UNDP Myanmar has taken care to ensure the projects under HDI–IV are fully gender mainstreamed.
In a practical sense this means that UNDP Myanmar has the commitment and implements a strategy to ensure that both women’s and men’s concerns and experiences are integral to the ongoing design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of our programmes in food security and income generation, health and education, HIV/AIDS and environmental conservation.
In this way we aim to benefit women and men benefit equally and ensure that inequality is not perpetuated.
A key modality of the gender mainstreaming strategy has been the capacity building of Self Reliance Groups (SRG) within the ICDP and CDRT projects, and also of the micro-finance groups, to help poor families achieve a more balanced economic contribution of men and women to their household incomes. Greater economic participation has lead to tangible gains for women in family decision-making.
SRGs are women’s groups that provide space for poor and marginalised women to grow in confidence and skills to improve their livelihood base as well as to influence social changes in the society. In Myanmar's rural setting, male incomes are not enough to cover more than the most basic subsistence. As such when household incomes are boosted by women’s SRG activities, families are able to accumulate assets and savings as well as diversify their livelihood base. Women’s contribution to family and village development in this way has translated to women’s enhanced voice in family, and in some cases village level decision making.
Capacity building, social mobilisation and associated HDI activities undertaken in this way are designed to have further gendered impacts, such as improvements in the equal participation of men and women, boys and girls in accessing social resources such as education (enhanced gross enrollment and literacy) and health at the grass-roots level.
Certain project activities such as community-based water supply and sanitation, early child care, reproductive health education and associated initiatives have specifically addressed women’s practical gender needs, that is, those articulated by women to solve the daily problems they face - especially those of poor women.
While SRGs contribute to the social and economic empowerment of poor women and their families, they are ultimately expected to become activity groups for influencing local decision-making processes and for implementing activities that will improve local livelihoods including sustainable environmental conservation and other social actions.
According to the experience to date, the level of community empowerment and participation, especially of the poor, is far higher in villages with SRGs than those without SRGs.
All the HDI-IV projects stress equitable participation of women and men, boys and girls in all of their development interventions. This ideal is modeled by the gender balance in our staff. |
