Gender Integration Toolkit: To Support the Integration of Gender-sensitive and Transformative Approaches in Social Development Programmes

"Gender aware policies and programs examine and address the set of economic, social, and political roles, responsibilities, rights, entitlements, obligations, and power relations associated with being female and male and the dynamics between and among men and women, boys and girls."

This Gender Integration Toolkit is designed to be a comprehensive training guide to enhance the capacity of organisations to integrate gender perspectives into their work. Its primary goal is to develop participants' understanding of and skills in addressing the impact of socially constructed gender norms on various individuals, facilitating critical analysis of these norms within their programmes and operational contexts. It is intended for use by the technical staff of ABAAD - Resource Centre for Gender Equality (an organisation that works to achieve gender equality as an essential condition to sustainable social and economic development in the Middle East and North Africa region) who lead training and capacity development for their partner organisations. The training outlined in the toolkit offers adaptable strategies and examples for incorporating a gender lens across diverse sectors such as health, peacebuilding, and education, ensuring relevance to the specific needs of each training scenario.

As explained in the toolkit, the training focuses on "gender integration" rather than "gender mainstreaming", emphasising the incorporation of gender considerations (looking at the impact of gender-inequitable norms) into programme planning, design, implementation, and evaluation processes. Gender mainstreaming, on the other hand, includes the process of incorporating a gender perspective in the administrative functions and the institutional culture of the organisation, as well as in their programmes.

Specifically, the toolkit seeks to:

• Build participants' skills and knowledge on how socially constructed gender norms affect the lives of women, men, and people of diverse gender identities and sexual orientations;
• Create space for participants to analyse how these gender norms impact their own programmes and the contexts where they work; and
• Provide participants with tools to integrate a gender perspective across the programme cycle.

The toolkit is divided into seven sessions that enable training participants to build their skills and awareness of basic gender concepts, how to do a basic gender analysis, how to know the differences between different types of gender-aware and gender-blind programmes, and how to apply all these frameworks to their own projects and programmes. Each session outlines the objectives; the activities in the session; the time, materials, and preparation required; and directions to carry out the activities.

The sessions and their objectives are as follows: 

Session 1: Let's Talk Gender Basics - Objectives:

• Understand the definitions of basic gender terminology.
• Critically reflect on the division of labour and how this impacts men's and women's lives.

Session 2: Why Integrate a Gender Lens into My Program? - Objectives:

• Understand the difference between gender integration and gender mainstreaming.
• Understand the consequences of gender blindness on programmatic interventions.
• Analyse the gendered root causes within assigned case studies.

Session 3: Gender Analysis - Objective:

• Increase participants' knowledge and skills to do a strong gender analysis.

Session 4: The Gender Integration Continuum - Objectives:

• Understand the continuum of gender as it relates to integrating gendered approaches in projects/activities.
• Understand the different approaches to gender integration in projects/activities.
• Identify strategies to move a project along the continuum towards a gender-sensitive or gender-transformative approach.

Session 5: Designing Gender-Sensitive and Transformative Activities and Outcomes - Objectives:

• Design gender-sensitive and -transformative activities that respond to identified gender-based constraints and opportunities.
• Brainstorm potential outcomes that would result from the proposed activities.
   

Session 6: Monitoring and Evaluation - Objectives:
 

• Understand the difference between monitoring and evaluation.
• Become aware of some of the monitoring and evaluation indicators that measure gender-specific outcomes.
• Develop outcome evaluation indicators that measure progress and impact of the programme on gender equality.

Session 7: Action Plan for Gender Integration Throughout the Program Cycle - Objectives:

• Review the key terms and concepts from the previous 6 sessions of the training.
• Design an action plan on how they will move forward on gender integration once the training is over.