How should DfID apply UK gender equality law?

It's already a shame for anyone to have to defecate in the open — but it's even worse when you're a girl. And it’s not just shame. In many parts of the world, the lack of latrines makes women and girls more vulnerable to sexual attacks. WaterAid told us the story of Bhawna, a 19-year-old Indian girl who used to fear being raped every time she needed to do her business, but now feels much safer after the organization helped install a low-cost latrine inside her house. But having access to a toilet is not enough to guarantee security for females in a society such as India’s, where in many parts of the country women and girls are treated as second class citizens and those that abuse them are often never held accountable. Working toward changing these cultural perceptions of women and girls and strengthening laws to protect them is precisely what WaterAid and many other nongovernmental organizations are hoping the U.K. Department for International Development will now do more of, once a new law enters into force requiring DfID to consider gender equality in all its development and humanitarian interventions — from drafting through to evaluation and monitoring. "If we're thinking about water and sanitation and hygiene intervention, and just thinking about women — and we're not thinking about the different access requirements, the different information requirements — we might not invest in making sure that they're accessible throughout their entire lifecycle,” WaterAid adviser Jane Wilbur told Devex. “It would mean people would still continue to be left out.” Participation, multi-sector collaboration At the time of writing, we know few specifics on how DfID plans to incorporate the new law — which amends the 2002 International Development Act — in its aid programs, as details are still being hashed out. However, according to a well-placed source, Devex has learned that DfID will soon be engaging with various stakeholders, including implementing partners, with the push for gender equality only applying to new programs introduced from May, when the new law comes into effect. NGOs such as WaterAid already have ready recommendations, including on meaningful participation and multi-sector collaboration. In Uganda, for example, women invited to be part of water point committees or those in charge of maintaining water sources are mostly given the roles of treasurers or hygiene promoters, but manual labor is often delegated to men. These are traditional gender roles, but what if there are no men left when a pump is broken? Who is going to fix it? “We need to challenge these misconceptions,” Wilbur said. And Wilbur mentioned the need to provide toilets in schools as a gender concern. Lack of latrines can force children to stop going. For girls it’s worse: no place to wash, no hygiene facilities, no available sanitary pads and no sexual education. “They’re also teased a lot by boys,” said Wilbur. “So if we’re thinking about the gender dynamics here within schoolwork, if we’re looking at menstrual hygiene management, we need to raise awareness between boys and girls so it challenges the teasing and the bullying.” Samuel Thomas, head of policy for Plan UK, underscored the importance of ensuring equal opportunities and quality education for both girls and boys. “There's been some tremendous work toward ensuring gender equality in enrolments in education in DfID-funded programs. The key thing is to make sure that the quality of education is equal for both boys and girls in these schools ... for instance, science and engineering are often seen as subjects for boys. We work hard to ensure that doesn't happen, so in South Sudan, we have a number of young women training to be mechanics,” he told Devex. Priorities Justine Greening, U.K. secretary of state for international development, has repeatedly said women and girls are a top priority for DfID. In fact, the agency already has an overarching strategy on women and girls that centers on safe childbirth, increasing their economic access and the number of girls finishing primary and secondary education, and pushing for better protection of women and girls — although this is not without criticism. The Gender and Development Network, a broad network of U.K.-based organizations and individuals working to advance gender issues and women's rights, raised concerns over the limitations of the strategy and exclusion of other similarly important issues, such as increasing women's political participation and the need to challenge social norms and practices that often undermine women's rights. “These issues are all included in the ‘enabling environment’ … but they are ‘cross-cutting’ rather than priorities, and therefore not linked to concrete targets and actions,” the group argued in 2012. Two years later and after the passage of the law, aid groups hope DfID will revisit its existing strategy and “deepen” it — perhaps first assessing each country's progress and needs on a case-by-case basis. “One thing you would do is look at the situation, look at the existence of gender-discrimination laws ... levels of violence, participation of women in the labor market, completion of girls' secondary education — all these factors. And the way you'd prioritize would depend on the situation of that country,” Maria Neophytou, executive director at The Great Initiative, told Devex. “Some countries are doing well on some indicators, and some do badly on others.” Accountability Apart from making sure the U.K. advances gender equality in all its aid programs, the new law also makes it a requirement for DfID to submit an annual report on the law to parliament. Aid groups say that this creates a layer of accountability, enabling civil society to monitor what DfID has achieved on gender equality that year — and learn what it will do the following year to push the agenda forward. “It is essentially a quite powerful tool, because it is now a legal requirement for us to ask questions, and to integrate it in defining policies and programs,” Neophytou said. This would hold significantly in many of DfID's aid programs, such as those in Afghanistan, where breaking down the barriers to gender equality is now under threat following the drawdown of foreign troops this year. “It's been stated by DfID, by the Ministry of Defense, and others in the U.K. government, that the measure of Afghanistan, and the measure of the intervention as a success, is whether or not women and girls are empowered as equal citizens after withdrawal. This [law] should help with the assessment of that,” Thomas noted. Will others follow suit on the reporting requirement? Wilbur thinks DfID should push governments, institutions such as the World Bank and the European Union, NGOs and private sector companies receiving U.K. aid to stipulate in their reporting how they are using the money to advance gender equality. “DfID is such a loud voice that if we can convince [these actors] to do this, that would have a huge change beyond just the DfID or U.K. fund,” she explained. Our source told us the agency would like to see similar legislation adopted by other donors, and would welcome organizations that would also practice a similar reporting in their work. At the moment, however, their focus is on DfID’s own reporting duties. The gender equality bill, a private member’s bill that initially seemed unlikely to pass through, not only became law but did so in less than a year. NGOs view this as a potential game changer for development aid, which could be replicated to build support around other pending laws to ensure the provision of equality on issues such as disability and age. According to Thomas, it sends the “clear message” that the U.K. is committed to gender equality by promising it will be a part of its aid strategy in the future, even if there is a change in government following May’s general election. “The critical point is … almost not so much what DfID does now, but about what DfID does in, say, 15 years' time.” Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.