How can we ensure that basic services are gender sensitive? This report from One World Action and the British Council looks at the processes by which services could be better tailored to men and women. It argues that services that respond to gender differences contribute towards gender equality and equity in general.
Services are not gender neutral. Women and men have different needs in relation to health care, education, transport, water provision, personal security and access to justice. However, they do not have equal influence on the decision-making that shapes service delivery. As a result, the basic service needs of women, as distinct from those of men, are rarely analysed or satisfied.
Each service is different. With water and sanitation it is a question of access. Gender sensitivity in education is more complex. It involves looking at issues such as the slant of the curriculum, sexual harassment and sexist attitudes. Each context is also different – socially, economically, culturally and politically. There is thus no single recipe for achieving equality of service provision. It is important to find the strategy that will transform the provision of a particular service in a specific context.
Nevertheless, some common strategic guidelines can be identified. In order to institutionalise gender responsive basic services, it is important to:
- raise awareness of gender issues among local decision-makers and civil society organisations, not through formal training in gender planning, but by understanding the lives of individuals in the poorest communities
- enable women in positions of power to develop more gender-sensitive service delivery and build greater transparency and accountability
- raise gender awareness at grass-roots level and among hostile or apathetic local officials; invest in reducing and redistributing women’s workload in order to allow them to use services fully; and engage with political parties to deal with patriarchy
- recognise that attitudes change slowly
- scale up pilot projects to municipal levels.
Effective gender-sensitive basic service provision requires gender awareness and responsiveness from policy-making, planning through appraisal, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and back to policy-making. A number of factors are critical:
- Democratic accountability and meaningful participation: Women and men need information on service options and must have the capacity and ability to ask questions. Mechanisms to ensure accountability include monitoring and evaluation systems, feedback from audits, evaluations and consultations.
- Preparation: Gender inputs must be made at the early stages of budgeting and in the earliest planning documents.
- Transparency: Stakeholders need to have the skills to monitor expenditure decisions and present amendments.
- Sex disaggregated data: This is vital to enable service delivery providers to see the common, different and specific gender needs and interests of women and men.
- Political will: Increasing the numbers of women in elected political structures must be combined with a willingness to challenge unjust power relations and expose the policy–practice gap.
