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5 things we’ve learned from analyzing how we’re addressing gender inequality

Oct 07, 2022
Jenny Conrad
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Describes the Theory of Change for Gender Equality at CARE

The recent Gender Snapshot on progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is concerned that, at the current pace of progress, SDG 5—achieving gender equality—will not be met by 2030.

At CARE we are doing all we can to further that goal of gender equality through our 2030 Vision, which includes the aim to support 50 million people to experience greater gender equality in their lives by 2030. In FY21 alone we reached 14 million people under this goal, with documented impact for more than 3 million women and girls.

We believe achieving gender equality requires transformative change and that changes must take place across all areas of an individual’s life for this to succeed in a sustainable way. This means not only working with women but engaging with everyone around them, from families to communities to governments.

To accelerate progress towards SDG5, we wanted to understand how projects are doing this in practice and which approaches are most important to prioritize. We identified eight projects* which were proactively promoting equality across all areas of women’s lives—their individual agency, the power relations through which they live their lives and the structures in which they operate—and analyzed them to see what common approaches featured in their programming.

So, what are the most striking things we have learned from this? And what did we need to already have in place in order to analyze how we’re addressing gender inequality?

5 key insights

Here is what we learned:

  1. Advocacy and social norms change together can be powerful: All but one project included both advocacy and promoting social norms as key approaches. Our focus on social norms change continues to grow.
  2. Addressing GBV is critical: All of the eight projects reviewed either fully focused on GBV or mainstreamed this within their project. This is relevant in all contexts, so it’s important for teams to follow the GBV Guidance for Development Programs and GBV in Emergencies Guidance Note when designing programs.
  3. Men must be included: All projects engaged men and boys in their programming to some extent. There are many ways to engage men and boys in support of gender equality.
  4. Working in partnership is important: Six projects worked with partners explicitly focused on advancing women’s rights or gender equality, with three of these project partners being women-led organizations. This is a key element of how we are transforming our partnership approach.
  5. Real change takes time: The highest scoring projects lasted more than one year or contributed to longstanding humanitarian programming. This included both humanitarian and development projects.

We acknowledge this learning is based on a small sample of projects and we will continue to assess the implications of each of these points as we apply these in our programs.

Ongoing analysis of gender impact

CARE has spent many years embedding gender equality into all our operations, including MEAL processes. There are three key frameworks and processes which inform CARE’s ability to analyze the impacts of our programming on gender equality.

  • Theory of Change: All of our programming is underpinned by CARE’s Gender Equality Framework, which acts as our Theory of Change. This focuses on the need for change to take place across three domains in order to have sustainable impact: we must build agency, change relations and transform structures. 
    Cycle describing CARE's Gender Equality Framework on Agency, Structure, and Relations
  • Gender Marker: CARE’s Gender Marker is a self-assessment program quality and learning tool which enables us to track, improve on, and support more effective, gender integrated programming. All projects are scored on this along a scale from gender unaware to gender transformative.
    CARE's Gender Marker Scoring
  • Annual reporting to a global system: CARE’s Project & Program Information and Impact Reporting System (PIIRS) is a single platform for collecting, accessing and reporting relevant information about our work from across CARE international. Each year, projects are required to report against the Gender Marker and report whether they are having impact on women’s agency, relations and structures.

The PIIRS reporting process allows us to aggregate and analyze data across all of CARE’s programming. We used this to compare how projects which reported impact across agency, relations and structures scored against the Gender Marker.

As we anticipated, there was a strong correlation between working across all three domains of the Gender Equality Framework and gender transformative scores on the Gender Marker—underscoring the need to address gender inequalities at multiple levels for deep and lasting impact.

It could be said that none of these findings are particularly surprising—there are good reasons we have long been prioritizing approaches such as addressing GBV, changing harmful social norms and engaging men & boys. However, we believe it is important to continue building evidence which supports the need to look holistically at how we approach gender equality.

 

Want to learn more?
Read more about how CARE is applying these insights to our programming in this Learning Brief. 

*The 8 projects analyzed which reported impact across all domains of a woman’s life in FY21 are:

About the authors
Jenny Conrad

Jenny is the knowledge Management and Communications Advisor for Gender Justice at CARE.

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Continuous Learning & ImprovementPause & Reflect
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