WUNRN

http://www.wunrn.com

 

Donor Spending on Gender in Emergencies 2013 - The Gender Marker Tool

 

An Investigation by CARE International UK into the UN Data on Donor Aid to Emergency Appeals for 17 Countries in Crisis

 

Direct Link to Full 8-Page Document:

https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/system/files/documents/files/Donor_Spending_on_Gender_in_Emergencies_2013.pdf

 

The Gender Marker* tool is a relatively new, though very welcome, mechanism to determine whether humanitarian projects respond effectively to the distinct needs of women and girls, men and boys. Donors’ use of the Gender Marker to make decisions on which projects they fund is an important development. It can show a significant movement towards donors committing to funding only those interventions that address gender equality. However it is acknowledged that there are challenges in its design and implementation.

 

The Gender Marker categorization is crude and it appears that NGOs are inconsistent in the way they report it. The fact that a project has a Gender Marker code of 2a or 2b does not necessarily attest to its quality. The wide range of actors implementing the Gender Marker need help to ensure that it is applied accurately and consistently. In our report, we have found data which is in turn worrying and surprising. As the UN’s own internal evaluations have found, the coding is not always done accurately and the process of establishing a global system for accountability on gender has inevitably faced teething problems.

 

One obvious challenge is that initiatives frequently address gender as a sub-component of projects with another over-arching objective, such as providing support for shelter or water and sanitation. This can cause the gender focus to be lost in the coding process. Some donors also provide core funding for agencies to work on gender, violence against women and girls and protection, which does not get documented by the CAPs as the funding does not flow through country-specific funding streams.

 

We know the figures do not capture the full picture of what aid agencies are supporting on the ground, but this is precisely the point. All of us – donors, UN and NGOs in the field – need to become much better at holding ourselves to account in what we are doing to address gender in emergency aid – specifically violence against women and girls. Signatories to the Communique for the High Level Event on 13 November have committed to “strengthen accountability at global, national and operational levels to address VAWG (Violence Against Women and Girls) in humanitarian responses and promote gender equality.”

 

CARE believes that one key step to make this commitment real is to become more rigorous about categorizing projects using the Gender Marker - not only in the design phase and reporting through the CAP system, but as a priority throughout on-going project monitoring and evaluation. Only then will the true picture of efforts to address the specific needs of women and girls, men and boys – including but not limited to gender-based violence – become clear.

 

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*The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) introduced the concept of the ‘Gender Marker,’ which was fully implemented in 2012.

 

This is a tool that codes, on a 0-2 scale, whether or not a humanitarian project is designed well enough to ensure that women/girls and men/boys will benefit equally from it, or that it will advance gender equality in another way.

 

Category 2a is for projects that seek to ‘mainstream’ gender considerations in their design (such as presenting information separately for women and men, boys and girls, known as sex-disaggregation of data, in assessments of need).

 

Category 2b is for projects that are a targeted intervention addressing gender dynamics (such as projects in response to sexual violence).

 

Category 1 is for projects including basic elements that have the potential to address gender concerns.

 

Category 0 is for projects that have taken no visible steps to address these issues and are considered ‘gender blind’. The term gender blind is used for projects submitted to the UN system which demonstrate no visible potential to contribute to gender equality, and may fail to address the needs of specific population groups or even unintentionally do harm.