Gender and development- historical background
‹ Definitions up Mainstreaming gender throughout the Project Cycle Management (PCM) ›
Gender and development- historical background The United Nations Charter of 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 established the first official worldwide recognition of women’s equality and non-discrimination on the basis on sex. However up until the late 1960’s the focus was on women’s reproductive roles, as women were seen as wives and mothers and their main issues were supposed to be obtaining access to food, contraceptives, nutrition and health care. The 70’s and 80’s marked a new phase in which the debate moved beyond women’s equality and the domestic sphere of women’s role as wives and mothers onto the global stage where the role of women was promoted as an aid for economic development. The important events such as the First World Conference for Women held in Mexico 1974, the UN decade for women “76-85” and the promotion of the Women In Development (WID) approach emphasised women’s right to development, recognition of women’s economic role in national economies and, most significantly, gave a voice to women in developing countries.
Some of the shortcoming of the approaches such as the WID applied in the 70’s were that they fell short of improving unequal relationships, and a significant number of projects were unsustainable as development projects failed to consider the multiple roles carried out by women, leading to a development model that in the end disadvantaged women. In the late 80’s the Gender and Development (GAD) approach was developed with the idea of improving the development model by “removing disparities in social, economic, and political balances between women and men as a pre-condition for achieving people-centred development” (GWA, 2006:11). However, since the 1990’s the gender perspective is still struggling to be clearly set into the development agenda of international treaties or objectives such as the Millennium Development Goals. The principles only focus on gender equality and do not concentrate enough on women’s centrality to other development areas (Bunch, 2006). For water resources, the Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) principles pay special attention to women as they “play a central role in the provision, management and safeguarding of water” (Dublin statement, 1992 ), implying not just gender equality but also empowerment and equity, their essential role in the concern for effectiveness and efficiency of water sector programmes, their importance for environmental sustainability and the absolute need to have gender-oriented analysis for the success of water resource projects. As illustrated in Figure 1, the gender process is long and ongoing. Practitioners are still struggling to bring a consciousness of gender issues to development work that will change perceptions and bring about true equality between men and women. Much of the work in the water sector today is affected by gender inequalities and inappropriate development projects. Without giving a proper focus to gender issues, projects often end up disadvantaging the principal group of water users, thereby affecting the lives of an already vulnerable group of