Originally published on ADB Avenue, 29 March 2017

Unsung gender equality hero: Adnan Tareen

We honor Asian Development Bank (ADB)s unsung gender equality heroes. They went the
extra mile to change womens lives through their work in development projects. For Adnan,
working for gender equality is deeply personal, having witnessed how women have been
deprived of basic benefits. He shares his experiences in pushing gender equality in Pakistan.

Why do you advocate for gender equality in your projects? Why does it
matter to you personally?

I come from a region in Pakistan where the quality of life of people, especially women
living in the mountain areas, is very low even when
compared with other regions within the country. These
people have very minimal access to basic utilities and
services and are often forced to migrate due to lack of
economic opportunities and limited basic facilities. Kids
have to travel kilometers every day to reach school.
These schools have sometimes no electricity and
sometimes no teacher. Even if parents are willing to send
girls to school, they get discouraged when they see the
conditions in which schools operate. In most of these
remote villages, women have to walk for 2-3 kilometers
every day to bring home drinking water and collect wood
for cooking. Working in the development sector, I always
had this desire and wish to help people, especially women, improve their quality of life
and give them opportunities to grow.

How do you go about doing this in your work?

While designing a project, it is important to consider how to create interventions that

would bring benefits to the poor and lower middle classes. More important is to
create an environment within our projects that would enable women to contribute to
the success of the project. This is only possible if project benefits and outcomes are,
to some extent, gender integrated. Having said that, I have to add that it is important
to be mindful of the gender component and its implementation mechanism when we
design our projects to make sure they can be practically delivered even though they
may be challenging. Last year, when we processed our access to clean energy project
in Pakistan, we planned some targeted interventions, like ensuring that women-
headed households and girls schools would be given priority among the project
beneficiaries and women will be trained on benefits from efficient use of
electricity. This direct targeting ensures that women are not overlooked in our
projects and lets them partake of its benefits.

What challenges do you face?

The most common challenge while integrating gender into an energy project is the
immediate reaction or argument you
get from the other side that
electricity is gender neutral
everyone gets it without gender
discrimination. Its true, but people
need to understand the difference
between getting electricity and
benefitting from availability of
electricity. Explaining the difference
between the two is challenging. But in
my experience, once you are
successful in explaining it,
governments are more than willing to
accept and implement gender sensitive models with keen interest. Resistance is
always there but sometimes, all it takes to convince skeptical counterparts is taking
time to explain it.

For the first time in 7 years, we will be unlikely to meet our 45%-at-entry
gender mainstreaming in operations target. What is your view about this?

I believe that it is important to look at the potential of a project and look at it from
various perspectives to see how and where you can mainstream the gender
components. In the initial design of our clean energy project, it was not immediately
apparent at first that it had strong gender components. However, after having
discussions within the team, our gender specialists refined the design of the project
and we managed to bring gender mainstreaming into the project. For instance, we
used renewable energy to bring power to maternal facilities. We included solar-
powered conditional cash transfers in schools to monitoring to ensure that boys and
girls and teachers would attend school. These show that if we just look at our projects
in a different light, we can identify and enhance where and how we can mainstream
gender.

Adnan Tareen is Senior Energy Specialist in ADBs Central and West Asia Department.
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