Search

This article presents a review of seven guides for gender-equitable value chain development (VCD). The guides advocate persuasively the integration of gender into VCD programming and raise importan...

Despite increased attention to gender issues in the international development arena since the rise of feminism in the 1970s, few agricultural research organisations have integrated gender in their problem diagnosis and technology development. Gender mainstreaming can significantly enhance the impact of research and technology development. Entrenching gender mainstreaming in organisations and their research agendas remains a challenge. To overcome it requires political will, accountability, a change in organisational culture, and technical capacity within an organisation. This article presents an experience of gender-mainstreaming practice in the institutional culture and agricultural research processes by Urban Harvest and the International Potato Centre (CIP).

Relations between the Ugandan government and NGOs engaged in gender-focused NGO advocacy tend to keep NGOs visibly engaged but do not necessarily alter the status of poor women. These relations manifest themselves in government advising NGO advocacy work; sympathising with the NGOs; co-opting NGOs and individuals; publicising gender issues; and de-legitimising gender-focused NGO activities. The article links these phenomena to the government's wish to appear receptive to the concerns of civil-society organisations, of which NGOs are a major component. This is important to its image in the international aid community, where it projects itself as generally democratic and supportive of good governance.

This article analyses the social-change practices of Minga Peru, an NGO in the Peruvian Amazon which promotes gender equality and reproductive health through radio broadcasts and community-based interventions. This analysis, grounded in participatory research methods, reveals a feminist and gender-equitable approach, allowing participants to take the role of leader rather than of passive research subject. Such participatory research methods helped to empower both individuals and their communities in the Peruvian Amazon, encouraging the development of more productive group dynamics and leadership.

This article examines the changing status of villagers' knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes towards gender roles and gender relations over time. Data were collected from eastern areas of Bangladesh through surveys and in-depth interviews. Findings show that knowledge about discrimination, empowerment, violence against women, and marital issues increased remarkably, and attitudes on those issues changed positively – but not as much as expected. Traditional patriarchal norms, values, culture, and social structures still operated as barriers to gender equality.

Concerns about gender equity have been at the fore of discussions and analysis of NGO interventions and action since the 1970s. Gender equity, defined as equal rights to access, opportunity, and participation for men and women, has always been a distinctive feature in the programmes of Gram Vikas, a leading NGO in the Indian state of Orissa. Conscious efforts to identify and address these issues began in the mid-1980s. Several specific initiatives have been made to create a level playing field between women and men in the village communities where Gram Vikas works, and within the organisation. There have been resistance and challenges to several of these interventions, and while some of them have embedded themselves to create lasting impact, others have had only limited effect.

This case study from Buzi district, Mozambique investigated whether gender equality, in terms of male and female participation in groups, leads to gender equity in sharing of benefits from the social capital created through the group. Exploring the complex connection between gender, groups, and social capital, we found that gender equity is not necessarily achieved by guaranteeing men and women equal rights through established by-laws, or dealing with groups as a collective entity. While there were no significant differences in the investment patterns of men and women in terms of participation in group activities and contribution of communal work, access to leadership positions and benefits from social capital were unequally distributed. Compared with men, women further found it difficult to transform social relations into improved access to information, access to markets, or help in case of need.

Women planners in Africa do not constitute a critical mass: their numbers remain negligible and their output unrecognised, while mentors and role models still tend to be male. Women's experiences are undervalued, and their knowledge is often excluded in policy, project planning, and implementation. This article arises not from systematic academic research but from confessional, reflective, pilot research based on personal experience and the experiences reported by 25 women planners between 1999 and 2004. It deliberately seeks to break the monotony of drawing from survey results which are often detached from experiential and emotional encounters. Using anecdotal material from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, it examines the training and professional environment of the ‘planneress’; and discusses the emotions, expectations, and experiences of female planners in everyday encounters.

This article offers strategies for women's empowerment in conservative, tribal, and religious environments, based on an innovative programme in Pakistan. Mainstreaming Gender and Development (MGD) encouraged participants to build on their communities' strengths, minimised resistance among families and communities by including them in the development process, and succeeded in building a cadre of women activists. Drawing on its experience, the author questions the importance of collective action, suggests that the selection of participants should be based on aptitude rather than socio-economic status, and highlights the potential for women's empowerment in challenging environments.

The political project of gender equality in Africa has gained momentum and made many achievements. However, these have been largely confined to the ‘big’ women working in the public and private bureaucratic contexts in which there is a greater commitment to gender equality. It is argued that in the context of Cameroon, until these ‘bigger’ women renew their commitment to their grassroots sisters, the experience of gender equality will remain largely unequal. Only strong links between white-collar workers and less privileged women will span this chasm.

Gender inequality is now widely acknowledged as an important factor in the spread and entrenchment of poverty. This article examines the World Development Report 2000/01 as the World Bank's blueprint for addressing poverty in the twenty-first century, together with several more recent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), with a view to analysing the manner in which gender is incorporated into the policy-making process and considering whether it constitutes a new approach to gender and poverty. It is argued that the World Bank's approach to poverty is unlikely to deliver gender justice, because there remain large discrepancies between the economic and social policies that it prescribes. More specifically, the authors contend that the Bank employs an integrationist approach which encapsulates gender issues within existing development paradigms without attempting to transform an overall development agenda whose ultimate objective is economic growth as opposed to equity. Case studies from Cambodia and V...

Gender mainstreaming, adopted at the Fourth World Conference in Beijing and captured in the resulting Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (United Nations 1995), is a strategy that involves ...

The extractive industrial sector, increasingly breaking new grounds in developing countries, is increasingly aware of the environmental and community issues involved in mining, including questions relating to gender. However, the main focus is on the impacts of mining on 'women' in the community, leaving aside practical issues related to the processes of mainstreaming gender within the company, in the workplace itself. What tools and approaches would be useful for those addressing gender issues in the mining sector, a sector that is still perceived as a masculine area of work? This short paper reports on a practical study undertaken in a privately run colliery in Indonesia. Through this example, it suggests ways in which to take a first step towards gender mainstreaming in the mining sector.

This paper considers the role of urban agriculture in addressing the practical and strategic needs of African women, and assesses the gender implications of embracing urban agriculture as a development intervention strategy. Empirical evidence from Botswana and Zimbabwe points to the multi-faceted role of urban agriculture whereby some women use this activity to support their households on a daily basis, and others use it as an avenue for social and economic empowerment over the longer term. In order to benefit rather than burden women, the promotion and support of urban agriculture must take on an emancipatory agenda, which supports individual, practical and strategic goals, and ultimately challenges the structural conditions that give rise to women's involvement in the activity in the first place.

This paper focuses on the use of geographic information system (GIS) in gender research and argues for the possibility that the tool has inherent biases with regard to data collection and representation.

Throughout the world, deeply entrenched barriers exclude women from meaningful participation in socio-economic and political activities. This is not merely an issue of fairness and equality. It has been argued that by expanding women's opportunities, society as a whole would simultaneously be strengthened and this would enhance broader development prospects. Recently, a wide variety of international initiatives have been developed to expand women's opportunities. One such programme is the funding of heifer projects for women. Using data from the Red Cross, this study examines the potential of heifer projects to expand women's opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa. This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis.

Since Ghana's decentralisation process began in the early 1990s, government officials as well as international aid agencies and NGOs have engaged in efforts to enhance attention to women's concerns and improve gender sensitivity in development processes at the local level. This article looks at three collaborative projects between international development organisations and district assemblies throughout Ghana to promote gender sensitivity and increase the representation of women in local governance. Though, as the author suggests, it is still too early to assess whether such initiatives have succeeded, it is also clear that decentralisation efforts need to be accompanied by adequate resources and appropriate institutional support and capacity building if they are to make a difference. This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis.

Development projects are under pressure to deliver positive gender changes. This paper provides a practical example of how one project in Tanzania attempted to meet this demand. It details how a conventional technical project developed its own understanding of what it is to be gender sensitive, and identified gender concerns that it might address. The main monitoring challenges became those of how to assess the significance of routinely recorded events such as increased cow allocations to women, and how to incorporate monitoring activities that might focus on researching less obvious, less visible, and more subtle processes of change into the project cycle. The paper advocates giving greater attention to meeting these challenges within projects.

Ministere du Plan (1996) 'Notes sur le Probleme du Logement dans le Cadre de la Reintegration Sociale des Populations Rapatriees', unpublished document, Kigali. Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (2001) The Government of Rwanda Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, National Poverty Reduction Programme, Kigali. Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (2002) A Profile of Poverty in Rwanda: An Analysis Based on the Results of the Household Living Condition Survey 1999-2001, Kigali. Ministry of Gender and Women in Development (2000) 'The National Gender Action Plan 2000-2005', unpublished document, Kigali. Muganza, Angeline (2002) 'A Government Acts against Gender Violence', Declaration of the Minister of Gender and Women in Development, Kigali, 6 June 2002. Ndahimana, Isaie, Celestin Niseyimana and Landrada Musabeyezu (2001) 'Donnees Socio-economiques de Base dans la Zone d'Intervention du Projet SNC', unpublished report, Kigali. Turshen, Meredith and Clotilde Twagiramaryia (eds.) (1998) What Women do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa, London and New York: Zed Books. UNDP (2002) Human Development Report 2002, New York: OUP. Zucherman, Elaine (2002) Evaluation of Gender Mainstreaming in Advocacy Work on Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), Washington, DC: Gender Action.

The fact that war changes roles and responsibilities within society, while exposing men and women of all ages and classes to new threats and opportunities, has become increasingly recognised. Civil wars disrupt and destroy civilian life. Men leave, die in combat, are brutalised, lose employment, or resort to despair, violence, or apathy. Women assume enormous burdens of work and all manner of different tasks and responsibilities, lose their security and their protectors, and are victimised and marginalised. Yet few members of peacekeeping missions have any training in dealing with the civilian population, much less the specific issues relating to gender relations. In response to this, a basic training package titled Gender and Peace Support Operations has been designed for use in pre-deployment induction. This article describes the background to its development and outlines how it is expected to be used and evolve in the future.

At first glance it would appear that despite women's vital participation in peace-making processes, they are for the most part marginalised or belittled. However, moving away from the idea of women as outsiders and/or victims, we find evidence of their involvement in projects initiated and driven by them and/or in activities in which they work in equal roles alongside men. Many women in conflict areas are advocating and working effectively with approaches to lasting positive peace that transcend traditional male-dominated structures and ideologies. Large numbers of ordinary women, men, and children are working mostly behind the scenes to achieve justice and equality. Women are very much involved but get far less recognition than men. The scale and diversity of largely unacknowledged but effective grassroots peace efforts worldwide, particularly among women, requires much greater recognition by the international community. This article is based on a research project that uses an oral testimony approach and...

This paper seeks to explode a number of myths about women's absence from wars and conflict; it considers some problems about their vulnerabilities in these circumstances; and offers some feminist perspectives for addressing these problems. The paper considers the conflicting demands made on women in periods of war and revolution, and argues that differing historical processes result in different post-conflict policies towards women. There is, however, a commonality of experiences that universally marginalise women in the post-conflict and reconstruction phases. Even when women have participated actively in wars and revolutions, they are heavily pressured to go back to the home and reconstruct the private domain to assert the return of peace and 'normality'. This paper contends that the insistence on locating women within the domestic sphere in the post-war era may be counter-productive and located in the historical construction of nationhood and nationalism as masculine in terms of its character and deman...

Do gender relations change through conflict? How might conflict itself be fuelled by aspects of gender identity? A recently completed research project that combined oral testimony with more conventional research methods concluded that conflict has undoubtedly given women greater responsibilities, and with them the possibility of exerting greater leverage in decision making and increasing their political participation. The research sheds light on the role of ordinary citizens as 'actors' responding to crisis, and describes how gender identities are woven into a complex web of cause and effect in which war can be seen as a 'conflict of patriarchies'.

The Gender Audit (GA) and associated reports and reviews drawn upon in this article enable an evaluation of how far the intervention processes at work in Kosova since 1999 have been inclusive of gender analysis and supportive of women's and girls' needs and interests. This assessment considers the strengths and drawbacks of various attempts to use and implement gender-sensitive projects. The GA was designed to support the emerging feminist reconstructive politics in Kosova. Its findings and recommendations tackle aspects of empowerment, equity, and opportunities, outlining some developments from community activism as well as outcomes of the international administration. By considering developments over a two-year period, it is possible to place issues of equity and opportunities in the context of change over time, with change at local and national levels linked with developing international dialogues. The article analyses local work undertaken by the Kosova Women's Network to overcome violence against wom...

This article describes an NGO project intended to empower scheduled caste women working in the silk-reeling industry in India through the provision of microfinance. It documents the impact that the project had on their economic and social status over a period of time and highlights the negative consequences of excluding male relatives from playing any meaningful role. It suggests ways in which the project might have been made more male inclusive while still empowering women. At the same time, it acknowledges that even if the men's hostility to the project had been overcome, the women's micro enterprises were unlikely to have been viable commercially. This is because the project insisted that the women operate as a group in what was a high-risk area of economic activity, with no clear strategy as to how their work could be sustained.

In the late 1970s, feminist social scientists began to challenge some of the assumptions underlying the dominant paradigms on organisations, arguing that they reflect and are structured by the values articulated within the larger institutional arenas in which they are embedded, thus reproducing gender-discriminatory outcomes. This paper unpacks the 'deep structure' of one NGO, Utthan, based in Gujarat, India, to understand the extent to which it is an engendering organisation. It suggests that, while gender-sensitive leadership, training, and resources play a critical role in addressing gender equity in development practice, organisational transformation is a much harder and longer process requiring sustained commitment from the leadership, staff, and funding partners.

Learning organisations and their focus on fundamental change have been seen as having considerable potential for making organisations more gender equitable and improving their capacity to undertake development or human rights work that is not gender biased. This article, developed by the Gender at Work Collaborative, explores the usefulness of ideas related to learning organisations in changing institutions for gender equality. While this collection of ideas and practice are seen as helpful, a deconstruction of organisational learning points out some difficulties with this body of work and proposes an enhanced toolbox, which would pay attention to such factors as power relations, the spiritual basis of the work, and the gendered 'deep structure' of organisations.

Ethical trade is expanding rapidly in the UK. Following the foundation of the Ethical Trading Initiative many companies are adopting codes of conduct to cover employment conditions in their supply chains, based on a process of multi-stakeholder participation. Addressing gender issues in their implementation remains an important challenge for policy makers. This paper considers how gender sensitivity in the monitoring and verification of codes can be enhanced within a multi-stakeholder framework based on evidence from a case study of export horticulture in South Africa. It makes policy recommendations to address the needs of more marginalised workers, many of whom are women.

Metadata only record The paper analysis five African case studies to answer some questions relating gender, livelihood security and sustainable environments. Men and women face different opportunities and constraints. The paper also identifies the conditions that allow effective involvement in natural resource management, and the development of indicators to clarify progress in terms of impact, process, and sustainability. Results suggest that if policy, programs, and projects are to encourage sustainable, effective, and equitable management of resources, they must focus on the concerns of locals and how they relate to the state, the economy, and the resource base. What is needed is to develop projects that are gender centered and focusing in capacity-building. The data supports the concept that women must play a major role in resource management decisions in order to achieve livelihood security and sustainable environments in Africa. The case studies highlight the importance of: 1. continuous collection, monitoring and evaluation of gender-disaggregated data. 2. Integrations of new technologies combined with gender-aware extension services and training. 3. Capacity building at the local level using local participation and organization, which helps strengthen projects and leads to their sustainability. 4. Impact on livelihood security. 5. Linkages and partnerships related to infrastructure, research, policy, training, and institution building can build project success.

While women's movements in Latin America and elsewhere have succeeded in putting many issues that are relevant to women and to gender relations onto the political agenda, and although most international aid agencies have made efforts to incorporate gender analysis into their work, this progress has been neither comprehensive nor unproblematic. This article focuses on ways in which the development cooperation agenda, and the priorities and working methods of development agencies and nongovernmental organizations, have served to distort the vision and practice of the women's organizations whose work they seek to support.

This paper explores the issues concerning women's groups in the context of women's network in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and from an association with such a network in West New Britain province. The women's groups in PNG often came into existence under the influence of colonial rule and as an adjunct to the Church. Some 20 years later, their vulnerability to colonization by other development factors--whether the state, the donor agency, or the beneficiaries--remains an issue for these groups because of their ambiguity of function and purpose. Despite this ambiguity, and in spite of the women subsuming a passive role in the face of the state and the donor, the women themselves have their own individual strategies for accumulating symbolic as well as real resources. However, the strategy is only open to a handful of women, whose position in society depends on the fact that prevailing patriarchal gender relations are continued. In addition, it is suggested that by simply existing, women's groups in PNG have continued to aid and abet the masculine tradition within the provincial and district governments.

Cyberfeminists share the belief that women should `take control of and appropriate the use of cybertechnologies in an attempt to empower ourselves.' The author argues that the demystification of technology is necessary, but not sufficient, for empowerment (or re-empowerment, a term she prefers) since mainstream cyberfeminism fails to `address the complexities of the lived contexts of women in the South.' This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis.

In Nigeria women's empowerment is essential to improving their standard of living and protecting their right to participate fully in development. More effective strategies are needed for women to participate in decision making. There are both static and dynamic aspects of the concept of empowerment. The former may lead to exogenous power strategies, while the latter may lead to endogenous empowerment facilitated by the dynamic concept that regards empowerment as a bottom-up process that develops the capacity of individuals. This process can be accomplished in six stages that encompass awareness, skills and capacity assessment, capacity-building and skills development, participation and greater control in decision-making, action for change, and evaluation. Nigeria needs an endogenous empowerment strategy for women's effective participation within organizations that is based on the tenet that women can only protect their interests through effective participation in their organizations and that highlights awareness-building, skills-acquisition and capacity-building, and changing discriminatory norms. External agents can not empower women but can foster conditions conducive to self-empowerment.

(1998). Research Round-Up Women's empowerment and micro-finance programmes: Strategies for increasing impact. Development in Practice: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 235-241.

Drawing on recent research, it has been explored how far and in what ways UK NGOs have tried to incorporate gender into the policies and procedures of their international development work, and how far a formal recognition of gender issues is shaping the way each organization functions. The strengths and weaknesses of different strategies are assessed (such as specialist staff or units, formal gender policies, gender training, equal opportunity recruitment policies, and mainstreaming) for transforming organizational practice.

NGOs, like other organisations, are gendered; that is, they reflect society's power relations between men and women. The author argues that NGOs must begin a process of gender-sensitive institutional change, building equitable practices and attitudes in the long-term, benefiting and empowering NGO staff as well as impacting on their programme work, and strategic objectives. This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis.

It is argued that an alternative strategy to women's involvement in development is the development of a whole "new dish, prepared, baked, and distributed equally" rather than acquisition of a "bigger piece of the pie." The issues of gender and development (GAD) involve women gaining power and control of the decision making processes. Past development has been too much of a "fixed menu" approach. Feminist development involves the satisfaction of the strategic needs of women, an agenda-setting direction, flexibility, and empowerment (SAFE). Strategic gender needs were conceptualized first by Maxine Malyneaux. Within women's defined roles, there are needs for access to adequate and clean water supplies, nutrition, health care, and income. Women in development (WID) approaches are strong in serving practical needs. The SAFE approach combines both the strategic and practical needs of women. Some argue that a focus on strategic and/or practical needs should be conceptualized in terms of changing women's position within a structurally unequal set of social relations. Some emphasize autonomy. The basic concepts of strategic needs is viewed as including the change in women's status and movement toward autonomy. Aid agencies and development groups have been mainstreaming WID and GAD over the past decade by integrating women and women's needs into administration, decision making, and the project cycle. Gender issues could be built into existing development paradigms or could change the existing development agenda with a gender perspective. It is argued that an agenda-setting approach is needed in order to assure that the strategic needs of women are incorporated. Flexibility and adaptation of approaches means that WID and GAD can be adjusted to all cultures. It is cited by Buvinic and Moser that welfare, equity, anti-poverty, efficiency, and empowerment are five ethical policy approaches. The policy approach of SAFE is that of empowerment or the knowledge and exercise of influence, power, and leadership in some or all social relations.

In Bangladesh, government organisations and non-governmental organisations are implementing programmes and energy-saving projects in an effort to save the environment. This article examines such programmes in the specific area of improved stove technology. It shows that inadequate assessment of the environment by environmentalists and development practitioners has led them to select inappropriate technology that has resulted in the failure to incorporate women in the energysaving movement. It identifies the reasons behind women's rejection of a technology that was imposed rather than based on an appreciation of their distinct problems, culture, and ecology.

This article reviews the extent to which the educational system has acknowledged the importance to women of the informal sector of the economy, and the extent to which it has sought to prepare them for employment or self-employment within it. It assesses the record of both formal and non-formal education in providing women with the necessary skills to compete with men for employment, and concludes that both have generally failed to assist women to obtain skilled, well paid, and secure jobs, leaving them in overwhelming numbers in subsistence-level activities in the informal sector. Within the non-formal approach to education, the article examines training in income-generating projects, which are a major conduit for assistance to poor women in developing countries. Some recommendations for improved strategies of education and training provision are presented. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.

While inequalities between men and women have long been recognised in formal development policies, poverty-alleviation schemes generally display a discrepancy between their declared commitment to equity for women and their actual achievements in incorporating the insights of gender analysis. This article explores the experience of NGOs which have successfully incorporated gender-awareness into the formulation of anti-poverty interventions. It shows that increasing poor women's organisational experience is critical to ensuring that their needs and views inform the planning process. The article concludes that, unless women are empowered to move beyond the 'project trap', and to take part in formulating policy and allocating resources, they will continue to be a marginalised category in development. This is an expanded version of a paper prepared for the Conference on Social Development and Poverty, Oaxaca, Mexico, September 1993.

Studies of resistance often overlook the significance of gender. This article, based on the author's experience as a Project Officer with an NGO that supported the development work of a grassroots organisation, the Gram Vikas Mandali Association Trust, describes the historical context of everyday resistance by village women against the Forest Department in western India. The article concludes with an attempt to understand why women were marginalised in more recent incidents of organised popular resistance, and what this tells us both about the nature of resistance to the state, and the nature of women's involvement in it.

Several decades of development experience have yielded a wealth of findings about the key assumptions, procedures, and practices by which women have been marginalised in development planning. The value of these insights lies not only in highlighting flawed planning procedures, but also in helping to formulate alternative frameworks for thinking about development. This article discusses ways in which such findings can be used in gender-awareness training for development practitioners, and sketches out the main elements of an analytical framework for reconceptualising development from a gender perspective.

This paper examines the loan-use pattern of women involved in wage employment and their benefits from such loans in Bangladesh. The effects of wage employment on gender relations and how these women balance loan use, wage employment, and housework were also explored. The study was conducted among women enrolled in the Ayesha Abed Foundation (AAF) of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in Jamalpur district, central Bangladesh. The AAF was established to generate employment and income for poor rural women. Data were gathered through survey, interviews, and focus-group discussions. Findings revealed that women wage earners avail themselves of the BRAC loans for consumption, asset accumulation, land purchase, and other productive purposes. About 53% of their loans were used by others and only 34 out of 341 women in the sample actually used the loans themselves. The loans were repaid by sewing or subsistence work, mainly in the subcenters (52%), through income from rickshaw pulling by their husbands (24%), and by selling vegetables, eggs, or milk. Furthermore, findings showed that the household work of women wage earners is generally taken up by other women in the family and has resulted in more men taking part in household responsibilities. In conclusion, wage employment plays an important factor in the promotion of the economic and social empowerment of women. Economic empowerment is observed in the greater degree of control women have over the money they earn. Social empowerment is manifested in the expanding mobility of women, whereby they are able to interact with other women and generate support systems.

This study reviewed the history of sex segregation in the police forces of Maharashtra state, India, and policy interventions since 1994 to reverse the trends; it also describes the process of improving gender equity in the policy department as part of a gender aim to control violence against women. Police jobs are allocated based on gender. Passage of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act was not implemented fully within police departments. In fact, the Police Force actively worked to keep itself outside the purview of the Act. Supervisors maintained the attitude that women were unsuitable for police work. Women were suspected of lacking in career commitments and were limited to only a small number within the force. These attitudes restricted women's entry, deployment, and promotions. The Government of Maharashtra has been pressured by district level women's groups to secure women's rights and to change the social environment that supports violence against women. The efforts uncovered violence unreported due to social pressure. It was thought that women's greater presence in policy departments would encourage women to report domestic crimes. The policemen disliked the interference of women. Since women were recruited for specific duties, the result was low self-esteem, frustration due to lack of promotions, sexual harassment, ostracism, and reduced job expectations. In 1993, officers received gender-sensitizing training. The training at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex focused on rules, practices, access to resources, and formal and informal inclusions and exclusions.

While in recent years, many nongovernmental development organizations (NGDOs) have committed themselves to addressing gender inequality in their development work, little is known about the gender-related practices of small NGDOs with annual budgets of less than 1 million pounds. It is known, however, that larger NGDOs tend to have developed more gender-aware policies and practices than smaller ones. Findings are reported from an exploration of the gender-related awareness and practices of 13 small NGDOs, 8 based in the UK and 5 based in Cameroon. The study found that at the organizational level, all studied organizations were aware of the concept of gender and acknowledged its importance, but had a wide range of ideas of what gender actually means. Most organizations had not devised any specific way of incorporating gender into their programs because they had neither a specific person nor unit responsible for gender issues. Male NGDO employees were not really involved in gender issues. Policy- and project-level findings are presented, followed by consideration of the problems encountered by small NGDOs, the advantages of such organizations, how to ensure gender-aware practices, gender and development versus women in development approaches, and recommendations for good practice.