Mercy Corps’ Global Gender Advisor, Sahar Alnouri, speaks to Global Envision about the difference between women's programs and gender programs, how a tsunami can unexpectedly transform sexual politics and how to pursue your organization's mission without ignoring local norms.
Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Guatemala and Yemen, which represents one country in each region where Mercy Corps works. The No. 1 selection criteria was that they had to volunteer. We also looked at whether the country director was on board. If they aren't, nothing will be maintained past the training point. And we needed local team members who are already champions of gender, another important piece for sustainability.
How long are you going to be in each of those countries?
Three weeks. The first week is focused on assessment in order to understand the big gender challenges staff are facing. What are the gaps in their knowledge? Where do they get stuck? Which things seem insurmountable? The training is actually only three days. During the last day, we take one of those big problems and, with the team, break it down, applying the tools they learned in the first two days of training.
What are the three phases of this strategy?
The first year is capacity building, which is a fancy word for teaching and training. In the second year, we'll make sure that as an agency, we have the tools and access to information and knowledge related to gender that we need. In the last year, we'll take the things that we're doing really well in gender programming, and really dig in and research them. The goal is to be able to share what we've learned with the wider development community.
What's the most compelling data or resources you've found that link successful economic development to interventions that utilize a gendered approach?
The recent research that, to me, was really game-changing was the Sex and Age Matter report [download the PDF here]. It’s not focused on economic development, but it talks about what happens when you collect sex aggregated data and use it in emergency work.
What most people don't realize is that after the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami, we learned that two-thirds of the people who died were women and girls. Knowing that makes a big difference in how you design a response to the emergency, particularly in creating long-term recovery programs. If you're missing women and girls, you have a big gap in the roles and responsibilities that women and girls fulfill. If you don’t respond to that as an aid organization and fill those gaps, what happens—and what did happen—is a rise in child marriage. Girls are pushed into marriages so that they can fill these roles that women were filling previously. That, in turn, drops education rates and decreases child health standards. It's a domino effect.
Why do you think gender is still an issue that aid organizations struggle with?
We are still struggling with gender in our own lives and communities whether we are in the United States or Pakistan.
What do you think has caused a "tipping point" effect on people getting more interested in focusing on this topic now?
In the early- to mid-90s, aid agencies started becoming more aware and interested in gender issues. And then, in the early 2000s, it kind of plateaued. Everyone had done their gender training; they had made their gender teams. They said, "We got it." What happens, though, is that teams turn over. New people come in. And more importantly, when something becomes mainstream, it tends to become invisible.
In the mid-90s, it shifted from women's programming to talking about gender. About men and women and boys and girls and recognizing that there are power relationships there. Anything we do to benefit one group, especially a vulnerable one, could have a whole bunch of ramifications that we didn’t intend. We say we're doing gender work but we're really still focused on women. There is no international aid organization that is getting this right.
Are we not collecting data long enough to see the harm? Are we not asking the right questions to the right people?
We [the development community] look at women and girls as if they are isolated. We say, “Women can’t read. So let’s have a literacy program just for women. We'll have it three days a week, three hours at a time. We will solve this problem. We will do it in an old school so we don't need to build one. We'll get books and teachers; it'll be fine." The problem, though, is women have a huge workload, especially in the developing world. If we're taking them away three hours a day, three times a week, that’s a significant impact on their workload. If they aren't doing that work, who’s doing it? Are daughters now skipping school to do chores so mom can go to literacy class?
When you only look at one group as if they are in a vacuum, and you don't look at how it’s going to affect their family and community, there is real potential to do harm. Not only that, but you're also just not achieving what you're trying to achieve.
In that example, should we collect data on how many people are going to school at the planning stage?
At the assessment stage. It involves making sure you're talking to different people and getting different perspectives. Find out who does what in the household, who does what in the community, who controls things, who makes decisions.
If we want to have a women's literacy program, it may be that in this community, the first thing we actually do is talk to men. Are they comfortable with the idea? Maybe we need to do a program for both men and women so we don't create a situation that leads to gender-based violence. Look at it as a system. Men are also negatively impacted by gender roles.
How do you target areas where the gender roles are specific and address centuries-old traditions, like tribal areas?
We try to be transparent and open with the community through a dialogue. It’s not about us giving the community what we think they need. It’s about working with the community to solve their problems in the best way that they see. In that situation, the challenge would be to show the tribal leaders how it would benefit the entire community for women to have access to education, and have examples from similar communities.
How do you have these difficult conversations with community leaders and make them feel like you're not forcing a Western perspective?
Well, first off, I would never have that conversation. One of my Pakistani team members would have that conversation. For example, of Mercy Corps' team of 200 staff in Iraq, we had 15 foreign nationals at most. Ninety percent of our staff around the world are from the countries where they work.
That's why my programming is focused so much on training and capacity building for team members. They're the ambassadors. If they get it, they'll be best able to explain, articulate and make it happen, much more so than an international [staff member] would be. And that difficult conversation would be had in different ways in different places. What works in Iraq doesn't work in Pakistan, so you have to adapt the training curriculum.
In the trainings, how do you deal with people's initial perceptions of gender issues?
The first day of the training is focused on concepts. What do we mean when we say "gender"? What is the difference between gender and sex and how does that relate to Pakistani culture, for example? Is this a foreign idea or does it exist here?
The important thing to get across is that gender is not a Western thing. It's not a value. "Gender" means there are different social roles and responsibilities for men and women and boys and girls in every culture. When we talk about gender equity and gender equality, that’s when it becomes valued. But gender is present everywhere: it's in our emergency responses, it's in our food security programs, it's in our water and sanitation interventions. In everything we do, we reach men, women, boys and girls because we target communities. Understanding the gender dynamics in those communities will make a big difference in how successful we are in our programs.
Watch Alnouri's TEDx Portland 2012 video
The training tour is the first step of a three-year strategy, funded by a $750,000 grant from Melissa Waggener Zorkin and Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. After building internal staff capacity among the organization's 4,000 employees spread across 41 nations, the second and third phases of the strategy involve gathering and analyzing gender disaggregated data from programs, tweaking programs across the board so they incorporate a gendered approach, and sharing knowledge with peers.