Gender equality

Gender equality matters: our approach

The importance of women and men's equal participation in politics has been stressed in several international conventions and UN resolutions. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is the most comprehensive international document that brings to light areas in which women are disproportionally treated in political and public life.

Article 7 and 8 specifically addresses the need of eliminating discrimination against women in all aspects of political and public life, especially women's participation in the political life as both representatives and voters. The ample international policy framework put in place to enforce women's political rights, allows defining women's full range political participation as a human right with international leverage.

Violence and the threat of violence are believed to impact in particular women's political participation negatively since it appears puzzling that people in general and already exposed groups in particular, continue to vote and even participate actively in canvassing in spite of violence. Electoral violence is thus interpreted in different ways: sometimes acting as a driver of increased political participation and sometimes having pacifying effects. Yet, for women and marginalized groups, threats and violence is generally seen as a hindrance to political involvement such as voting.

Against this background, the Action and the activities that it conveys is taking the following measures to ensure a gender sensitive approach and implementation.

Gender indicators with respect to project content and implementation are the following:

i) Since the issue at hand, namely electoral violence and conflict is thought to affect women and men differntly, the Action is permeated by a gendered approach, which runs through all components of the Action, namely the capacity development component, research, curricula development/advisory support/lessons learned and regional conference;

ii) The research will use gender disaggregated data and analysed accordingly. In quantitative research, the stratification can be made according to gender as denominator: in qualitative research, gender will be one of the crosscutting themes when conducting the case studies and further, when analysing the empirical material.

iii) The empirical findings will ideally constitute a fundament for debate, especially when it comes to the cultural and social heterogenous context of the SADC region. Cross regional case studies with gender and electoral related violence and conflict will be particularly encouraged and at least two of the five papers that will be presented in the regional conference will center on gender and electoral violence and conflict. Moreover, the handbook will take into consideration gender dissaggregated data and recommendations;

iv) The training activities is taking into consideration the effective participation of women, paying particular attention to location, hour and lengh and cost of the travel to get to a training venue;

v) Monitoring and evaluation indicators is as far as possible gender disaggregated;

vi) Both women and men will participate in the monitoring and evaluation of the project, and gender-related benchmarks will be evaluated in relation to the initially set guiding principles;

vii) The numbers of men and women in the organisation and the management structure is well-balanced and comprises 50 percent of women and 50 percent of men;

viii) Gender-balance is taken into consideration in terms of responsibilities and leading positions in the joint project team, and also when it comes to in-country researchers.

The Action believes that the ideal environment for development is one that creates or facilitates broad-based participation. Considering the centrality of youth and young girls in Africa's population and the recovery and development process necessary for true progress, actions need to be taken to ensure the inclusion of youth in a wide variety of projects and programmes. Therefore the Action will ensure that young people are targeted for interventions and inclusion in all stages of a project life cycle. A concrete measure in the capacity development component is to invite organisations that promotes youth participation in politics. In Zambia for example, Operation Young Vote was represented during the BRIDGE TtF module and became a much appreciated added value by sharing their experiences in their area of expertise.