CGIAR Research ProgramCGIAR Research Program on Grain Legumes on Grain Legumes

Integrating Gender Research: Some ideas

Esther Njuguna-Mungai

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The Gender Requirement…

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Gender integration is a requirement of most, if not all, donor agencies currently

Increasing need to show ‘realized value’ for the vulnerable members of society/target communities, mostly identified as women, children,.. , youth

Most organizations, projects designing the ‘gender strategy’; Nations adopting ‘Gender Policy’…

There is an urgent need for ‘methodological’ development to support the need for research in gender

What is not gender research and analysis…

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Scientists ambushed by the ‘gender requirement’?1. Women in meetings, teams (numbers,

exploitative?)

2. The ‘gendered’ anecdotal evidence….

3. Comparison of women headed and male headed households

4. The ‘gender paragraph’ syndrome… Necessary but not sufficient…….

What is gender research and analysis?

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Women’s and men’s concerns are integral to the design of program

How a program implementation affects norms as well as gender relations; or how norms and gender relations affect a program?

How would a program implementation strategy change to accommodate the issues in bullet 2 above

Data collection, monitoring and evaluation that keeps tracking the men’s and women’s responses to the implementation of the program

Transformative approach….

Gender in the CGIAR system…

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11 Common Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDO) 5th IDO is on ‘Gender and empowerment’

Meeting in Cali in May for the gender coordinators to suggest indicators for the IDO

1. Women’s control over resources relative to the men

2. Women’s participation in decision making relative to the men

Expectations for all CRPs to show their contribution to the common IDO

CRP is tracking gender data that is relevant for contribution to the common gender IDO.

Status of Gender Research in CRP-GL

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We have a gender strategy

We have a gender specialist

We have a gender budget

We have ‘gender studies’ in some of the research activities, implemented to different levels of satisfaction….

Can we give data on ‘gender and empowerment IDO’ when reporting to the CO?....

What we can we do as a team…

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Formulate/re-formulate ‘gender research questions’ …

Allocate resources to implement ‘gender research’ in all the research activities

Minimum standards in collection of sex disaggregated data in household survey

Strategic research1. Strategic gender research questions2. Strategic research questions where gender is

integrated

Gender integration in the KARI McGill Food Security Research Project

• Gendered objectives• Gender strategy• Orphan crops and

indigenous chicken: Women’s enterprises

• 2/3 gender balance in farmer groups and project activities

• Gender disaggregated prioritization

• Training and farmer-to-farmer learning

• Monitoring and evaluation of impacts

Minimum standards in collection of sex disaggregated data in household survey

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How does the income composition of rural households influence preferences for, and adoption of, new agricultural technologies for smallholder farms? Interview a household… ____________________________________________

Defining the unit of the analysis for the study to be the ‘individual decision makers’ (man, woman in the household); understanding the individual choices, preferences and decisions for the man and the woman requires that you interview the individual man and woman in a household.  Understand what happens when the ‘preferences are matched, preferences are not matched’ between the man and the woman in the household, how the choice is then negotiated, who carries the day in technology choice/adoption (power shifts) What are the factors that would cause the outcomes to go in one direction or the other (income, education, social networks)…

Strategic gender research questions

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The gender and agriculture network has designed a study:

‘a global study on gender norms, agency and innovations in agriculture and Natural Resources Management’

Cascading it to Grain legumes

‘a global study on gender, norms, agency in management of grain legume seeds in the SAT’

Conclusions….

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Gender may have been a donor requirement, but there are a lot of concrete food security and development outcome gains that arise from our incorporating gender questions and focus in our work

Lets keep asking the ‘who question’…..each research project is unique

Gender research is still evolving, and its implementation is a continuous negotiation…each project activity taking a unique design

Gender implementation strategies for research activities with support from the gender coordinator

THANK YOU

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