How can women and men have equal access to and control over the resources and services in their environment? How can we ensure that women’s health problems are recognised and treated in the village clinic? How can women control the number of children they have and gain access to family planning? How do we get more girls to go to school and tailor education to their needs? How can women and girls claim their right to equal access to resources and basic services? And how can we ensure that these services address gender issues? In this paper, we explain what donors can do to achieve gender accountability.

As a result of the new aid modalities, with their emphasis on budget support and focus on the macro level, it is difficult for donors to determine whether their funds are actually going to poverty alleviation and gender equality. Donors today have less direct contact with the poor than they used to. They are more dependent on politicians and providers to reach the poor and on ways in which the poor can hold the powerful accountable. Important issues for donors, then, are promoting accountability on the part of those with power and enabling the poor and disempowered to hold them accountable.

What can be done to make service delivery work? The answer according to the World Development Report 2004 (WDR) is that successful services for poor people emerge from relationships in which actors are accountable to each other. The WDR depicts accountability relationships as a triangle with three roles: citizens/clients, politicians/policymakers and providers, but civil society also plays an important role in gender accountability.

This paper focuses on gender accountability with respect to public services, mainly health and education, and elaborates on an accountability model developed by the World Bank. Other important basis for gender accountability are provided by the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which presents mutual accountability as a basic principles, as well as by international instruments like the Millennium Development Goals which pursue equal rights for women and men.

According to the WDR, too often, services fail poor people in terms of access, quantity and quality. While the report recognises that the role of citizens and clients as service beneficiaries does not imply that all citizens are alike or have the same views, it pays insufficient attention to gender differences. Gender differences affect how people are treated and their scope for holding service providers or politicians accountable. Girls and women encounter specific problems when dealing with public services that make it especially difficult for them to hold service providers or authorities accountable. These problems concern women’s access to services, the extent to which women are visible and esteemed, and providers’ knowledge of and conduct towards women.

Successful service delivery for poor people, and especially poor women, can only emerge from institutional relationships in which actors are accountable to each other, either by the empowerment of poor people, or by the social inclusion of poor people by service providers. Empowerment means that poor women and men can hold politicians and providers to account and claim their rights for better public services. They can take action to claim their rights for better public services by using their voice to influence politics, or by using client power to influence public service providers. Social inclusion means that providers and politicians or policymakers account for their services to poor women and men. These actions fall under the ‘short route’ of accountability, a direct route between clients and providers or government. In the long route, parliamentarians fulfil an oversight role in participative planning and budgeting processes, and they hold providers accountable for their services to citizens/clients. Donors and civil society can both contribute by helping the poor to make themselves heard and hold the powerful accountable.

Attention for accountability forces providers to focus on results, politicians to monitor these results and clients to claim their rights. Attention for gender accountability visualises how women and men benefit from public services. It makes visible if gender inequality exists and motivates all the participants to improve the situation and to involve female clients in development processes. A gender approach often get stuck in good intentions and theoretical concepts, without concrete results that improve the lives of the poor, especially poor women. Gender accountability – with its emphasis on results - is a very practical way to work towards gender equality, involving different actors at different levels. It improves the effectiveness and quality of development cooperation.

This paper presents cases, methods and guidelines to strengthen gender accountability. The methods commonly used today are participatory planning, gender budgeting and capacity building with respect to gender issues and women’s rights. But tools and training alone will not achieve the desired results. Women’s organisations, other civil society organisations and donors have an important role as watchdog, holding governments to account for the implementation of their national and international commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

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1. I NTRODUCTION

As a result of the new aid modalities, which emphasise budget support and focus on the macro level, it is difficult for donors to determine whether their funds are actually going to poverty alleviation and gender equality. Donors today have less direct contact with the poor than they used to. They are more dependent on politicians and providers to reach the poor and on the poor to hold the powerful accountable. Important issues for donors, then, are promoting accountability of the powerful, and enabling the poor and disempowered to hold the powerful accountable.

Accountability is defined as accounting for services delivered by policymakers and providers to clients, and a stronger voice of poor men and women towards policymakers and providers in return for the delegation of tasks, power or resources to policymakers and providers (Lawson & Rakner).

The World Development Report: a triangle of accountability

According to the 2004 World Development Report (WDR), successful services for poor people emerge from relationships in which actors are accountable to each other. Weaknesses in relationships can cause services to fail. It is not possible to enforce contracts – hold providers responsible for outputs and outcomes – in isolation. If providers do not receive clear instructions and precise specifications of the desired objectives, stricter enforcement is unfair and ineffective. If providers are not given adequate resources, holding them accountable for poor outcomes is, again, unfair and ineffective.

The WDR depicts accountability relationships between the three main actors as a triangle: citizens/clients (patients, students, parents, voters); politicians/policymakers (prime ministers, presidents, parliamentarians, mayors, ministers of finance, health, education), and providers: (organisations like health departments, education departments, water and sanitation departments, and frontline professionals like doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers).

Source: World Development Report, 2004

Ideally, actors are linked in relationships of power and accountability. Citizens exercise their voice over politicians. Policymakers enter into pacts with organisational providers. Organisations manage frontline providers. And clients exercise client power through interactions with frontline providers. In low-income countries, a fourth role fulfilled by external finance agencies affects each of these relationships. There are two possible ‘routes of accountability’: a short route and a long route. In the short route, there is a direct link between public service providers and users. In the long route, it is elected representatives who influence public service deliverers and hold them accountable. They in turn are influenced by and accountable to the community.

In order to make services work for the poor, accountability must be strengthened in three key relationships in the service delivery chain: between policymakers and poor people, between policymakers and providers, and between providers and their clients.

The WDR recognises that the role of citizens and clients as service beneficiaries does not imply that all citizens are alike or have the same views. Yet it gives insufficient attention to how differences in beliefs, hopes, values, identities and capabilities coincide with gender and the gender relationship in which they are embedded. These differences affect how people are treated and their scope to hold service providers or politicians accountable. Involvement by a fourth actor, civil society, is necessary in order to address gender accountability. On the whole, institutions like service delivery systems, governments or providers reflect and confirm traditional gender roles and visions. They are often insufficiently aware of the special needs, wishes and rights of women. Civil society, especially women’s organisations, can help raise awareness and play a role in monitoring developments. They can hold the powerful actors in the triangle accountable for pro-poor services and they can support the poor in claiming their rights and gaining more power.

International instruments

The problems of poor women are not new or unknown and many international instruments exist to address them. Nearly every country has committed itself to equal rights for women and girls through its ratification of international instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and through commitments made at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo) and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing). Gender equality is also one of the Millennium Development Goals. In signing these conventions, governments agree to remove discriminatory laws and other obstacles to equality, to promote equality by affirmative action, and to eliminate discriminatory attitudes, conduct, prejudices and practices.

These instruments give stakeholders a powerful legal mechanism at country level to hold their governments accountable for gender equality. A country’s international commitments can be used as a benchmark for national results.

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets an agenda for donor and partner countries to make aid more effective through a significant scaling-up of aid. The five principles of the Paris Declaration are harmonisation, alignment, ownership, managing for results and mutual accountability. In these strategies, an important role is set aside for accountability issues. With respect to mutual accountability, partner countries are committed to strengthening the role of parliament in national development strategies and/or budgets, and reinforcing participatory approaches by systematically consulting a broad range of development partners when formulating and assessing progress in national development strategies. The recipients of aid, regardless of whether it is foreign aid or internal service delivery, are no longer seen as passive clients but as active agents who have rights to these modalities. Clients can hold service providers accountable.

The focus to date has been on the wording of the Declaration and on technocratic and efficiency aspects of aid delivery. While the Paris Declaration does not explicitly address gender equality, the gender networks of the IANGWE and the OECD/DAC have drawn up recommendations with respect to the new aid modalities and promoting gender equality.

This paper presents an overview of the literature, interspersed with cases and practical examples. We hope it will inspire donors in their work towards achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. The paper describes how services fail poor people, in particular poor women. The following two sections make a case for gendered public services through the inclusion of poor women and men, and for the empowerment of poor women. Cases are described in which women took the initiative to hold those in positions of power accountable. The last sections deal with the influence of civil society and donors.

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2. MAKING SERVICES WORK FOR POOR WOMEN

This publication focuses on gender accountability in public services like health and education. Below, we describe how services fail poor people, especially poor women. Gender accountability is not only about tackling elites unwilling to reach the poor, it concerns gender relations and power differences at all levels, and the lack of knowledge among politicians and providers regarding the specific situation, position and demands of women.

Services fail poor people

According to the 2004 World Development Report, ‘Making services work for poor people’, too often services fail poor people in terms of access, quantity and quality. The report describes four ways in which services fail poor people. First, while governments designate about a third of their budgets for health and education, very little is spent on the services poor people need to improve their health and education. The main beneficiaries of public spending on health and education are the non-poor. Second, even when public spending can be reallocated towards poor people, through, for example, primary schools and clinics, the money does not always reach the frontline service provider. Third, even when a greater part of government spending does reach service providers, there may not be enough competent professional people, e.g. doctors and nurses, to do the work required. Professionals often work in a system where the incentives for effective service delivery are weak, where wages may not be paid, corruption is rife, and political patronage is a way of life. The lack of reward makes remote rural areas unpopular with highly trained doctors. Finally, the fourth way that services fail poor people is lack of demand. Often, poor people themselves choose not to send their children to school or take them to a clinic. Cultural factors, notably concerning gender differences may explain why some parents refuse to send their daughters to school, or some husbands will not allow their wives to go to clinics – even for deliveries. The social distance between poor people and service providers often acts as a deterrent, too.

The affordability of services

Although the availability of services naturally varies widely between countries, poor clients encounter specific problems of access to public services. Generally, poor people need to travel much longer distances than richer people to reach health and education services. Even when the services are free, many poor rural families cannot afford the time it takes to travel to the nearest primary school or medical facility. Other problems are the limited opening hours of public facilities and absent teachers or health providers. As regards opening hours (e.g. mornings only in farming communities), these are often not adapted to the lives of poor people. Poor people spend a greater percentage of their money on services, and often need to pay more for the same product (e.g. water). Another common problem is corruption, which may present itself in various forms. Teachers may demand bribes to admit students or give better grades, or may teach poorly to increase demand for private tuition after school. ‘Free’ public services are often very expensive. The poor also lack insurance for expensive services and have to resort to informal moneylenders who charge very high interest rates.

The quality of services

Services in low and middle-income countries, if available at all, are often of poor quality, especially in remote or poor areas where highly qualified professionals are less likely to accept a job. Thus, patients in these regions may be given the wrong medical advice or the wrong treatment; pupils may be taught with ineffective teaching methods. Besides professionalism, the quality of services also depends on the availability of materials, like schoolbooks, medical equipment and pharmaceutical drugs.

The provider’s behaviour

Services also fail in terms of the interaction between provider and client. Providers’ behaviour to their clients, especially women and ethnic minorities, is not always respectful. There may be a great social distance between providers and clients. That, and discrimination, may raise obstacles to services even when the services themselves are free.

Services fail poor women

Women and men perform different tasks and live in different economic and social conditions. They therefore have different political interests. Women spend more of their time close to home. Their responsibilities usually include running the household, taking care of dependents, and community management. They would benefit enormously from safe drinking water, good sewerage and sanitation, refuse services, health services and ample availability of fuel. The conditions in which services are delivered are important issues for women. As the main users of water, for example, women are well placed to give advice on the choice of pump, where to run the water pipes and where to place the standpipes, so as to avoid basic design flaws which disadvantage women and children (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements – UNCHS).

With respect to women’s health, maternal mortality rates in developing countries are high. The chance of dying of pregnancy-related complications is almost 50 times higher for women in developing countries than in developed countries. Each year, half a million women die of preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth while a further 18 million are left disabled or chronically ill. Women have a 1 in 2,800 chance of dying from pregnancy-related causes in developed countries, compared to a 1 in 61 chance in developing countries and a 1 in 15 chance in sub-Saharan Africa.

Women’s unmet need for contraception is also high. One-fifth of married women in the Middle East and North Africa and one-quarter of married women in sub-Saharan Africa cannot get the contraception they need. In some regions, this results in a high incidence of unsafe abortions. The WHO estimates that, worldwide, there are about 20 million unsafe abortions each year, with about 70,000 resulting in death. This figure is equivalent to 13% of total maternal mortality. The evidence suggests that fewer women would resort to abortion if their unmet need for contraception were improved, thus also improving maternal health and female longevity. Women are more vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections, particularly HIV/AIDS. Women and girls currently make up almost half of the HIV-infected population in the 15-49 age group worldwide, and nearly 60% in sub-Saharan Africa (UN Millennium Project).

Education is associated with the empowerment of women, but currently two-thirds of out-of-school children are girls. Educated women are more effective at improving their own and their family’s standard of living. The empowering effects of education include a higher earning potential, a stronger position in bargaining for resources within the household, more decision-making autonomy and control over their fertility, and participation in public life. Female secondary education has a strong influence on fertility and mortality. Higher levels of education play an important role in promoting women’s health and raising the marrying age. A similar relationship exists between higher levels of education and the incidence of violence against women. Countries that fail to meet the goal of gender parity in education face considerable costs, both in foregone economic growth and in failure to reduce fertility, child mortality and malnutrition (UN Millennium Project).

Notwithstanding all this evidence, services often fail poor women. Problems can be divided into three main domains:

Poor access to services

Girls and women have to work harder than boys and men, and thus have less time to make use of public services. They do not have time to travel to health and education services. Many girls are kept out of school to help their mothers with the housework and take care of younger brothers or sisters. Young girls may encounter problems when they start menstruating and their school lacks the necessary facilities. If they get pregnant, they may be forced to drop out of school.

Another specific concern of girls and women is safety. Fear of sexual harassment often causes them to avoid long journeys or travelling after dark. This literally limits their opportunities to attend school or health clinics.

In some cultures, traditional health care is seen as a women’s matter while modern health care is the domain of men. This means that men decide about visits to health clinics. In other cultures, women cannot move freely without their husbands’ permission, even for a visit to a health clinic. Another problem encountered by women is the cost of public services. Women have a lower income than men, or are dependent on men’s income.

The consequences of women’s dependency on men are illustrated below:

Identity cards

In Egypt, an identity card is required to obtain access to social welfare services, or to enrol children into school. A woman can be named as a dependant on her father’s or husband’s identity card, so that girls and women tend not to be issued identity cards. The system effectively puts up a gender-specific access barrier that limits women’s access to public services in two ways. First, women’s engagement of public service providers is mediated by male relatives and presumably only done with their approval. Second, in the event of separation or divorce, a wife is left without an identity card, so that she cannot access public services.

Source: Jenkins & Goetz (2004)

Low visibility and undervaluing of women

The example of the Egyptian identity cards, above, illustrates the invisibility of women: to be powerless is to be invisible. Women are similarly invisible to accountability institutions. Public reporting systems often have no information on the number of women and girls making use of public services, or on the specific problems women encounter. Women themselves often have less information than men and their concerns about public services often fall on deaf ears. In parts of Africa and Asia, there is little consideration for women and girls when they are ill. Women who are aware of a health problem may ultimately choose to remain silent if they fear adverse reactions from their family or community.

Self-censorship

Qualitative research in the Koppal district in India showed that half the number of episodes of illness suffered by girls or women (39%) were never treated, mainly because they felt their illness was not serious enough. Yet 55% of the episodes that women thought were not serious actually made daily routines difficult. In men, the rate of self-censorship was substantially lower: only 23% of episodes reported by men were never treated because they believed their illness was not serious enough. And this might well have been the case because 71% of the episodes in this group did not impede daily functioning.

Source: Iyer (2005)

In many parts of South Asia, women and girls are expected to eat least and to eat last. Malnutrition affects children’s attention span and performance at school. In India, it was found that girls living in villages where schools offer a free meal are 30% more likely to complete primary education.

Women and girls are not only less visible, in parts of the world they are literally missing. South Asia has the highest number of out-of-school girls in the world. In some parts of this region, it will be impossible to achieve parity of enrolment in the near future because of artificial disparities in the demographic profile. There are 50 million fewer women in South Asia today than there should be. In India, according to the 2001 census, there are only 927 women to 1000 men. In states such as the Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and Gujarat, the ratios are between 79.3 and 87.8 girls to every 100 boys.The causes are sex-selective abortion and premature death through violence and neglect (Oxfam, 2006).

Service providers’ knowledge and behaviour

Providers often lack knowledge about women’s specific needs and rights. They don’t know where they can find poor women and girls, or how to reach them. Or they lack political will: they simply don’t care about women. Women, especially poor women, are often discriminated against in their interaction with service providers. Some examples:

Mistreatment

Many schoolgirls in Africa and elsewhere are the targets of sexual harassment and even rape by male teachers. Schoolteachers are not punished for this behaviour, while girls who become pregnant are forced to leave school.
Women are verbally assaulted during labour and their pain is ignored. Staff sometimes hit women during childbirth.
Healthcare workers in India routinely give their poorer women clients less information on contraceptive choices and side effects.

Source: Goetz & Jenkins (2004).

There are two ways that corruption at the level of resource delivery may affect women differently than men. First, money for women’s development may be more easily pilfered by state agents because women tend to be less aware of their rights, and less willing than men to demand that public authorities account for missing funds. Second, there are sexual currencies of corruption, for instance when state agents demand sexual services in lieu of money bribes (Goetz & Jenkins, 2004).

Focusing on poor women

Gender disparities do not always disadvantage women or girls. In Latin America, for example, secondary school enrolment is 77.5% for males and 82.5% for females. A gender approach here must give specific attention to the position of boys. This paper, however, focuses on the position of women and girls, as on a worldwide scale they have fewer opportunities to live their lives as they choose.

The participation of men is required in order to overcome gender inequalities. In the case of reproductive health, for example, men have to be encouraged to take responsibility for their sexual and reproductive behaviour. Men must collaborate with their female partners and be accountable to them, to ensure positive reproductive health outcomes. This is an interesting and important accountability relationship within the client’s part of the triangle.

Accountability must be strengthened in the three key relationships in the service delivery chain. The next sections contain many examples and cases of how the accountability mechanism works. Home

3. SOCIAL INCLUSION AND EMPOWERMENT

Successful service delivery to poor people depends on institutional relationships in which actors are accountable to each other. This section deals with social inclusion and empowerment, two sides of the same coin, which are both necessary for clients to have a voice and influence in the process of service delivery. In the context of gender accountability, social inclusion means that providers and politicians or policymakers account for their services to both poor women and men. Empowerment means that poor women and men can hold the powerful actors of the triangle to account and can take action to claim their rights for better public services, by using their voice to influence politics or by using client power to influence public service providers.

Gendered public services

Social inclusion and empowerment, of both women and men, lead to gendered public services, i.e. services that respect the rights of poor women and men. Local governments from around the world have recognised these rights in a worldwide declaration.

A worldwide declaration

‘Women have the right to equal access to the services of local governments, as well as the right to be treated equally in these services and to be able to influence the initiation, development, management and monitoring of services. The provision of services such as education, welfare and other social services by local governments, should aim to see women and men as equally responsible for matters related both to the family and to public life, and avoid perpetuating stereotypes of women and men;

Women have the equal right to sound environmental living conditions, housing, water distribution and sanitation facilities, as well as to affordable public transportation. Women’s needs and living conditions must be made visible and taken into account at all times in planning;

Women have the right to equal access to the territory and geographical space of local governments, ranging from the right to own land, to the right to move freely and without fear in public spaces and on public transport;

Local government has a role to play in ensuring the reproductive rights of women and the rights of women to freedom from domestic violence and other forms of physical, psychological and sexual violence and abuse.’

Source: IULA Worldwide Declaration on Women in Local Government.

The example below illustrates how the municipal authorities of San Salvador have realised gender mainstreaming.

San Salvador Gender Equality Policy

In San Salvador, the new Gender Equality Policy aims to promote women’s concerns and gender equality in all municipal government activities. It proposes action in areas of citizen participation, education, culture, work, health, security, infrastructure and services. It also identifies the importance of looking at the municipal council itself in terms of gender equality within its organisation and approach. To ensure the mainstreaming process is carried out effectively, the policy employs gender focal points throughout the council’s structure and has included gender training for 40% of staff. This has been combined with public awareness campaigns on gender issues and with the creation of spaces for citizen participation and consultation. The policy has so far resulted in greater legitimacy for gender concerns within council policy and has increased support for women’s demands in the wider community.

Source: Clulow, in: Bridge Citizenship cutting edge pack.

Methods to improve social inclusion and empowerment

Various methods are used to take both women’s and men’s concerns and wishes into account and to ensure that local development processes are a reflection of both. Currently, the most popular of these are participatory planning and gender budgeting, which will be described in the next section. This section describes other methods to strengthen the voice and power of the poor, especially poor women. There are many guidelines on how governments can improve access to public services for girls and women. Examples of these are given in the Annexes 2,3 and 4. The following methods are especially interesting from the viewpoint of accountability.

Sex-disaggregated data

Sex-disaggregated data can be useful in providing all key actors in the accountability process – citizens, providers and policymakers – with the necessary information to monitor service delivery. For optimum allocation and management of scarce resources, municipalities need to know who demands what resources, when they are needed and where. A clear picture of the reality experienced by women is a vital first step in identifying and addressing women’s specific needs. Sex-disaggregated information is a key tool to ensure that women – who make up roughly half of the population, and the majority of the poor and marginalised – receive a fair share of resources. The value of sex-disaggregated data is that it makes the differences between men and women visible. If information is not collected in a way that enables the differences between men and women to be clearly identified, it is likely that the specific gender needs and interests of women will be given less attention, or ignored completely (Donk).

Clients empowered to hold providers accountable

Individuals and households have a dual role as citizens and direct clients. As individual citizens or citizen coalitions (communities, political parties, labour unions, business associations), they participate in political processes that define collective objectives. They also strive to control and direct public action to accomplish those objectives. As direct clients of service providers, individuals and households hope to get clean water, schooling for their children and health care for their families. As citizens, the poor have a voice in their government, as clients towards providers they can have client power (World Development Report).

Women’s voices have to be heard and answered. A new measure of accountability is required – accountability to gender equality. No longer the passive beneficiaries of development, poor women who seek accountability act as citizens and agents who can inform priority-setting and decision-making, demand answers from policymakers and enforce sanctions for poor decision-making. A more political approach is needed that makes women more aware of their rights and develops their capabilities, including an understanding of how institutions function and how to negotiate to promote change (Mukhopadhyay and Meer).

Empowerment means having the power to make decisions about your own life and development, to control your own destiny. Clients gain empowerment by having power in the programme. There are many experiences with structures that create a direct link between public service providers and users in order to give more power to users, such as health boards and committees, parents’ committees at schools and water committees. Experiences in Tanzania, however, show that these committees often follow the long route of accountability, that is, of upward accountability to government which then holds public service providers accountable. As a result, members of these committees are more focused on the government than on their constituency. Upward accountability has become a culture that is not easy to transform. Regular consultations with constituencies do not take place. One reason for this is that the members are not elected, but appointed by the government (Boon).

Local government, as the following example from Rwanda shows, can facilitate client power.

Health in Rwanda

The roots of the 1994 genocide lay in poor governance characterised by a highly decentralised authority and lack of popular participation. Drawing lessons from this, the government of Rwanda developed policy with specific objectives for empowerment and better service delivery:

enabling local people to participate in decision-making about the governance and development issues which concern them;
strengthening accountability and transparency at all levels of leadership.

In the health sector, incentives ensured that service providers were selected and retained on the basis of their proven competencies, determined by client satisfaction. Because earnings depend on how many clients are served, there is an incentive for service providers to mobilise local women to deliver their babies in health centres. Client power has increased through the involvement of beneficiary communities that provide information on service providers’ performance and through local communities that have set up their own health centres to solve the problem of people having to travel long distances to health facilities.

Certain conditions must be in place for this model to work. There must be sufficient funding to attract competent service providers, there must be motivated and experienced intermediaries to manage the funds, strong mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation, and the support of local governments and communities.

Source: Government of Rwanda.

Do participatory programmes work?

According to the World Development Report, empowerment and accountability can improve service delivery by amplifying clients’ voice and broadening their choices. The World Bank decided to evaluate whether participatory intervention programmes increased the empowerment of poor and disadvantaged populations, and improved accountability to them. The results are presented in the box below.

Do participatory programmes work?

People in Nepal – as in many other countries – marry and start families while still in adolescence, yet young people are often denied access to good information or appropriate services on prenatal care, childbirth and HIV.

Nepalese girls marry at an average age of 16. Fifty-two per cent have their first child before the age of 20. Among those giving birth, 55% of those under the age of 20 reported receiving any prenatal care, 14% of births were attended by trained personnel, and only 9% of deliveries took place in a healthcare facility. Under 7% of married girls in the 15-19 age group reported using any method of contraception. Rural girls from poor families were the most disadvantaged.

Community-based participatory approaches engaged disempowered groups at every stage of the programme. Interventions aimed at creating youth-friendly services, improving peer education and counselling were linked with broader interventions prioritised by the community. An action-planning process was conducted, in which the results of needs assessments were shared and analysed with the community, and community task forces were created to set priorities and design feasible interventions. Programme implementation structures were set up with community-level committees that allowed both adults and adolescents to increase their authority and decision-making power in the project.

Before the intervention, a young rural woman in the study’s geographical region only had a 6% chance of receiving prenatal care compared to her urban counterpart. By the time the project ended, this had improved to 80% (control regions didn’t show a similar improvement). The results also showed that the participatory intervention was successful in empowering adolescent and adult community members, and increasing the accountability of providers and policymakers towards the community. This was due in part to the participatory structures that fostered clients’ skills in consensus-building, decision-making, planning, organising, consulting, and demanding resources and accountability from various actors. The client-provider relationship changed in the study region, not only through the training of service providers, but also because young people were made aware that they could enforce responsive behaviour from providers.

The participatory approach had a significant impact on a number of broader contextual factors, including age of marriage and childbearing, secondary schooling, mobility and social spaces for young women.

Source: Malhotra et al.

Providers motivated to serve the poor: social inclusion

The World Development Report also mentions other methods that can be used especially by policymakers to hold providers accountable. One approach, for example, is to choose providers with an intrinsic motivation to serve the poor. Alternatively, incentives can be raised to serve the poor or work in underserved areas. A third approach is to put services out to tender, and use the competition this generates to monitor and discipline providers.

In Brazil, for example, providers with an intrinsic motivation to serve the poor used community voice. Their motivation was strengthened by the way the government carried out recruitment and monitored performance.

Incentives can be effective in, for example, getting more girls to attend school, provided the measures benefit both poor people and the service providers. Incentives can influence female education in different ways, as the examples below illustrate.

How incentives can influence female school enrolment

In Benin, school fees were waived for girls in an attempt to raise female school enrolment. Instead, schools preferentially enrolled boys and raised informal fees for girls.
In Bangladesh, girls can be awarded scholarships under the Female Secondary School programme if they attend school regularly. The programme also gives secondary schools a grant based on the number of girls enrolled. Secondary school enrolment in Bangladesh is on the rise, with the number of girls growing faster than the number of boys. It has also led to the establishment of new private schools. Wishes for girls’ schools and separate toilet facilities for girls were mysteriously accommodated when girls’ attendance meant more money.
In the Mexican Oportunidades programme, girls get higher scholarships than boys. The programme has raised overall secondary school enrolment by 25%: 33% for girls and 16% for boys.

Source: WDR2004; Székely.

Women in public office

A more indirect method of client empowerment is to give a role to civil society organisations (described elsewhere in this paper) or representative government organisations. A strategy for social inclusion and gender-sensitive public services is to get more women in public office. Getting women into mainstream government or administrative positions is a vital part of engendering local government. Although the presence of women in public office in itself does not guarantee that the interests of other women will be represented, their presence has a symbolic and practical value; they serve as important role models, which may lead to other women becoming involved in local government. Furthermore, they can share their specific experiences, knowledge and relationships as regards the local environment with their male colleagues. They have proven themselves effective change agents in the neighbourhoods, which they know intimately and on which they have strong views and invaluable suggestions. This experience and expertise should be drawn upon (Beall).

Another strategy is to empower clients is to work through national women’s machineries. At the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995, governments agreed that national women’s machineries should be the institutional entity to support and build capacity to mainstream gender equality across all development planning and implementation processes.

The location, structure and size of national women’s machineries and gender units influence their ability to promote gender equality in policies and programmes. Although there is no single blueprint for the structure and positioning of a gender unit or focal point, several generic requirements must be met. The unit should be structurally and functionally located in finance and planning ministries so that it can influence resource allocation decisions. In addition, the primary responsibility of staff in the central gender unit should be to advise and support the efforts of others, who in turn must be mandated to incorporate gender into their work. If the national women’s machinery is to promote gender equality across several other ministries, it needs to be appropriately staffed and have a policy rather than an operational mandate. Staff need to have financial skills so that policy commitments are followed through in national and ministerial budgets. To remain relevant, national women’s machineries must have legitimacy and credibility with women’s organisations and NGOs representing women’s interests. They must create structures for consulting with and responding to the concerns of women’s organisations, ranging from informal discussions or public hearings to seats for NGO representatives on government committees. Such direct links between national women’s machineries and their constituency, women’s organisations, can also help to maintain accountability (UN Millennium Project).

In general, women’s machineries are not doing very well. First, capacity building for national women’s machineries must attract significantly greater resources than it has to date. Second, the focus should not so much be on gender training, but on gender-sensitive macroeconomic analysis and tools to improve the collection and analysis of data on women’s concerns and needs. This will make national women’s machineries more capable of influencing national planning processes (Mukhopadhyay & Meer).

Women politicians

In addition to women in public office and women’s machineries, women can fulfil an important role as parliamentarians and local council members. The Paris Declaration commits partner countries to strengthen accountability by building parliamentary oversight roles and by ensuring broad-based participation in formulating and reviewing national development strategies. To ensure that any failure to address women’s needs is picked up, parliamentarians need to be able to carry out gender analyses. Broad-based participation in policy formulation and review is likewise welcome (Goetz, 2006).

In the long route of accountability, elected representatives influence and hold public service providers accountable. Women parliamentarians have a role in engendering public services. Research shows that women politicians address women’s rights more often than male politicians. Women are committed to putting new and different issues on the political agenda. In many cases, social issues, including monitoring social welfare policies to detect discrimination, are more likely to be raised by women.

Do women make a difference?

A survey of almost 200 women politicians in 65 countries revealed their perception of how women’s political involvement makes a difference: women noted a shift in political priorities and outcomes, behaviour and practices, and a broader and enriched political process (a crosscutting approach). Politics became more responsive to people’s needs in general and to women’s needs in particular, and made a move towards true gender equality.

In the light of gender accountability the most interesting outcomes are:

A broader and enriched political process

Respondents most frequently observed that women have the ability to link policy areas in a crosscutting approach when addressing the social needs of the community.

An analysis revealed a wide range of policy and legislative issues on which women’s specific contribution had changed the traditional male approach, including access to abortion, maintenance and child support, childcare and care for the elderly, increased transparency in management and political practices, promotion of gender equality and gender awareness in politics.

A better response to women’s needs

About 89% of respondents felt a special responsibility to represent the needs and interest of other women.

A move towards gender equality

Participants identified the place of human rights conventions in the establishment of equality and justice for women.

Better democracy, increased transparency and improved governance

Women participants in this survey overwhelmingly noted that the inclusion of women would improve democracy, transparency and governance.

Source: Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU).

Politicians – both men and women – have a role to play in gender-specific planning and budgeting, and have to be trained to fulfil this role competently. They have to learn about gender roles identification, gender needs assessments and the utilisation of sex-disaggregated data. It is also useful to teach politicians how to establish contact with women’s organisations.

The next section deals with gender-specific planning and budgeting.

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4. GENDER-SPECIFIC PLANNING AND BUDGETING

Aid modalities are changing from direct project support to a new aid architecture that emphasises ownership of policies and general budget support. For this reason, donors’ attention is shifting from the micro to the macro level. These changes, and an increasing emphasis on accountability, call for other methods with respect to gender issues. At the moment, the usual methods are gender planning and gender budgeting.

Gender-specific planning

Women and men use and experience their environment in different ways. This has important implications for the ways in which villages and cities are planned and managed. An engendered approach to local development seeks to ensure that both women and men have equal access to and control over resources and services. It also aims to support a more accountable, participatory and empowering local development practice, by taking a gender-sensitive approach to the way in which organisations in the public, private and community sectors are constructed and interact. Participatory development involves a process of consultation in which both women and men should participate. An engendered approach increases the effectiveness of policy, planning and management by providing practitioners with tools to integrate a gender perspective into their activities. Integrating a gender approach into policy, planning and management of human settlements will make local development not only more equitable but also more effective (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, UNCHS).

Donors’ attention has shifted from local to national level. Their focus now is on Country Strategy Papers (CSPs), Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), and Sector Wide Approaches (SWAPs). Needs assessments are crucial if development initiatives and public services are also to be based on the experiences of poor women. Processes such as participatory assessments and consultations have the potential to put gender-differentiated needs on the policy agenda. Most of these papers, however, do not take gender equality and the empowerment of women into account, despite the existence of specific guidelines to improve women’s participation in the consultation process.

To effectively address issues of gender equality in the service delivery of local government, broad awareness, knowledge and political commitment need to be achieved. Policymakers have to understand gender issues (see box).

Understanding gender issues

Research involving a series of interviews with South African policymakers showed that many did not have a true understanding of general gender issues. While many believed they were addressing gender inequity, few could actually substantiate how they went about doing so. The same held for gender planning: nearly all of the 70 planners interviewed considered themselves gender-aware, but many were unable to explain how they translated their gender awareness into practical activities, and 67% acknowledged that they had not heard the term gender planning before. The same author stated that gender-planning advisers are not usually expected to have had any formal training; being a woman is assumed to be sufficient guarantee that a planner will adopt a gender-specific approach.

Source: Watson

Experiences with participatory planning in Bolivia showed that meetings were often held at inconvenient times for women, and local interpreters were absent for women who did not speak the official language. Other reasons for the insufficient participation of women in decision-making forums were lack of education, low confidence levels and family duties. When women did participate, the context was not empowerment and women’s participation in society, but their vulnerability and how social safety nets could be constructed to help them (Bell).

Participatory planning is not the same as gender-specific planning. It is not sufficient to invite women or women’s groups to make the planning process gender-specific. Women have more difficulty than men expressing their priorities, as they often lack basic literacy and policy analysis skills. Women’s efforts to articulate their concerns are often drowned out by other, more powerful and more technically competent civil society groups. Women must be allowed to express their specific needs and concerns, which is not always possible in the presence of men. Often, women echo men, reproducing the desired answers and keeping silent on their own ideas and viewpoints. In this case, specific methods have to be developed and applied to give women the right to speak, such as discussing the subject of women’s voice with the male participants in the planning process, working with separate subgroups before plenary sessions, or organising women-only meetings. The involvement of women’s organisations is also an important strategy.

Some suggestions to involve women are given in the box below.

Stakeholder involvement in policy development

A special effort should be made to include minorities or marginalised groups in policy consultations. In many countries, women and their grassroots organisations form the backbone of the productive sector but are frequently and easily overlooked in planning.

Steps to involve women should include:

workshops at community level that are adapted to women’s situations and time constraints;
support to women’s organisations and local NGOs in terms of resources, capacity development and advocacy skills;
use of local languages;
use of participatory processes and networking; and
ongoing collaboration with NGOs active at the local level.

Involving a broad range of stakeholders in the earliest stages of the policy development process should help to overcome some of the problems experienced in previous attempts to integrate women into mainstream development plans – namely, that the integration of women led to an ‘add-on’ approach to existing policy frameworks rather than a critical analysis of the political, social and institutional framework that underpinned gender inequality and a recognition of the need for transformative policy initiatives.

Source: The Commonwealth

The box below describes how planning processes were engendered in a project in India.

Participatory planning in India

The system of Community Development Society (CDS) practised in Kerala (India) is based on a participatory bottom-up planning approach in which prioritisation and decision-making are delegated to the poor. The approach works at three levels.

The Neighbourhood Committee prepares the ‘micro plan’ based on the perceived needs of the community. These plans are consolidated into a ‘mini plan’ at district level, and multiple mini plans are integrated into a town-level plan of action by the CDS with assistance from Municipal Officials. The focus throughout the process is on improving the quality of life of women and children.

The communities themselves identified the poor families using a poverty index. They were legitimatised by the representation of local women, making poor women the stakeholders. The CDS model has already been replicated in all 58 towns and in one entire rural district of Kerala. About 55,000 community women volunteers are directly participating in the development process that has led the State Government to prepare a large-scale community-based poverty eradication programme.

Source: UNHCR best practices database

The Dutch Embassy can also play a role in gender-specific planning, see:

The PRSPs in Tanzania

The PRSP in Bangladesh

Gender budgeting

Budgets appear neutral with regard to gender, but differences become manifest largely at operational level when allocations are translated into deliveries. A gender analysis of budgets can increase the transparency of government budgets, it can make visible what resources and services are allocated to what sectors, and who benefits. Many countries, especially in Africa, have developed methods to analyse budgets or let citizens participate in the decision-making process.

The first gender analysis of budgets was done in Australia, where it was unsuccessful because it was only an exercise by the government; outside interest and pressure were absent. South Africa started gender budgeting in 1993 and has enjoyed greater success, the analysis being a joint product of the government, parliamentarians and non-governmental organisations. Civil servants provided data, the NGO carried out operational advocacy, and parliamentarians lobbied (see the box below).

The South African Women’s Budget Project

The South African Women’s Budget Project examines the whole of the government budget to determine its differential impacts on women and men, girls and boys. The gender budget analysis incorporates three aspects:

gender-specific targeted projects;
expenditure on government employees, in particular the gender distribution of public servants at the decision-making level;
mainstream expenditure: remaining expenditure not covered by the first two categories to determine who actually receives funds and who benefits, both directly and indirectly.

An example is the allocation of resources to education: the Women’s Budget Project examines all the different types of education (preschool, primary, secondary and tertiary education, basic adult education) and, for each type, the impact of expenditure on boys and girls. It includes expenditure at household level, i.e. the care economy (for instance medical insurance) and the reproductive economy (such as the provision of childcare). The Women’s Budget also examines donor-funded activities to determine their gender advocacy role and their impact on government-funded activities. The fact that donor-funded activities favour gender-sensitive programmes may trigger negative effects: gender-related activities may end up not being covered by government funds because of expectations that donors will finance them.

Source: UNDP, 2000.

After the success of the Women’s Budget in South Africa, similar initiatives were started in Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. In Uganda, women parliamentarians discovered that decision-making concerning the allocation of resources is a highly undemocratic process, involving only 6 to 8 powerful persons (including representatives from the IMF and the World Bank). At the moment, gender budgeting is applied in many countries around the world. An example from India shows that women still experience obstacles to participation (see box below).

Service delivery audits in India

Some districts in Kerala in India introduced special measures to assure the participation of women in service delivery audits: e.g. one-third of the people at a meeting must be women in order to have a quorum (and the total must add up to 30%), or in another district, women must be present in the same proportion that they are found in the local community, that is, 50% if not more.

In Kerala, a separate group and development area for women has been created, and 10% of the local budget is earmarked for women’s development. Women-only groups convene in special meetings for identifying local needs for the annual plan. Focusing only on this earmarked budget may, however, limit women’s participation in the many other areas addressed in these needs assessment exercises. Women’s presence may be sidelined in this way. There is also growing evidence that men have established collusive relationships to divert funds intended for women’s use.

The need for special measures for social inclusion is underscored by other cases, too. In one remote district in India, few women attended the local meeting because they had been threatened. Yet not only had these women been deprived of their full wages on a drought-relief work programme organised by the local council, many had also not received other benefits due to them because of their ‘below poverty line’ status. It was not easy to engage poor women in local audits that challenged the interests and earnings of powerful village elites. Formal rights to know about public spending and to demand explanations from officials are meaningful only insofar as civil society groups are capable of offering women (and other socially marginalised groups) protection from local elite backlash attacks. Moreover, low levels of literacy and time constraints limit women’s capacity to engage effectively in audits or in monitoring the activities of public service providers. Other constraints include the greater demands on women’s time given their involvement in both reproduction and productive work, their lack of familiarity with (and hence sometimes greater intimidation by) the world of official decision-making and administration, and their exclusion from patron-client relationships that would at least give them rights of access, influence and reward in the distribution of benefits from development programmes.

Evidence showed that women had different priorities in local planning. Issues of water, fuel and health are key women’s interests, as are practices such as illegal privatisation of common land (cutting down trees, encroachments), which are often important sources of illicit income for local council officials. Evidence from a few all-women local councils show that women introduce shifts in local spending, from prioritising land transfers to women, to water issues such as women’s toilets in low-caste areas.

Source: Goetz, A. and R. Jenkins (2002).

The gender budgeting process has limitations. First, gender budgeting is still restricted to the health and education sectors, even though women are also profoundly affected by spending in sectors such as justice and law enforcement, public safety, rural and urban infrastructure and transport. So far, there have been few efforts to find out how spending in these areas affects different groups, including women (Goetz, 2006).

Another shortcoming is the crucial role of women’s organisations. These organisations must be rooted in local communities and be accountable to their constituencies, to ensure that the voice of the poorest women is taken into account, but this is often not the case.

Third, macro-economic knowledge is necessary to gear observations towards the language of financial and economic planning ministries that are, on the whole, responsible for the thrust of PRSPs. These ministries concentrate on economic policies. In many ways, gender analysis lacks this type of focus, partly due to a lack of knowledge among gender experts or women’s organisations. At the same time, macroeconomic capacity and a focus on the material aspects of women's well-being do not guarantee that government economists will listen (Whitehead).

Besides women’s organisations (more about this point in the next section), it is also important that parliamentarians are involved. As stated in the previous section, parliamentarians often have to learn to fulfil this role. The box below contains an example of parliamentarian training in Uganda.

Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), Uganda

The mission of the FOWODE is to promote gender equality in decision-making through the introduction of quotas for disadvantaged groups (women, young people and disabled people) in Ugandan local government.

Although women, young and disabled councillors elected under the quota system are regarded by their constituents as more responsive than other councillors, their lack of political experience has prevented them from translating their understanding of their constituents’ concerns into policies that are sensitive to social differences and that empower disadvantaged groups.

The FOWODE therefore trains elected representatives at regional level on the role of representatives, gender awareness, communications skills and budget analysis. Through its gender budget project, the FOWODE advocates gender-balanced, pro-poor budgets and more transparent and participatory budget-making processes. They have produced a handbook called Budgeting for women and men. Some trainees have formed caucuses and successfully lobbied for a larger share of development allocations to address the concerns of their constituents. However, because their training has made them more articulate than their fellow councillors, they are sometimes resented. In the future, therefore, mainstream (male) councillors will also receive training. This should have the added advantage of increasing mainstream councillors’ effectiveness and sensitivity to the needs of women and disadvantaged groups.

The experience of the FOWODE shows that, not only does capacity building need to be an ongoing process, as newly elected representatives enter local government, but also that the wider electorate needs to become more aware so that they can take part actively in governance processes and hold their representatives to account.

Source: Rakodi

Goetz and Jenkins described two constraints on the effectiveness of supplying parliamentarians with critical budget analyses. First, there is always a delay in producing the analyses, since they cannot be conducted until after the budget priorities have already been announced. Second, parliamentarians cannot do more than raise questions about gender-differential spending patterns. Government answers to these questions are rarely followed up. Most of these initiatives are, at best, efforts to improve the answerability of office-holders for gender equity, as they do not produce evidence that can be used for the enforcement dimension of accountability. However, some tools have been developed to improve information about actual spending patterns and their impact. The public expenditure incidence analysis calculates the amount spent on a public service at user level and gathers data on gender differences in numbers of users and the types and qualities of services they access.

Public Expenditure Incidence Analysis

A public expenditure incidence analysis in Ghana revealed major urban and rural differences in access to health and education services, as well as marked gender and class biases in secondary school enrolment. Such information constitutes hard evidence of biases against women and the poor in spending and policy implementation patterns.

Source: Goetz & Jenkins, 2002

Tools and training are not enough. If women’s perspectives on poverty reduction priorities disappear once the consultative stage is over, or if the results of a gender budgeting process are ignored, nothing will change. According to the WDR, orienting public spending toward services used by poor people only helps if spending reaches the front line, where it benefits poor people. Even if more public money is spent on services – and more of that money is spent on services used by poor people and actually reaches the intended school or clinic – how the money is used still determines its efficacy. Fixing the problem requires dealing, not just with technical or management questions on how much to spend on one input relative to others, but with the institutional and political contexts that generate these decisions in the first place. Institutional reforms seek to strengthen the relationships of accountability among various actors so that good service provision outputs emerge. Women’s organisations, other civil society organisations and donors have an important role to play in holding governments and providers accountable with respect to women’s empowerment and gender equality.

The next section deals with civil society.

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5. THE IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY

The World Development Report does not give much attention to the role of civil society, but recognises that non-governmental and civil society organisations can help to amplify the voices of the poor, coordinate coalitions to overcome their collective action problems, mediate on their behalf through redress mechanisms, and demand greater service accountability. Women’s organisations have an important role to play, not just in strengthening the voice and client power of poor women, but also in holding the powerful accountable and counteracting the gender biases in formal institutions. This section explains the role of civil society, especially women’s organisations.

Holding politicians and providers accountable

Women’s organisations are of vital importance in putting women’s issues on the political agenda and monitoring progress. Often, issues do not reach the policy agenda until powerful or well-organised groups in society identify and assert their issues as problems. Mainstreaming gender issues and adopting a women's perspective in policy and planning would not have been possible without the organised force of women over the last two decades. At local, national and international level, experience suggests that it is primarily the organisational power of women which ensures that political parties take the power of the female vote seriously. In this context, the best gender-sensitive practice for local government would be to maintain open channels of communication and foster mechanisms for dialogue with groups and organisations representing women. Decentralisation works best when it encounters an active civil society. Civil society organisations also have a responsibility to facilitate women's participation, and articulate and represent gender interests (Beall).

Women’s organisations and civil society organisations have taken the lead in holding governments and international agencies accountable for implementing their national and international commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment. In addition, in countries where internal accountability is lacking or where women are not well represented in politics, women’s organisations can play a key role in ensuring that some degree of informal accountability is realised. Consultation with civil society organisations provides an important check on the process of formal accountability and helps to ensure that formal accountability processes in a country represent the interests of citizens (Eurostep).

It is important to ensure that women’s organisations also represent the viewpoints and demands of the poor, which is not always the case, as many women’s organisations are composed of women from the higher classes. Women’s organisations have to be rooted in local communities or collaborate with local women’s organisations to reach the poor at local level. They have to be accountable to their constituencies.

Below are some examples of how NGOs can amplify the voices of the poor by working at different levels.

Participatory planning in Bangladesh

In one district in Bangladesh, the national NGO PRIP Trust and local NGO Racine worked together in the decentralised planning process of eleven Union Parishads (local councils). They focused on assisting newly elected women members, so that they would function effectively and influence planning processes and resource allocation in favour of poor women and men. A situational analysis of the Union Parishad had helped reveal the corruption in the system, the lack of transparency in the planning process and the marginalisation of elected women. Other methods like training elected members to undertake resource mapping and actually getting them to survey and prepare resource maps then helped create transparency in the identification and use of resources

Source: Mukhopadhyay & Meer

Linking women at different levels

The Uganda Women’s Caucus (Women in the Constituent Assembly) learned from a women’s NGO (ACFODE) what grassroots women’s organisations were saying in radio and TV broadcasts of their meetings. In return, Caucus members broadcast a weekly radio programme in which they examined issues being debated in the Constituent Assembly.

Source: UNDP, 2000

Many institutions, including political institutions and provider organisations, claim that they work from a gender perspective while the results of their activities often contribute little or nothing to gender equality. There are historical reasons why states and other development actors continue to produce outcomes that disadvantage women. Gender-biased systems are more than discriminatory attitudes or irrational choices on the part of individuals; they are embedded within the norms, structures and practices of institutions, shaping the incentive systems, accountability structures and bureaucratic procedures in ways that derail gender equality efforts. Goetz sees institutions as historically constructed frameworks which continue to serve the political and social interests they were designed to serve in the first place. Historically, women were excluded from the public sphere, and while class, caste, race and other differences did not allow all men access to public institutions of power, men nevertheless dominated decision-making and decision enforcing, and men’s needs and interests were embedded in the structures and practices of public institutions. Institutions thus promoted male dominance and female dependence. Therefore, when new agents (women) entered and new concerns (such as gender equality) were introduced, little seemed to change (Goetz, 1997).

In collaboration with several women’s organisations, Mukhopadhyay and Meer wrote a book on how women’s organisations can advance gender accountability. They concluded that these organisations are aware that working exclusively on the outside will continue to marginalise their efforts, and have therefore infiltrated state processes. By working on the inside, they have been able to bring women’s voices to state processes and actors, even without the formal authority to do so. They were able to do this by building strategic alliances and drawing on the legitimacy built up over many years as development actors in civil society. From the vantage point of ‘outside insiders’, they were able to observe how these institutions functioned, how decisions were made, and how resources were allocated and devised strategies to increase institutional accountability to poor women. They identified strategic entry points, were themselves strategic in their timing, and adopted an approach that offered assistance even as they highlighted corruption, lack of transparency and the marginalisation of women.

The experiences of these organisations emphasise that making gender equality a core concern in governing development involves engagement with institutions to change norms, rules and practices, as well as working with the most marginalised women and men to develop their ‘voice’ and agency.

In their book, Mukhopadhyay and Meer summarise the different key strategies used by the NGOs involved, and present a very clear case in Bangladesh of how an NGO can make health services work for poor women.

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6. The role of donors

According to the model in the World Development Report, the outcome of services for poor people can be improved by strengthening the three relationships in the chain: between client and provider, between citizen and policymaker, and between policymaker and provider. In striving for gender accountability, donors should strengthen accountability and not undermine it by bypassing one or more of these relationships. Donors should use foreign aid to try to strengthen the links in the service delivery chain.

The new aid modalities

As mentioned earlier in this paper, the new aid modalities require other mechanisms to monitor how partner countries use funds. In the light of this, accountability has become an important issue. Donors are looking for ways to support the powerful in becoming more accountable and to support the powerless in demanding accountability. The Paris Declaration should support donors in this respect. Gender mainstreaming is a complex process that is even more challenging with the current shift from local level to macro level, or from project and programme management to engagement in policy dialogue.

Anne Marie Goetz suggests that the Paris Declaration may offer new opportunities to integrate a gender accountability approach. For example, the emphasis placed on national ownership in the new aid relationships provides an opportunity for developing countries and donors alike to ensure that women play a meaningful role in articulating women’s needs and in seeking responses from policymakers. As regards alignment, Goetz suggests that measures of the quality of decentralisation could include an assessment of the services that reach women at local level, or assessments of the quality of local level governance, particularly the nature and impact of petty corruption on women and the poor. She sees the principle of ‘harmonisation’ as the best opening for a gender accountability approach, where it has been agreed that harmonisation efforts are needed on crosscutting issues such as gender equality. This is essential because of the simple fact that objectives that are measured tend to be actively pursued. Gender-sensitive indicators could be introduced in country policy matrices and PRS frameworks to manage results. These should be in line with commitments to CEDAW, the MDGs, the Beijing Platform for Action and other agreements on social inequality issues. Mutual accountability means that donors and partners are accountable for development results through systems, procedures and capacities in donor and recipient countries, which measure aid performance. Accountability institutions and civil society groups can only assess mutual accountability - that is, scrutinise the quality and impact of spending decisions – if specific accountability indicators are developed that reveal the effects of development spending at national and local levels on gender equality. Such indicators could be included in annual performance assessment frameworks for PRSPs and SWAps, in public expenditure tracking surveys, beneficiary incidence analyses and participatory service delivery surveys to demonstrate the impact of aid on gender equality. Donors and developing country governments could report performance on these indicators to their own taxpayers (Goetz, 2006).

What has been done?

The Dutch embassies have developed several activities to promote accountability, including educational programmes where, for example, school councils are formed with both teachers and parents, and where school grants are published to a wider public. In terms of gender accountability, special attention should be given to the circumstances that promote female education and women’s participation on school councils. Other embassies hold policy dialogues and donor meetings to discuss accountability or support for strengthening the accountability of service providers. Some specific cases from Tanzania and Bangladesh deal with gender mainstreaming of PRSPs.

At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, the Social and Institutional Development Department (Emancipation and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Division, DSI/ER) has worked closely with the gender networks of IANGWE and OECD/DAC to formulate recommendations on the new aid modalities and the promotion of gender equality. Mutual accountability is seen as having different dimensions that all need to be measured including giving a voice to citizens, particularly women; establishing gender-responsive development planning frameworks and budgetary instruments; and using existing or new data on gender inequality. One of the recommendations is that development partners may develop mutually agreed measures to track expenditure on gender equality initiatives, and the effects of these initiatives and of gender mainstreaming in key sectors. They may also carry out joint assessment reviews. The gender networks also recommend developing national accountability mechanisms and tools which include accountability to parliaments, stronger audit offices, greater community participation, free media and attention to gender equality. Strengthening the capacity of national parliamentary systems is seen as one of the key accountability mechanisms at national level for monitoring how public expenditure specifically addresses gender inequalities and women’s status (Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender – IANGWE / OECD-DAC Network on Gender Equality, 2006).

The Gender Equality Marker, for example, has been developed for donors by OECD/DAC to record whether activities explicitly aim to achieve gender equality. Instruments for the inclusion of gender equality and women’s empowerment in strategy papers have to be developed and used by the donor community.

What else could be done?

The sections dealing with methods give some insight into how embassies can support gender accountability by increasing women’s empowerment and social inclusion. Embassies should systematically address gender in accountability dialogues, interventions, reports and evaluations. They can also support civil society organisations that strive for women’s rights and gender accountability. Gender accountability should be mainstreamed in gender budgeting and PRSP instruments.

Bell describes how donors have strongly advocated gender mainstreaming in PRSPs and how, in addition to directly supporting this, they often participate in interagency gender working groups to achieve this aim. The extent to which PRSPs incorporate gender may depend more strongly on donor pressure and funding than on civil society activism as civil society organisations often lack sufficient leverage within government structures. This highlights the need for donor pressure if gender is to be incorporated in all PRSPs. At the same time, however, it raises the question of country ownership. In order to ensure legitimacy, any pressure exerted by donors should be combined with support for organisations in recipient countries that strive for gender equality and women’s rights. Bell also makes suggestions on how donors can contribute to the PRSPs, especially to gender-specific planning.

As described in previous sections, another important strategy to improve gender accountability is to support female politicians and civil society, especially women’s organisations. A Eurostep study about gender accountability confirms the importance of independent civil society organisations that do not bend under government pressure. While budget support and sector-wide support benefit governments, separate instruments should be used to strengthen civil society, directly aimed at strengthening women’s organisations and women’s participation in interest groups. This will, in turn, help strengthen the social fabric and empower women in society, and as such, will strengthen the informal accountability of development processes. The World Bank report specifically recommends that donors fund projects in which governments are not interested. This contradicts ownership, though it can work where a good pilot project encourages a new approach through its demonstration effect, or where a one-time intervention is needed. This recommendation can work for projects that specifically aim to contribute to women’s empowerment and that will enhance women’s capacity to exercise their voice and client power to hold service providers accountable.

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GUIDELINES FOR GENDER ACCOUNTABILITY

The guidelines below may be useful for donors wishing to strengthen gender accountability:

Provide sex-disaggregated data

Provide and demand sex-disaggregated data in all documents (research, planning reports, evaluations, and so on) to make gender biases visible.

Gender auditing, budgeting and assessments

Promote gender auditing systems and gender budgeting initiatives. Carry out assessments and evaluations to measure outcomes and impact of service delivery with regard to gender equality. Disseminate the results of evaluations and consultation processes.

Support policymakers and politicians

Strengthen government organisations (accountability institutions, women’s machineries) and parliamentarians so that they can address gender equality issues in national planning and monitoring processes and give account to their constituencies. Capacity building, including gender issues in macroeconomics, to deepen gender analyses and to adapt to the language of planning ministries.

Support civil society

Support civil society, especially women’s organisations, by funding and/or capacity building in order to ensure its role in amplifying the voices of the poor, advocating social justice and inclusion, monitoring public policy and promoting accountability, in order to strengthen the voice and client power of women and to counteract gender biases in formal institutions.

Funding

Establish Women’s Funds or earmark resources for activities with respect to women’s empowerment, to ensure women’s involvement in the new aid modalities, especially to strengthen the role of women’s organisations and increase women’s capacity to exercise their voice and client power to hold service providers accountable.

Strategic alliances

Build strategic alliances between civil society and their constituency of poor women, government planning and accountability institutions, and politicians, so that they may support each other in the accountability process. It is also important to build strategic alliances between Dutch civil society organisations and governments and civil society in partner countries.

Harmonisation

Work with other donors to harmonise policies, procedures and practices concerning gender mainstreaming and gender accountability. Ensure donors, governments and NGOs share their experiences.

Mutual accountability

Ensure gender accountability, not only in the procedures and processes of partner countries but in the annual planning and monitoring processes of donors as well, and ensure that performance on gender accountability is reported to own taxpayers.

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References

Annexes

Annexe 1: How policymakers can include women

Annexe 2: Policy Framework and Action Points WITH RESPECT TO EDUCATION

Annexe 3: Checklist for women’s health and equity