At the cutting edge >>Review of DFID's Gender Equality Action Plan


First published: 2010-05-05

SDDirect's team of gender specialists, Francis Watkins and Alice Kerr Wilson, asked Fiona Coffey, an organisation development and change management expert, to work alongside them to evaluate DFID's progress in gender mainstreaming. Fiona Coffey reports.

What is the best way to evaluate progress on gender mainstreaming in major international development organisations? When DFID asked SDDirect to review the impact of their Gender Equality Action Plan (GEAP), launched in February 2007, they invited us to take a fresh approach. In particular, they asked what an 'institutional change perspective' would tell us about the way DFID handled the internal change process, and how much progress had been made in creating an organisation that had integrated gender into all aspects of its work.

On the face of it, the approach we took was along the lines of a traditional 'light touch review' - analysis of documents and interviews with key stakeholders within and outside the organisation to get a perspective on progress made. But the difference came in the questions we asked.

"As gender specialists we tend to take certain things for granted. One is that gender mainstreaming is a necessary and good thing. Our main focus then becomes what an organisation has done about it, the evidence of progress and whether or not we think it is good enough," Francis told me. My starting point was different. I wanted to ask why an organisation and its people would seek to mainstream gender in the first place looking underneath the moral arguments. This perspective focuses on how and why ideas get adopted and blocked in organisations and the resulting impact on core processes such as business planning, resource allocation and staffing. It now includes looking at the quality of leadership, where authority is located and how decisions are made.

Another interesting insight came when we looked at the process by which the DFID GEAP was created. Consultative, 'bottom-up' inclusive approaches tend to be recognised and favoured by those working in the social development field, because participation is an appropriate value underpinning their work. But this may not always be the most powerful and therefore effective way of getting things done in an organisation. In fact, selecting a highly consultative approach based on personal engagement may brand the initiative as 'lower status' and therefore marginal, if an organisation responds mainly to change by edict from the top. If you ask who's in charge of gender mainstreaming and how they are going about it you will usually get more insight into the likelihood of change happening than by studying 50 pages of well-crafted action plans.

We saw how selection of the 'change' strategy inevitably affects where and how progress is made. It's clear that organisations have different preferences, strengths and blindspots in the way they choose to get things done. There are choices about where and how to 'work with the grain' and when and how to challenge existing ways of working.

At the end of the project Francis told me: "This project made me question a lot of the assumptions we make in approaching gender mainstreaming evaluations. Looking at this work through a 'change management' perspective opens up new possibilities for our work with organisations like DFID. Hopefully it could shift the debate from just looking at why changes should be made, to the differences these changes will make to the way an organisation works and to the outcomes of this work."

If you would like to hear more about SDDirect's work on gender mainstreaming or discuss any of the issues raised in this article, please contact Francis Watkins at francis@sddirect.org.uk or Alice Kerr-Wilson at alice@sddirect.org.uk.