting a single aspect and a full assessment. A second section called Step by step showing how to undertake each aspect of an integrated assessment:

10

Internal aspects: UNDP policies, planning documents, human resources, in-house capacities in our offices and organizational culture. External aspects: Areas of practice, programs and projects for our offices, and a number of other actions to promote gender equity. A third section offering a series of recommendations for the process. In addition, this block introduces a set of toolsplaced at the end of the Manualto help us during this second stage of the voyage.

Where do we want to go? How to prepare a Gender Strategy

After the assessment shows us our starting point, the next step is to set our destination, taking our capacities into account. Preparing a Gender Strategy will enable us to decide where we want to go, what our goals are and the main features of our upcoming voyage. The Gender Strategy that is adopted by a country office must be the outgrowth of a process of participatory internal reflection. This document will pull together the main guidelines or action lines identified as necessary to move toward gender equity. It is a tool that must highlight our offices political commitment and make it possible to carry out a holistic, coherent, planned gender mainstreaming exercise. By reviewing an offices Gender Strategy, we can grasp its perception of gender mainstreaming and even of gender equity overall: whether it emphasizes internal or external actions, whether it views responsibility for gender mainstreaming as shared or individual, and so on. In this block, you will find: A first section explaining why a Gender Strategy is important and describing different types of strategies: a strategy focused on a single aspect and an overall strategy. A second section called Step by step showing how to construct each element of an integrated office strategy. As in the assessment, this is organized into: Internal aspects: UNDP policies, planning documents, human resources, in-house capacities in our offices, organizational culture, and so on. External aspects: Areas of practice, programs and projects for our offices, and a number of other actions to promote gender equity.

11

A third section offering a series of recommendations to carry out this task. A fourth section setting out a plan for undertaking this voyage. Once we know our starting and destination point, we must define the most fundamental elements of the voyage: logistics, organization, timing and costs. We will do this by preparing Operating Plans. These plans are the prerequisite for a Gender Strategy to become concrete enough to implement. Operating Plans may be multi-year or annual, while also materializing actions within a shorter timeframe, allocating responsibilities and budgeting. This block also introduces a set of toolslocated at the end of the Manualto help us during this stage of the voyage.

Tool Chest

Each block has its own tools. You will find them referred to throughout the text. For easy reading, tools are located at the end of the manual, in the order mentioned. Some tools are useful for several blocks, because they are flexibly designed. Therefore, they are referenced in several places.

In order to offer an integrated intervention model, we have had to refrain from going into great depth in each aspect. Consequently, we have decided to emphasize those aspects that have been least explored in our organization (organizational culture, equitable human resource practices, etc.). We leave it to you to choose one or more of these pathways.

Bon voyage

12

Some usage guidelines

The Blocks:
Each block is distinguished by a different color. They all contain the conceptual development of an issue and follow a logical order to construct the process: taking the initial steps, preparing an Assessment; and developing a Gender Strategy and its corresponding Operating Plan. Please note that: The tools are not isolated entities. The Assessment, the Strategy and the Operating Plans are not tools conceived of in isolation, but rather they are inter-related and mutually reinforcing. They are part of a process that is not really linear or consecutive. The Assessment makes a snapshot of the current situation and also identifies possible challenges and actions that will become lines of action in the Gender Strategy. Operating Plans materialize major strategy actions.

The tools are not viewed as specific products but as part of a process. Preparing and implementing the Assessment and the Gender Strategy may be defined in terms of outcomes, but these tools also serve the purpose of facilitating organizational empowerment in our offices within the broader process of institutionalizing gender equity in our organization. The tools are flexible. The true value of these tools is their flexibility, which enables us to adapt them to the distinct reality and process in each country office. The idea is not to uncritically replicate experiences from other places, but to take what is useful from them in terms of our own goals, interests and possibilities. For that reason, this Manual has attempted to address as many aspects as possible that should be taken into account in a gender mainstreaming strategy, so you can select those that are your highest priority or are most relevant for your office and enrich them with your own vision and experience.

Symbol Legend:

Tool

Concept Box

Note

13

14