Programs, projects, and initiatives
Institutional level initiatives
Adaptations of the Grameen bank scheme
Agricultural planning with women and men
The post-Nairobi years witnessed a variety of efforts and initiatives by government, NGOs, and community organizations to improve women's lives, remove barriers to opportunities and resources, and to mobilize women to demand for their rightful share. Some of these initiatives are being undertaken at the institutional level, that is, within government bureaucracies or NGOs, others, at the community level.
Building advocates and allies. To bring gender into the agenda of government agencies, the NCRFW used a two-pronged approach: the creation of a WID/GAD focal point or group, as mandated by EO No. 348; and a series of gender sensitivity sessions for decision-makers and a number of staff-members of the department or agency. Based on the evaluation of the focal points, the NCRFW has called for a restructuring of focal points, including the recruitment of high level sponsors, and the strengthening of the gender-advocacy competence of the focal group members. Despite the weaknesses of the focal-point scheme, headway is being made in some departments (Table 32). NCRFW has also initiated discussions on gender issues in the context of the agency's thrust or mandate. The next challenge lies in developing concrete planning and implementation guidelines, as well as effective policy and monitoring instruments that the agency could incorporate into its existing system.
Systematizing gender efforts. Similar efforts to sensitize decision-makers, planners, designers, and field implementers to gender issues in rural development have been taking place among many NGOs, The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has supported several levels of gender training for NGOs receiving assistance from any of its funding windows or mechanisms. One of its funding mechanisms, the Philippine Development Assistance Programme (PDAP), has pursued the gender advocacy trail relentlessly. First, it required all of its programme staff to participate in a two-day gender analysis and planning workshop. Then, it required its NGO-partners, most of which are working in rural communities (Table 7), to attend one of several regional gender sensitivity/analysis training workshops. It later invited its project committee members to a gender planning session. After these gender sensitization efforts, PDAP reworked its policies, procedures, and proposal-preparation guidelines to encourage NGOs, submitting proposals to address gender issues right from the project planning phase. In late 1992, the PDAP tried out a new project monitoring scheme that would ensure gender differentiated reporting not only vis-a-vis beneficiaries and participants, but also in regard to distribution of project resources. All these initiatives took place within a 2-year period. The sustainability of the efforts, however, is in question as a number of the programme staff have left the organization. Nonetheless, between 1986/87 (when PDAP first began its operations) and the end of 1992, the proportion of women beneficiaries increased from 50.9 percent to 55.4. Still, a question that could be asked at this point is one that PDAP itself raised in 1991: Did the project substantially increase women's income'? The women interviewed in March 1994 viewed the issue in a slightly different way, remarking on the smallness of the scale of assistance rather than on the returns GI/M 1994).
Two Philippine variants of the Grameen Bank scheme are provided by the Agricultural Credit and Policy Council, a government agency (ACPC; NCRFW 1994:53-54), and by the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD), an NGO (Annex A). The two cases share the following features: constitution of its member-borrowers into groups of five, which monitor the members' loan and savings; savings mobilization, intensive orientation and loan supervision; and weekly-repayment schedules. The innovation in the ACPC case lies in the creation of a project-funding tier vis-a-vis the "Grameen Bank replicators" NGOs, and Cooperative Banks) and, indirectly, the communities of women member-borrowers.
In the case of CARD, the initiators and implementers was CARD itself, which manages the Landless People's Development Fund (LPDF), out of grants (revolving credit funds) and savings and loan repayments. Daily lending operations have been turned over to local branches that are run by CARD-trained local bank workers. Through members' peer pressure and intensive orientation and loan supervision by group leaders and by CARD. loan repayment rates have not gone below 90 percent (IPC 1993a). Women claimed that the loans enabled them to have their own economic projects or to expand their operations. The CARD scheme also built their confidence in their ability to run an organization as a benefit of joining CARD's credit program (GI/L 1994). The high repayment rate, however, has its own cost: women worrying about meeting their loan obligations, particularly if their ventures fail (IPC 1993a). A women's organization which considered adopting the CARD scheme found it women-unfriendly, as it noted how the pressure to repay on schedule had pushed some women borrowers to accept laundry jobs (MC 1994). The group also noted that, unlike in a cooperative set-up, the LPDF was CARD'S, not the members'. Nonetheless, the CARD experience demonstrates one possible credit scheme that works, is sustainable, and can also be made more people-friendly.
In 1992, the Philippine-Australian Pilot Provincial Agricultural Extension Project (PPAEP) was launched in the provinces of Albay and Camarines Sur (in Region 5), and in Bukidnon and Misamis Oriental (in Region 10). Its implementing agency was the Department of Agriculture, and later the local agricultural offices. An integral part of the project was the organization and mobilization of rural-based organizations to draft a community framework plan and, in particular, their agricultural sector action plan.
The chances of women's membership in the planning team were high since the women constituted the majority of the research teams, which were the first groups formed to work with PPAEP. Three strategies were observed by the participating communities, the most common of which was to specify women's agricultural or home-based industry needs in the plan. A less common practice was to specify how women would be involved in, or benefit from, the general agricultural activities or projects. In many instances, activities for women were also included. A much rarer strategy, known to be employed by one community, took the form of a separate "women's plan". The first and third strategies tended to include traditional DA intervention for rural women, while the second forced the community to recognize the roles women play as farmers and technology users, and to think beyond the usual (popular) projects of hog-raising and handicrafts for women.
The women found the planning exercise, and the research activities that preceded it, too time-intensive. However, they acknowledged two benefits: they learned a lot (about planning) from their involvement in the project, and they felt confident that they would benefit from assistance or initiatives that would come out of the plans.
Efforts to increase rural women's awareness of political issues and of gender power relations have been noted in the national report (NCRFW 1994). One case is provided by KaBaPa, a coalition of peasant women's organizations; another, by the Technology Outreach and Community Help (TOUCH) Foundation, and NGO working with people's organizations in Mindanao.
The KaBaPa program to increase women's electoral literacy involved the production of a voters' educational manual and its translation into various Philippine languages and dialects. Since 1986, KaBaPa has also been conducting study sessions for its members to discuss pressing political matters, such as the Bataan nuclear plant, the U.S. bases, and more recently the country's foreign debt.
The TOUCH project brings couples together into a session to discuss gender issues based on their own experiences. The topics range from how the man treats his spouse, to work sharing at home, and to leisure and vices. TOUCH community organizers who serve as facilitators try to keep inputs to a minimum, and strive to avoid giving lectures. The emphasis of the sessions is couples' experiences vis-a-vis gender roles and sexual relations; the goals, to sensitize the women about expanding their roles, and to work on the men to share women's burden and to recognize their spouse's right to self-determination. In an assessment of the sessions, women claimed that their spouse did begin to help with housework, and most of them cut down on their drinking - the cause of many marital spats and wife-beating.
In 1977, the Rural Improvement Club (RIC) of San Isidro (Libmanan in Camarines Sur) opened a number of "kindergarten schools" in different sitios (settlement districts within a village). Unlike most kindergarten schools, those in San Isidro also served as childminders or day care centers. The schools are housed in borrowed premises and often of very light construction materials. Because cash has always been limited, the RIC leadership has avoided investing in semi-permanent structures, as doing so would result in having only one school.
The RIC runs the kindergartens on donations and on financial and labour contributions from the children's parents. Teacher-volunteers, who have to be at least high school graduates, are paid a small stipend, also from donations. Moreover, the children are usually provided free paper and pencils.
What sets the San Isidro initiative apart, even from other RIC-run kindergartens, is the fact that several schools have been established. The location of the schools has enabled landless women to send their children to the school without having to escort them to the village center. The free paper and pencils also liberated landless families from worries about shelling out cash for school supplies. By providing almost free pre-elementary education to the children, the San Isidro RIC, as other RICs have done, has democratized pre-school education.
Other initiatives are: the dairy project of the Ecumenical Development Cooperative Society, wherein women play an active role in pushing the dairy development in the country from farming to management to lobbying for legislative action (cited in NCRFW 1994:58); the Partnership of Landowners and Workers (PLOW) project, which involves both male and female sugarcane workers in Negros Occidental (IPC 1993c, see also Annex A); the advocacy of the Women in Rice Farming Systems Network based at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), with IRRI and Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) scientists to orient their technologies for female as well as male users (Bautista, and others 1994); and the GAD advocacy within the National Confederation of Cooperatives (NATCCO), which has taken the form of the Enhancement of Women in Cooperative (EWIC) pilot project (Illo and Uy 1992). This project includes activities for conducting a series of gender sensitivity sessions with the leadership and management of affiliate-cooperatives as well as with women's groups within primary cooperatives, preparing training and operational manuals, and lobbying for the allocation of loan resources for women's projects. To date, NATCCO has decided to "integrate" the functions of its WID unit with its regular departments.
