Conducting a gender analysis is a requirement for all USAID Operating Units prior to developing projects and activities, and a gender assessment is required for Mission-wide strategies. Both these analyses and assessments should look at the roles and potential inequalities between all women and men within a targeted geographic area and should encompass all individuals, including all forms of diversity (e.g. ethnicity, age, religion, race, disability, etc). In practice, however, taking into account how diversity and gender dynamics might vary within these different groups has often been ignored and forgotten. One of the groups that is most frequently excluded from gender analysis- but is present in all ages, levels of society, geographic regions, and ethnic and racial groups- are men, women, and children with disabilities.
There is a strong need for USAID Missions to take proactive measures to ensure that women and men with disabilities are included in gender assessments and analyses. It is estimated approximately 10-20% of the world’s population have a disability. Even with such a large representation within communities, people with disabilities often face blatant discrimination. This discrimination, combined with possible inadvertent barriers, often leads to people with disabilities being excluded from USAID programs and activities.
This document serves as a “how to” guide on including women and men with disabilities into USAID’s gender assessments and analyses. Specifically, this document also provides: a brief overview of why it is important to include disability in both activity analysis and country-level gender assessments; issues specific to disability that one may need to consider while conducting an assessment; suggested questions to include during an assessment following a frequently used gender assessment framework; and, additional resources for information on disability.
Key Findings:
- Gender assessments and analyses need to include and take into account all men and women, including men, women and children with disabilities. While striving to incorporate and include diversity, it is important to assess the situation of people with disabilities within a country since they often are the most vulnerable and yet the most likely to be inadvertently excluded from USAID programs and activities.
- Including disability in gender assessments does not change the scope of the assessments, but rather is a way to ensure that gender assessments capture all individuals including those who are often most vulnerable and unintentionally excluded from USAID programs.
- A separate approach or framework to include disability in gender assessments and analyses is not needed. Instead questions on disability can be added to the questions already being asked of stakeholders.
- To obtain an accurate view of disability within a country, questions on disability should be included in all of the interviews with the various stakeholders. Additional meetings with DPOs or NGOs working on disability may also be helpful to obtain an accurate assessment of gender and disability within a country.
- Including men and women with disabilities into a gender assessment does not need to be a difficult or time-consuming process yet it does signify a change in practice. The benefits, however, of having gender analyses and assessments that take into account all individuals within a country far outweighs any possible additional effort.
