This blog reflects on a longer learning paper from Social Development Direct: GEDSI Mainstreaming in practice. This can be downloaded here.
By Danielle Cornish-Spencer, Head of Technical Services
When I talk about Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) mainstreaming, I’m not talking about a tick-box exercise or a “nice to have”. I’m talking about the difference between programmes that quietly reinforce harm and exclusion, and programmes that are safe, credible and genuinely transformative.
At Social Development Direct (SDDirect), we’ve spent over 25 years working with governments, donors, multilaterals and civil society to put GEDSI at the heart of how decisions are made and resources are spent. From large-scale reform programmes to humanitarian crisis responses, we’ve seen that when GEDSI is treated as optional, it is the most marginalised people who pay the price.
For me, GEDSI mainstreaming is fundamentally about three things: safety, integrity and social justice.
Safety: doing no harm and actively protecting people
When GEDSI is ignored, programmes can create or exacerbate risk, particularly for those already pushed to the margins. Exclusion is never neutral. If we don’t understand how gender, disability, age, sexuality, race, class, language or migration status shape people’s experiences, we miss the violence and abuse that are often hiding in plain sight.
Centring GEDSI is one of the most practical ways to ensure development and humanitarian work not only does no harm, but also actively protects people. It means asking hard questions about who is invisible in our data, who cannot safely access services, and whose safety is being traded off for speed or convenience.
Integrity: using resources wisely and building trust
There is also a question of integrity. Programmes that gloss over GEDSI often entrench unequal power relations and lose credibility with communities and local partners.
Even if a project looks good on paper, if it only reaches those who already have power and voice, it can make inequality worse. Building GEDSI into the design, governance and delivery of programmes is one of the best ways to safeguard public investment and ensure that what we are doing stands up to scrutiny.
Social justice: tackling root causes, not symptoms
Finally, GEDSI is about social justice. It means challenging discriminatory norms and redistributing power so that benefits reach everyone.
At SDDirect we deliberately talk about GEDSI, not just “gender mainstreaming”. Gender can never sit in a silo. Intersecting inequalities such as disability, ethnicity, language, sexuality, religion, age, caste or dependence on climate-sensitive livelihoods - compound disadvantage. Those intersections are where exclusion is often most acute, and where the potential for transformation is often greatest.
What does GEDSI mainstreaming look like in practice?
Our approach goes well beyond one-off training or a GEDSI “module” at inception. We work alongside partners over time to strengthen organisations, systems and cultures so that inclusive practice can withstand political shifts, staff turnover and inevitable shocks.
In practice, that means we:
- Build on strong analysis - integrating GEDSI into political economy assessments, humanitarian needs analyses and sector diagnostics, so that structural inequalities are visible from the outset.
- Target systems, not just individuals - embedding GEDSI in organisational structures, people, processes and values, rather than relying on one or two champions to carry the load.
- Work politically - understanding what keeps inequalities in place, mapping allies and blockers, and identifying realistic levers for change.
- Focus on sustainability - building partners’ capability and confidence to lead their own GEDSI agendas, rather than creating dependency on external expertise.
- Adapt to context - grounding solutions in lived experience and local knowledge, not importing templates that don’t fit.
At the end of this short blog, you’ll find a set of short boxes that showcase how we mainstream GEDSI across different areas of our work: from GBV prevention and response, to MERL, women’s economic empowerment, governance and inclusive societies, and safeguarding.
If you’re grappling with how to move from GEDSI commitments on paper to real change in people’s lives, I hope our paper and the examples below spark ideas.
This blog reflects on a longer learning paper from Social Development Direct: GEDSI Mainstreaming in practice. This can be downloaded here.
Case Story | Mainstreaming GEDSI within our Governance and Inclusive Societies (GIS) work
Much of the work within our ODA globally on the GEDSI Responsiveness Continuum draws on a framework initially pioneered by Caroline Moser in collaboration with SDDirect, for the Infrastructure and Cities for Economic Development (ICED) Facility. From there, our work in GIS continued to pioneer GEDSI mainstreaming, integration and targeted programming using a set of bespoke tools and approaches.
The Evidence and Collaboration for Inclusive Development (ECID) programme (2018-2021) was funded through UK Aid Connects Strengthen Civil Society Effectiveness pillar. UKAC was set up by DFID to deliver lasting change to poor people’s lives by supporting consortia of diverse organisations to come together and create innovative solutions to complex development challenges. ECID had an emphasis on data/evidence generation, dissemination, mobilisation, and uptake - generating and using data from, and on, the most marginalised groups and individuals in an interactive, cyclical process to amplify their voices in decision making at all levels in three target countries: Myanmar, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. This approach aimed to foster connections and collaboration between a wide range of stakeholders (civil society, government, private sector). The programme had a particular focus on women and girls, ethnic minorities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex people, persons with disability and people living with HIV, actively linking these local voices, and lived realities on the ground, to global policy and discourse. SDDirect was the GEDSI lead responsible for designing and undertaking the GEDSI aware approach to PEA, designing ethical guidelines for research and data collection to put DNH at the centre of our approach, developing a GEDSI Strategy and undertaking programmatic and organisational GEDSI scans.
Case Story | Mainstreaming GESI within our MERL work
SDDirect was part of a multidisciplinary consortia delivering the Global Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (GMEL) service for the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF). GMEL supported the Joint Funds Unit (JFU) to develop and implement MEL systems and processes that meet the demands of programming in fragile and conflict affected contexts and generates and synthesises evidence for policy and decision-making.
SDDirect’s role in GMEL was to lead the meaningful integration of GESI across GMEL interventions aimed to strengthen the CSSF fund-wide MEL ecosystem. Amongst other deliverables, SDDirect’s GESI leadership resulted in:
- A GESI marker to monitor the fund compliance with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC) gender equality policy marker, which supported projects to meaningfully mainstream GESI into their projects and MEL
- Guidance and principles for incorporating GESI in Theories of Change and Results Frameworks
- Guidance to conduct intersectional gender analysis in conflict affected settings
- Safeguarding and GESI principles for CSSF evaluations
- Principles for addressing gender and social bias in data analytics
For more information about our work in the GMEL for CSSF, please see here.
Case Story | Mainstreaming GEDSI within our work to prevent and respond to Gender-Based Violence
SDDirect takes a fundamentally GEDSI transformative approach to all our work in GBV, recognising that violence is underpinned by power imbalances and gender inequality, and only systemic shifts in who holds power and how it is used will reduce the prevalence of violence against women and girls in all their diversity.
The Malawi Violence Against Women and Girls Prevention and Response, or Tithetse Nkahza! (Let’s End Violence!) Programme in Malawi, for which SDDirect was the technical lead, embedded GEDSI throughout the programme. Within the expectation that the programme operate at the transformative end of the GEDSI Responsiveness Continuum with respect to gender equality and women’s rights, the programme set itself what it considered a more realistic goal of strategic engagement on all forms of social inclusion, with the aim of adapting to transformative ways of working toward the end of the programme. Tithetze Nkhanza! developed and delivered a GESI strategy, a set of GESI markers, and a range of learning products about embedding GESI transformation, particularly Disability Inclusion, within a GBV programme. Regrettably the programme was closed prematurely due to the UK aid budget cuts in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the efforts to reduce the prevalence of violence against women in all their diversity were not rigorously assessed. The programme design, however, has been scaled up and is being delivered by a consortium of WROs in Malawi with funding from the What Works 2 programme, with a continued focus on reaching women with disabilities. The accompanying randomised control trial is designed to determine whether integration of GEDSI into the programme yields results. More information is available here.
Case Story | Mainstreaming GEDSI within our Safeguarding work
The Safeguarding Resource and Support Hub (RSH) is an FCDO-funded, global support mechanism for CSOs to strengthen their approaches to addressing SEAH perpetrated by those associated with aid.
In May 2022, RSH launched an Eastern European Hub (RSH EE), funded by the Disasters Emergency Committee. The hub aimed to strengthen the safeguarding of refugees fleeing Ukraine, overwhelmingly women and children by working with CSOs proving support to refugees in Moldova, Poland and Romania. RSH quickly established the need for targeted GEDSI Strategic interventions focussing on disability inclusion, SOGIESC inclusion and Roma inclusion. These groups were strategically targeted due to the demographic profile of the refugees and the political and social history that exacerbated safeguarding risks for people with disabilities, members of the SOGIESC community and members of the Roma community. The Hub looked inward, creating a culture and capabilities within the team to meaningfully deliver on these GEDSI objectives, and contracting specialist expertise. Outwardly, they conducted research on safeguarding risks for people with disabilities and refugees with various sexual and gender identities, developed contextualised resources such as the Disability Inclusion series and the Roma community safeguarding series, and ensured documents and guidance were translated including into Romani and four different sign languages. They also facilitated roundtables to bring organisations together to raise awareness and address the specific safeguarding risks for the SOGIESC community.
Given the relevance of RSH EE’s work, over 6,300 resources were downloaded from the website, and 100% of the CSOs engaged by the hub were satisfied with the support provided, while 91% felt that the support was tailored to their needs.
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ENDNOTES:[1]
Some organisations and donors use the term GEDSI to explicitly highlight disability inclusion, while others prefer GESI (Gender Equality and Social Inclusion) as a broader framing; both approaches aim to promote equity and address exclusion in context-specific ways. In 2024, SDDirect changed our terminology to GEDSI. Projects delivered before then use the term GESI.