The material for this training process came from the following project case studies:
The focus of this process is on skills training at the community level, awareness raising and empowerment.
The projects in Costa Rica and Honduras worked to strengthen and empower women's groups at the grassroots level. While their overall aim was to enable women to play a greater role in agricultural planning and development, the entry points for these projects were activities that helped women to develop their income base. Improving existing economic activities, introducing new ones and assisting with micro credit schemes were all part of a process of helping rural women to develop a stronger resource base and enhance their capacity to take part in decision-making activities.
For both these projects, enhancing rural women's productive capacity was an essential step in "empowering" them to take a more active part in the decision-making that affects their daily lives. By working in groups and having organized representation, the women were subsequently able to influence government policies and programmes that have a direct impact on their livelihoods.
The two projects were typified by a bottom-up approach whose starting point was at the field level with farmers. The deliberate emphasis on working with and empowering women was based on a clear recognition that women have, in the past, been by-passed by extension workers and planners and that active steps need to be taken to address this imbalance at all levels
The Costa Rica project started in 1996. One of its major aims was to strengthen rural women's capacity to participate in the new agricultural diversification programme. An important part of this goal was developing mechanisms for incorporating gender into the mainstream of agricultural planning and policy formulation.
The project therefore had a number of complementary objectives. One of these was to develop a methodology that would help make gender an integral part of the strategic guidelines for developing policies and programmes in the farming and environmental sectors. Key to this was creating the institutional conditions that would lead to acceptance of the gender approach in these sectors. Another objective was to strengthen grassroots women's organizations and build an agricultural producers' movement that would enable women to be part of a broader gender-responsive planning process. As with the Honduras project, the Costa Rica project organizers saw that grassroots organizations had a key role in influencing and sustaining a gender approach in government policies and programmes.
With these goals in mind, the project organizers developed an integrated strategy, working simultaneously with grassroots-, regional- and national-level institutions and focusing on both practical activities and policy formulation. Implementation was organized into three interlinked stages.
Stage 1: Training of human resources
A major focus at this stage was the formation of a multidisciplinary team of trainers to: conduct workshops and courses on gender analysis; monitor the training process; and train the reference groups. The training team attended several workshops organized around three modules. The first of these modules concentrated on sensitizing the participants to gender inequalities, the second provided a series of tools with which to apply the concept of gender to development projects, and the third revolved around development strategies with a gender perspective.
Stage 2: Strengthening of the grassroots groups.
Strengthening of women's negotiating skills was seen as key to ensuring that a gender-responsive planning approach is integrated into policy, plan, programme and project formulation at all levels. Activities to build these negotiating skills and strengthen grassroots organizations were centred around the following three workshops:
The workshops began by analysing the problems and resources of each of the rural cantons represented. The women identified the problems, resources, skills and development potentials of their areas and, on the basis of this diagnosis, each canton prepared a plan of action. After the workshops, consultations were held with village representatives and local authorities on the feasibility of the plans. Steps were then made to obtain the financial and technical assistance necessary to support each plan.
At the same time, a strategy for training local extension workers to support the women's groups was put into place. Workshops were held to train extensionists on gender and gender-responsive planning. In some instances materials from FAO's SEAGA Programme were used and a training plan and facilitators' guide were prepared using this Programme.
Stage 3: Incorporation of gender policies into the sector's guidelines
The activities in this stage reflected the project's concern with influencing the policy environment. To ensure support for, and reinforce the attitude and skill changes associated with, the introduction of gender issues, the project organized a number of thematic consultative workshops to analyse policy guidelines from a gender perspective. The different effects of these policies on men and women were examined.
The Honduras project has a long history - it started in 1983. From its inception, it has had a strong grassroots and gender focus, the emphasis being on strengthening grassroots women's organizations so that they could benefit from the agrarian reform. It was felt that raising awareness and building organizational capacity at the grassroots level would eventually influence decision-making at the intermediate and national levels. The longer-term goal was the integration of women's concerns into development planning and project implementation.
The project has gone through the following three stages:
One component of the grassroots support was the recruitment and training of community organizers, who were called link producers. These were local women who worked on a voluntary basis and were trained to support and complement the work of institutional extension workers. Their tasks were to:
Their work was oriented to supporting women's traditional roles in subsistence agricultural production.
Some 160 link producers were trained. Six training modules were developed and a link producer methodology manual was prepared. Training was also provided for extension workers to help them to change their attitudes and improve their ability to work with women.
In the first stage of project implementation, training for women was given very low priority, and this had a negative impact. Women developed unrealistic expectations of the monetary returns they would earn from their production activities. Low levels of skill and poor organizational capacity meant that they could not meet the high targets set. There were also other problems at this stage. The absence of a good marketing strategy meant that women could not sell their produce and, in turn, could not repay loans from the microcredit scheme. As a result, the project's rotating fund was not replenished.
Illiteracy, lack of motivation to assume new roles, lack of awareness of production alternatives and lack of time to participate in group activities, because of the demands of domestic responsibilities, also emerged as key obstacles to project implementation. As a result of this experience, training was then given much higher priority in the project.
Promoting the concepts of equity and fairness was a major feature of the TOT in Costa Rica. The analysis of social systems, and of the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups within a social system, was an essential part of the gender analysis approach.
TOT activities were organized around three modules: basic concepts on gender and development; rural development management; and application of the gender approach to rural development. Films and visual techniques were used as training tools to promote these ideas. The themes, key issues and methods of a typical three-day TOT workshop on basic concepts of gender and development are given in table below.
TOT on basic concepts of gender and development |
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THEME |
KEY ISSUES |
METHODS |
|
Sensitization on gender |
Difference between gender and sex |
Presentation using slides and films |
Activities of rural women |
Exercise using VIPP techniques |
|
Productive and reproductive communal activities |
Presentation using slides |
|
The invisibility of female labour |
Presentation using overheads |
|
A new framework for development |
Presentation using overheads |
|
Sustainable development |
Discussion of ideas on what can be done, and what should not be done, to achieve sustainable development |
Exercise using VIPP techniques |
The gender perspective |
Reflection and discussion on how agricultural technicians and extension workers in the mixed farming sector work, the challenges they face and the actions that can be taken to ensure that there is more gender equity |
Discussion and exercises using VIPP techniques |
The materials and guidelines of the SEAGA Programme were a major resource for this training activity. Many of the presentations used in the first theme were based on the toolkits in the SEAGA field-level handbook. For example, the session on productive and reproductive communal activities was based on Field-Level Toolkit A on the development context and Toolkit C on stakeholders' priorities for development. The different frameworks for development session was based on activities from Toolkit B on livelihood analysis. Presentations using these tools were used as a basis for group discussions and brainstorming activities. The SEAGA Programme also provided trainers with a conceptual framework of gender and equity.
Other useful resource material for working with women's groups that is available from FAO can be found at the end of this section, under References.
Other sessions used visualization in participatory programmes (VIPP) techniques to analyse the activities of rural women. The main aims of VIPP techniques are to draw out participants' ideas and stimulate discussion on the key issues. Their objective is to identify and analyse possible solutions to particular development problems and issues.
As a first step, participants are given cards of two different colours. On one colour they write what should be done, and on the other colour what should not be done. The cards are then pasted on the board and discussed. The discussion may be led by a few key questions such as: Is this the right approach? Is it necessary to do this? Is it possible to do this? How can it be done? When? and By whom?
For example, in a VIPP exercise for analysing approaches to sustainable development the sort of positive suggestions that might arise would include: "Priorities have to be set for the community" and "We should produce extra to sell at local markets so that we have money for other needs"; negative suggestions could include: "Men should be the main decision-makers" and "Women should concentrate on work at home and let men do the marketing".
Useful questions for discussion of these suggestions include: "Is this the right approach?", "Can this be done?" and "How should it be done?".
The Costa Rica and Honduras projects are concrete examples of a bottom-up approach that works. Training has been an important component in this process. The two projects highlight a number of important training issues and practices:
