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Taking a serious look at gender issues – starting with ourselves
Photo: Hari Priyadi/CIFOR
The organizers of the inception meeting for Component 2 of the CGIAR Research Program on Trees, Forests and Agroforestry took their own advice to heart and analyzed feedback from male and female meeting participants separately. Component 2 focuses on the management and conservation of forests and tree resources.
Five women (out of 12 at the meeting) and 17 men (out of 31) identified themselves by gender on their replies. Although too few to allow for statistically valid comparisons, the results were perhaps unexpected and certainly suggestive.
Focus on Gender in the CGIAR
“The CGIAR is committed to increasing its efforts to orient research and to change farming practices and systems so that women can play an important part in enhancing agriculture productivity and improving their livelihoods.”
CGIAR Strategy and Results Framework
The CGIAR first started discussing the importance of mainstreaming gender in agricultural research for development in the 1980s. Over the years, there have been some excellent examples of CGIAR research, for example IRRI’s Women in Rice Farming Systems and IFPRI’s project Strengthening food policy through gender and intrahousehold analysis.
These sought to improve the world of women farmers by understanding the specific constraints that women face in managing natural resources and how to overcome them. More commonly, however, gender issues suffered limited support and recognition and most CGIAR Centres did not have an explicit gender strategy.
According to a 2010 scoping study conducted by the International Center for Research on Women, those Centres that did successfully incorporate gender in their research agendas shared specific enabling characteristics, which included managerial support, a critical mass of qualified staff, donor support, and mechanisms for ensuring accountability.
The new CGIAR is determined to mainstream gender with a system-wide approach that seeks to address gender inequalities in a consistent and systematic manner in all the CGIAR Research Programs. Forests, Trees and Agroforestry will allocate 10% of its funding to gender-related research.
View presentation 'Incorporating Gender in our work- CRP6'
“Overall, the men said they were more satisfied than the women on a range of issues,” said Laura Snook, Coordinator of Component 2.
Men were more satisfied with the level of mutual understanding and the depth of discussions, the background documents, travel arrangements and the meeting room and facilities. The one measure on which women were more satisfied than men was the decision-making process.
“There are lots of ways to think about these results,” said Snook, “and we intend to find out in more detail what they mean and to see what we can do about this in future. The really interesting point is that we hadn’t considered disaggregating the results by gender before.”
The suggestion to do so came from Carol Colfer, a Senior Associate with CIFOR and expert on gender in development, who advised the researchers at the meeting how best to bring gender issues into their research. Colfer commented: “I have been a gender resource person off and on for nearly four decades, and very often I have been the only person available with that particular interest and expertise, with neither a firm institutional mandate nor any financial incentives to strengthen my encouragements. This meeting represented a significant departure from that pattern.”
An independent scoping study of gender in the CGIAR Research Programs noted that Trees, Forestry and Agroforestry had “integrated gender in original and effective ways” in its research agenda. Each main research question has identified gender-specific aspects, and there is an impact pathway in the proposal that shows how research results will be translated into increased gender equality and improved lives for women and men.
Riina Jalonen, Bioversity’s gender focal point for this CGIAR Research Program, said “the organization is looking forward to stepping up our gender work in tree diversity research. One important entry point will be to look at how we prioritize species, for example timber versus non-timber products. Non-timber products are usually much more important to women in poor communities.”
Overall, the Research Program will devote approximately US$1 million annually over the next three years (2012-2014) to building capacity for gender-focused research. Manuals on gender research methods, with sets of indicators for gender inclusion, will be accompanied by training seminars and capacity building for CGIAR staff and key partners.
And, of course, collecting and analyzing gender-disaggregated data.
 | Bioversity International is a member of the CGIAR consortium |
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This work by Bioversity International is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
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