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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).