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Gender and Development

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Table of Contents

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Purpose of the checklist

Why is gender important in urban development and housing projects?

Key questions and action points in the project cycle

Gender analysis

Project design

Policy dialogue

Appendix: Terms of reference for gender specialist

Selected references

Gender Checklist: Urban Development and Housing

Why is gender important in urban development and housing projects?1

Urban development and housing (UDH) encompasses the following subsectors: water supply, waste management, drainage, transportation, electrification, housing, land use planning, slum improvement, sanitation and hygiene, environmental management, and employment generation. UDH projects usually take place in socially complex and densely populated areas. Gender is only one of many aspects that need to be taken into account, but it is an extremely important one.

Some earlier experiences in ADB-funded and other donor-funded UDH projects have demonstrated the following lessons, which illustrate the centrality of gender:

Lesson 1. Women and men differ in their roles, needs, and perceptions regarding UDH. Conscious efforts to address their views lead to better project design and performance.

Women are the primary collectors, transporters, users, and managers of domestic water and promoters of home and community-based sanitation activities. Women also play a primary role in waste disposal and environmental management. As women bear a primary responsibility in household chores, new or improved housing designs, including lighting and ventilation, should reflect their needs.

Furthermore, in some areas, evidence shows that targeting women as individual customers could better increase the number of connections to water and sewage services than a nontargeted approach. This has major implications for the marketing strategy of service providers, be they public- or private-sector, that have financial viability problems.2

Yet, in many societies women’s views are not systematically represented in decision-making bodies. UDH projects provide major opportunities to close this gap.

Lesson 2. Focus on gender has multiplier effects.

Focusing on gender leads to benefits that go beyond good UDH project performance, as manifested in such aspects as better procurement, operation and maintenance (O&M), cost recovery, and hygiene awareness. Those other benefits include the following:

·         Economic benefit: Better access to urban infrastructure and services provides better living conditions for women, improving their health and productivity. Also, reducing the time spent on water collection and sanitation management gives women more time for income-generating activities, the care of family members, or their own welfare and leisure. The economy, as a whole, therefore also benefits.

·         Benefit to children: Freed from the drudgery of water collection and management, children, especially girls, can go to school. Their health will also improve. Hence, the impact can be expected to be intergenerational.

·         Empowerment of women: Involvement in UDH projects empowers women, especially when project activities are linked to income-generating activities and productive resources such as credit (see box 2).

Lesson 3. Gender can be better addressed through an approach that is responsive to the needs of the poor and encourages stakeholder participation.

Whether it is a community-based approach or a bigger-scale private-sector approach, the focus on poverty reduction and the participation of beneficiaries are two other key determinants of the effectiveness and sustainability of UDH management. A UDH project must focus on the links between gender and poverty by identifying, for example, households headed by females and those households’ special needs. This is especially critical in slum development, since many households in slum areas are headed by women. A UDH project must also address the constraints on women’s participation in project design, construction, O&M), training, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E).

Lesson 4. Where a community-based approach is relevant, an adaptive, learning, and process-oriented approach should be taken; continuous dialogue between the project authority and the women and men beneficiaries is therefore important.

Project beneficiaries are likely to have a stronger sense of ownership when the project gives them enough time, design flexibility, and authority to take corrective action. In this way, they find it easier to incorporate their earlier learning and negotiate with project staff and service providers. This is especially so in a context where women’s participation is not the norm. Therefore, a mechanism must be built into the project to allow such two-way interactions between the beneficiaries and the service providers.

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1.     This section draws on ADB (2000), Fong et al. (1996), and Woronluk and Schalkwyk (1998).

2.     In the World Bank–funded Sulawesi and Irian Jaya Urban Development Project in Indonesia, the regional state-owned water company, PDAM, was faced with a problem of financial viability, mainly because of the low number of customer applications for connections. Two subdistricts in the municipality of Palu in Central Sulawesi were selected for pilot marketing of water connections, with one subdistrict targeting women as customers and another targeting men. For four months there was extensive marketing through community meetings conducted by marketing staff, brochure distribution, and door-to-door visits. The marketing campaigns targeted to women resulted in a far greater number of new connections (30 households out of 450 households) than the marketing campaigns targeted to men (5 households out of 450). The sample size may have been too small to permit a quick generalization of the results. Nonetheless, this study shows that a marketing strategy that is focused on women’s roles as customers of clean water can help increase the number of connections. This is because of women’s primary role as domestic water managers. On the other hand, this may not be universally true, as the level of women’s decision-making power in the household varies in different societies (Haryatiningsih 1997).





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