Gender Equality, Women's Voice and Resilience: Guidance Note for Practitioners

"The purpose of this guidance note is to provide CARE and partners with direction for integrating gender equality and women’s voice into their resilience-related work."

This guidance note, part of the CARE 2020 Programme Strategy, offers "examples of gender considerations in resilience-related projects; and different tools and resources to support gender equality and women's voices resilience within projects." Supported by the Australian Government’s Humanitarian Partnership Agreement and commissioned by CARE Australia, it is based on gender and resilience research conducted by CARE in the Asia-Pacific region (Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste, Vanuatu, and Vietnam).

Gender equality and women’s voice (GEWV) can be integrated into resilience-related work through studying examples and strategies, considering key gender actions, and using tools and resources to support GEWV and resilience within projects. Strategies include the following:

• Enabling resilience by understanding gender inequality, for example, patrilineal access to land in Vanuatu.
• Enabling resilience by engaging men and boys, for example, creating spaces for women and men to discuss gender and power separately before bringing them together.
• Enabling resilience by nurturing women’s groups and alliances, for example, providing women in Papua New Guinea with gender and equality, and leadership training.
• Enabling resilience by supporting government partners, for example, working with the Women's Union and local women's groups in Vietnam. 

Key gender actions include:

• "Plan and budget for gender technical leadership in your project."
• "Invest in context-specific analysis to understand the interconnected factors shaping the aspirations of men and women, in order to design effective and appropriate action..." through gender analysis and gender sensitive assessment.
• "Develop a gendered Theory of Change (ToC) for your project, with specific gender goals and objectives, informed by a gender analysis...."
• "Integrate gender-responsive and gender-transformative interventions to support progress on the program Theory of Change and gender goals/ objectives."
• "Monitor changes in gender equality throughout project implementation and act on issues that arise...", including tracking progress towards gender equality through measurement using gender-specific indicators.
• "Integrate gender training into the life of the project for CARE and partner teams, and other key stakeholders."

A sampling of the tools  to support gender equality and women's voices resilience within projects described and linked in a table on pages 16-18 by category are:

• "Frameworks - 
• Gender Equality and Women’s Voice Guidance Note:  a framework for the achievement of gender equality and women’s voice through transformative change across the three domains of agency, relations and structure in both public and private spaces.
• Good Practices Framework for Gender Analysis: eight core areas of inquiry to support deeper analysis of gender and power relations.
• Guidance -
• Gender in Emergencies Guidance Notes:  practical guidance on key processes and approaches to further CARE’s gender equality work. They include guidance on: Gender Action plans; gender in emergency preparedness planning; rapid gender analysis; and others
• Making it Count: Integrating gender into climate change and disaster risk reduction:  how-to guide that supports project staff, government and non-government partners to practically address gender and women’s voice during the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of climate change and disaster risk reduction activities. 
• Engaging Men and Boys Technical Resources: These resources provide useful information on how to ensure that men and boys are part of the solution to gender inequality. 
• Analysis, design and implementation -
• Gender Sensitive Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (GCVCA) Toolkit: a community-level analysis tool that integrates climate change into a wider participatory vulnerability assessment.
• Gender and Inclusion Toolbox: designed to support programme designers and field practitioners undertake gender sensitive and socially inclusive research.
• Gender Marker: an operational tool to assess whether or not humanitarian relief work is prepared for, designed, implemented in a way that ensures all benefit equally, and if it will contribute to increasing gender equality.
• Monitoring, evaluation and learning -
• The Participatory Monitoring, Evaluation, Reflection and Learning Manual (PMERL): helps project managers, field implementation staff, local partners and communities to measure, monitor and evaluate changes in local adaptive capacity, for better decision-making in CBA activities.
• Women’s Empowerment Impact Measurement Initiative Guide: helps teams to link project-level monitoring and evaluation to impact measurement systems at program level."