But what about the dudes?

Guest blog post by Darcy Knoll, communications intern for CARE Canada

CARE Canada unabashedly works with women and girls.

It’s the centre of the imagery. The emphasis on empowerment. Walking in Her shoes.

But what about guys? When will we get the attention we deserve?

As a male working at CARE, the question must be addressed: Am I fighting for the wrong side in the battle of the sexes?

Far from it.

Over the past few months, I’ve taken a considerable amount of time to learn about CARE’s approach to gender equality. I must say, the folks here are really quite adamant about this. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are at the very heart of all aspects of programming: maternal and child health, food security, climate change, HIV/AIDS, emergency relief, economic development… you name it and there’s a gender lens attached to ensure it’s beneficial to both women and men equally. This is a pretty Big Thing at CARE.

And that’s really how it should be.

Lucienne Vil and Edouard Espérance work together to take care of a community nursery at Gros-Morne, Artibonite, Haiti, as part of a CARE horticulture project. Many of the project participants, including Lucienne and Edouard, adopted children whose parents died from AIDS. (Photo: 2011 Mildrède Béliard/CARE)

In many countries, men and women (or women and men) are not equal in social standing. Be it the public or private domain, the pendulum is often so far askew that it’s fallen over entirely.

Indeed, if you have a Y beside your X chromosome the chances are good you’ll have better access to health care, nutrition, paid work and education, not to mention you won’t fear domestic violence and you’ll have the ability to make decisions. High fives all around for men, just ignore the mothers, daughters and sisters looking on.

Fixing this situation is not done to the exclusion of men, in fact, including men is essential to addressing the imbalance. After all, helping improve the lives of one half of the population while building resentment in the other is not the secret to long-term success.

So as not to dissuade the brothers out there, let me be clear, men and boys are a part of everything CARE does. For example, CARE works with fathers in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, training them to feed their children nutritious food and to recognize signs of common childhood illnesses. This will help fathers to become more involved in childcare, easing women’s work burden. In CARE Canada’s own backyard, men are key members of the organization’s Gender Committee, keeping gender equality on everyone’s radar.

A country, community, or family cannot drive forward if half its tires are left flat and ignored. This goes way beyond gender or sex/male or female/woman or man; it’s a matter of human rights.

Reflections on the 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development

On March 22, 2012, CARE Canada’s Gender Advisor Margaret Capelazo attended the Canadian launch of the 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development. The report recognizes the tremendous strides made for women’s rights, education, health, and access to jobs and livelihoods gained over the last 25 years, but also the major gaps that remain. The report highlights the importance of not just looking at the gender gaps that can be filled with economic development, but also those that will not disappear with economic development including gaps in education and female mortality. The report also stresses the importance of using evidence-based public action through better data collection, impact evaluation and learning.

I was pleased to attend the launch of the World Development Report on March 22^nd. The report focuses on five areas that are key to achieving gender equality. Some relate to meeting basic needs in health, water, education or income generation. Others focus on changing the social rules and cultural norms that create gender inequalities in the first place, such as women’s access to justice and passing gender inequality from generation to generation. The final priority area is making sure that we have good, solid evidence about what works and what doesn’t for women and girls.

As I read through the Report and listened to panel discussions at the launch, I reflected on how the World Bank, governments, donors, and NGOs like CARE,  measure changes to the social rules, cultural norms and power dynamics that create gender inequalities – the root causes. It is easy to measure changes to girls’, women’s, boys’ or men’s behavior because we can see this behavior on a daily basis. It is harder to measure change that happens at a deeper level because it’s harder to see, because social change happens over long periods of time and because it differs from culture to culture.

For example, in CARE Canada’s Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) work in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, which is supported by the Government of Canada, we want to know if women are able to put their knowledge about nutritious food to use and have the final say over what their girls and boys eat. Usually, other household or community members influence a child’s diet, to the detriment of their health and growth. Given cultural differences, we use different measures to see if women’s final say has increased in each country. In Ethiopia we measure the say of women compared to their husbands. In Zimbabwe we measure women’s say against that of either their mothers-in-law or their husbands, depending on local custom. This is the type of flexibility necessary to measure change to social rules around decision-making.

CARE is doing its part to strengthen our measurement of gender equality. On International Women’s Day, March 8^th, we released our Reaching New Heights: A Measurement of Women’s Empowerment report. I encourage you to read this report to learn more about how we are measuring gender equality and using the results in our work around the world.

Traditionally, the international development community has shied away from measuring deep social change in relation to gendered power dynamics because it is a delicate subject related to individual cultures. But with the World Development Report and the commitments in the Busan Declaration, donors, governments, and NGOs such as CARE renew their efforts to measuring what really counts and to ensuring that our measurement activities are efficient and effective so that we can focus on what works for women and girls.

Stepping out of bounds

November 25^th is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. CARE empowers women and girls as part of our mission to defend dignity and fight poverty worldwide.

By guest blogger Margaret Capelazo
CARE Canada Gender Advisor

 

What do you think of when someone says “stepping out of bounds”? Perhaps your mind turns to sports: Volleyball? Basketball?  Soccer? Put your toe across the line and the play or possibly the game, is over.

For many women in the world, stepping out-of-bounds has much harsher consequences.

Imagine a woman who is not able to leave her home – she may be blocked by her husband, her father, or perhaps the community. She may not have permission to travel down the road to school, to walk to the nearest town to access health care, or to go to the local market to sell or buy food. If she steps out without permission, she may face violence or even death. The boundaries she is confined to are both physical and cultural, affecting her ability to get an education, earn a decent living, access health care and spend time with friends.

A local woman constructing a road in Pakistan. Photo:Warrick Page/CARE

As part of our work around the world, CARE empowers women, girls, boys, men, and entire communities to break down these boundaries. In Pakistan, for example, CARE works with women and their communities to help women leave their homes and earn an income rebuilding roads. These women get a legal minimum wage and support to start small businesses that provide a longer-term income once the roads are finished. The project also benefits the community as it improves their access to the services and supplies they need.

Before women could even step out to join this project, however, CARE worked closely with community elders, husbands and male heads of household to ensure women’s mobility was fully supported. As a consequence, the women participants had safe travels to work each day and their role in the project was accepted by the community.

Today, the women participants are literally paving the way in their communities – just as CARE paved the way for these women to participate and live in safety, with cultural acceptance and dignity.

On November 25, we mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against women, followed by the 16 Days of Action leading up to the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.  We encourage everyone to act now to prevent violence against women. Whether you speak up about violence in your own community, participate in a local community event to mark the 16 Days of Action, make a donation to an organization like CARE Canada or seek out other ways to take action – you will make a difference. We all have a part to play in eliminating violence against women. Do your part today.

Putting gender equality at the heart of CARE’s work

“Imagine for a moment, a stick-house. Now imagine if a man is holding up one end and a woman the other. If one is not as strong as the other, the house will fall down. Our work in gender equality seeks to make sure that both sides of the house can be held up — that the one that is strong remains strong, while the other is empowered to the same level.”

Margaret Capelazo is CARE Canada’s Gender Advisor. She recently returned from a meeting with CARE International’s global gender advisors in India. Fresh from this experience, we asked her about CARE’s work to empower women and girls.

You recently returned from a meeting with CARE International’s gender network in India. What kinds of things did you discuss there?
Part of the meeting focused on coordinating our gender equality work across the CARE federation. CARE works in 87 countries, and CARE International’s gender network is responsible for building the accountability mechanism that makes sure CARE’s work equally benefits girls, boys, women and men. We also reviewed our programming to make sure that we are using the best possible activities to bring men and women equal access to and control over profit, goods and services; to strengthen women’s leadership skills and men’s skills working with women in leadership positions; and to support men and women equally when they claim their rights.

Women own the processing center as a collective. They shell, sort, package and prepare the nuts for sale. In some cases they accompany staff on buying trips and increasingly handle related business transactions. As a result, they have learned relevant management skills. (Photo: CARE)

You also visited a project run by CARE India. Can you describe the project and what it’s trying to achieve?
As part of our review we visited a project in which poor, low caste widows are running a cashew processing center. Usually these plants are run by men, and men see the profit from the cashew trade while women earn little money as their wage labourers. CARE India has built the skills of women whose husbands were killed in the 2004 South East Asia tsunami to own and manage three cashew plants, as well as to use clean, safe equipment to process the cashews. This provides the women with a more lucrative livelihood option and it gives more equal opportunity to men and women to benefit from the cashew industry.

Is this similar to other CARE projects?
In the countries in which CARE works, men’s small businesses tend to be more sustainable and profitable than women’s. This is partially due to unequal access to capital, market information, technology and labour. In Kenya, Mali, Peru, and Pakistan, among other countries, CARE works with women and men to provide women with a greater range of financing options, up-to-date market information, transportation services, cost-effective technology and leadership skills necessary to manage a small business. In a world where disproportionately more women than men earn their living from very small, informal businesses, this type of assistance often makes the difference between business failure or success.

The cashew processing centers established through CARE India work primarily with Dalit women who are single heads of households. The processing centers include a child care facility for young children. This helps reduce child labour and provides a healthier environment for children to stay while their mothers are working. This also means that older girls can remain in school. (Photo: CARE)

For example, in Pakistan, CARE Canada implements a CIDA-funded project in which widows from the lowest class are trained in basic entrepreneurship skills and supported as they write a business plan, secure capital and make market contacts. Due to the social rules in Pakistan, men who want to start a business are more able to do these things because the rules say that men can leave their homes and villages but women can’t. Our project staff talks to opinion leaders, imams and government officials to persuade them to change the rules and support women so that they, too, can get out of the house and run a small business. What would the women be doing if they didn’t own a business? Picking cotton by hand at Rs. 60/day (approx. $0.70) or begging. Providing more economic options to women allows them to have a dignified way of earning their living.

Do you feel positive about the work CARE is doing and what it’s achieving? What do you think the road ahead will be like?
I do feel positive about the work that CARE Canada is doing around gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. CARE staff, both here and in our country offices, are very thoughtful and considerate about finding solutions that get to the root of the issue and have the maximum benefit for women and girls. Poor women have strong ideas for their own development, and the staff here are very good at incorporating these into projects that are implemented around the world. The next move will be to take all of these ideas and projects and to link them up, so that women and men who are working on women’s economic empowerment can support each other and innovate the most effective ways to achieve gender equality.