ActionAid - Gender Mainstreaming at ActionAid

Gender Mainstreaming At ActionAid

ActionAid places a major focus on achieving women’s rights. In addition to achieving gender equality in the local communities, ActionAid works towards achieving gender equality in the organization itself. For example, in ActionAid Nepal, the gender imbalance in the organization itself was so great that ActionAid Nepal established a temporary “Women-Only Recruitment Policy,” which raised the percentage of female staff from 12% to 24%. In 1995, in the Beijing Platform for Action (also known as the Fourth World Conference on Women), gender mainstreaming was identified as the most important mechanism to reach the ambitious goal of gender equality. There are eight major components of gender mainstreaming policy that are implemented by ActionAid.They are as follows:

1. A dual strategy of mainstreaming gender combined with targeted actions for gender equality.
2. Gender analysis
3. Internal responsibility
4. Gender training
5. Support to women’s decision making and empowerment
6. Monitoring and evaluation
7. Working with other organizations
8. Budgets

• Dual strategy of mainstreaming and targeting gender equality:
  • ActionAid has used gender mainstreaming in policies, projects, and programs at all cycle stages.
  • ActionAid also takes actions that target gender equality.
• Gender Analysis:
  • ActionAid provides a gender analysis at all program cycle stages; however, sex-disaggregated data and gender info, along with a gender-sensitive budget analysis are not provided.
• Internal Responsibility:
  • At ActionAid, responsibilities are shared between all staff and gender specialists/focal points.
• Gender Training:
  • At ActionAid, there is an understanding and implementation of gender policy for staff and counterparts.
  • There is also staff/counterpart gender training/skills.
• Support to women’s decision making and empowerment
  • ActionAid strengthens women’s organizations through capacity building and training.
  • ActionAid offers support to women’s participation in decision making and empowerment.
• Monitoring and evaluation:
  • ActionAid contains effective tools for monitoring/evaluation and contains gender-sensitive indicators.
• Working with other organizations:
  • ActionAid strengthens gender equality by working with government, donors, UN, private sector, and NGOs.
• Budgets
  • ActionAid allocates certain financial resources for staff to carry out gender policy.