Theme 1: Women's Involvement In Project Identification, Planning, Monitoring And Evaluation

DISCUSSION POINTS

  1. Examples of policy guidelines and checklists
    • How have they been used?
    • How could they have been more effective?
    • What are their limitations?
  2. Data collection and statistics
    • What methods are currently used?
    • How could they be improved?
    • How can the data be made available to women in developing countries?
  3. Pre-Project research and feasibility studies
    • What methods are currently used?
    • What is needed?
    • How can research findings be shared and made available to women in developing countries?
  4. Project planning, monitoring and evaluation
    • What efforts have been made by development project NGOs to involve local women in planning, monitoring and evaluation of projects?
    • What efforts have been made to train local women to carry out these activities?
    • What improvements should be made?
    • How can women in developing countries influence decisions of their government ministries in relation to development programmes?
    • What could be done to increase this influence?

LINKS WITH OTHER WORKSHOPS

  • Staffing of NGOs (2)
  • Training (6)
  • Women's organisation and networking (5)

 

INTRODUCTION TO WORKSHOP 1

WOMEN'S INVOLVEMENT IN PROJECT IDENTIFICATION, PLANNING, MONITORING AND EVALUATION

Sundari Ravindran (India)

Women should have greater participation. This statement is very familiar since it is repeated in nearly every recommendation made to the NGOs, the UN etc. at all levels of policy and decision-making. I don't think we have gone very far in this direction because when all these recommendations were made, nobody bothered to mention how? Is it possible? Are women able to participate? Which women are going to participate and in who's development? I don't mean participation for those few women sitting up there in the development NGOs or government development agencies and deciding what development there should be for women in the villages. This is again a top-down approach. It should be the women who are going to be affected who decide what development is, plan and implement it. It's surely easier said than done.

I would like to share with you the experiences I have of working with women in the villages. I don't know how these bits and pieces could be generalized. However, they tell me that it is possible for village women to think they know what development is in their terms, what they are going to do and how. This is necessary because our concept of development could be very different from that of the village women. We, who come from the cities, are educated and concerned, would define development as the provision of welfare, water supplies, health and school services etc. While, on the other hand, women from villages think that to improve their lives is to be powerful. Development is not an end where they have good health services and other facilities but it's a process of empowering themselves wherever and whenever they are able to do so.

It was by accident that I worked in a rural women's group for four to five years. I was an adult educator in a government adult education programme and became involved in a set of villages. I got in touch with some women literacy teachers. We became a kind of a group and knew each other pretty well. Because of their experiences in these villages, these women literacy teachers changed. One of them told me one day that she had come to realize that she was somebody else besides X's wife and Y's mother. In due course and even after the programme ended, we kept in touch. Some of these literacy teachers organized a women's group and worked in their own villages with the women's groups there. The priority of their work is not to tell women how to eat well, to be clean, to do this or that etc., but to question themselves: "Why are we constantly getting sick? " "Is it possible for us to eat what everybody says is the most balanced food?" "Do we have the money to do so?"

The village women have a very different agenda for health education, the ways to get to know about their bodies and so on. So the projects were designed by them, and I helped in forming the budget, salaries etc... They administered the project with my help. Five women were elected to form a committee taking care of the funds that came in. For the first two years, they needed some support.

In the process of the projects, health clinics and water taps came as part of the actions in the villages. There is a women's group in each one of the villages to organize and to demand from the government. They are very strong and call themselves organizations. The women pay a subscription into a bank account operated by two women in the group. In the past fifteen months, they have been running independently without me.

This experience has given me the confidence that it's possible for village women to define their own development needs and implement their own projects. It's not only possible but it is necessary because the priorities they set and the priorities I would have set are very different no matter how committed I am. We must remember that we have not lived their lives and we cannot identify ourselves so much with their problems.

These are powerful examples of how women can organize themselves. Nevertheless, they are in isolation. Groups in one area cannot influence women in the rest of the country. So, the next question will be how we can hear, learn and build on these very positive experiences. Vice versa, how can these be brought out of isolation? They should be able to make an input in the decision making processes of respective governments, international organizations and funding organizations. But how are we going to bring this about? And what are the necessary structures guaranteeing that these voices will reach the top levels, that these women will have a say in policy at both government and international levels etc? And, last but certainly not the least, how can we fit in as women from different backgrounds? What is our role and how can we be useful?

 

REPORT OF WORKSHOP 1

WOMEN'S INVOLVEMENT IN PROJECT IDENTIFICATION, PLANNING, MONITORING AND EVALUATION

Rapporteur: Donna McFarlane Gregory

Who defines needs and plans projects?

If development projects are to address the needs of the people, the people themselves must be involved in defining needs, setting priorities and planning strategies to meet the defined needs.

However, there is no point in grassroots communities becoming involved in planning unless they have access to resources. Sundari (India) mentioned the need for cooperation between the community itself and an intermediary person who has the skills to present the project in a form acceptable to government or funding agencies.

Donna (Jamaica) gave an example of cooperation between development agencies and the recipient community in project planning. Funds were made available through the USAID and the Population Council to promote income generating projects for women as part of the Urban Development Corporation's plans for reorganising West Kingston. She was given the task of finding out the views of local market women so as to forestall the building of markets that would not be used by the women.

Susan (Zimbabwe) said that in her country there was cooperation between the government, the NGOs and the village people in the planning of projects.

What type of project?

There was considerable discussion of the merits of income generating projects. Nancy (Mali) said that in her experience all income generating projects have problems in becoming self-sufficient. Magaly (Dominican Republic) expressed the further concern that the major problem is that women do not get a just financial return for their work and often do not earn enough to be independent. The emphasis should be more towards increasing the money women get for their work and ensuring that they themselves are able to decide how to spend the money they earn. However, she did mention the advantage of income generating projects in bringing women together and hence helping raise their consciousness.

The group generally felt that there was an over emphasis on income generating projects and a lack of resources for projects enabling women to analyse their situation and devise cooperative ways of bringing about change.

Indeed Sundari (India) questioned the use of the terms "project" and "identification". It is more important for women to mobilise for participation in planning processes than merely to identify projects.

Magaly (Dominican Republic) stressed that traditional ideological beliefs affect the way in which women view themselves and hence the kinds of choices they make about projects. This results in a tendency to choose craft projects such as sewing, making beads etc. She cited an example of a project where forest was cleared to set up coffee plantations. Despite the fact that women picked the coffee no women were given land rights and they organised no pressure to insist on this.

Strategies

  1. The most urgent priority is to influence government policies through building structures that carry messages effectively from the base upwards. In relation to this a useful tool would be a practical guide to effective lobbying.
  2. Donors should be encouraged to support research into the role of women and the problems identified by them. There should be greater emphasis on pre-project research.
  3. Methods should be devised to influence the attitudes of development organisations towards women and to make women an area of greater priority.
  4. There should be increased North-South cooperation in order to influence bilateral aid from both the donor and recipient ends.
  5. There should be increased resources for the training of women to manage their own projects, including training in administering funds, budgeting, crisis management, etc.